Into the Woods – Page 114 – Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere

First outdoor bread

I was itchin’ to try the gas grill as a bread oven, so I made a loaf this afternoon. It was not perfect, but baking in the grill seems entirely manageable. And after some Googling, I see that plenty of other people also use grills for baking bread.

To add a margin of safety, this loaf was only about a third stone-ground whole wheat and two-thirds unbleached white flour. It was a mixture of sourdough starter and ordinary yeast, which has become a habit with me mostly because I like the taste. There was not much oven spring, but I have never been good at oven spring. Such oven spring as I got was not at the top of the loaf, where I had slashed an X, but around the edges.

My grill has a warming shelf several inches above the grill surface. I set my cast iron skillet on the shelf. To try to get some steam into the oven, I put a pan of water on the grill and let it come to a boil before I put the bread in the oven. The bread was still slightly too done on the bottom because of the high flame down there, but that was not a big deal. It didn’t burn.

The best part of this bread was its shatter-y crust — not a bit tough. There was a very slight whiff of flame in the taste, but not much. Here are some observations and some notes for the next attempts:

— Put the pan of water directly under the bread pan to keep the bottom crust from getting overdone. Use less water.

— Get a smoker basket and give the bread a teensy touch of hickory smoke.

— Throw an onion on the grill for the last ten minutes or so to give the crust a little roasted onion taste.

Overall, it was a fine little loaf of bread with a superb crust. I think there are two keys to getting a good crust. One, don’t use any oil at all on the dough either while it’s rising, or in the pan. Use only flour to prevent sticking. And two, get as much steam into the oven as you can. Steam is always the biggest challenge.

The normal failure of CFL bulbs

Note that the top of the base is slightly brown from heat, which may have occurred when the CFL failed. This is normal.

I happened to be standing right underneath a compact fluorescent bulb yesterday when it failed. It failed exactly according to the book: There was a quiet pop, about the volume of a single grain of popcorn popping, and the bulb went out. When I removed it and looked at it, the white base was slightly brown from the heat of the ballast failure. This was a completely normal failure in accord with the way CFL lamps are designed to work.

The bulb was one of four in my kitchen ceiling that light the countertops. The lamp was seven years old. It was one of the brighter types — equivalent to 100 watts of incandescent light at 23 watts power consumption.

Right-wingers who believe that any kind of energy conservation is a left-wing conspiracy have done everything possible to demonize CFL bulbs. A while back, a conservative friend on Facebook shared a propaganda post about how terrified some right-winger was when a CFL bulb made a popping noise and a blackish brown spot appeared on the base. If I hadn’t been home it could have burned my house down! said the Facebook post. Horse wash. Some of the earlier bulbs failed less gracefully, but they all eventually fail, and the failure is usually in the power supply. As the Wikipedia article on CFL lamps points out, one of the challenges of designing CFL lamps is designing in an inoffensive failure mode. And of course nobody wants to smell smoke. My CFL failure yesterday created no odor at all.

The power supply in the base of the bulb, by the way, is a small electronics board that first converts AC house current to direct current. Then transistors convert the direct current to very high frequency alternating current, which is fed to the bulb. It’s this circuit that normally fails, not the glass part of the bulb.

No one claims that CFLs are perfect. What we all want is cheap LED lighting with a natural sunlight color. We’re getting there.

You mean you can cook with fire??

My first primitive efforts at cooking with fire

The abbey’s back deck has been woefully underused in the seven years that the abbey has been occupied. This is because there was no furniture and no creature comforts. I had been on the lookout for deck furniture, but I never seemed to come across something that was simple, reasonably tasteful, reasonably durable, and reasonably affordable. Plus the projects list was always so long. And then today at Lowe’s hardware I came across a bistro set, on sale. I bought it. Then I went to a local store that had big umbrellas on sale. Suddenly the deck was furnished.

The temperature reached 96 degrees today. And yet I was extremely surprised to find the deck entirely habitable. The umbrella keeping the sun off, of course, made a huge difference. Plus, the woods are very close. If any breeze at all is stirring, cool air washes out of the woods.

As I sat at the bistro table drinking fresh-made lemonade and eating canteloupe, I realized that another dream was suddenly within reach: the dream of cooking outside with fire. I already knew the price of gas grills because I already had admired them at Lowe’s. The abbey is a small establishment. A modest two-burner grill would certainly do. And so back to Lowe’s I went.

I am a total novice at cooking with fire. My condo in San Francisco had a communal gas grill in the solarium on the roof, and I used it occasionally. But still I’m a novice. I didn’t really have proper roasting vegetables on hand, but I made do with potatoes, onions, and the last ear of the three-for-a-dollar Whole Foods corn.

Holy smoke! What is it about the primitive taste of fire cooking that speaks to our primitive natures? Was it Michael Pollan who called human beings “the cooking apes”? These covered gas grills are interesting devices. They can serve as ovens, and there’s a thermometer on it. It won’t be long before I experiment with baking bread in it — probably sourdough.

And on my next primitive trip to Whole Foods, I will certainly concentrate on roastable foods.

There’s a very practical side to fire cooking in this hot weather. It keeps all that heat outside the house.

Just as my roasted vegetables and veggie burger got done, a light rain began to fall. As often happens, the bulk of the storm went to the north. But a light rain and a refreshing breeze were making soothing ocean sounds in the woods, and the on-sale umbrella was keeping me completely dry at the on-sale bistro table.

I think I may spend the rest of the summer outdoors.

A bargain? At Whole Foods??

It’s extremely unusual to get a grab-n-growl bargain at Whole Foods. But I think the fresh corn yesterday, three for a dollar, qualifies. I suspect that anything that early and plentiful came from Louisiana or some such other place that has been getting all of our East Coast rain.

And the chickens sure do like to clean the cobs.

A bread for all seasons

I post about bread fairly often. It’s not that I eat a vast amount of bread. I probably eat less bread than most people. But I almost never buy bread, so, unless I bake it myself, there’s no bread in the house.

Hot weather is a challenge. I hate heating up the oven when it’s 90 degrees or more outside. The oven pours heat into the house that the air conditioning system then has to get rid of. So, it’s flatbreads to the rescue. Flatbreads can be baked, quickly, in a skillet. So the overall energy use, and therefore heat production, is lower. If you have an outdoor grill with a griddle, then flatbreads could be made outdoors in the shade. Flatbreads also would make good campsite bread.

Lots of cultures have flatbreads. Rather than calling them by a foreign name, why not just assimilate flatbreads into American culture and call them flatbreads. What defines a flatbread is that it’s not leavened. If it’s made from wheat (as opposed to corn), it will blow up like a balloon in the pan, forming two layers, each half of the starting thickness. I call this process “popping.” To be really good, flatbreads must pop. It will deflate, of course, after you remove it from the heat. But that’s OK, because the bread has split into two layers with a pocket inside.

To get your flatbreads to pop, you need a reasonably soft dough. The skillet must be hot. And you must roll the dough to the right thickness. If it’s too thick or too thin, it won’t pop.

All whole wheat flour makes a tough flatbread that, though good, won’t pop very well. Half whole wheat and half unbleached flour works nicely. The skillet must be hot almost to the smoking stage. There’s no oil in the skillet, or in the dough, so high heat is less risky. As for how thick to roll the dough, experience is the best teacher. The dough is just flour, water, and a little salt.

Flatbreads love to be lightly buttered while they’re hot. They’re great with summer curries and summer stews like ratatouille. If you’re new to flatbreads, practice your flatbread skills now, and you’ll be ready by ratatouille season. Flatbreads are also great with summer favorites like tuna salad or hummus.

A brief essay on day lilies

If you’ve seen one day lily, have you seen them all?

Not if you worked as hard as I did to get these started. They’re all individuals. I’d name them, like chickens, if I had time. They all are grandchildren of the 300 day lily sets that I planted here seven years ago. Their natural habitats are banks and ditches — places where you want to let nature run wild.

There’s something very sad about day lilies, though. They get only one day in the sun before they shrivel and die. And peak day lily season doesn’t last long.

“We Shall Not Be Moved”

There had been rumors of civil disobedience and disorder, so Stokes County officialdom was braced for that last night ahead of the meeting of the Walnut Cove town board. But, in the end, what the board got was a seriously serious tongue-lashing, followed by a packed house (plus 30 or 40 others standing outside and looking in the windows) singing “We Shall Not Be Moved.” Then everyone walked out.

The reason for the board’s tongue-lashing was its vote a month ago to hasten fracking in North Carolina by allowing the State of North Carolina (at taxpayer expense) to do core-sample drilling on town property, not far from a huge coal ash impoundment at Duke Energy’s Belews Creek Steam Station.

Here’s a link to a story in the Winston-Salem Journal.

Exploratory drilling — it’s come to that

Today a big truck belonging to Patterson Exploration Services rolled into the little town of Walnut Cove, five days earlier than expected. The truck is a drilling rig that will drill a core-sample hole 1,750 deep to look for the presence of frackable gas. This is at taxpayer expense. The core sample was mandated by the right-wing N.C. General Assembly, now a puppet to corporate influences such as ALEC and banking money out of Charlotte.

The people here feel like they’ve been hit by shock and awe. It might as well be 1968, with Soviet tanks rolling into Prague.

There will be another public meeting Tuesday evening, at which we’ll learn what the people’s next move is going to be.

Here is a link to the story in the Winston-Salem Journal.

I sense something historic here

The Rev. Dr. William Barber II at Rising Star Baptist Church in Walnut Cove

North Carolina government has been taken over by right-wing politicians who have been hastily enacting the billionaire agenda — lower taxes for the rich, higher taxes for working people, the worst voter suppression laws in the nation, the privatization of education at the expense of the public schools, refusal to expand Medicaid simply to spite the president, cuts to unemployment insurance, the fast-tracking of fracking, and eagerness for oil drilling off North Carolina’s fragile coast. The chief source of resistance ought to be the state Democratic Party, but the state Democratic Party has been missing in action, largely because of exceptionally lousy leadership and debilitating scandals.

The NAACP rose to the challenge. The Moral Monday events in Raleigh have irritated and embarrassed state government every step of the way. The mastermind of Moral Monday and the president of the North Carolina NAACP is the Rev. Dr. William Barber. In the first two years of Moral Monday, not much was said about environmental issues. But now the NAACP has come out swinging on the matter of environmental justice. One of the catalysts was a deal between the state of North Carolina and the little town of Walnut Cove (in Stokes County) to do a core-sample drilling on town property to assess how much frackable gas might be down there. The site of this drilling is only a couple of miles from a large and dangerous coal ash impoundment owned by Duke Energy (at the Belews Creek Steam Station). It’s also near the Dan River, less than 20 miles upstream from a coal ash spill into the river last year. The coal ash impoundment and the core-drilling site are right on the edge of black neighborhoods.

Last night, the Rev. Barber spoke in Walnut Cove. Actually, it was a sermon, in a small black church nearly full, half with black people and half with white. His sermon was about why taking care of the land and water is a moral issue. I have never heard anything like it. We white people were stunned, because we’re well aware of how some religious people find support for the exploitation of nature and “dominionism” in scripture. But the Rev. Barber found quite the opposite, drawing mostly from Genesis and Zechariah.

Those of us who have been down in the grass roots for the last three years, locally fighting fracking, feel as though the cavalry have ridden in. It’s not just that the NAACP may file suits under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. It’s also that no one is better at focusing attention on injustice than the NAACP, or better at organizing people. And frankly, those of us who have been working locally, more or less alone, managed to make our cry for help heard. I suppose it depends on what happens next. But it feels historic to have the NAACP’s most charismatic leader here in our little county. And I think it’s likely that right-wingers won’t control the state of North Carolina for long. They have overplayed their hand and exceeded their mandate, and lots of people including some Republicans are not very happy about it.

This was historic in 1978. To my knowledge, no African-American has run for political office in Stokes County since then. We are working on that.

Just because it’s June …

There will be blackberries.

I’ve sown a lot of red clover seed, but I learned that it’s just too big a plant to grow in the yard. Only white clover, it seems, happily co-exists with grass. But the red clover loves unmowed ditches and banks.

There will be day lilies — lots of them. The deer have not eaten them this year the way they did last year, during a dry spring. I’ve learned that it’s mainly drought that drives the deer into the yard to devastate what’s growing at the abbey. They still come for the clover, but that’s not a problem.

I planted my heirloom beans late, but the first ones are coming up now.

If the promised rains come through, the celery crop will be good.