Into the Woods – Page 183 – Watching a bewildering world from the middle of nowhere

Sprouted wheat bread

I’m an experienced sprouter, and I’ve meant to experiment with sprouted wheat bread for a long time, but I never got around to it until today. Why sprouted wheat? The grain is much more nutritious after it’s sprouted, and it’s said to have other healthy virtues. The bread turned out very good — surprisingly light with a moist crumb and chewy texture.

I used a quart of sprouts (having started with a cup of wheat kernels). I ground the sprouts very thoroughly in the food processor. After grinding, they looked pretty much like dough made from whole wheat flour. To that I added half a cup of water with the yeast, about three-quarters of a cup of King Arthur whole wheat flour, and about half a cup of flax seed meal. I’ve included pictures to show that the dough looked, and behaved, pretty much the same as whole wheat flour.

In the sprouting jar

Ready for the food processor

Kneaded

Rising

Ruralpolitans?

Wall Street Journal

I have often wondered why we weren’t seeing more signs of a dropout movement, or a back-to-the-land movement, during this economic downturn. Maybe it’s happening. The Wall Street Journal had a piece this week about migration to rural areas, calling these back-to-the-landers “ruralpolitans.” It’s a rational thing to do. And yes, having the Internet makes it easier and diminishes the feeling of isolation.

Winter bargains

Fresh greens are among the best bargains in the grocery store during the winter. This huge mess of turnip greens cost 99 cents.

Lily at sunset

Lily loves the big upstairs windows — especially when she’s all snug on the bed at sunrise and sunset.

The hippies were right

I often wonder why the current economic downturn, though it certainly has caused certain useless and paranoid sorts of cultural uproar, has not led to more positive attempts at adaptation like we had in the 1970s. Though the 1970s experimentation with back-to-the-earth movements were mostly eventually abandoned as failures, still those movements changed many people permanently.

The script for these movements, you’ll remember, came from publications that are now classics — the Foxfire books, for example, and the Whole Earth Catalog.

In those days, there was one cookbook that you’d be sure to find in any health food store — the Ten Talents cookbook by Frank and Rosalie Hurd. This cookbook is still in print in a revised edition.

While unboxing books yesterday, I came across my copy of the Ten Talents cookbook. I have the original 1968 edition. It remains the best vegan cookbook I have ever seen.

Another book that was very important in the hippy era was Jethro Kloss’ Back to Eden, which also became a hippy handbook.

These two books — Ten Talents (1968) and Back to Eden (written in the 1930s) — are decades ahead of their time. It is remarkable how they are in accord with all the research that has been done on health, disease, and diet since the books were written.

Pumpkin seeds

Dry toasting

How lucky for us that, as a rule, the cheapest foods are also the healthiest. Think: beans, onions, cabbage, squash, most grains, and so on. A cheap and healthy food that is very much neglected is the humble pumpkin seed. Google for “pumpkin seeds” to read up on what they have to offer.

A good rule of grocery shopping is that any food that can be bought in bulk should be bought in bulk. Ironically, Whole Foods, an expensive grocery store, is one of the few stores (in this area, at least) that sells certain staples in bulk. They have pumpkin seeds, along with a nice assortment of nuts and grains. Even nuts, when bought in bulk, are relatively cheap.

But what does one do with pumpkin seeds? They are sometimes sold pre-processed as a snack, roasted and salted. But that’s neither cheap nor healthy. Lately I’ve been dry-toasting them in a pan, grinding them in a small grinder, and using them generously as a topping for things like vegetable and pasta dishes. Add some food yeast and a little salt and you’ve got a nice, toasty topping that can be used like grated parmesan — but the pumpkin seeds are much cheaper and much healthier.

Grinding them saves a lot of chewing!

Ida

The Dan River three miles downstream from Danbury in Stokes County

Moisture brought up from the Gulf of Mexico by Hurricane Ida left four inches or more of rain this week. This was one of the nicest rains in years in these parts. The rain is also bringing up the groundwater, which has never really recovered from a long drought earlier this decade.

George Bernard Shaw's "St. Joan"

Winston-Salem Journal

I was surprised to read in this morning’s Winston-Salem Journal that the UNC School of the Arts is doing George Bernard Shaw’s play St. Joan. Those of you who are in this area might want to consider going.

As the director says, quoted by the Journal, “Nothing has changed since Joan’s time.” I have read this play a couple of times, but I have never seen it produced. I plan to post in the future on the story of Joan of Arc and why her story matters so much to us moderns.

And by the way, it seems the casting is going to be great. We don’t really know what Joan looked like, but based on references in the historical record and the genetics of the peasants in her part of France, it is safe to assume that she was short and dark-haired. She may not have been very pretty, because the many soldiers she was around seemed to have trouble leaving her alone. But obviously she radiated charisma.

Refrigerator poem

A company named Fridge Fun in Santa Rosa, California, makes magnetic poetry kits for refrigerator doors. One such kit includes 240 words taken from Shakespeare. One arranges the magnetic words to make one’s own poems. I had one of these kits on my refrigerator door in San Francisco, and a friend had written a 15-line poem on the door. When I moved, I couldn’t bring myself to disassemble the poem, so I transferred the magnetic words one by one to a cookie sheet to preserve the poem. I finally got around to typing the poem into the computer.

Refrigerator poem

All errors lost in this world
Hath always love as a stage.
Thus such human sorrow protests
Wicked men who dream
About created women

What torture shall plague it self unto
Brave riddance whence I am damned
For playing love’s rotten pomp
Discretion will own me nothing:
Trouble never toileth too much mercy

Pray thine rose dost kill bad art
‘Tis mad the night’s flesh became
Alas ambition breaks when a new light is made
Fit and true in me
My most strained heart is good for thee.

— James Michael Gregg, San Francisco, 2005

Just for fun, here are the very few words left over from the kit that were not used in this poem: Part, Circumstance, It, Was, The, At, Neither, Philosopher, Nor, Borrower, Lend, Comedy, An, Home.

Pumpkin

Pumpkin curry

I am shocked how many people tell me that they buy only canned pumpkin and never cook pumpkin fresh. It’s easy to cook pumpkin in the oven. Just cut the pumpkin in half, scrape the center clean of seeds and strings, and bake the pumpkin on a cookie sheet until it’s tender. A big pumpkin will need up to an hour and a half in the oven at 325 to 350 degrees. When the pumpkin is done, let it cool. Then scrape the pumpkin out with spoon, leaving the empty pumpkin shell (and the seeds and strings) for the chickens.

Pumpkin is just too cheap and too nutritious not to use when it’s in season. It’s good for many things other than pies. Search the web, and you’ll get lots of ideas for recipes.

The pumpkin just came out of the oven.