4 eggs down, 2 dozen to go

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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

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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

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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.

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These tomatoes were broiled in the oven, with parmesan

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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.

The (distant) future of eggs

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Home-laid abbey eggs

It has been nice to see a number of stories in the past month about major restaurant chains switching to cage-free eggs. But it’s a slow process. There’s an awful lot of industrial chicken infrastructure that has to be changed. And even hens that aren’t in cages are not exactly living in chicken heaven. The majority of cage-free hens will still be packed into big, crowded barns with no access to the outdoors.

Wendy’s restaurants announced yesterday that they will go cage-free by 2020. Starbucks and Panera also have promised to go cage-free by 2020. McDonald’s and Subway will take 10 years to go cage-free — 2025.

This is a start. Surely it was the market, or “consumer sentiment,” that demanded this change. People are becoming increasingly aware of our cruelty to animals kept on industrial farms. However, I suspect that, for psychological reasons, most people have less denial in thinking about chickens raised for eggs, because laying hens aren’t slaughtered (not, at least, when they’re still young). It’s easier to think about the lives of laying hens than about the short lives of broiler chickens.

Here’s a link to a nice Chicago Tribune story on cage-free egg farming. A farmer is quoted as saying that he keeps his hens for over seven years before they’re sent off to be made into soup. I’m a bit skeptical that hens are kept that long.

Though I love knowing that all my eggs are laid just up the hill, I’m very aware that having chickens is not for everybody. If I were buying eggs, I’d just pay extra for the most hen-friendly eggs I could find.

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Given a choice on a January day between a grassy orchard and the woods, the girls prefer the woods, though they also spend time in the orchard to get the clover and chickweed.

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Green grass and chickweed from a warm and wet December

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Blue-filtering eyeglasses

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My eye doctor urged me to wear blue-filtering glasses while I’m in front of a computer screen or an iPad screen. Though I love the Retina display on my new 27-inch iMac, the screen does seem to be — at least subjectively — more intensely blue than the screen on my old iMac. So I’ve started wearing my blue-filtering reading glasses when sitting in front of the iMac.

The concern for ophthalmologists is high-energy visible light. There is evidence that it is a factor in age-related macular degeneration. Too much blue light also may affect the brain in a way that interferes with sleep.

Adding the blue-filtering feature to a pair of new glasses doesn’t add all that much to the cost of the glasses. Notice in the photo above that the computer screen looks slightly more orange when seen through the glasses, because the blue light is reduced.

If you’re in front of computer screens a lot, and especially if you’re older, this is something worth discussing with your eye doctor.

And, of course, keeping the brightness of the screen as low as is comfortable will help preserve the computer screen, use less energy, and reduce the strain on your eyes.

The ability (and inability) to judge character

You would think that after hundreds of thousands of years of evolution as social beings, we humans would be pretty good at judging the character and intentions of other humans. The sociobiologist E.O. Wilson has written, for example, that we humans constantly study other humans and that this explains our insatiable demand for stories, or why we love to gossip. Even our pets are very good at perceiving our intentions.

And yet a sizable chunk of the American population is dangerously bad at judging character. Not only that, this sizable chunk of the population all too often sees deranged and narcissistic people as political and religious leaders and sends them money by the millions and hundreds of millions of dollars. This is one of the most frightening and unpredictable facts of American politics. I am not terribly concerned about sexual peccadillos, except for the extreme hypocrisy of all-too-many preachers. Private sexual peccadillos don’t get us into wars or prey on the poor so that preachers and millionaires can ride around in jets and avoid paying taxes.

Can the ability to judge character be tested? Are there ways of impartially establishing who is good at judging character and who is not?

As early as 1929, MacMillan published Studies in the Nature of Character: General methods and Results by some academics from Columbia University. Since then, a good bit of research has been published on how good we are (or are not) at judging the character of others. How is this research done?

The basic method, as far as I can tell from my own admittedly limited research, is to go to a group of people who know each other and to ask those people to predict how others will perform on “personal inventory” tests. There are many such personality tests that clinicians use, for example the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory. Then you compare people’s predictions with other people’s actual performance on the tests and look for statistically significant correlations.

What are some of the factors that correlate with being a good judge, or a poor judge, of character? Here are some of the candidates, with a rough description of what researchers have found:

• Age: Though children improve in their ability to judge character between the ages of 3 and 14, there is no evidence that older people get better at judging character.

• Sex: There no convincing evidence that men or women are better at judging character.

• Family background: This area has not been well studied, but so far there is no evidence that family background matters much.

• Intelligence: Now we’re getting somewhere. Smart people are indeed better at judging the character of others. Smart people also, unsurprisingly, are better at judging the intelligence of others.

• Training in psychology: This is murky, but it may well be true that trained psychologists are no better than the rest of us at judging character.

• Sensitivity and artistic ability: There is pretty good evidence that artistic and sensitive people are better judges of character. People with literary abilities may be particularly good at judging character.

• Emotional stability: The evidence here is scant, though it is pretty clear that people who are excessively anxious, troubled by obsessions, etc., are poorer judges of character.

• Social skill and popularity: Though good social skills seem to help people judge character, those who are the best judges of character tend to be capable of a kind of scientific social detachment. For example, physicists may be better judges of character than psychologists. Poor judges of character are more socially oriented than better judges. It may follow (though I did not find any specific research) that introverts are better judges of character than extraverts.

And finally:

• Good character: People of good character are probably better equipped to judge the character of others. It’s important to keep in mind a famous statement by Gordon Allport:

As a rule, people cannot comprehend others who are more complex and subtle than they. The single-track mind has little feeling for the conflicts of a versatile mind. People who prefer simplicity of design and have no taste for the complex in their aesthetic judgments are not as good judges as those with a more complex cognitive style and tastes.

Unfortunately I could not easily find any research that looked for correlations between religiosity and the ability to judge character. But insofar as I myself am able to judge the character of others (feel free to judge me!), I would have to say that evangelical, salvation-oriented religious types are among the very worst judges of character. As for why people send millions of dollars to preachers like Jim Bakker or Jimmy Swaggart, it helps to remember that half the population have IQs of under 100 and live pretty hard lives. Getting money and votes out of people who are not so smart and not doing very well is now a think-tank science — the smart studying the not-so-smart so as to take political and economic advantage of them. Unfortunately, that may be the No. 1 key to American politics at present.

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Pancakes: Problems and solutions

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There is no way to make pancakes into a truly healthy breakfast. But, sooner or later, we’re all going to give in to the temptation of eating them. I’m always looking for ways to make eating comfort foods more of a misdemeanor rather than a felony.

To be sure, it has been decades since I’ve eaten a pancake made of white flour. Yuck. My flour of choice at present is sprouted whole wheat flour. But it’s still just flour. How might we get the carb load down and the fiber and nutrition load up?

I’ve often used cooked apples as a topping for pancakes, but how might we do that with raw apples? This morning I grated two Granny Smith apples (the KitchenAid shredder made quick and easy work of it). I tossed the apples in maple syrup with some cinnamon.

That meant one pancake for breakfast instead of two, plus two fewer apples waiting in the refrigerator for me to figure out what to do with them. The apples were yummy prepared that way. There are worse crimes.

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Farms and farmland: What are the trends?

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This is the farm of my great uncle Barney Dalton in Laurel Fork, Virginia. Barney was born in 1876 and died in 1972, but his farm is still owned by his heirs, who work hard to keep it looking like it looked 75 years ago.

A story in this morning’s Winston-Salem Journal (by my friend Meghann Evans) reports that Forsyth County, North Carolina, is working on a plan to preserve farmland. I’m all for it, though for Forsyth County it would seem that the plan is a little late. Though Winston-Salem and Forsyth County have not grown as fast as Raleigh and Charlotte, developers have been buying up farmland and turning it into suburbs for decades. It has been more than 25 years since I lived in Forsyth County, but decades of uncontrolled suburbanization is one reason why I would never be able to live in such a place anymore.

Meghann’s story about Forsyth County got me wondering about the trends in farmland.

Just a couple of weeks ago, actually, I was at a Stokes County Arts Council event and saw a friend who is co-owner of Stokes County’s largest real estate company. “How’s business?” I asked her. “Have property values gotten back up to the pre-crash peak?”

She said that farms are selling very well but that homes are still a bit of a drag.

I’m going to guess that one of the reasons that Forsyth County can even afford to talk about preserving farmland is that farmland is more valuable than it used to be. Developers can no longer buy up farmland dirt cheap and turn it into suburban gold. Driving through a place like Forsyth County, evidence of this change is easy to see. Suburban housing is still being built, but the housing is much more dense than it used to be. That is, new suburbs don’t sprawl as much as they used to because the land is not as cheap. Houses are much closer together. Much of the new housing consists of multi-story, multi-family units.

Worldwide, farmland is increasingly seen as a good longterm investment. Much of the investment in farmland is coming from corporations. In fact, here in Stokes County, one of the biggest land transactions in the past couple of years involved 1,000 acres of farmland in the Dan River bottomlands. The buyer was a corporate outfit from Greensboro. I still don’t know what they plan to do with the land.

One surprising new trend is that agricultural degrees are in great demand, and there aren’t enough graduates to fill the available jobs. Just this year, the U.S. Department of Agriculture reported that 60,000 high-skilled jobs in agriculture are expected each year but that there are only about 35,000 graduates available to fill the jobs.

In a news release earlier this year, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack said, “There is incredible opportunity for highly-skilled jobs in agriculture. Those receiving degrees can expect to have ample career opportunities. Not only will they be likely to get well-paying jobs upon graduation, they will also have the satisfaction of working in a field that addresses some of the world’s most pressing challenges. These jobs will only become more important as we continue to develop solutions to feed more than 9 billion people by 2050.”

Though the corporatization of farmland ownership is disturbing, I nevertheless see it as an encouraging trend that farmland is becoming too valuable to be trashed by housing developers out to make a quick buck. For a young person trying to figure out what to do in college these days, I’d suggest horticulture with a minor in English. Wouldn’t that improve the world?

Lily (the abbey cat) gets nervous if her food bowl gets low and she can see the bottom of the bowl. She nags me until I fill it, and then she feels secure again. I feel the same way when I’m in places that are too densely populated, too dry, or otherwise too dead to support an exuberant population of living things. I need trees, rain, streams, good dirt, my own water from a well, an orchard, a garden spot, and some chickens. If the deer, voles, raccoons, possums, rabbits and even snakes rush in to live off my spot of land, then I’m flattered. At least I’ve got something for them to take.

Normally I’m at odds with trends. But the trend toward valuing and wanting to be near farmland is a trend I’m glad to see.

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Nearby farmland

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The abbey garden in a good year