Spicy SweetThe candy making has been continued apace. The resugaring problem of the initial batch of cinnamon almond praline has been fixed. It is very helpful to have a highly conductive stout pot for this sort of thing, as well as two other toys. We have a digital thermometer with a wired probe and a temperature alarm, and the thing has proved beyond all handy for roasts and sauces and yogurt and baking; it comes as no surprise that it makes for a splendid candy thermometer a well. It tremendously responsive, and wails like a banshee when one is about to burn whatever it is. The other toy is a vast slab of marble which sits ready in our kitchen for pastry making in the winter. It does well for candy.
The second set of experimentation was fudge. I am learning, so I make small batches and give them away. It is nice to ask my victims what they would rather. They said fudge; I have made fudge. The first batch boiled over, but it turned out alright. I need to investigate better qualities of chocolate.
I ask again my willing victims, and they say "Toffee!" I will get there, but I have decided this time to become autonomous and attempt a hand at harder candies, just a bit over three hundred. The experiment this evening was nutmeg drops, but the drops flowed to disks, to be rolled in powder sugar and tucked away in the cupboard. They are strange, but they are good.
I fear that this may lead to more nonsense in the kitchen: I need candy molds, now.
The Vomiting CartographerIn the house where I grew up, the main method of musical reproduction was a loose set of boxes, and at the center of it all sat squarely a glowing box of amplifier tubes and assorted bits of days gone by. The orange glow of the thing was lovely on cool evenings. The most telling mark of the era from which it came was that it has a power switch. It did not go into strange hibernation, sipping juice from the wall so as to leap to service at the glancing brush of a button. When it was off, it was off.
In our more modern life, we, too, have a strange collection of boxes, but they are never really off. They do sleep, hair-trigger napping, ever ready for us. They let us know this by a chipper little red light on each, and our fancy stack of metals and plastics sports no less than four of these things when not actively engaged.
From the distance of the reading chair, at night under the slim pool of light from the lamp when all else is dark, the little red lights make a little constellation in red, for our own private use. We must name it nobly, and tell good stories of it.
The Thing About The BagsSome time ago upon emerging from a local polling place, having cast stones in the primaries, I was accosted by a gentleman who, armed with clipboard and the kind of bald earnest that can only be manufactured and not meant, tried to have me do him the favor of putting my name on his petition. I am originally from a place where this sort of thing is strictly verboten; one cannot legally even put signs within a stones throw of the doors of a polling place, and I am a product of the privacies so cherished there. I declined the man, and tried to tell him why, and things went somewhat downhill.
I was interrupted. "Where are you from?" I told him, which got me suspicion; it is not a local place. "And you just voted?" I explained to him that I have been living here between these rivers for the better of a decade, but I grew up elsewhere. I pointed down the street to our home, but the concept seemed strange to him. "Well, I've been up where you say you're from," he said. The petition was about the environment. "And given that, I'd expect you would care more about the environment."
So I pointed out that it was a privacy issue more than environmental issue, and I tried to explain about the plastic bags, to be interrupted again. That was enough for me, so I took my leave and went to buy some yogurt. After me, he called out:
"I'm always interested in hearing people's remarks."
No, old man, you were not. You were interested in hard selling me into doing you the favor of having my name for your list. You were not considerate of my privacy - you were not considerate of me. If you had been at all interested in my remarks, you would have listened about the plastic bags.
It turns out that plastic bags, if care is not taken, break down in the environment into tiny bits in a similar way to many other plastic products. These bits work their way down into the water, and then down to the sea.
In the Pacific, this is a particular problem: in the middle of that great ocean turns a great slow eddy, the Pacific Gyre. The Gyre is a natural collector of ocean-borne trash, and it is becoming thicker and thicker with tiny bits of plastic. One very real effect of this is the death of birds. Young albatross chicks consume ever more plastic with their meals each year, and cannot process or pass it. It sits in their stomachs and keeps them full, and they slowly starve to death. The effect on the population is accelerating.
In part due to this, I try to bring a cloth bag to the grocery when I go, to tote my goods home in. I too often fail. When I forget, however, and I am not presented with the opportunity to help out with the bagging, I leave the choice of material to the person at the end of the belt. I find it useful to be as least difficult as I can be in those situations (I have seen the strangeness pass for hours through the checkout line, and I am not ashamed to admit that I lack the tremendous patience that is needed to make go of it on the weird bad days), and the relative merits and sins of paper or plastic are somewhat set aside by my attempts to make good use of whatever I get, be it craft or recycling or some other thing (I too often fail).
That particular time, having fetched my yogurt, I asked for a plastic bag. I would bring it back to that man, I said. I would show him the bag, and tell him stories about it. I would demonstrate my care for the environment. I would give him my remarks. When I returned to the polling place, they had gone.
I am uncertain what wisdom I can offer toward plastics. We have a real taste for the stuff, now, and that hunger will most assuredly send ever greater amounts out to poison the seas. At the same time, polymers save effort, save time, save lives, and make such things possible as the temperamental machine on my lap and all the activity that it implies. We should likely use less. We should certainly exercise more care. I do not know.
I am more sure of this: if one wants from someone a favor, don't be rude to them.
Costs of VigilanceFor a while now, I have occasionally woken in the morning to one eye reddened and in pain, a sharp itch that no amount of drops or blinking can fully soothe. I had reason to visit the optometrist, so I made mention of it, and she said I should be checked when I sleep to see if I do so with my eyes open, a little or maybe more. This was not a possibility I had expected.
As it turns out, this was not a bad thought. Sometimes, I fall asleep on too many pillows, and I am naturally wont to curl my head forward at night. The combination of this things can sometimes cause my head to slide forward down the pillow at night, dragging open one eyelid and keeping it pinned back. I know this only because I caught myself at it the other morning. I do not recommend it.
Between BreadA very long time ago in the place where I came from, we had a local branch of a coffee roasting concern within easy distance. These people made very good coffee. I speak of brewed coffee, here; they made a respectable shot of espresso, but in the main they were about brewing and selling fresh beans. They also has a simple board of breads and sandwiches for breakfast and lunch, and a case of pastry for eatings long into evening. Of particular interest was their variant of the BLT. They used reasonable bacon done in the microwave with pretty good lettuce and tomato, with a bit of mayonnaise. There were two remarkable things about the sandwich. Tangible was the choice of a baguette to cradle all of the above; this was not a great baguette, to be sure, but it was fresh bread, and good. Less so was the balance of flavors and textures in the thing: the wheat of the bread and the sweet of the red tomato, the different crisps of lettuce and bacon, one salty, one light. A gentle binding of mayo, never cloying, simply supportive. The wonder of it was that this little coffeeshop got all of that right on every single sandwich I ever ate there, in ways I cannot reproduce. They have long since closed.
Just off exit 12 of I-84 in New York state sits a long low chrome building of a diner, a throw of a stone south of the road. It has grown in scope over the years, adding more space. The food remains: hearty, classic American, with iceberg salads and cherry tomatoes. There are many recommended things on their menu (the soups are always fine) but the openfaced roast beef sandwich, covered in gravy and set aside potatoes mashed, is an experience that keeps one warm all the way to Vernon.
More recently events turned to a baguette again, this time a better loaf from a local baker that knows its salt. We split the thing, and slathered one side with a tangy young goat cheese and piled the other with freshly rinsed cress. Squashed together and eaten outside, it was a very nice sandwich.
I have been having trouble with milk in my coffee, and I have found most non-dairy coffee alternatives lacking (and those that are not are most probably not all that good for me). I have again taking to tempering my coffee with honey, and a bit of orange blossom water. It's good that way.
My Dear Mr. SixAlmost too long ago, now, a friend of mine lent me an audio cassette entitled Simple Gifts, as done by William Coulter and Barry Phillips. It was a collection of simple, heartfelt instrumental arrangements of Shaker melodies, and I listened to it too much. One of the wonders of our time is not only that these things can be recorded and played again, but those recordings can re-rise from the ashes of magnetic media, ascendant as digital bits in a tightly wound loop drawn out on an encased platter of silvery foil. In this particular case, Simple Gifts and its two sister recordings, Tree Of Life and Music On The Mountain are all available, in singular or as set, from Gourd Music in Felton, California. They are all good, if one goes in for this sort of thing.
Gourd has other treasures to offer. I find the twin discs of Robin Petrie's Victorian arrangements of Christmas Carols for hammered dulcimer and sundry to be quite comfortable, even as the air shimmers with eighty degrees. I am always pleased to find good examples of Carols as folk music, ripped free of the dollar signs. This stuff is that stuff, and fine stuff. I expect as this year deepens again to cold and early twilights, this music will only become more of a comfort.
They sell Woody Phillips, too.
Old Bland ScratchFresh pasta has been a recurrent topic; someone mentioned in passing the existence of a dish called Pasta Diablo, or something along those lines. As described, it was a plate of fresh semolina pasta, made having shot the dough through with hot peppers, yielding self-spicing noodles. All it was said to need as a dressing was a bit of good olive oil. I assume that it was also eaten with a good grate of Parmesan, because why would anyone eat pasta without that? We can think of no good reasons.
(I will insert here that I speak only of Parmisano Reggiano, that moist crumbly cheese that sports the pretty purple mark on the rind, reared in Parma and sold in lumps off the wheel. I do not mean the vacuum-packed market parmesans that are the color of cream, and I do not mean that stuff in a box.)
Pasta Diablo: I have set out to make the stuff. Everything to do with making fresh pasta is scaled against the egg: all of my recipes so far ask for some flour per egg, some this per egg, some that per egg. We have some lovely dried and shredded aleppo pepper, and I decided to start with that. It is smoky, potent stuff, with a nice late burn and a deep red color.
For the first pass, I used several healthy pinches of pepper per egg. From this, we ended up with a nicely speckled pasta that didn't taste like pepper at all. I ramped the pepper up to a teaspoon and a half per egg, which gave the finished noodle a nice lightly orange hue, but still no pepper flavor. I was to have gone with a full tablespoon for the last batch, but I blinked at the last minute, and went with a little less. This time, the pasta was deeply orange and beautifully dotted, thick strands of gentle flame. They scantly teased the tongue with heat. Clearly, I am doing something wrong.
It's not an impotent pepper; it was pointed out that I ought to taste the pasta water, to see how much is leaching out. My experiments must also now branch out into different grinds, and different peppers. We shall see. There is plenty of summer left.
An Earth-Shattering KaboomIt is a good night for near darkness. I have had some number of good reasons to stay up a little late this evening, and most of those chores are complete. I have a glass a watered wine, weakened as they would serve to children, sitting by the chair. The window is open, and whispers of cool air finger in, shavings of the turmoil outside.
I do not know how much a doppler weather radar costs, but I think it would be interesting to own one. Instead I make do with the simple animations provided for me by NOAA. They are brightly colored and oddly soothing as they trace the unsteadied atmosphere as it washes out of the plains and over our western end of the state. Outside is quite different; outside it is dark, made more so by the punctuated hot blue momentary light. Should our fragile power fail us, it might get darker yet.
The rain smells fresh, and the compression of the air sends rumbles loud down the street, fooling car alarms and adding their feeble voices to the night. I remember from childhood to count seconds from the flash, and I remember, too, to count from zero, but I have forgotten what the number means. The atmosphere is angry and has rendered the radios useless. Revelers on the street call out as a potent light, somehow brighter for its closeness, makes a noise to sound the very rending of the sky.
It is sometimes useful to wait up for things; I think I shall turn the light off myself, in a moment.
Weight Loss Plan Done PoorlyAfter a decade and some with my chef's knife, it has finally come to pass that I have cleaved off a little bit of myself into what would have become dinner. The bit of dinner in question was a tomato, and the bit of me in question was a barest slice of fingertip from my smallest finger on my lesser hand.
It was not that bad except that it would not stop oozing, so to hospital with me we went. It turns out that these kinds of injuries tend to do that, and it's normal. I am now having a bit of difficulty with this keyboard come times of capitalization, and the guitar is right out.
On the upside, I can now use my pinky, bereft of print, to commit terrible crimes.
The Soft Taste of Sweet EveningThere are sources to seasons, deep wells of memory as far back as youngest childhood. There are hazy recollections of favorite toys, or of places visited when seen from the height of thighs around one. It is claimed that the most sensual experience one might have before the turn of youth to the furrowed brow is one of ice cream. It is evocative stuff, a food of wonders.
We recently attended a new local ice creamery, a place built upon the conceit that they will knead into premises-made ice cream any number of innumerable candies and fruits and syrups, all before your eyes upon chilled stone slabs, the stuff smashed and folded toward mixture by paddles held by learning hands. They sing and dance for tips, too, but we mostly missed that, as they have in the large dispensed with such silly stuff in an effort to get the product out the door faster than the line forms (I ask you; if one were to sing and dance for them, would one get a discount?). It was the complications of the menu board that took me back, though, returning to distant favorite ice creams found in far flung haunts.
If you traveled some years ago to the hamlet of Orleans, Massachusetts, and took from town the road to the Atlantic that swings past the playhouse, across from the farmer's stand (and near the post office in the windmill) sat a little shack of a place named Sundae School. It was a satellite branch of the main store, but the ice cream didn't suffer for it. The won awards for it. They had standard flavors and other flavors, and a surprising one was Sweet Cream and Nuts, which was true to its name: cream, sugar, and nuts. It was clean and light, and perfect for hot days.
If instead you had been on Church Street in Pittston, Pennsylvania some handful of years earlier, at the top of the hill near Mill Street sat Grablick's Dairy. They had a full soda counter, and they would serve chocolate phosphates with a lecture. They made the ice cream on the premises, too, and they had several local variations on regional interpretations of specialty sundaes. The best in my estimation was the dusty road: vanilla ice cream, hot fudge, a dash of malt, a handful of pecans, whipped cream.
Having et, return, then, to Sundae School. This place deserves more mention if only for the New England nomenclature. They would happily serve a Frappe (which elsewhere is thought of as a milk-shake), a milk-shake (which elsewhere has not thought of), or a brown cow (which I refuse to explain). Equally notable was the appearance of Moxie on the menu. But for ice cream, I am somewhat convinced that the best scoop that has thus far crossed my tongue has come from there, a serving of Coffee Oreo ice cream perched atop a sugar cone, melting a little in the thick heat of an August night.
If you attend a mixable ice cream shoppe, have them spin some fragments of that famous cookie into a smear of coffee colored cream for you. I do not think it will disappoint.
Scrabbled Patch, Turn Thy GreenIn our corner of the state, we are lucky to have working for us an excellent conservation agency. The Western Pennsylvania Conservancy's most famous charge is the magnificent Fallingwater and its surrounding grounds, but it would seem they will happily trouble themselves with any green space one would care to have them take the tending of. Our area is rife with these little flowered patches, decorated with color and heady with scent. They are most welcome pauses in between the thin lawns and the hard paving that are common under the foot.
This, too, is a place of food. Although the kitchens here are by convention cramped and sporting dubious topologies, more often than not lovely things come forth from them. On any given weekend, a church basement somewhere in this place is busy with the production of dumplings. I have mentioned our groceries; there are also farms, many surprisingly nearby, ready to sell actual things from the actual earth to come home and then turn into pie. A native friend of mine delights in far-flung vacations, but a corner of him is always anxious to return, in large part because of the food. In my experience they take the food seriously here.
My modest proposal, then, for the good folks at the WPC, is to put some herbs in there with the blossoms and the shrubs and flowering tree. Grow us basil, let thyme and lavender leak out of the plot onto the sidewalk to be trampled, perfuming the air. Bring out large clay tubs for the mint.
This is not to say that this would actually work. It is unfortunate that we live in the litigious way that we do, says my sinister self; were it a public herb plot for the public's consumption, I cannot fathom the combination of statute and spoiling stern sign that would offer any comfortable amount of indemnity, should anyone actually go and pluck the stuff for cooking in these troubled times. Come to that: what secret urban arts might be practiced upon the poor rosemary in the dead of night, under no eyes? It is unfortunate to think about.
(The WPC does have an active program in community vegetable gardens, and well worth investigation if only for that, though this is more a program of active participants set aside on ground under closer watch.)
But I would hope it to work, were someone to try it. It would be a solidly utilitarian gesture underneath the flavor and beauty, a not uncommon move on this part of the patch. Nothing builds a community like a garden, the quiet earth bound up in food. And they take the food seriously here.
O'Hara ParkA blessing in any urban environment is greenspace. Trees and lawn are always welcome to counter and punctuate the brick and stone and asphalt under the feet of modern city life. There is a history of philanthropy here (battles spring and neap over some of its sincerity), and we have some tremendous deeply treed spaces to thank for it.
The example of such space near me now has origins bound up with Mary Schenley nee Croghan, British Army Captians, elopement, April and September, and other goings on in kind. The land itself bears no scars of any of that. The wide spaces of lawn open up the sky, and the thick trees of the wooded paths buffer the noise and the heat of the nearby city.
It is in parts a kinkly, slopy piece of land, folded and crimped by time and stream. Sets of paths have piled up over years; at the bottom of some of the little valleys winds a ghost of a walkway, only seen easily as echos of paths surrendered between crumpling bridges of weather softened stone first put in place two turns of centuries ago. A time after that, deeper wider paths traced out routes a little up the hillsides, leaping across the valley bottoms on larger bridges built with stone darkened perhaps by the angry air of this place for much of the last century. They are even now putting down new paths as they refurbish the old and older ones. This generation may be the third of forth; I am unsure.
When we were younger we would charge down the sides of those valleys on foot, then struggle up the other opposite with the help of hands, all in the name of going in a straight line. These days, I stomp my way through the paths as I am meant to, in long looping curves that follow the hollocks around and back again. If I am smart, I bring a stick. The trails end up longer than I think, most times.
It is not just those on two feet that take to the trails, there are those who come to play on two tires as well. Some of the paths are for them alone, difficult to manage on foot even with a stout stick and a more deliberate pace. I take to these sometimes anyway, usually when I happen to be wearing a brightly colored shirt. Sometimes they thin down to almost nothing. Sometimes they go to hidden places. They are like secrets.
I almost always hear the riders coming in plenty of time to get well out of the way; the snap of the chain and the rattle of the gearings become more alien against the soft murmur of the forest as they approach, long before any movement can be seen through the leaves. Sometimes they pass like ships with gentle slowness, the front tyre carving careful path through the muddy ground. Sometimes, they pass in a frolic, with laughter and slight breathy air as legs dig into the gentle slope.
Sometimes, they pass like ghosts. They are bent over in a quiet determination of speed, fleeing unknown things through the whip and chatter of the grasping leaves and unruly ground. They breathe hard, pushing with the downward hill, until the path is yanked away and down further by the past furious efforts of the stream below. They shoot outward in an explosion of whooping and air, to disappear from view into the green.
Hey, Greg!Fruit season is a cumin in! We are on the eggshell edge of strawberries ripe and sweet, and have intention to visit what farms we can. If the weather treats us well this year, we may make the go of picking our own. I would rather pick blueberries (the back, the knees) but picking any berry will be worth it, as it always has been.
For strawberries, I let them sit in a sprinkle of sugar, and glop the resulting sweet muck over halved cream biscuits, all under a cowl of ever gently whipped (more) cream.
I have not been eating a lot of cream lately, so I was mildly surprised to find no less than four brands of heavy cream at the grocery, more so that one of them was merely Pasteurised. We got that one. I think it tastes more like something than any heavy cream I've recently had, and it whips up very nicely.
All content under copyright by the author. Dancing is permitted. The strange deltic glyphs in the sand under tidal flow are a pleasure to watch in their deepening. Offer not valid in Kansas. We put it down and then we lost it. It all happens in the corner of the eye. Commentary accepted at comment@goob.com, although the traps are agressive and the pointy bits simply drip with dark liquour. We have a dog, but we do not own it. Thank you.