Day: November 8, 2010

Turkey Tracks: I Like My Bread

Turkey Tracks:  November 8, 2010

I Like My Bread

Take a look at what came out of my oven last night:

 

The loaf on the left is a wild yeast sourdough bread that is cranberry, pecan, and chocolate.  The one on the right has dried cherries and walnuts.  I froze the latter and ate a slice of the former for breakfast.  Yummo!

I’ve had this wild yeast sourdough starter for about 4 years now.  I forget quite how I started it–starters aren’t all that hard.  Sally Fallon and Mary Enig have recipes in Nourishing Traditions.  Any good bread book does, actually.  I never add commercial yeast to it.  It took a while to really get going, but now, you can see it’s popping up beautifully. 

I have developed a sponge method that takes about 2 days.  Sometimes, 3, like yesterday when the mixture sat covered on the counter bubbling for 2 days and picking up more yeast because I forgot it.  I feed the starter one day and pull off  half for next time.  Then I mix up a sponge and let it sit for a day.  Then I knead and bake.  It takes me 3 minutes to mix in more flour, 10 minutes to knead it, and it sits and rises for at least two hours, and bakes for an hour.  Clean-up is about 10 minutes.

My bread is probably very close to an older European bread.   It’s just wild yeast, flour, and water.  I don’t add salt as that draws moisture and makes it mold quicker.  Rather I slather it with salted butter or unsalted butter and REAL sea salt (grey, moist) sprinkled over the butter.  I can add fats, or sweeteners, or eggs, but I rarely do.  This time I added the dried fruit, nuts, and, as an adventure, the chocolate.  And, I only eat one piece a day at the most as I really control the amount of grains I eat.  This bread, too, is fermented with the sourdough starter, so the phytates, which can and do cause chronic illnesses, are managed.  Everyone used to soak grains, nuts, and seed before eating them, but we’ve forgotten how, and we’re eating a ton of grains these days–which is a big factor in all the chronic disease we have going on. 

My bread is best sliced and toasted.  It’s too heavy for sandwiches really.  And I’ve mostly given up sandwiches anyway.  Too much bread.  I just eat the innards of sandwiches. 

I’m looking forward to breakfast tomorrow!

Turkey Tracks: The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Turkey Tracks:  November 8, 2010

The Elegance of the Hedgehog

Muriel Barbery is a French professor of philosophy.  Her novel The Elegance of the Hedgehog has been enormously popular in her native France, England, and in America. 

I do not see why.

I believe the novel’s success to be partly due to a lack of critical reviews.  The reviews on-line are all laudatory.  So is the novel’s popularity due to some popular idea that this is a philosophical novel that produces cultural capital if one has read it because it does discuss various philosophical ideas along the way?   But, for me, Barbery’s philosophical stance in the novel is incoherent.  And, Barbery shocks the reader by killing her protagonist just when the three central characters have come together in an interesting way.  It’s as if Barbery does not know what to do with them once she’s set their stage.  And, I found it very difficult to capture the large cast in my head as I read.  I kept having to page back to see “who is that again?”

But, let’s look at how Barbery handles philosophy.  She, as is customary, divides the subject into two major camps:  idealism and materialism.  Idealism comes from the mind of the individual interacting with the world, as in Descartes “I think, therefore I am.”  And, phenomenology, a subset of idealism and the subject of a debunking discourse in the novel– is the belief that the real world in inaccessible  because all that exists is perception formed in the mind.   Materialism, on the other hand, believes that there are bones, dates, and observable constructs in the world.  Marx, for instance, is from the materialistic camp.  But, Barbery dismisses Marx on the first page of the novel.  Not all of materialism, but Marx, who writes of capital and its impact on class–a major subject in the novel as the main protagonist is a concierge in a fancy apartment filled with rich people. 

With idealism dismissed and Marx dismissed, what remains?  For Barbery it’s a particular material moment of viewing Beauty.   ART, thus, gives us the power to erase desire because we can look at beauty/art without wanting the objects portrayed in the art.  Further, the still life, or the objects within art, hold beauty in a timeless moment.  Barbery describes other such timeless beautiful moments of beauty in the novel.  So, all of materialism is reduced to beauty held in a moment seen only by the observant–like the petal of a flower falling that one of the protagonists sees. 

But, but, but–isn’t beauty in the eye of the beholder.  And, aren’t notions of beauty formed by one’s culture and by the context within which one lives?  History shows shifting notions of beauty.  Yet, a key scene that sketches out Barbery’s philosophy is when the concierge visits the apartment of a wealthy Japanese man and sees a western still life from several hundred years ago.  Together the two people–one Asian and one French–salivate over this very Western picture.  Would the Japanese man really have this notion of beauty?  Would the concierge really enjoy esoteric Japanese movies that display Japanese notions of beauty?  This is the great bourgeoise move that makes all people alike under the sun.  By drawing a notion of universal beauty that can be seen by all, Barbery erases the very real differences that exist between cultures, between ages.  What has followed that idea around the world has been a violence carried out by those with the power to do so.  The different are made to want the same things as the conqueror when their culture was/is very different. 

Aha, but maybe that’s where the popularity lies.  It’s the same old Western story told yet another way, isn’t it?  And, isn’t the viewing of ART actually a moment of idealism, not materialism.  Isn’t that moment mediated by the mind and the cultural knowledge of the mind?  So, what’s really going on here is an entrapment within the idealistic circuit which maintains the status quo of… class reality, for instance.

Yes, that’s it.

Turkey Tracks: October Book Club

Turkey Tracks:  November 8, 2010

October Book Club

It was my turn to host our book club.

We meet late afternoon for tea and discussion.  This month the book was The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbary,which I want to discuss in a separate entry.

For some reason I was thinking about John’s mother.  Norah gave me so many pretty things over the years.  Among them this Royal Tara tea set:

 

The wool placemats and napkins were a wedding present 44 years ago.

Here’s what the table looked like.  Not too fancy, but comfy feeling on a cool day.

 

I made two kinds of cookies.  A buttery saffron one from the Pensey’s Spices catalog that had just arrived:

 

They were quite good, but are still hanging around since we really don’t each much white flour and sugar.   Because of that I made macaroon cookies that are almost healthy.  They do not have any white flour, have healthy coconut meat, limited sweetener, and some good nuts and dried fruit.  It’s a recipe I’ve evolved from one in Sally Fallon Morell and Mary Enig’s book–a mainstay in my kitchen–Nourishing Traditions.   OK, so the chocolate isn’t great, but, there you have it, I love chocolate in the winter.  I don’t seem to have a thing for it in the summer.

Louisa’s Healthy Macaroons

Preheat the oven to 300 degrees and  line two cookie sheets with either the new silicon sheets or parchment paper.  (I’m afraid to ask if these silicon sheets are ok to use as they make baking cookies so easy.)

4 egg whites (I use the yolks in yogurt fruit smoothies)

pinch of sea salt (the wet grey kind with minerals intact, not the white dried kind in the grocery store)

 2 Tablespoons arrowroot

1/2 cup maple syrup or honey–or less (the honey cooks faster than the maple syrup)

1 teaspoon vanilla (Fallon/Enig call for 1 tablespoon, but I find this too much since I have added more ingredients and since I was using Penseys’ double vanilla)

2 cups dried, unsweetened coconut meat (I order on-line from Coconut on-line and get a BIG jar which lasts about a year)

Add extras:  nuts that have been soaked in salted water and dried in a dehydrator to remove the phytates, dried fruit, chocolate bits.  Good combos are pecans and apricots, dried cherries and chocolate and nuts.  I just chop a high-quality chocolate bar into chunks.  I probably add a good 2 cups of extras. 

So, whip your egg whites and pinch of salt until you have firm peaks.  Add the arrowroot and sweetener and vanilla.  Add the coconut and mix with a big spoon.  Add the extras.  Do not overmix and break down the egg white mixture.

Put big gobs of the macaroon mixture onto the sheets.

Like this:

Bake at 300 degrees for 30 minutes and then turn down the oven to 200 and let the cookies dry out a bit for…about 30-40 minutes.  Taking them out early does not hurt them–they just get too sticky.  You want them to be nicely brown and a bit dry.  Here’s a picture of them done just right:

 ENJOY!!!   And put in an airtight container as they pick up humidity.

Turkey Tracks: John Buys Me A New Camera

Turkey Tracks:  November 8, 2010

John Buys Me A New Camera

My camera broke.  I can’t imagine why.  It just started eating batteries and, gradually, just stopped working.

No one dropped it.  Or, mistreated it.  It just…stopped.

That halted progress on my blog, of course.  I find text so much more interesting with pictures added.

John came to the rescue.  He bought me a new camera.  A slim little thing that is very powerful.  I love it already. 

He also spent hours fixing my computer when the new camera software caused the printer to stop working.

I find technology to be endlessly frustrating.  It can reduce me to tears and temper tamtrums.  And I feel like it wastes so much of my time since when things go wrong, it takes forever to sort everything out again.  I feel like I’ve missed several generations of learning with technology.  And nothing seems to be written down reliably so I can follow instructions.  My intuition is so NOT the intuition of technology.

Anyway, I’m all set to go again.  Thanks to John, who patiently comes to my rescue again and again.

Here’s a picture of–and thanks to–John with the new camera:

Turkey Tracks: New-Baby-Coming Projects

Turkey Tracks:   November 8, 2010

New-Baby-Coming Projects

 

We have a new granddaughter coming in early December.   We might even be in Charleston, SC, when she arrives.    

Anyway, when her mother Corinne and my son Bryan were here in the summer, Corinne and I took a day and picked out fabrics for some special projects.

We picked out fabrics for two soft blankets:

 

These blankets are flannel on one side and a cotton fabric on the other.  Corinne loved all the bright, lively children’s prints on the market now and chose these two.  These blankets wash and wear beautifully and get used in countless ways.  I gave our other daughter-in-law two for each new child (for a total of 8!), and Tami put them under a baby’s head in a crib to catch spit-up (saving washing the whole sheet), on the changing table, on the floor, over a sleeping baby, and so forth. 

I buy 1 1/4 yards of each fabric, rip the selvages and edges to get straight grains, lay the two layers together right sides together, and trim where needed (the flannel piece is often larger), and sew around the edges (1/2-inch seam) leaving a turning space.  I trim down the corners and push them out.  Then, turn the fabrics right side out, iron, sew down the edges, and fold them prettily to show both layers. 

Corinne also picked out an Amy Butler pattern for a diaper bag and fabrics to make it.  Here’s what the finished product looks like.  There are big pockets on both sides and lots of pockets inside, which I divided on one side for bottles: 

Here is an end view of the handle detail:

And, one of the interior:

And, Corinne picked out an adorable bug fabric for the baby’s quilt backing.   She left the rest to me, and here I am, beginning work on the quilt for my new granddaughter:

And here’s a hint of what’s going on:

Turkey Tracks: Finished Rug

Turkey Tracks:  November 8, 2010

Finished Rug

I finished the knitted rug I wrote about a few posts back.  It came out really pretty, don’t you think?  The colors are perfect for the kitchen–clear and bright.

I have enough cotton yarn and fabric left to make one more, which I likely will do.

I could have done a neater job on joining the three sections.  I need to review the mattress stitch again.  The joins are sturdy, however, and are not going to come apart.  Thank you Mason-Dixon quilters!

  

 

 

Turkey Tracks: Long-arm Sewing Machine, “Lucy”

Turkey Tracks:  November 8, 2010

Long-Armed Sewing Machine, “Lucy”

 

I’ve wanted a long-arm sewing machine for a long time, as I said in an earlier post.  But I was not sure what kind to get, who would service it, how to set it up, what kind of table would be sturdy, and could I really learn to be as good on it as Joan Herrick is.  (Joan is a fellow member of Coastal Quilters, a chapter in the Maine state quilters’ guild, Pine Tree Quilting Guild.)  Joan is an amazing long-arm quilter.  When I got some money from my mother’s estate, I took the plunge.  John named the daunting looking machine “Lucy” after we set her up.  Mother would be pleased as she had a secret desire to quilt but never took the plunge.

I got a Handi Quilter Avante, and it came to me from Utah.  I’ve tried all the machines in this class–made for the home hobbiest–and kept returning to it.  It has an 18-inch throat, which means I have an 18-inch strip to quilt before I have to roll up the quilt top.  For those of you who don’t know, a long-arm sewing machine slides back and forth on tracks, so you quilt from side to side on the quilt.  You roll the top, batting, and backing onto rollers, so you don’t have to pin all the layers together.  And, long-arms today have stitch regulators that keep stitches even across the quilt.  Even my first halting practice session made my work look beautiful.  But, there is a learning curve.  Free-motion stitching on a domestic machine involves using small muscles.  The long-arm requires you to learn to harness big muscle movements down to fine work.  There are, also, extra handles that can be installed for close, fine work.  With those, you sit on a stool.  For everything else, you stand and have at it. 

Also, you can operate the machine from the front or the back.  The back handles are used when you want to use a pattern you trace with a laser beam or grooved boards that a stylus fits into to trace a pattern.  I got two of these board patterns which I’ve never been able to manage on a domestic machine:   Bishop’s Fan and a Clamshell patterns.  And I came home with a few laser-traced patterns, but I was terrible at those when Gerri showed me how to do them.  More practice there for sure!  And, I’m partial to my own designs anyway. 

John and I spent a very fun day putting together the elaborate and sturdy table Lucy inhabits–a real learning experience for me.  We were able to get 8 feet of the possible 12 feet table set up, so I can handle quilts up to about 83 inches wide.  That’s a pretty big quilt.  But, it turns out Lucy has had TWO bad computer boards and does not work, so she is in Sanford (3 hours south) getting new innards.  I went down to Sanford for training for 2 days (a fabulous experience–thank you Gerri Waitte) and made another trip back to take Lucy to be fixed when it became clear that there was another bad board involved.  (I didn’t want to ship Lucy down to Sanford.)  Karen Johnson, or KJ, who just got her learner’s license, drove most of the second trip which was great practice for her, especially as it was pouring rain .  Sanford Sewing Machine has been terrific about getting Lucy fixed.  Tim Sansevieri even made a trip up to change out the first board, but it also was bad, as we discovered when he had been gone about an hour.  All of this board business is just a bit of frustrating bad luck and a fluke for both Handi-Quilter and Sanford Sewing Machines, and Lucy will be off and running shortly.  Likely we will pick her up when we fly back home from Charleston in early December.   

Here’s a picture of Tim and Lucy in my quilt room:

Turkey Tracks: The Fall Garden

Turkey Tracks:  November 8, 2010

The Fall Garden

Our beautiful, beautiful fall has moved into early winter here in coastal Maine.  We are still wearing our shoulder season clothes, which involves cotton fibers, but the day will come soon when we’ll be hunched over in the dry storage areas locating the bins with wool and cordoroy.   We’ve had a really warm, balmy fall–which has been full of ticks–once unknown in Maine.  No No Penny, who is a wood rat kind of dog, has really suffered with ticks this fall.  Here is a picture John took of the wetland down the hill from our house, but somehow, other than this one picture, we didn’t get any really good pictures of this year’s spectaclarly brilliant foliage.  And, this picture was taken early in the fall before the yellows really burst through.  I have this picture as my screensaver for the momet.

 Our garlic came from FEDCO, so I cleaned up the garden and planted it.  Planting garlic is really easy.  You just separate the bulb into cloves, dig a shallow trench (about 3 inches deep), put a clove about e very 4 or 5 inches, cover the cloves, and later, after a freeze, cover them with some organic matter–straw or hay.  I also sprinkle azomite over my garlic bed.  And, I work all year to add organic matter to the garden beds, including, now, composted chicken manure.  I don’t add too much manure as too much nitrogen isn’t good for the plants.  And, chicken manure is really strong.  I’ve also been reading that commercial farming has really depleated our soil of magnesium, which we humans need and are not getting in our food.  Since kelp and sea salt are good sources, I will pay more attention to amending with seaweed now.  One clove of garlic yields a whole bulb next fall and a tasty garlic scape about May when last year’s garlic is going or gone from our stockpiles.     

Cleaning up the garden involved harvesting the remaining beets and most of the carrots.  I left one row to winter over, which makes the carrots really sweet.   We will think about that row off and on during the winter.  Here’s what came inside:

 I had a great deal of help planting the garlic.  I only have to appear outside and all the chickens come running.  If I have a trowel (overturned dirt! worms! worms!) they stick close to me like glue.  In the end, I had to put some chicken wire over the new patch to keep them from scratching at it.  Here is a picture of May May sticking close.  The white spots  around her head are, I think, new feather quills coming in after her yearly molt.   You can see the color of her comb and waddle are not as intense a red as they were in the spring.  She’s two years old now, and the faded color is a sign that all the eggs she’s laid have taken a lot out of her.  She will, likely, rest a bit over the winter and regain her strength.  We do not plan to augment with light this winter to keep our chickens laying artificially.  Nature knows best, and we people need to learn to eat what nature offers us in season.  Easter is celebrated because the days grow longer, and the chickens start laying strongly again.  The eggs provide much-needed nourishment after a long winter, and are nature’s plan for replenishing the flock.  Look though at how healtlhy her feathers look–that’s the meat and milk–good protein sources–I give the chickens each morning.  The chickens love to camouflage themselves under the big kale leaves, and they love to nibble on it too.   More than once I’ve been surprised by a chicken hiding under garden plants. 

 

 

KJ and Jake, from last year’s graduating class at The Community School have stayed in the area.  They came and helped us winterize one Saturday.  We emptied out all the flower pots and stored them away, put away all the lawn furniture (3 porches worth!), put away all the garden decorations (St. Francis, bird baths, etc.), moved the chicken coop, and got out the winter boardwalk John made just before our second winter.  The boardwalk makes it easy to sweep snow from our paths–unlike the gravel path beneath, which is hard to shovel.  And, the boardwalk makes it easier to walk from the house to the car.  Here’s what it looks like:

                                                                        

Kale stays in the garden.  It only gets sweeter in cold weather,and I’ve dug it out of snow banks many a time.  Chard, too, will take the cold, though it is not as hardy as kale.  Here’s some Lacinto kale that friend Margaret gave me last spring.  Behind it is our asparagras patch, which will be three years old next spring, which means we can harvest some of it.  The chard is “rainbow” chard, which I love.  (Even the stems are good to eat.)  I plant marigolds all over the garden as they deter many garden pests and provide polka dots of bright color in the fall.

Another task is to cut and freeze the Italian parsley.  Friend Rose told me that she trims back the big stems, shoves it into a freezer baggie, and throws it into the freezer.  She says it defrosts as if it’s just been picked, and she chops it up and uses it for whatever she needs at the moment.

I always think I’m done for the year and then remember something left to do.  I need to layer the garden beds with straw.  Margaret buys it in bulk, so I can get 5 or 6 bales from her.  Right now it’s raining, so I’ll wait until it dries out a little.  And, we’ll have to move the chicken coop one final time.  Right now it’s right where we get a snow mountain from shoveling the back paths and porch!