Tag: Food

How about another serving of spuds?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

This is what happens when I dig up too much for a single Tendrils. To wit:

  1. “You can’t really be good at cooking unless you can cook a potato.” ― Julia Child
  2. “Potatoes are the one food that makes everybody happy.” ― Rachael Ray
  3. “All food starting with p is comfort food: pasta, potato chips, pretzels, peanut butter, pastrami, pizza, pastry.” — Sara Paretsky
  4. “Potatoes are the ultimate comfort food, especially when they come with gravy.” ― Trisha Yearwood
  5. “Few people sufficiently appreciate the colossal task of feeding a world of billions of omnivores who demand meat with their potatoes.” — Jonathan Safran Foer
  6. ”Preparing food is one of life’s great joys, but a lot of times, parents ask their kids if they want to cook with them and then tell them to go peel a bag of potatoes. That’s not cooking — that’s working!” — Guy Fieri
  7. “If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe. But if you want to make mashed potatoes, you need just a potato and a little salt.” ― Carl Sagan
  8. “People have been cooking and eating for thousands of years, so if you are the very first to have thought of adding fresh lime juice to scalloped potatoes try to understand that there must be a reason for this.” — Fran Lebowitz
  9. “World hunger will not be solved by finishing the garlic mashed potatoes on your plate.” — Geneen Roth
  10. “Potatoes are proof that God loves us.” ― Benjamin Franklin

 

How do you like your potatoes?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

I was going to delve into ten facts about spuds but wound up with round of tasty quotes instead. Dish up!

  1. “Unbelievable as it may seem, one-third of all vegetables consumed in the United States come from just three sources: French fries, potato chips, and iceberg lettuce.” ― Marion Nestle
  2. “I bought a big bag of potatoes and it’s growing eyes like crazy. Other foods rot. Potatoes want to see.” ― Bill Callahan, Letters to Emma Bowlcut
  3. “Potatoes are to food what sensible shoes are to fashion.” ― Linda Wells
  4. “A lucky person is someone who plants pebbles and harvests potatoes.” — Greek proverb
  5. “Potatoes are very interesting folks. I think they must see a lot of what is going on in the earth — they have so many eyes.” — Opal Whiteley
  6. “Look at that moon. Potato weather for sure.” — Thornton Wilder
  7. “Every Irishman, the saying goes, has a potato in his head.” — Augustus Hare
  8. “It is always wise to make too much potato salad. Even if you are cooking for two, make enough for five. Potato salad improves with age — that is, if you are lucky enough to have any left over.” — Laurie Colwin
  9. “Zen … does not confuse spirituality with thinking about God while one is peeling potatoes. Zen spirituality is just to peel the potatoes.” — Alan Watts
  10. “Murder is like potato chips: you can’t stop with just one.” — Stephen King

 

Why we really dig Fedco seeds

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

In my household, like many others in northern New England, the Fedco seed catalogue and ordering from it are something of a fond ritual this time of year, even a devotion.

Here’s some background.

  1. The company is a co-op founded in 1978 by back-to-the-earth followers of self-sufficiency gurus Scott and Helen Nearing, who had moved to Maine from Vermont in the mid-‘50s.
  2. At first, it functioned as a resource for food coops and sold to no one else.
  3. Heirloom apple trees were added in 1983 and autumn bulbs the following year. Seed potatoes came next,, and in 1988 Fedco took over the organic supplier role of the Maine Organic Farmers and Gardeners Association. (Many people know MOFGA for its big, hippie-infused Common Ground Fair every September. You may have read about that here.)
  4. In its first year, with a one-page mail-order page in a food-coop newspaper, Fedco and its part-time staff handled 98 customer requests. The initial list had 81 items, mostly vegetables, some herbs, liquid seaweed fertilizer, and no flowers. These days it handles more than 38,000 orders from all 50 states for an estimated $4 million revenue.
  5. The catalogue is funky, black-and-white on newsprint or similar stock, rather than the glossy photos of big commercial garden retailers. The illustrations lean toward sketches and 19th century printers’ images. It carries more than a thousand seed listings alone, along with a host of other things gardeners and small-farm operators find useful. The descriptions reflect careful study, helping buyers make reasoned decisions, especially regarding what’s new. It’s inspirational. You can also order online, using a catalogue that does have color photos and is easy to navigate.
  6. Legalization of cannabis has generated new business, even though Fedco has so far resisted selling its plants or seeds. Much of the business is in organic fertilizer, especially for home growers.
  7. Rather than growing the seeds itself, Fedco repackages from 100 to 150 seed growers, and other suppliers, mostly in Maine. Other products are more widely sourced.
  8. Fedco concentrates on a unique niche, mostly in the Northeast, and deliberately stays small, out of direct competition with large corporations.
  9. Its 60 full- and part-time employees own 40 percent of the company, while the consumers own the remaining 60 percent and get small discounts on their orders.
  10. The company’s charter aims at pay-level equity, preventing wage extremes between high and low.

Details from the company’s website and from Jeffrey B. Roth in Lancaster Farming.

We’re still looking forward to a transformed kitchen and a lot more

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 3 Comments

Under other conditions, this is where we would have started our renovations.

The kitchen, in our firmament, is the heart of a home. The one in our historic house needed some serious attention. Let me amend that, needs extensive remodeling.

The electric Montgomery Ward stovetop we inherited has a dead burner. If you’re too young to know about Monkey Wards, it was a major Chicago-based retail chain and mail-order empire that went bankrupt and out of business before Sears Roebuck. If I need to explain Sears and its Kenmore brand appliances, you really do need a history lesson. I’ll let you give me one in current pop culture in exchange. Back to the kitchen, for now. There’s no oven, other than the small tabletop convection unit we brought up with us. It’s definitely not big enough for a Thanksgiving turkey or a boneless beef prime rib, as was my birthday tradition in Dover, or even full trays of cookies for Christmas. A dishwasher is a necessity in today’s ideal world, especially when you consider my dishwashing skills, frankly, as falling short. The lack of decent electrical lighting over the sink doesn’t help. As for that lighting or additional electrical outlets? The list quickly grows. We weren’t expecting our redo to be as extensive as the one we undertook in Dover; do note, we also gleaned valuable insights from that. Or at least one of us had, the one whose opinion counts most.

Next to the kitchen was the mudroom, uninsulated and without electricity. We needed someplace to put a big freezer to augment the kitchen, garden, and marked-down grocery jackpots. The existing roof there was funky at best and leaking, along with exterior rot. New windows could point to space for new shelving, too. OK, we’ve addressed half of the mudroom checklist, for now.

The front door of the house, as previously noted, needs replacing, along with the downstairs windows and most of their sills. Anything to cut the heating bill, right?

At this point, we’ve decided to defer work on the downstairs bathroom aka the water closet.

Ditto for the emerging dining room slash crafts room with a butler’s pantry. The room which was my headquarters in the universe for five years.

And then, as for gutters? Or window dressings? Or new furnishings?

The bottom line in all of this has shifted but remains exciting, all the same.

Yet, when you’re married to one of the world’s great cooks, the state of the kitchen is a major consideration.

She and her elder daughter have some great ideas and dreams.

I, in turn, reap the benefits as these happen.

 

Popcorn goes way back in antiquity

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Last year I presented a Double Tendrils about the popular and seemingly ubiquitous snack of popcorn. Quite simply, it’s not just for watching movies. And around this time of year, we start eating more. Not only that, but it turns out to be a uniquely American contribution to the world’s cuisine.

The topic simply overflowed so much that we didn’t have room for tidbits about its deep history.

So here goes with ten related factoids that pop up on that front.

  1. Try to think of a more purely American food than popcorn. Whether salted or buttered at a movie theatre, or as kettle corn at a county fair or a caramel popcorn ball come the holidays, we hoover it up, even when we’re not watching movies, OK?
  2. Look, archeologists have found traces of popcorn in 1,000-year-old Peruvian tombs. But it goes back way even earlier.
  3. The first use of wild and then cultivated corn points for now to the Bat Cave of west central New Mexico in 1948. Ranging from smaller than a penny to about two inches, those ears are about 5,600 years old, older than Adam and Eve, for anyone counting.
  4. In tombs on the east coast of Peru, researchers have found grains of popcorn perhaps 1,000 years old. These grains have been so well-preserved that they will still pop.
  5. Popcorn was integral to early 16th century Aztec ceremonies. As Bernardino de Sahagun observed, “And also a number of young women danced, having so vowed, a popcorn dance. As thick as tassels of maize were their popcorn garlands. And these they placed upon (the girls’) heads.” In 1519, Cortes got his first sight of popcorn when he invaded Mexico and came into contact with the Aztecs. Popcorn was an important food for the Aztec natives, who also used popcorn as decoration for ceremonial headdresses, necklaces and ornaments on statues of their gods, including Tlaloc, the god of rain and fertility.
  6. An early Spanish account of a ceremony honoring the Aztec gods who watched over fishermen reads: “They scattered before him parched corn, called momochitl, a kind of corn which bursts when parched and discloses its contents and makes itself look like a very white flower; they said these were hailstones given to the god of water.”
  7. Writing of Peruvian natives in 1650, the Spaniard Cobo said, “They toast a certain kind of corn until it bursts. They call it pisancalla, and they use it as a confection.”
  8. Kernels of popcorn found in burial grounds in the coastal deserts of north Chile were so well preserved they would still pop even though they were 1,000 years old. Likewise, in southwestern Utah, a 1,000-year-old popped kernel of popcorn was found in a dry cave inhabited by predecessors of the Pueblos.
  9. Indigenous Iroquois people in North America were documented popping corn kernels in heated pottery jars near the Great Lakes region in the 1600s.
  10. The first patent for a microwave popcorn bag was issued to General Mills in 1981, and home popcorn consumption increased by tens of thousands of pounds in the years following.

All you can eat

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

A Penobscot Bay windjammer cruise typically includes a lobster bake, though technically the crustaceans are boiled or steamed with corn on the cob. The event takes place on any of a number of uninhabited islands along the way.

It does mean going ashore, of course.

For the record, last summer I ate 3½ lobsters – hey, they were small chix – but a shipmate managed 6½, just shy of the Louis R. French record of seven. Had she known, I would have cheered her on.

For those of a more squeamish nature, hot dogs and other hot goodies are offered, along with gooey s’mores, as long as the wood fire continues.

For more schooner sailing experiences, take a look at my Under Sail photo album at Thistle Finch editions.