Down at the mouth

Two weekends ago, I sat down at my computer at 11 am and didn't leave it (except for quick snacks and bathroom breaks) until 5:30 pm.*

And when I left the computer at 5:30 I went for a walk -- no, correct that -- I was so giddy about my wonderful day of writing that I went for a float.

Not only did I produce probably a whole chapter's worth of new material, but I had confidence in what I had already written--I saw the shape of the book, even the parts that I have only vaguely sketched out, and I felt all I needed was the time (say, starting on September 8th when the kids go back to school) in which to fill it all in.

Where did that confidence go? Why am I presently in such a muddle? It's a beautiful day, the critters are behaving themselves, there is no reason to be down at the mouth. But my confidence in my ability to write this book is simply gone. All I've been able to accomplish since that very productive day is some very minor editing.

The only vaguely positive thing I can say is that at least in reading what I've written, I wasn't tempted to delete it--I thought it was pretty good. But right now it feels like a different person wrote it.
__________
*Brian took the critters away overnight to do some choo choo stuff so I had no interruptions or distractions of a human nature.

Tantre farm share, week 11 (plus 2 interlopers)

Vaguely left to right and bottom to top: basil, Roos Roast (interloper #1), eggs from Amos Coblentz (interloper #2), peppermint, 1 pt mixed cherry tomatoes, garlic, 2 qts potatoes, 1 qt mixed green and wax beans, Italian kale, melon, 4 eggplants, 2 heads of lettuce, broccoli, 4 cucumbers, onions, beets, lots of summer squash, carrots. Much easier to see in the pic with notes here.

This week's menu plan:

• Thanks to Noelle and her mention of a wonderful sounding Vietnamese cook book, Into the Vietnamese Kitchen by Andrea Nguyen (which I promptly requested from the library), tonight we'll have rice topped with fried tofu, Vietnamese deep fried eggplant, nuoc cham, and cucumber-red onion-cilantro salad.
• On the night I have my yoga class we'll have a salad night of totally mashed together cuisines (Alsatian, vaguely Greek, sort of Japanese and French-ish) accompanied by wine, crusty bread and a hunk of deliciously stinky Muenster d'Alsace I was gifted: a lettuce, carrot and cucumber salad with tarragon vinaigrette, the rest of the eggplant, tomatoes and mint in a half batch of my favorite eggplant salad and green and wax beans with walnut miso dressing. I know none of these things go together and I don't really care!
• I'm going to try to get some melon into the small people by pureeing it and making it into popsicles (probably with some lime juice and agave nectar or honey). The rest will get eaten at breakfast with granola and plain yogurt.
• Bi bim bop with copious quantities of vegetables will join the beef, egg, rice and kim chi: broccoli, green beans, carrots, cucumber, summer squash.
• Grilled pizza with caramelized onions, roasted beets, pine nuts, olives and goat cheese and accompanied by super thin sliced raw summer squash with shaved Parmesan, salt, olive oil, and basil.
• Brian is planning on smoking some brisket this weekend, so I'll use the potatoes to make some sort of potato salad to go with it. Maybe the kale will get the southern treatment and be braised and doused in hot pepper vinegar. And some cucumbers will get made into quick tarragon pickles.
• Some garlic and basil will go into pesto (to be frozen in ice cube trays for a taste of summer in the depths of winter).

Internal voices

I can't remember the last book I read that relied so heavily on internal voices. John Pipkin has written a remarkable book, Woodsburner, that not only takes on a fascinating little blip of history (the day that Thoreau accidentally set fire to the Concord woods) but that does it through the thoughts of a kaleidoscopic collection of characters. There is very little dialog in the book--it mostly occurs only as the characters remember the past.

All the characters are suffering from some level of crisis whether it be spiritual, ethical, or emotional. Eliot is the excruciatingly bad want-to-be playwright--a man who desperately wants to be perceived as artistic and literary, but who can't appreciate what he has and does well. There is Caleb, a self-righteous guilt-riddled, hellfire-spouting and opium-addicted preacher. Oddmund is probably the most sympathetic character, a humble almost to the point of invisibility immigrant who silently loves his employer's wife. Emma, the rotund recipient of Oddmund's adoration, is a barely literate lover of books. There are a pair of strange old women, Anezka and Zalenka, who bring a touch of magical realism to the proceedings. And of course there is the star of the show: Thoreau.

Because you are inside the character's heads, there isn't much back story--there's no external narrator who brings you up to speed. This results in some really lovely reveals: the characters' pasts come out unexpectedly. There are delicate inferences which help move the book along, crucial for the pacing since without it, the internal nature of the book might get claustrophobic and leaden.

The fire serves as the catalyst and the crisis for each of the characters. It motivates their thoughts and propels their actions. The ending is beautiful and liberating: all the characters have had their trial-by-fire and all come out the other side transformed, liberated, and changed though in very different ways.

I thought the author did particularly well with Thoreau's voice. We follow Thoreau's mind through complicated shifts from desperate panic trying to stop the fire, to justifications and excuses that he comes up with to shift the blame for the fire off of himself, to the exhilarating pleasure that he takes in the force and intensity of nature. It has been a long time since I read Walden but I remember a bit of these shifts--methodical accounting, lyrical enjoyment of nature and underneath, some justification sneaking in ("I didn't ask my neighbors to feed me a nice dinner so I don't really have to incorporate it into my narrative of simplicity and living off the land"). Pipkin doesn't come right out and say "the fire led to Walden" but he makes his opinion about the cause and effect nature of the actions clear and well reasoned. It seems almost duplicitous that people teach Walden without this piece of authorial context.

About half-way through, I did think I'd need to start a drinking game where I did a shot every time Oddmund sucked on his tiny dead tooth. That repetition started to drive me a bit batty and I think about half of the instances where the phrase was used could be cut. But that's a tiny quibble with a really remarkable book.

Tantre farm share, week 10

This week the farm share throws down the gauntlet: can I eat (and/or freeze) a full share on my own while Brian is out of town?

My belly and I accept the challenge!

Vaguely left to right: 4 heads of lettuce (red leaf, green frilly, 2 red oakleaf), 1 qt green beans, 2 qts potatoes, arugula, parsley, 3 broccoli crowns, beets, basil, kohlrabi, 4 yellow zucchini, one huge onion, 2 cucumbers, carrots and collard greens

• Some potatoes, summer squash and basil will go into this potato, squash goat cheese gratin.
• I'm feeling kind of noodly this week so I think I'll make a bastardized pad thai with broccoli, green beans, cucumbers, onion, carrots, egg, tofu and peanuts.
• Beets will get roasted like last week (and this week I can eat them all myself--oink oink!)
• All the lettuce and arugula means that I'll be eating LOTS of salad. I'm going to keep the spinner full of washed greens so that whenever I get hungry there's salad ready (I'm feeling a little peckish right now at 9:30 am and a morning salad maybe with some toasted walnuts sounds kind of nice). If I'm feeling stumped about how to vary the salads, I'll turn to Mark Bittman's 101 Simple Salads for the Season. It is an excellent way to jog a tired brain. I'm thinking some greens will get topped with some sort of grain and citrus (time to try quinoa again?). Some will get the nicoise treatment again with more green beans, parsley and potatoes and some hard boiled egg. I still have a few peaches left and the chicken/basil/peaches combo is good so I'm going to turn it into a salad this week with salad greens, grilled boneless skinless chicken breast, a peach basil salsa and some blanched broccoli.
• The girl critter has requested mashed potatoes so even though I'm not terribly fond of them, I'll make some for her. I can use all the help I can get consuming the share this week...
• I'm looking forward to a weekend breakfast of of spicy collards and cheese grits with strong black coffee.
• I'm going to see if shredded kohlrabi takes the nuoc cham sauce as well as the green beans did last week.

Fermentation time!

Brian may have his yeast beer buddies, but I've got my own microscopic friends. I've already been converted to making my own yogurt (which is so stupidly simple that I'm a little disgusted with myself for buying the stuff for so many years) and this week I deepened my relationship with lactic acid bacterias by making sauerkraut.
I snagged some of the brewing supplies that Brian wasn't using: an ale pail, lid and S air lock. Got out my 4 heads of Tantre cabbage (about 7 lbs total), my mandoline, knife and kosher salt.

Then I gave my right forearm a terrific workout shredding all that cabbage into the sterilized pail:Hmmm...not enough cabbage me thinks....

So I dashed off to Krogers (it was Sunday evening) and picked up 4 more huge organic cabbages (.59/lb which seemed pretty cheap to me). By the time I finished shredding those big old mama's my hand was getting numb. Maybe next time I'll use the food processor, even though I don't have one of the newer shwoopy kind with the wide mouth feed tube.

I stirred in the recommended amount of salt (about 3 T per 5lbs) and then ignored it for a while until the cabbage started sweating out its juice. Good god does that stuff ever sweat!
I put a clean plate on top of the cabbage and stuck on another container filled with water to weigh it down and keep the cabbage below the top of the brine. Then I stuck on the pail lid and plunked the thing down in the basement where it will stay relatively cool.

I hear you can get kraut in 5 days if you put in a probiotic, like one of those pills from the health food store, but since the only ones I had in the house were blueberry flavored chewables (from when one of the critters was having tummy troubles) I figured that I'd go the slow and traditional route this time.

So, now we wait for at least a couple of weeks. But instead of tapping my foot impatiently, I'm going to think of it as party planning time! We'll have no need to deal with the crowds at the German Park this summer: we have Brian on board for beer, Brian Pinkelman can make the sausage, I'll supply the sauerkraut, the library will provide the CDs of polka tunes and Sarah will make an appearance dressed as the St. Pauli girl. Right Sarah?

Green Bean Bliss

I love fresh green beans. I love the way they squeak between my teeth; I love the flavor; I love the color; I love how they can be used as big green fangs to make a 6-year-old crack up.

And now I love them even more because I melded them with my favorite summer flavors, those found in the Vietnamese lime sauce Nuoc Cham. Today I blanched the rest of my Tantre green beans, chopped up a half a cake of firm tofu and tossed it all with the dressing. It was fast, easy, tasty and perfect for a hot, humid day.

Green Bean and Tofu Salad with Nuoc Cham

1.5 quarts green beans
.5 cake of firm tofu, cut into small cubes
juice of 1 lime
2 t brown sugar
1 small clove of garlic, pressed
1 T soy sauce
1.5 T fish sauce (I like the 3 crabs brand)
.5 of a long serrano chili, chopped fine (or more if you want it hotter)
1/4 C unsalted peanuts, chopped coarsely
at least 2 T each of chopped basil (Thai basil if you have it), spearmint and cilantro

Chuck the beans in a big pot of boiling water and blanch until just tender. Dump in a colander and run cool water over them. Cut into 2 inch lengths.

In your serving bowl combine the lime juice, sugar, garlic, soy sauce, fish sauce and chili. Give a stir to dissolve the sugar. It may not look like enough dressing but it is. Then toss in the green beans, tofu, chopped peanuts and chopped herbs. Don't serve immediately--you want the flavors to get absorbed a little into the tofu and beans. Instead, let it sit for about half an hour, tossing every 10 minutes to make sure that the flavors are distributed.

Tantre farm share, week 9

I say I want to make sauerkraut and the cabbage gods respond! Two small heads of cabbage appeared in this week's Tantre Farm Share:

Vaguely left to right: parsley, carrots, beets, two heads of garlic, yellow zucchini, leeks, 4 cucumbers, basil, 2 quarts of green beans, bag of broccoli, curly kale, 2 quarts of new potatoes, 2 small cabbages and 2 bunches of mixed Asian greens

I also picked up a dozen eggs and two quarts of Flaming Fury peaches (love the name). Michigan peaches are still in their early days -- not as amazing as the Redhaven's that will come in later this season -- but I plan to cook with these.

Menu plan:

• As mentioned, the cabbage is going to be transformed into sauerkraut (I'll probably head down to the Saturday market and get more).
• Roasted chicken thighs with peaches, ginger and basil served with rice and braised leeks
• Cucumbers will go into a jumbo batch of cucumber feta salad with toasted pita chips--it's more like a dip than a salad exactly and incredibly addictive.
• The carrots are amazing and I'll only eat them raw--anything else masks their delicate, almost minty flavor.
• Turkish zucchini pancakes with yogurt garlic sauce
• The broccoli, parsley and some garlic will go into this warm chickpea and broccoli salad.
• Thanks to last week's suggestion from Librarymama, some of the green beans and potatoes will go into a salade Nicoise.
• Blanched green beans and tofu will get mixed up with a SE Asian style dressing--lime, fish sauce, sugar, garlic, peanuts and copious quantities of basil, mint and cilantro.
• The beets will be roasted (see below) and probably gobbled straight from the pan.
• Brian is taking the kids to some train fest thingy this weekend so, I'll probably eat some of the vegetables he is less fond of while they are gone: the Asian greens in miso soup with tofu and the kale and beet tops in the basic garlic/hot pepper/lemon juice saute; I think the latter makes a terrific dinner with a hunk of crusty bread and some sort of strong cheese.
• An upside down peach cake--the cake base will probably be a yogurt cake. Not sure what recipe I'll use yet.

Now, back to those beets. I've roasted beets many times, but always roasted them whole. Then Sarah directed me to the method described in this recipe in which the beets are treated like potatoes--peeled and cut up before roasting and tossed with a little olive oil and vinegar. This results in a much less slippery texture--they get caramelized and chewy around the edges and are so good that I ate them like popcorn and had to use all my self control to save some for Brian.

Yeah, that's all I left him, poor guy...

Roasted Cubed Beets
based on Melissa Clark's recipe

about 2 lbs of beets, peeled and cut into uniform-ish sized cubes
a good glug of olive oil
1/2 t kosher salt
1/2 t black pepper
1-2 T red wine vinegar

Preheat oven to 375.
Get out a sheet pan with sides, cover it in foil. Dump all your ingredients on it and toss until beets are nicely coated. Cover the pan with foil and roast 15-20 minutes, then remove the foil and continue to roast until tender inside and getting a little crusty on the edges (about another 15-20 minutes, depending on the size of your beet cubes.)

From behind the veil

I have a friend who has gone behind the veil. It is a meaty veil. And tasty too.

I have a confession: I love sausage. I know that it is horrible for you. I know that it contains more salt and fat than you should eat in a month much less in one go, but I still love the stuff. I can't think of a type of sausage I don't like: dried, smoked, blood, pork, lamb, beef, chicken, turkey, high-end charcuterie or low-end hot dog (OK, I prefer the better type of hot dog, like a Koegel's Vienna, but have been known to enjoy an Oscar Meyer too).

You can blame my love of this incredibly unhealthy meat on rebellion: my parents never allowed me to eat hot dogs when I was a kid--my dad would start quoting Upton Sinclair and talking about ground up fingers. They eat red meat only a couple of times a year, and usually only when I cook for them. So some part of me is still a kicking, screaming teenager inside and gets an extra thrill when my teeth snap through that casing and the hot sausage juice floods my mouth. I try to tell myself that I make up for this nutritional weakness with the abundant vegetal nature of the rest of my diet (yeah, yeah, I see you rolling your eyes...).

Anyway, back to the veil. Tonight I was lucky enough to eat this for dinner:
Focus on the tubes of beauty in the foreground and on the left side of the plate: I present to you Brian Pinkelman's first batch of homemade smoked sausage. Brian is a brave man! He screwed his courage (and stomach) to the sticking place and plunged behind that veil! He didn't just intellectually accept that this product is made of vast quantities of fat but he tracked down fatty-enough meat (which apparently is hard to come by and requires a special order), manhandled it, mixed it, stuffed it and smoked it. And then, bless him, he shared it!

I am much too scared to go behind the veil. There is a big difference between knowing that sausage is bad for you and being elbow deep in the fat that you intend eventually to ingest. I fear that I would be overwhelmed with the visceral sight of the ingredients and would be unable to enjoy sausage ever again. And that is just not a risk I'm able to take.

God it was good. So good that after I finished mine I got on the phone and offered to babysit for his (albeit cute and infinitely better behaved than my own) kids if he paid me in sausage.

Or maybe I can come up with a trade--I was thinking as I ate the blissful thing that I wished I had some sauerkraut to go with it. Some homemade sauerkraut, something I have wanted to make but never took the plunge. What with the possibility of more Brian-creations on my plate in the future, I feel like destiny is telling me to ferment my first cabbage!

And speaking of fermentation, I got to enjoy the marvelous tube of meat with my first taste of my Brian's new beer--a toasty, tasty Grand Cru.

For those of you who brew, here is what went into it:
5 lbs 2-row pale barley
3 lbs wheat
1 lb caravienne (toasted barley)
2 lbs Michigan wildflower honey
1 oz hallertauer (hops--flavoring)
1 oz strisselspalt (hops--aromatic)
Belgian Abbey Ale Yeast

How that becomes beer is a bit of a mystery to me, but I know it involves a weekend day's worth of hanging out on the deck with friends, a full cooler of the last batch of beer (you know, to keep the inspiration up) and a big cauldron of stuff simmering away on the turkey-fryer/propane thingy and fiddling around with digital thermometer and lots of buckets and tubing. As Brian quotes frequently from The Joy of Homebrewing essential to the process is the phrase "Relax! Have a homebrew!"

Crafty Question

I need some help here people. I discovered an amazing sausage throw rug on the internet that I can't afford and want to try and reproduce before October 7th, the date of Brian's birthday. Or if it was a really labor intensive process, it could be pushed back to Christmas.

Actually there are 4 different rugs. The Ham Sausage is pretty, but since I've never eaten Ham Sausage (Biershinken), it doesn't appeal quite so much as the others.
Aesthetically the Blood Sausage appeals to me most. (I've eaten British blood pudding sausage with big fried English breakfasts and liked it well enough, but I've never tried the German version):
Culinarily, I'm a Soprassata girl through and through (and I also think it is quite attractive):
I don't mind a taste of real Mortadella now and then but it doesn't strike me as "meaty" enough, though I do think this one is mighty pretty with its little floating bits of green pistachio and peppercorns:
So help me out, people. Is there anyway I could make one of these? I remember doing a rug-hook kit when I was about 9 years old (a hideous picture of an orange and brown mushroom on a lime green and yellow background--ah the colors of the 70s!), but I think that might look too fuzzy and fuzzy meat is not a good thing, I think. Maybe I could knit and felt something like this then sew it to a canvas backing? Actually what I think would probably work best is felted crochet (at which I suck, but hey this would be an inspiring way to get over my hangups). I saw this amazing crochet portrait in Craftzine and the technique looks adaptable to meat products.

I think I'll have to face down my crochet fears sooner or later because I'd really like to make Monster Crochet's awesome bacon scarf. You can knit it using intarsia, but the good thing about the crochet version is the back looks as good as the front, which cannot be said for a knit version.

In a more general note, crafty goodness has not been hovering around this household. In fact, I'm in a crafty funk. My knitting projects are not keeping my attention--I'm part way through two different items and have been ignoring both because I'm tempted to rip them out. I haven't started the Gathered Pullover even though I bought the pattern because of the color of my yarn--knitting with dark purple seems like it would be pleasant in, say, November. But the color turns me off in the middle of summer. About all I've done on the crafty front is a couple of lame beading projects with the girl critter. So I'm hoping some meaty craft project will get me going again.

Revenge of the spurned appliance

I guess I swore at it one too many times.

I thought that with the banishment of the-fridge-that-I-hate to the basement--

This is what banishment looks like.

--I would be done bitching about this particular appliance. But no. The damn thing took revenge upon me.

I stashed some of this week's farm share in its dinky, rickety produce drawers until I was ready to use it. But when I went down yesterday to get it I found that the-fridge-that-I-hate took out its wrath on my beet greens and some of my rainbow chard by FREEZING THEM. And this is when it is on its warmest setting! Sigh.

It seems to be doing ok at its main job which is keeping one particular batch of Brian's home brew from exploding all over the basement. He made a dark beer that somehow over fermented so that it has a tendency to blast its way out of the bottle; we dubbed it "Dark Angry Father." It's really tasty, but dangerous stuff. We gave a bottle to my dad and did not emphasize strongly enough that he should immediately refrigerate it with the result that--Whoops!--he had to clean beer off the kitchen ceiling...Even the properly refrigerated stuff has to be opened over the sink and into a wide pitcher because of the exuberance of the foam.

So, you might be wondering what is upstairs now that the appliance banishment has occurred. Allow me to introduce you to:

The Fridge That I Love

Yes, the Elephant Shrews have made their home in the top left corner and the boy critter wrote a poem about himself on the right side.

I've already noticed at least 4 times in the last week that when I looked for a particular condiment in the-fridge-that-I-love, what do you know, I found it! All without kneeling on the floor, knocking other condiments off shelves, or swearing!

I bet the-fridge-that-I-hate heard me making kissy noises at the new fridge. As I will still be availing myself of the extra freezer space in the banished fridge and the occasional use of the refrigerator compartment, I will tread warily around the thing. Who know what it has planned next...