Category Archives: Cooking

Cooking, Holidays, Writing

The Hours Before Christmas

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Winter                                                                       Moon of the Winter Solstice

Went out today to pick up the bound copies of Missing.  Fun to see the thick, maybe 4 inches, copy of my work over the last year, year and a half.  It has what Kinko’s calls a comb binding which consists of a round linked spiral of plastic wound through closely space holes punched in the left margin.   This will allow each of my beta readers to have their own copy that they can mark up as much as they want.  A lot, I hope.  Not sure why but I really feel different about this process.  Better.

Then over to the Festival grocery store for a few items we needed.  It closed at 4 today and I was there at 3:15 pm.  The mood was jolly.  A very nice Christmas surprise.  When I walked in, a guy my age, white hair with a ponytail and beard, black leather Harley jacket pushed a cart out toward me.  “There you go.”  A small gesture, kind.  But so in keeping with the season that it left me smiling the whole time I was in the store.

Back home where Kate cooked tenderloin fillets, potatoes and green beans.  A festive supper.  And a good one.

Now Christmas eve has almost come to an end.  We plan to go see Abraham Lincoln tomorrow and eat Chinese.  Jewish solidarity.

Cooking, Writing

A Quiet Sunday

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Samhain                                                                       Thanksgiving Moon

A quiet Sunday.  Up about 7 with the dogs.  Breakfast, oatmeal and a banana.  Downstairs to write my first pass on the assignment for the mythology class.  After that over to Festival.  Back.  Had two more pieces of pizza for lunch.  I said it was quiet day.

Started the soup, a thirteen-bean soup.  I soaked the beans over night, rinsed them, a bit foamy, added 5 quarts of water (I know. A lot of soup.) and a smoked turkey leg (replacing a ham-hock.  Less fatty, still smoky), brought it up to a boil, down to simmer for 3 hours.  Took a nap.

Got the ingredients for the  last thirty minutes of the soup together:  2 quarts tomatoes, chili powder, dried garlic flakes (ours), an onion, 2 cups worth.  This red onion made me back away from the counter, chemical warfare.  Damn effective.  All into the pot.  Boil again.  Wait.

It’s done.  Cooling.  Supper tonight.  And for many other nights.  A lot of it, most of it, will go in the freezer.  Tired of eating meat, fatty things, over indulgence.  Don’t like it but I do it anyhow.  A puzzle.

Now.  Edit the writing assignment.  250 words is a very tight capsule.  Got to squeeze information in sideways.

Cooking, Holidays

Festival(s)

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Samhain                                                        Thanksgiving Moon

Over to Festival…the supermarket.  Listened to music of a festival, Christmas.  Singing along to Rudolf as I plucked brown rice, persimmons and smoked turkey legs out of their temporary places and put them in my cart.  Thanksgiving is over; let the shopping begin.

It is, as always, a pleasure to shop for groceries.  Bright store, well stocked, interesting selections and…Christmas music.  Brought me right out of Thebes and into the good ole heartland of the U.S. of A.

Gonna make a soup now, eat some pizza leftovers and then get to work on Jason and Medea.

Commentary on Religion, Cooking, Myth and Story

Meat

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Fall                                                              Fallowturn Moon

Sat down to supper tonight.  Beef.  Rare.  Kate’s a great hand with the steak. Always gets it right.  As I cut through a piece, the course I’m taking on mythology flashed to mind.  Just before I ate supper, as a happenstance, I listened to a lecture on ritual and religion.  A major part of Greek rituals was sacrifice.

The sacrifice was usually an animal and, though piglets, pigs, chickens, sheep and goats could be offered, the very best was cow, a bull or an ox, the bigger the better.  Last week we learned about Prometheus and his deception of Zeus which involved wrapping thigh bones in glistening fat and offering them to the gods while the humans kept the meat for themselves.  Professor Struck suggested in this case the myth served to justify the odd habit of giving the gods the least of the sacrifice.  Could be.

A more cogent argument this week, from anthropology, about why sacrifice animals at all.  The sacrifice, commanded by the gods, offsets, according to this line of thought, the blood guilt humans experience when killing and eating animals.  This makes sense to me.

Now, we don’t have the ritual context, not even the native american habit of thanking the animal for the gift of their life.  My rationale has always involved anthropology; that is, we humans are built as omnivores and as apex predator we eat at the top of the food chain.  No blood guilt, just animal nature.

Probably no more defensible than the gods made me do it.

Cooking, Garden, Latin, Myth and Story, Translating Metamorphoses

Head and Hands

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Lugnasa                                                                      Autumn Moon

Worked my head into a fuzzy place today.  Just couldn’t go further, so I worked out.  That always helps.

Tomorrow is a Latin morning with my tutor at 11:00 AM.  Before I meet with him, I have to review my Ovid, the last of the Philemon and Baucis, 14 verses.  I reviewed the Aeneid this afternoon, 9 verses there.  This crop, in both authors, was difficult.

This weekend is a garden weekend.  The orchard, shoring up a leaning apple tree.  It’s a Zestar and we had two apples from it today.  Boy, are they good.  I plan to harvest the tree before we begin the shoring up.  These are mostly bagged and, for some reason, the squirrels have left them alone.  Maybe they’re honeycrisp connoiseurs?

We’re going to prepare for winter pruning, decide the remaining tasks before the cold and get on the priority ones.

There’s one more soup to make, a winter vegetable that will use our onions, leeks, carrots and tomatoes at least.  Our frozen soups. pot pies and vegetables have begun to use up the available space in our freezer so one task is to clean out the old and the no longer desirable to make room.  That will happen over the weekend, too.

Cooking

Groceries.

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Lugnasa                                                                   New (Autumn) Moon

On the asphalt headed toward the grocery store, Festival, this morning.  You can tell it’s fall because the outside of the store sports very large boxes of pumpkins and still tightly gathered mums in pots.  Soon there will be shocks of corn and bales of hay.  Inside caramel coated apples, plain and nut covered, and the first red grapes of the fall.

Monday morning is a slow day at the market.  Two of the grocery guys were out stocking shelve, each apparently a healthy consumer of the store’s products (that’s healthy in the eats a hell of a lot sense), a produce clerk arranged pineapples above the bananas.

A few shoppers, mostly purposeful, no wandering.  Cereal aisle.  Check.  Turkey and sausage.  Check.   Eggs.  Pizza.  Bread.

Going hungry to the grocery store is a sure way to make fat profits for the nice folks at Festival and I was hungry.  I went $40+ over our weekly food budget, but on the bright side, I got a lot of good things to eat.

Then home.  Now, nap.

Cooking, Garden

In August, Thinking of January

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Lugnasa                                                               Garlic Planting Moon

The harvest and preservation season continues apace.  This morning I made a leek/tomato soup using 18 of our own leeks, two of our tomatoes and six of the ones we purchased yesterday at Green Barn, also locally grown.  This afternoon I’ll make another four chicken-leek pot pies for freezing and tomorrow a batch of chicken noodle soup and at least one, if not two, sugar cream pies.

Sugar cream pies are a Hoosier tradition and one of my favorites.  On a webpage devoted to the history of the sugar cream pie in Indiana it referred to the recipe as a desperation one, a recipe used when all the other stores had been used up.  Could be.  The recipes, though they vary a bit, all call for butter, cream and sugar.  Some of them that’s the whole recipe.  Finger stir–so as not to whip the cream–pop in the oven.

Desperation never tasted so good.

So we’re in August here in Andover, thinking of December and January.  The house smells great.  Kate’s making corn relish,

Cooking, Dogs, Health

Gimmee That.

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Lugnasa                                                               Garlic Planting Moon

Kona, our 12 year old whippet, as spry and agile as ever, a canine hymn to successful aging, started, about a week ago, jumping up and pulling down bagged honeycrisp apples.  They were on a low hanging branch and I can’t imagine what she thought she was about, but she bagged (sorry) several before I saw her in the act and promptly plugged up her way into the orchard.

Honeycrisps mature in mid-September, so her effort, maybe she was being helpful?, was premature by a month or so.  As a result, Kate and I decided to try drying apples and pears.

A word on pears.  Thankfully Kate saw this in a drying article on pears and we got them off the tree in time.  Saw what?  Well, the UofM extensions says the mistake most novice pear growers make is to let the pears ripen on the tree.  Geez.  Turns out they get grainy and not as tasty if you let Mother finish the job.

We cut up the seven apples I recovered (some had been gnawed on by other dogs) and the four pears, soaked them in sodium bisulfite (from your friendly home brewing store in nearby Springlake Park), spread them out on drying racks and put them in our Excalibur.  I had a slice when I got up from my nap and they taste just like dried apples!  Success.

We’re reinventing ma and pa every day here this fall in Andover.

 

Cooking, Garden, Weather +Climate

Ancient Necessity

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Lugnasa                                                                  New (Garlic Planting) Moon

This afternoon as Kate and I drove out for a late lunch, the clouds were high cirrus, horse-tails against a robin’s egg sky.  The angle of the sun tells the story of seasonal procession and the temperature hinted at fall days still a ways ahead.  We’ve lost 97 minutes of daylight, having long ago turned the corner headed toward the winter solstice.

A lot of the garden activity now happens inside the house.  Herb and fruit drying, soup making, soon canning.  These are the harvest months of August, September and October.  No, we don’t subsist based on our garden’s produce, but eat it we do, over most of the year, either directly from the garden or laid by in any of various methods.  In a sense we only continue the long Midwestern cultural tradition laid down by ancient necessity, the life or death need to eat during the cold months.

Our harvest and preserving echoes that tradition since necessity long ago gave way to grocery stores and farmer’s markets, but in that echo we can hear the voices of our grandmothers and our grandfathers as they worked in the fields, filled the farm kitchen with the heat of their cooking, preparing themselves and their family for winter.

Lack of necessity, however, does not mean lack of need.  I believe there is a need for us to plant a seed, or nurture a transplant, to care for a tree or bush or a flower.  And more.  To gain in reciprocity something from that nurture: a fruit, a vegetable, some sustenance.  And more.  To use that food on our own tables, to create the magic of the true transubstantiation, flesh of the earth, blood of the sun, work of the plant made into our body.

This is an ancient necessity, to know this transformation from plant to food.  Why?  Because no matter our physical location, it is still and will be for the foreseeable future the source of everything we eat.  If we do not understand it, we will not protect it.  If we do not protect this source, we are in danger of losing it.  Ancient.  Necessity.

Art and Culture, Cooking, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

Latin Fridays. (Maybe I Should Eat Fish, Too?)

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Lugnasa                                                       New (Garlic Planting) Moon

Down in the pits with Ovid this morning, rasslin’.  I’m not moving as fast as I did a month ago, but I believe that this stretch is more difficult, not that I’m slower.  There are many small satisfactions in translation:  learning new words, puzzling out word order, identifying conjugations, putting phrases together to form a sentence and sentences together to form a narrative.  I enjoy it.

Today is a Latin day, so I’ll whack away at Ovid in the afternoon, too, before I work out.  Tomorrow it’s back to Missing though I hope I can work some short Ovid sessions along the way, too.

I had two different couples stop me after the Rembrandt tour yesterday, none of them part of the home school group who were my primary tour.  They both said I was an excellent docent.  Used those words.  That felt good.  I thanked them and said it was good to hear.

Kate’s roasting peppers this morning.  That set off the smoke alarm and the co2 detector.