North Carolina barbecue

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I am not strictly a vegetarian, but I seldom eat meat. I pretty much never cook meat at home, partly because I hate looking at and handling raw meat, and I detest the mess it makes in the kitchen. So, if I eat meat, it’s because I’m out and about.

Pork barbecue is one of the few foods that North Carolina is famous for. North Carolina barbecue fits into two regional categories — eastern barbecue, and what we farther west call “Lexington style” barbecue, because Lexington, North Carolina, is ground zero for it.

Michael Pollan, in his 2013 book Cooked — a natural history of food — uses North Carolina barbecue to illustrate cooking with fire. North Carolina barbecue is slow-cooked and smoked over savory woods. It is served sliced or chopped with a sauce that is heavy on vinegar and reddened with tomato. It is frequently served with a slaw in which the cabbage is dressed with a sauce similar to the barbecue sauce.

This barbecue sandwich (Lexington style) is at Fuzzy’s barbecue at Madison, which is in Rockingham County. I stopped at Fuzzy’s and ate what the natives eat while waiting for my Jeep to have its annual safety inspection.

P.S. Note the spoon that came with the side serving of slaw. I am not certain whether it’s a regional thing (with Stokes County as ground zero) or a new, less local element of cultural decline in the past few years brought about by the Republican Party and the rolling back of the Enlightenment. But, increasingly, if you order certain foods in local restaurants (beans, for example), you may get a spoon with it and no fork. When this happens, I am instantly paralyzed. One might eat certain deserts with a spoon, or soup. But everything else is eaten with a fork. I would as soon eat slaw with a spoon as vote for a Republican. 🙂

Tearing the horn off an anvil?

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When I was a young’un, a saying I frequently heard (it was particularly said of children) was that a person who was prone to breaking things could “tear the horn off an anvil.”

Over the years, I have occasionally used this saying. Often I have been met with a blank look. This caused me to realize that many people are not clear on what an anvil is, or why an anvil has a horn.

At the lawn mower shop last week, I noticed a particularly photogenic anvil. I took a picture of it in case I ever needed to illustrate the saying.

An anvil, of course, is used by smiths and other metal workers for hammering a piece of metal into a particular shape.

As for the machine below, which I also photographed because it was photogenic, I’m not exactly sure what it is. My guess, though, is that it’s for crimping metal. Notice the crimped length of stovepipe behind the machine. If my theory is correct, then this machine would let you make a stovepipe out of a piece of sheet metal.

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Variations on an old theme: Banana bread

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Everybody makes banana bread, right? Like me, you probably have a standby basic recipe. Still, it’s good to experiment, especially with ways to make banana bread a little healthier.

Not many years ago, saturated fats such as coconut oil were deemed to be very bad for us. Now some sources, at least, encourage us to eat coconut oil in modest quantities. The problem is, the taste of virgin unrefined coconut oil is not compatible with many baked goods. But with banana bread, it’s a different story. Coconut oil can be substituted for all, or part, of the butter.

Banana bread also works great with heavy flours such as sprouted whole wheat flour. Sprouted whole wheat flour, however, is very thirsty. I added half a cup of milk to the recipe to help moisten two cups of sprouted whole wheat flour.

The glaze is strawberry preserves and honey thinned with a bit of rum. Some of the whipped cream went into the coffee.

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Local milk!

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While in the Winston-Salem Whole Foods on Monday, I was pleased to see milk from a local dairy in the dairy case. It’s grass-fed milk, and the dairy is Wholesome Country Creamery in Hamptonville. Hamptonville is in the Yadkin Valley not far from where I grew up.

Not since I was in San Francisco have I been able to buy milk from a local dairy. That milk came from the Strauss Family Creamery in Marin County.

The Winston-Salem Journal did a story last year on Wholesome Country Creamery, which I did not see at the time. It’s an Amish dairy, and the creamery grows all its own feed. The dairy also uses a lower-temperature pasteurization process.

I’m old enough, and my rural roots are deep enough, that I remember when relatives, including my grandmothers, used to keep cows. That’s important, because I remember what milk should taste like, and I will never forget. My grandmother no longer had a cow after the early 1950s, but a few of the neighbors kept cows up until the early 1960s, and we used to buy milk from them.

It’s pricey, but I could get used to local grass-fed milk.

Dumplings

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When I was a young’un, I was as intrigued with the word dumpling as I was with dumplings. There was something funny, archaic, and magical about dumplings — both the food and the word. I would have guessed that dumpling is of Germanic origin, but the Oxford English dictionary throws up its hands and says that the origin of the word dumpling is obscure, though the word was first detected in Norfolk around 1600. The word dump — which may or may not be related to dumpling — has cognates in Danish and Norwegian.

In any case, most cuisines probably have the concept of dumplings. Filled dumplings are particularly intriguing. Whether you call them pierogi or pot stickers, or one of the 453 words that Italian has for filled pasta (I’m joking), it’s only dumplings that I’d particularly care to make, because I tend to be pretty bad at imitating exotic cuisines, and I always do best with stuff that is pretty traditional and old-fashioned. I do exotic cuisines only by fusing them with Southern or California cuisine.

It was the sauce that led me to dumplings for supper. The abbey stocks many types of vinegar, but one type of vinegar that I had never previously stocked is malt vinegar. I bought some English malt vinegar yesterday at Whole Foods, and I started Googling for ideas about what — other than fried potatoes — might go well with a sauce based on malt vinegar. I used to love eating pot stickers at Asian restaurants in San Francisco. Pot stickers go nicely with strong sauces. So I ended up making dumplings just to go with the dipping sauce I had in mind. I made a dipping sauce of garlic, harissa sauce (an African pepper sauce that I have learned to always keep on hand), soy sauce, honey, and malt vinegar.

The dumplings were filled with mashed rutabaga, chopped onions, and grated Havarti cheese. The dough was made only with bread flour and water. The dumplings went nicely with seared cabbage (seared cabbage is frequently served at the abbey, especially in winter). I ate the dumplings with my hands and dipped each bite in the dipping sauce.

Two-personality pancakes

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Even though it’s February, and even thought the yard smells like the 500 pounds of organic fertilizer that was spread yesterday, the temperature was in the 60s, and the deck and the grill were calling.

For breakfast I settled on pancakes with two different treatments. On the right is a chutney of roasted apples and tomatoes. There is onion and coarsely grated carrot in the chutney, sautéed on the stovetop. The seasoning is cinnamon and cumin, with a bit of brown sugar. On the left is a grilled banana with maple syrup. The pancakes are made from organic sprouted whole wheat flour, milk, olive oil, and baking powder.

I suspect that supper will be cooked on the grill, too.

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Arbor vitae trees

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The first trees I ever planted at the abbey were four arbor vitae trees, four feet high at the time. I chose them only because I like them. I think that arbor vitae trees have a kind of old-fashioned magic about them.

Now there are 13 arbor vitae trees at the abbey. I wish I had room for more. What I didn’t appreciate until fairly recently is just how important evergreen trees are to the birds. The number of birds that wintered over this year at the abbey has really impressed me. They sleep in the arbor vitae trees. At dusk, the arbor vitae trees all chirp.

The trees also provide hiding space for birds to duck into during the day. I’ve been spatting with a hawk lately that is stalking the chickens. The wild birds duck for cover if the hawk is around. The native cedar trees also provide a lot of cover. I have too few cedar trees, but I do have one very large one that fills up with doves every evening. The big magnolia grandiflora also provides lodging for lots of birds, as well as a hiding place for the chickens during the day.

I’ve decided to plant a kind of low-growing magnolia along the uphill side of the driveway. That should provide yet more bird shelter.

During the recent snows, I scattered seed on the deck for the wild birds. They ate it like crazy when the ground was covered with snow, but after the snow melted, they’ve ignored the seed. That tells me that there is no shortage of natural food for the ground-feeding birds and that more shelter may well raise the bird population even more.

By the way, don’t be tempted by Leyland cypress trees, which look somewhat like arbor vitae trees. The cypress trees (to my eye) are not nearly as beautiful. Plus I understand that they are slower-growing and more susceptible to disease.

Eggs Benedict, homemade muffins

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Is it that I don’t get out much, or are eggs Benedict not on many restaurant menus anymore? Once upon a time, when butter and eggs were considered much more unhealthy than we consider them now, eating eggs Benedict was extremely decadent. But the chickens have been laying extremely well lately in spite of the cold, so I have eggs to spare, and then some, for Hollandaise. Eggs Benedict are a heck of a lot of work, though, so that ensures that one doesn’t eat them too often.

Making English muffins is no big deal. I used the recipe from King Arthur flour’s web site and baked the muffins on a griddle on the gas grill. As for the Hollandaise, for years I have used Irma Rombauer’s classic recipe from the 1943 edition of Joy of Cooking. It comes out a little thick, though, which probably means that my home-laid eggs are much bigger than the eggs Irma used. The fake bacon is from Morning Star.

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