A bunch of shiitake mushrooms sprouted during a cold December rain. Obviously they like the cold. Some of the mushroom logs are now two years old. For whatever reason, it has taken them some time to get started.
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
There are no spoilers in this post.
Yesterday I went to see “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey.” I went to the full IMAX 3D version, $12.75 for a matinée. It would be silly for me to try to review it, because I can’t think of a single meaningfully critical thing to say. In fact, most of the reviews I’ve read have been silly, as the reviewers strain to come off as more knowing and more gifted than Peter Jackson. Jackson is a genius. Tolkien was a genius. It would be a criminal act to miss this work of genius while it’s still in IMAX theaters.
I had never been to an IMAX film before, or to a 3D film. The effect was stunning. It gave me vertigo at times, and I had a headache for the rest of the day, but it was worth it. And by the way I very rarely have headaches now that I’m retired. Headaches are for the awful world of work. But it’s a strain to stare at a screen for three hours, neck locked most of the time. When the camera was at a lofty height, looking down, and spinning (imagine yourself in the clutches of a giant eagle), I got vertigo. But that’s probably what the director intended.
I like to try to take stories apart to try to see what makes them tick. Part of the genius of Tolkien’s work is that his stories resist this process. One alternative is to try to look at Tolkien’s life for clues. As most people know, he was a professor of language and early literature at Oxford. He was affected by both World Wars. He was deeply distrustful of modernity and industrialization. A long hike in the unspoiled Alps when he was a teenager apparently inspired his mountain settings and his long treks. He loved languages, and in particular he loved the English language.
Anyway, this is not a review. It’s just a reminder to go see “The Hobbit” on a big screen.
Miso
Only recently did I realize that miso is a living fermented food, like yogurt or sauerkraut. I had observed for many years that recipes usually warn you to add the miso last to soups and not to boil it, but no recipe ever said why, and it had not occurred to me to wonder. I figured it was just one of those things that recipes thoughtlessly repeat though no one knows a reason for it, like not lifting the lid on rice while it’s cooking.
But now I know. Miso is a living fermented food, therefore we must eat it, even if it is salty. But eating miso is not a chore. It makes a great stock for soups. It also enables quick winter soups, because you don’t have to simmer all day to get a proper stock. A friend recommends borscht made with miso. I will try that later today. Miso also makes a great little cup of hot broth. Just add a teaspoon or so to hot water.
The stuff is pricey. I paid more than $9 for a pound of miso yesterday at Whole Foods. Partly I think this is Whole Foods’ high markup. A friend gets the same brand in Asheville for between $6 and $7 a pound. But a little miso goes a long way, and it will keep in the refrigerator for half of eternity. Whole Foods carries about four varieties of miso, I believe, made by Miso Master in Asheville.
A grits tutorial
Periodically I have breakfast with friends at a roadside family restaurant in northern Stokes. I keep ordering grits, but I continue to get runny — bordering on watery — grits in a little bowl. Now maybe this is actually some folks’ preference in grits. But, to me, that’s not proper grits.
Grits should be thick, like thick mashed potatoes. They should be thick enough to hold a nice mound — never a puddle! — on the plate and support a well of melted butter. They should be served hot, but not so hot that they burn your tongue and ruin your breakfast. Grits should sit for 5 to 10 minutes off the heat after they’ve cooked, to thicken and cool a bit.
As for “quick grits” or — heaven forfend — “instant grits,” don’t even think about it. Proper old-fashioned grits take only 20 minutes or so to cook. As for how much water is required, about four parts water (or slightly less) to one part grits is about right. (But, like rice, grits vary, so there is no universal rule.) Just keep simmering and stirring, with the lid off if necessary, until the grits thicken. Erma Rombauer, in the 1943 edition of Joy of Cooking, boils the grits briefly, then steams them in a double boiler for an hour. I’ve never tried that, but it probably would work great. Grits require close watching, so a double boiler would give the cook a break.
People sometimes express surprise that I, having lived in San Francisco for so long, am a fan of grits. People often think that San Franciscans are too snooty to eat grits. But that’s not true at all. San Franciscans know about food from all over the world, so it would be impossible to keep anything as good as grits a secret. You can get grits for breakfast in lots of places in San Francisco. And I hate to say it, but the grits I’ve had in San Francisco are better than the grits I’ve had in these parts lately. I think it’s the same problem that afflicts all low-price “family” restaurants. They don’t have trained cooks, they can’t afford to use good ingredients because they have to keep prices low, and they cut too many corners instead of giving things the time and attention that good cooking requires. Grits probably “set up” in a slow-moving kitchen, and frequent fresh batches aren’t practical, so runny grits may be the only way to solve the problem in a slow-moving kitchen.
So we country folk, when friends meet friends for breakfast, have a hard time finding the good cookery that city folk take for granted. But we have just as much to talk about, and we live at a slower pace, so a breakfast can run — à la française — up to two hours. And most country restaurants even have WIFI now, because they’re on the main roads where the cables are.
Mrs. Squirrel
Click on image for high-res version
Mrs. Squirrel, now that she has stolen every last one of the walnuts, came back to beg for more. She kindly consented to pose for a portrait.
Radio interview with Ken
Ken was interviewed today on The Story, a nationally syndicated radio show. Here it is in podcast form. It’s about 40 minutes. Ken is in Nebraska at present.
And by the way, here’s an Amazon link to Ken’s book, which will be out in May. His blog is here.
Sandwich bread
For a long time, I’ve been scorning sandwich bread, and my loaf pans have gone unused. I can think of several reasons. For one, I’m addicted to hot bread. For two, I try not to rely too much on sandwiches. But sandwiches have their place, especially on busy days. And especially in the winter, there’s nothing like hot toast at breakfast. Sandwich bread is very convenient for making toast.
To me there are really two basic types of bread dough. First is the type of dough that leads to French bread. It has a complex crust and a stretchy texture. To get French bread, you need only flour, water, yeast, and salt. There’s nothing like French bread when it’s fresh. But it soon becomes useless. The French have a saying that goes something like: On the first day it’s bread, on the second day it’s toast, and on the third day it’s a doorstop. French bread must be used pretty quickly, or it becomes chicken treats — though it can be converted to bread crumbs, or used in certain puddings. The French call it pain perdu, or lost bread. In some French recipes, pain perdu is like our French toast — stale bread dipped in a sweet batter and fried.
The dough for sandwich bread is different. For sandwich bread you want milk in the dough, and butter or oil. This changes the crumb and the crust of the bread. The bread stays more moist. It’s more cake-like. It is tender and slices much easier. And it’s good for toast or sandwiches for three days, maybe even four. Sandwich bread, though, is not nearly as good when you want warm fresh bread to serve with supper.
As regular readers know, I almost never list recipes. This is because I never obey recipes. I find a recipe that I like and trust as a starting point, and I modify it to suit myself. Here is a good starting recipe for sandwich bread from King Arthur flour. I use olive oil instead of butter, I use a little less oil than they call for, and I use about two-thirds whole wheat flour. I also put it in a hotter oven for the first 10 minutes, then reduce the heat and adjust the baking time. I find that bread rises better in the oven if the oven is hot enough to give it a quick pop. Then lower the heat. Oh what I would give for a commercial bread oven, with steam. Actually that’s not true. I wouldn’t give what they cost — thousands of dollars even for a small one. So we have to do the best we can with the ovens in domestic ranges.
Thieving squirrels …
Squirrels are bold, sneaky little things. They come up to the windows to snoop and tease the cat. One by one, this squirrel is stealing my black walnuts, which are drying on the deck. He nibbles off the hull either on the railing or the bird bath, then scampers back into the woods carrying his prize.
A new Verizon tower: major big deal
When someone puts new communications infrastructure in a data-poor rural place like northern Stokes County, it’s a big deal. Verizon is finishing up a new tower in the Lawsonville area, and it’s exciting for the folks around here.
When cellular towers started popping up in the countryside 10 and 15 years ago, I scorned them for their ugliness. Now I overlook the ugliness, because in rural places where we’ll probably never see fiber optic or cable, wireless services are our best hope. Those of you who live in places with good celluar coverage don’t need to care about where the towers are, but here in the sticks we need to know.
My present Internet connection draws on a Verizon tower about 4 miles away. I have a directional antenna in my attic that is aimed at that tower. The antenna plugs into a Verizon “air card,” and the air card plugs into a WIFI router. On a good day, I can get speeds of 1.25 Mbps down, enough to stream a Netflix or Hulu movie on the Apple TV. At other times, the connection is slower, around .75 Mbps down. This is much, much better than it used to be, after Verizon bought Alltel and continued to expand its rural coverage. But that is pathetically slow by urban or international standards, and it also costs more than much faster service in urban areas.
The new Verizon tower is about 15 miles away over the crooked roads we have in these parts. Yesterday I went out on a mission to have a look at the new tower and record its latitude and longitude, so that I can calculate its actual distance and make a guess about whether the new tower will help me get faster Internet. I also hoped to catch some engineers at work so that I could annoy them with questions. I’ll also make this into a little tutorial on how to find your nearest tower and calculate its precise distance from you.
First of all, you have to know where the towers are and which carrier the towers belong to. It may not be easy to get this information. Here in northern Stokes, the easiest way to track new towers is to follow the meetings of the county commissioners. Permits for new towers are always on their agenda. At last Monday’s meeting of the commissioners, it was mentioned that the new Verizon tower is expected to “light up” in a couple of weeks. If you don’t have local political intel on where the towers are, you often can identify them by searching the Antenna Search database. That database may not always be up to date, but it’s a start.
Then you drive to the tower and use your iPhone or a GPS device to record the latitude and longitude of the tower. The coordinates of the new Verizon tower at Lawsonville are longitude 80.223695 west, and latitude 36.496175 north.
A word about the notation used for latitude and longitude: There are two ways of doing this. There is a decimal format, which I used above and which your GPS device probably uses by default; and there is the traditional format that uses degrees, minutes, and seconds. You must always be aware which notation is being used and convert between them if necessary. There is a calculator here for doing this conversion. The Lawsonville tower’s coordinates, converted to traditional notation, are longitude 80 degrees west, 13 minutes, 25.302 seconds; latitude 36 degrees north, 29 minutes, 46.23 seconds. This can be represented as -80° 13′ 25.302″, +36° 29′ 46.23″.
Once you have the coordinates for the tower, get the coordinates for your home. For convenience, record the locations in both decimal and traditional notation. Now you can use a calculator to derive the distance and the direction (also called the azimuth) between the two points. Here is a link to the FCC’s calculator. The FCC kindly puts these calculators on line because calculations like this are often done in radio work. Use the FM-type calculation, since we’re talking about FM radio. (Digital brats still wet behind the ears like to quarrel with me and say that cell phones are not radios — they’re phones. Digital brats also like to deny that there is anything analog in the process. Wrong, wrong, wrong. It’s radio, and radio is always and forever analog, even when carrying signals that are digitally modulated. Digital brats like to think that radio is obsolete. They are laughably wrong. Their digital lifestyles are dependent on radio.)
When I did these calculations for the new Verizon tower, I found that it is 7.6 miles from me. That’s a good bit closer than I had expected, and it’s probably close enough to improve my Internet and cell-phone coverage, even though there’s a second Verizon tower about 4 miles away. One nice thing about Verizon’s CDMA technology is that a single device such as a smartphone can actually pull from more than one tower to increase its data bandwidth. I am not absolutely certain that this is true of Verizon’s new LTE 4G technology, but the engineer I spoke with yesterday up at the tower seems to think it’s also true of LTE 4G.
Speaking of LTE 4G, Verizon continues to say that their rollout of LTE 4G nationwide will be complete by the middle of 2013. The engineers I spoke with yesterday said that the LTE 4G cabinets for the new tower have been ordered but that they have not yet been received or installed.
There is no fiber optic connection to the new tower — it’s too remote, just as I am too remote for fiber or cable or even DSL. For “back haul” of the data, the engineers tell me that a microwave link will be used to another Verizon tower that does have a fiber connection. The other end of the microwave link is almost certainly the Verizon tower that is 4 miles from my place (on Mission Road), since that tower does have a fiber optic connection to “back haul” the data to urban civilization.
The engineers I spoke with yesterday were hard at work, finishing up the job of installing equipment on the new tower. Two or three guys were actually up on the tower, working on the antennas. Other guys were working in the equipment shack and even doing landscaping work. I’m glad I drove the Jeep yesterday rather than the Smart car. The tower is up a steep hill on a ridge, on an access road newly cut. Verizon has done an outstanding job of doing erosion control on the new road and around the tower site.
It’s nice to see Verizon spending money here, since I’ve spent so much money with them in the last four years.
Verizon plans to make money, of course with the new tower and the LTE 4G rollout. In rural areas which have been converted to LTE 4G, Verizon is offering a new service called “HomeFusion.” It will be pricey but fast. As I have learned, you can’t get decent Internet over wireless out in the sticks without a good antenna, properly placed. The Verizon HomeFusion service will include professionally installed outdoor antennas.
My data bill is now my highest bill — higher than my health insurance, higher than my county taxes, twice as high as my energy bill. Out here on the fringes of the digital world, there’s no other way.
Merlin
Hulu and Netflix, plus an Internet connection that is faster than it used to be (but still slow by civilized standards), her permitted me to check out older television shows. I’m now about seven episodes into Merlin.
Merlin is not a high-budget production, and it’s probably aimed at least partly at children. But the BBC has an amazing ability to do a lot with small budgets. Plus I understand that because Merlin became popular, its budgets and quality rise in future seasons (of which there are five).
These are not the standard King Arthur stories out of Malory. Rather, the stories were written for the series and focus on the doings of teen-age Prince Arthur and the teen-age Merlin, who in this series grow up together at Camelot. It’s good — if not dazzling — television for lovers of fantasy and period pieces.