Month: January 2019

Pumpkin-leek tarte with barley crust

I posted a few days ago about a dessert pumpkin pie with a barley crust. But with more than twenty little pumpkins stored under the stairs that need to be used before spring is over, dessert pies wouldn’t be very healthy, with no one but me to eat them. So here is a quiche-like vegetable pie, with a reasonably low level of carbs as well as fat.

In my previous experiment with barley crust, I used the amount of oil that I would normally use for a wheat crust. That was entirely too much oil for the barley. The crust was too crumbly. This time I reduced the amount of oil by half (to a quarter of a cup for two cups of flour) and made up for it with water. That worked great.

My little pumpkins look so magical that I have a hard time taking a knife to them and eating them. I have to remind myself that that’s why I grew them, and that, left under the stairs, they’d only rot. I do take a portrait each time I use one. Though these are true pumpkins, they’re also like winter squash. So if you don’t have baskets of little pumpkins under your stairs, you could use winter squash for a tarte like this. I used two large stalks of leeks, lightly sautéed in olive oil. The other ingredients are two eggs, some grated Gruyère, and seasonings including a quarter teaspoon of nutmug. The top of the tarte is sprinkled with grated Gruyère and some parmesan.

The dough for barley crust is stickier and more fragile than a wheat crust. I roll pie crusts between sheets of waxed paper. To keep the barley crust from sticking to the paper, I oiled the paper lightly with olive oil.

The tarte was delicious. Many kinds of vegetables can be turned into a tarte. A turnip tarte? Why not. Next time, I’d like to impart a little roasted flavor into the tarte, maybe with some browned onions or shallots. Also, I’ll oil the pie plate next time, to give the bottom crust a bit more crustiness.

Though this tarte looks like a quiche, there is no milk or cream in it. Just two eggs and some grated cheese with vegetables.


The crust is organic hulled barley, which I grind into flour myself.


Portrait of the little pumpkin that was dispatched for this tarte, with a spice bottle for scale


The top of the pumpkin browns because I used the small oven. But the texture of the pumpkin inside is more steamed than baked.

A vegan Scotch broth

I wrote about Scotch broth here five years ago, and I mentioned that the best soup I’ve ever had was a Scotch broth. It was in Edinburgh, on my first trip to Scotland in the mid-1980s. Though it was a vegetable soup, I might not have known at the time that the stock was based on sheep bones.

With Scotch broth, the broth is everything. It’s the sheep bones, I’m sure, that give authentic Scotch broth its sturdy substance. I’ve never made broth with sheep bones, so I’m always looking for substitutes. It occurred to me that the cooking water from chickpeas might help. I’ve never tried it, but I’ve read that if the cooking water from chickpeas is concentrated enough, it will whip up like egg whites. For this pot of broth, I used about one-quarter chickpea broth, one-quarter pumpkin juice (drained from a baked pumpkin that went into a pie), and one-half water. The barley, which is essential to Scotch broth, also helps with thickening the broth.

I’ve been known to make a slightly reddened Scotch broth with a touch of tomato paste. But the Scotch broth that I had in Edinburgh was green — from split peas and leeks, I’m sure. I went for green on this pot of Scotch broth, and I got the color I wanted.

The ingredients are the stock, barley, dried split peas, some rutabaga (which I believe the Scottish call a swede), onion, carrot, celery, and leeks. The soup needs a long, slow simmer. I added the leeks for the last 20 minutes of cooking.

A chicken story with a happy ending


One of many feathers found at the scene

I was sitting at the computer upstairs when I heard the chickens screaming. I dashed to the side porch, slipped on my shoes without tying them, grabbed a broom, and ran toward the orchard yelling.

The battle was happening on the far upper end of the orchard, beyond the asparagus patch. I couldn’t see the battle clearly through the weeds and honeysuckle that grow on the fence. One chicken ran out of the undergrowth and headed toward the garden. But from the sound it was clear that another chicken was still engaged. Not until I loomed over the scene of the crime with my broom did the hawk try to get away. It crashed against the fence several times before it realized that it had to fly toward me to escape. I could have knocked it out of the air with my broom if I had tried, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.

A terrified chicken got up from the ground, dazed. She didn’t seem to be injured. She stumbled toward the chicken house, climbed the ramp, went inside, and cringed in one of the nests in a corner, trembling. The chicken that had run to the garden was fine, though scared out of her wits. It took me a while to find the third chicken. She had gone to ground down below the chicken house, hiding under some brush. She answered when I spoke to her and extricated herself from the brush. I escorted her to the chicken house to comfort her sister.

If chickens have the freedom that they love and deserve, then hawks are the biggest problem. Dogs, foxes, and coyotes have never gotten through the fences here. Raccoons only come at night, when the chickens are locked safely inside the chicken house.

The local hawks — Cooper’s hawks, I believe — are not any bigger than a chicken. A chicken that puts up a good fight can escape a hawk attack. What’s funny about this hawk attack (the first attack I’ve had since last summer) is that I am pretty sure that two chickens were fighting the hawk. That’s not what I would have expected. I would expect all the chickens to run except for the one that can’t get away. One of my chickens, I suspect, deserves a medal for bravery.

Everyone who has had chickens in this area struggles with the same question: Is it worth it? Is it fair to expose chickens to a danger from which you can’t fully protect them? The chicken infrastructure here is better than what most people can provide. Most chickens here live to be several years old. Those years are good, happy years. This is my eleventh year of keeping chickens here. I’m not ready to give up. Nor can I blame hawks for being hawks. I just wish they’d stay away. I hope this one learned a lesson.

According to PETA, 9 billion chickens are killed each year in the U.S. to be eaten by humans. Worldwide, the number is 50 billion. Their lives are as terrible as their deaths. Misery on that scale is existentially incomprehensible to me. If you’ve ever gotten to know a chicken, you know what sweet, sensitive, emotional creatures they are. A happy chicken that can truly live like a chicken is a rare thing. My chickens live that way most of the time. Their vulnerability is disheartening. But it’s wonderful to see them fight for their lives — and win.

There were lots of feathers at the scene of the crime. Most were clearly chicken feathers. There was one large feather that I believe is a wing feather from a hawk. Way to go, girls.

Barley crust = pumpkin pie fit for a monastery


Pumpkin pie with barley-flour crust

I have written before about my experiments with home-ground barley flour: When is it a good substitute for wheat, and when is it not? Barley flour makes a very good pie crust.

It’s good, I would say, but not perfect. Made with the usual amount of oil, the barley-flour crust is too crumbly. But, particularly for the parts of the crust that stand above the pie and are exposed to the heat of the oven, the tasty toastiness of the barley crust is fantastic. For my next experiment with barley-flour pie crusts, I will reduce the amount of oil in the crust and compensate with water.

Over the next few days, I will eat this whole pie. So I wanted it to be as healthy and low-calorie as possible. I reduced the amount of sugar by half — from three-quarters of a cup to half a cup. It still tastes like a desert. But the reduced sugar actually enhances the pumpkin taste. And the pumpkin taste is very good. I can even imagine a savory vegetable pie based on pumpkin with no sugar at all. These are my organic homegrown pumpkins. I still have lots of pumpkins left from the 2018 pumpkin crop, stored in baskets under the stairs.

Something about the barley taste is very old-fashioned. The taste of toasted barley is so good that I Googled for “toasted barley flour,” thinking that it surely must be a thing. Sure enough, toasted barley flour is a staple of Tibetan cuisine.

The old-fashioned taste of the barley and the reduced sugar produced a kind of austere pie that actually was appealing in its austerity. Pumpkins are a New World food. But if some monks in Gaul in the 13th Century had some pumpkin pie, then this is what I’d imagine it would taste like.


One of my little pumpkins after baking. I’ll scoop out the flesh and give the rest to the chickens.


Fresh-ground barley flour

It’s inevitable

The March cover story of The Atlantic probably marks a turning point in the long process of bringing Donald Trump to justice. The Atlantic is a centrist publication that often speaks for Washington’s centrist think-tank establishment. This article makes it official: the centrist Washington establishment is done with Trump. They now understand what he has done.

Here’s a link to the article, which is magisterial: Impeach Donald Trump.

February 7 probably is the day when most Americans, who are very busy and distracted, will begin to pay attention. That’s the day Michael Cohen (Trump’s “fixer” and former attorney) starts his testimony to the House Oversight Committee. On February 8, Matthew Whitaker (Trump’s acting attorney general) will testify before the House Judiciary Committee.

My view, based of course only on dot-connecting and following bread crumbs, is that Washington already knows what has to happen — that Trump must leave office. It took time to collect the evidence and to build the legal case. It appears that Robert Mueller is almost done with that. The next step, then, is to inform the American people and to prepare the American people for what is going to happen. That preparation process is now beginning. It seems highly likely that yesterday’s reports that Trump instructed Cohen to lie under oath to Congress about the Moscow Trump Tower project (that alone would be grounds for impeachment) is a part of the preparation process. What the American people are going to learn from Cohen’s testimony on February 7 is going to be shocking. As Yoni Appelbaum points out in the Atlantic article, once Trump’s crimes start being described in day after day of public testimony in Congress, Trump (and Fox News) will have no chance of controlling the narrative. Instead, the narrative will be about the FBI’s evidence and congressional testimony under oath.

Linux

Recently someone gave me a 10-year-old (or so) laptop that had been written off as dead. It was sold with Windows Vista, and it would no longer boot. I installed Ubuntu Linux on it and found that it works great. Bottom line: Free laptop.

I’m a Mac loyalist and a conscientious objector to anything from Microsoft (though I believe that Microsoft products have gotten much better now that they’ve lost their monopoly and competition has forced them to improve their software). I’ve been a Unix user since about 1985, and I first used Linux in the early 1990s. Linux has come a long way.

A laptop is not something that I particularly need. But, on those relatively rare occasions when I travel, a laptop is nice to have. Laptops of this vintage can be bought on eBay for as little as $40 if you catch a bargain. In choosing an older laptop to run Linux, you want one new enough to have a dual-core 64-bit processor and 4 GB of memory. An older laptop may be heavy, but they’re cheap. Older batteries can be a problem, but the battery in my newly acquired laptop will run for about an hour. Most of the time, though, even when traveling, you can find a place to plug the laptop into the wall. You’ll want a laptop with built-in WIFI.

Learning to use Linux may be a tad more difficult than learning to use a Mac or a Windows machine. But Linux has gotten much easier to use, with a pretty graphical interface. Probably the biggest challenge that most people would face in bringing up an older laptop on Linux is installing Linux. That’s not something that I want to get into here in detail, because you’ll find many tutorials if you Google for it. But the simplest route is to download a Linux installer on another computer and then copy the installer to a USB thumb drive that is configured to be bootable. You boot the laptop off the USB thumb drive and run the Linux installer. Once you’ve installed Linux, the sailing is much easier.

I am using Ubuntu Linux 18.04, which is the newest version of Ubuntu Linux at present. Ubuntu Linux comes with LibreOffice already installed. LibreOffice is an open-source suite of office software that is, as far as I know, pretty much 100 percent compatible with Microsoft Office. It’s as easy to use as Microsoft Office. It will open all your existing Microsoft Office files. And if you use LibreOffice for word processing, you can send your files to users of Microsoft Office and they’ll be able to open the files just fine.

Ubuntu Linux also comes with the FireFox web browser installed, and Thunderbird for email. If you need software that is not pre-installed, there is a long list of open-source applications that Ubuntu will download and install for you.

Weather emergencies


Ice storm on the ridge

During the weekend, an ice storm turned out to be considerably worse than was forecast. Around sunrise on Sunday morning, the lights starting dimming, then flickered, then went out. Power failures are common here, but somehow I knew that this one would last longer than usual.

In bucking myself up to make the best of it, I decided that I should see it as a trial run for larger emergencies, as a test of how well prepared I am for a relatively brief weather emergency.

Staying warm at these latitudes might be a real challenge during unusually cold weather, such as a “polar vortex.” But when the temperature is around 30F, the outdoor temperature is not a serious threat. I have a propane fireplace for backup heat. I also have a lot of warm clothing. Staying warm: No big deal, even for the cat.

Water: Also not a big deal. I have drinking water as well as flushing water stashed away. I did decide that I should do a better job of supplying washing-up water near the kitchen sink.

Cooking: Also not a big deal. I have propane-fueled camping cookers for that. I don’t like having those things indoors, so a table under the roofed part of the deck becomes the cooking area. It would be nice to have some sort of oven during a long outage, so that needs some thought.

Hot water: In small amounts, heating water in a kettle over a propane cooker is not a big deal. But what if an outage lasted for days, and one needed enough hot water for laundry or baths? That’s a bigger issue. Probably the most practical solution would be to drop back 100 years and heat water outdoors, with a tripod and cauldron over a wood fire. That needs thought.

Food: Food is not a problem. I have emergency food tucked away if I should need it. And when bad weather is forecast, I stock up on groceries.

Refrigeration: I didn’t open the freezer. When the power came back after 14 hours, the temperature inside the freezer was 17 degrees rather than the usual zero — not a problem. For a longer outage, I’d have to sacrifice whatever is in the freezer.

Emergency power: I don’t have, and I don’t really want, a generator. They’re noisy and aggravating and require fuel. However, when the power is out, you can’t have too much battery power.

Lighting: I’ve got candles and kerosene lanterns. But the most convenient, and the safest, form of lighting is to use battery power. I have lots of flashlights, but a headlamp of the type used by campers is by far the most convenient.

Battery power: The challenge with batteries is to keep them charged, both before you need them and after you start using them. You need to stash a lot of batteries of all sizes. But what about rechargeable devices such as smart phones, which want to be charged with a USB connection? For that I have one of the heavy battery-powered devices that is used to jump-start cars with dead batteries. These things usually have 110-volt inverter connections and USB outlets. Its internal lead-acid battery has enough capacity to keep a cell phone charged for many days. Don’t expect to get much 110-volt power out of it, though. Its internal battery is not that big.

Solar power: If a power failure lasts for days, lots of batteries are going to need charging. For that I have a 50-watt solar panel that I have never used. I just keep it stashed until I need it. The controller that goes with the solar panel can charge 12-volt batteries, 24-volt batteries, or USB devices. One needs at least one deep-discharge marine-type battery. A small solar-powered system sufficient to keep your flashlight batteries, phone, and a radio charged can be put together for around $200.

Communications: This, I found, is the biggie. You need a plan for keeping your smart phone charged, though of course a land-line telephone is a good thing if you still have a land line. The most serious challenge I faced during a relatively short outage was getting local news from the outside world. You’ll want to know how bad things are out there. Depending on how close you are to civilization and news organizations, a nearby radio station may or may not be helpful. The only helpful solution in my location is a scanner for monitoring emergency communications.

Local emergency communications: During the past few years, most cities and counties have abandoned their older analog radio systems and have switched to digital “trunk tracking” communications. Trunk-tracking scanners are expensive and complicated. An alternative, as long as your smart phone is charged, are smart phone apps such as “Scanner” for iPhone. Such apps should be able to monitor local emergency communications based on your location, using your cellular data. This may not be 100 percent reliable, because someone in your county, as a public service, has to make these audio feeds available. But this worked for me last weekend. The alternative is to spend $300 to $400 on a scanner and to run it on battery power.

So, how was it out there?: It was a mess! The sheriff’s department and fire departments were kept busy by power lines that had fallen on or near roadways. Some of the downed power lines caused fires. There also were a great many trees fallen across roads. Ambulances were called for a good many heart attacks, plus what sounded like a drug overdose. Several times, sheriff’s deputies asked the dispatcher when service trucks from the power company were expected to arrive. That made it clear that the power company’s priority was responding to emergency requests from the sheriff’s department rather than outage complaints from homeowners. I was surprised, really, that I got power back after only 14 hours.

Reading material: I have a Kindle. But there’s nothing like an old-fashioned book, read by the fire.

With the exception of a solar-powered charging system or a scanner for emergency communications, none of these preparations are expensive. We should all have, at a minimum, a three-day emergency plan. Longer would be better.


Scanner app for iPhone


Breakfast oats out on the deck, boiling over

Where the squirrels live


Shot with a 200mm lens from an upstairs window. Click here for high-resolution version.

From my upstairs office window, during the winter, I can see deep into the woods, up to the top of the next ridge, and down to the little rocky stream below the house. I also can watch the squirrels going about their business in the trees. I have a pretty good view of two squirrel nests, though binoculars would be needed for proper squirrel-watching.

Of all the creatures in the woods, squirrels have the best — and I suspect the safest — homes. They have to worry about hawks and owls from above, and foxes and coyotes from below, but my guess is that squirrels are caught less often than animals such as rabbits that can’t climb trees.

For many animals in these latitudes (including squirrels, I suspect), the best habitat is to be found where forest comes up against meadow. In a forest, the canopy catches most of the sun. But in a meadow, the sun reaches the ground, and all the growth is different. At the borders of woods and meadows, wildlife gets the benefits of both worlds.

As much as I hate seeing woods cut down for timber, I have to admit, having watched such areas begin to recover, that after the shock of the loss of woodland habitat, many species benefit as low-growing plants take over. Deer and rabbits love it. It’s also how humans managed to subsist when they first started living in the Appalachian forests. They would cut, or burn, a hole in the forest. For subsistence, they required both kinds of terrain — woodland and farmable meadow. When a natural event such as a fire clears an opening inside a healthy forest, that opening becomes a kind of oasis. Even if one big tree falls, and sunlight suddenly reaches the ground, all sorts of growing things take advantage of the opportunities.

I like reflecting on this, because I think it shows that rural living is sustainable — farmland alternating with woods. A recent Gallup poll found that most Americans would prefer rural living to a city, a suburb, or a small town. Rural living, I believe, is a privilege, because it’s not an option available to most people, given the kind of economy we have today.

In the photo below, one of my squirrel neighbors is working the yard for food. I’m not sure what. Skunks, raccoons, moles, and birds mine the yard for grubs, especially during the winter. But as far as I know, squirrels don’t eat grubs.

Speaking of moles, most people regard them as pests. I find them to be very beneficial. In mining for grubs, they do a beautiful job of aerating the soil. Grass flourishes in areas that the moles have cultivated.