Let's hear it for the chickens

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March 4: four eggs. There are three nests in the henhouse, but they always share and take turns.

My four chickens have averaged slightly better than three eggs a day all winter, and it was a cold winter. Even though it’s still early March, they’re already starting to return to their four-eggs-a-day standard of productivity. They have only ever broken one egg, and that was when they were young and inexperienced. I myself have accidentally broken three or four.

They are content, yet demanding, always hoping for treats, which they get, every day. Sometimes the best I can do is cut up some raw potatoes or carrots, or maybe apples, or pluck the outer leaves from a head of cabbage. Their favorite treats are kitchen scraps — peelings and leftovers. Pasta drives them wild. They seem to think it’s worms. On cold mornings they relish a warm breakfast — cracked grains mixed with leftover gravy or soup. During the summer, finding treats for them is easy because the kitchen always has lots of summer produce. During the winter, treats are more of a challenge. They always have laying mash in their feeder. But it’s treats that keep things interesting.

Newspapers and magazines are full of stories about backyard chickens these days, but here’s one of the best pieces I’ve come across. Peter Lennox, an academic, waxes philosophical on the keeping of chickens:

Watching chickens is a very old human pastime, and the forerunner of psychology, sociology and management theory. Sometimes understanding yourself can be made easier by projection on to others. Watching chickens helps us understand human motivations and interactions, which is doubtless why so many words and phrases in common parlance are redolent of the hen yard: “pecking order”, “cockiness”, “ruffling somebody’s feathers”, “taking somebody under your wing”, “fussing like a mother hen”, “strutting”, a “bantamweight fighter”, “clipping someone’s wings”, “beady eyes”, “chicks”, “to crow”, “to flock”, “get in a flap”, “coming home to roost”, “don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched”, “nest eggs” and “preening”.

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On bread and bakeware

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I bought an iron skillet only three weeks ago, but it has already become my favorite pan for baking. Whether it’s biscuits, cornbread, or rolls, the iron pan produces the most even baking and the best crusts, both top and bottom.

Today’s rolls contained both cashews and soy flour. I continue with my experiments to try to produce a truly good bread with the lowest glycemic index possible. Just using whole wheat flour, of course, is better than white flour. But I don’t regard whole wheat alone as a true glycemic-friendly food.

Some of my experiments have involved brans, both wheat bran and oat bran. Bran, though, makes a coarse, not very tasty bread. I’ve also tried flax seed meal. But there’s something about the consistency of the flax seed that detracts from a really satisfying bread-eating experience.

One way to lower the glycemic index of bread is to add protein. For today’s bread, I whizzed in a blender half a cup of cashews in a cup and a quarter of water. I added a little more than a quarter of a cup of soy flour, then enough whole wheat flour to make the dough. It was pretty darn good bread.

There are some low-cost iron skillets from China on the market, but I’m sure you’d be much happier with an American-made skillet from Lodge.

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The rolls always fall out of the iron skillet clean as a whistle.

And again…

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If we had to have one of the snowiest winters I can remember, even from my young’unhood, I’m glad it was the winter after I was safely moved into a cozy new house with a good heating system and a fireplace.

This photo was taken from the deck behind the house. It clearly shows the slope of the hillside I live on.

Rehabilitating potatoes

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I’ve written previously about how sweet potatoes have a lower glycemic index than white potatoes and are all around healthier than white potatoes. But lately I’ve become aware that there are things we can do to lower the glycemic insult of white potatoes.

If you Google around, you’ll find a number of sources that say that red potatoes are slightly less of a glycemic insult than white potatoes. But even better, when potatoes are cooked and then chilled in the refrigerator for 24 hours, the glycemic index goes down substantially. Boiled red potatoes, chilled and then eaten the next day, can have a glycemic reading as low as 56.

As I understand it, this is not simply because the potatoes are cold. It’s that, as the starch is chilled, the starch chemistry changes its structure so that it’s slower to digest. I believe this change persists even if the potatoes are reheated.

I keep seeing references to new types of low-glycemic potatoes developed by agricultural universities. But so far I have not been able to find a source of these potatoes, either as produce or as seed potatoes for planting.

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Carolina church supper potato salad

Popovers

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The best popovers, to be sure, are made with white flour. They’re light, buttery, and crisp around the edges. But it’s possible to make perfectly decent whole wheat popovers. I use the austere popover recipe from the 1943 wartime edition of Irma Rombauer’s Joy of Cooking. Rombauer includes several variations on popovers in this edition, including the standard light and poppy version. The whole-wheat wartime recipe uses one egg, a cup of flour, and a cup of milk. Soy milk works fine. Yep, they’ll rise, if you beat the egg well enough. When they’re done, be sure to prick them with a knife or fork to let the steam out.

Whole-wheat sweet-potato gnocci

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Gnocci with toasted walnuts, tempeh, and mushrooms. This is a very meaty dish … hard to believe that it’s vegan.

For those days in which you walk in circles in the kitchen trying to think of something a little different to cook, consider gnocci.

Gnocci, I believe, are considered tricky to make. I don’t think so. Any cook who is experienced working with dough will understand making gnocci. If you Google, you’ll find lots of tips and recipes from the experts, which I am not. However, I do strongly believe that you don’t need egg in the dough. Just two ingredients — potato and flour — work fine.

Gnocci are usually boiled. They also can be browned in oil, which is how I made gnocci today. Sweet potato gnocci particularly like to be browned in oil, I think, because the sugar in the potatoes gives the gnocci skins a nice, chewy texture.

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The dough: nothing but sweet potatoes and whole wheat flour

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Sliced and forked

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Sizzlin’

The family cow

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My grandmother Mary Lillian Bowman Dalton with one of her cows, c. 1925, Laurel Fork, Virginia

Yesterday while walking back from the mailbox, I was admiring one of my neighbors’ pastures. It has a good fence and a thick stand of grass ready to turn lush as soon as spring arrives. I realized that, in rural areas like this with a history of family farms, it would be relatively easy to bring back the family cow.

Consider how quickly backyard chickens have come back into fashion. There is even a new bimonthly magazine for backyard chickens. Chickens, of course, require far less infrastructure, less space, and less labor than a cow. But if the day ever comes when we see severe unemployment (meaning that people find themselves at home most of the time) combined with inflation in food prices, I suspect that some hardy rural people who have the pastureland will go back to keeping a cow.

In talking with Ken Ilgunas last weekend about my oath to measure my success here by how effectively I can turn back the clock to 1935, I mentioned how I was the last generation to witness, and, in a child’s way at least, to participate in the operation of family farms. Neither the economics nor the infrastructure of the family farm is mysterious to me. Almost all of my relatives lived on small farms, and some of those farms were in operation before 1900. I have gathered the eggs, seen cows milked, seen butter churned, seen mules pulling plows, unloaded hay, fed and watered the horse, helped with the tobacco crop, and seen the wood cookstoves blazing and steaming while Sunday dinner was cooked. Apart from the land and the infrastructure required for a small farm, it’s a matter of labor. Somebody has to be home all day. A few strong young’uns are an indispensable asset.

Would I like to have a cow? No. I don’t have the pasture space. I’m also content with soybean milk, which I could make for myself if I had to. But cows have an amazing capability that ensures them of a niche in a relocalized economy — they can turn grass into milk.

There’s a lot of material on the Internet about family cows. This is a good place to start.

Thank goodness I'm out of style

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Approved house style: New York Times

I can think of a hundred ways to psychoanalyze the people who set themselves up as lords of style and look down on the rest of us. But I’d rather try to be nice and think of it as a serious question: Why is there such a thriving industry and subculture of style?

The best answer I can come up with is that the style industry is an arm of consumerism. It’s to teach us to disdain and devalue what we have so that we’ll buy something new. It’s to teach us that if we don’t buy the new styles, people will make fun of us.

Invariably, the houses that newspapers feature in their architecture columns are boxes. The box in the photo above was certain to be featured in the New York Times, because, not only is it a box, it’s a crooked box that cost $1.4 million. There’s this quote from the owner of the house: “If we just produced another thatched cottage, we might as well still be living in caves.”

The plaid outfit speaks (loudly) for itself.

As for the cabbage, the food writer for Salon informs us that people used to eat cabbage, but cabbage fell into disrepute and something ruined its reputation. I never knew. The way to redeem cabbage’s reputation and make it fit to eat again, he tells us, is to give it a “ripping sear in smoking-hot oil.” Maybe later.

I live in a cottage, my best outfits are from L.L. Bean, and I eat cabbage the old-fashioned way. With the capital I save from not being stylish, I might be able to afford an out-of-style landscape, and a garden.

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Approved style of dressing: New York Times

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Approved style of eating cabbage: Salon