Tag: Food

FRESH EGGS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 5 Comments

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Buying “free-pastured” eggs from a coworker produced one of those Eureka! observations in our kitchen. Just look and you see how different organic or natural food can be. The yolks were bigger and brighter than anything we got at the supermarket. Tastier, too, which isn’t always the case with the back-to-nature examples.

The shells, I should add, came in lovely pastels, depending on the breed. The light green was my favorite.

And then he moved on, and so did I. Or maybe winter came first, with the annual drop-off in hen productivity.

Still, we see a difference in the free-range eggs we’re buying these days, rather than the supermarket’s own brand.

EAT YOUR WEEDS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 17 Comments

OK, the title’s a cross between the classic “Eat your greens,” as grandmothers used to advise, and the once ubiquitous “Eat your Wheaties,” as the Cheerios folks used to advertise. But this time of year, I’m doing something that gives me a sense of being simultaneously virtuous and hedonistic.

Here’s what you do. Pick the dandelions before they blossom, hopefully uprooting them while you’re at it, and then wash the early greens before the plants turn altogether bitter. (Toss the roots aside; that’s the weeding part of the equation.) You then use the tiny leaves as the basis for salads or, I suppose, anything Florentine. Yes, food writer Angelo Pelegrini (a decade before Julia Child) was right in his praises: dandelion greens in season can be glorious. If you like spinach, you’ll understand.

We’ve been delighting on them both as cold salads and as quickly blanched greens, especially with hard-boiled eggs and/or thick, crisp bacon on top. A fried egg works nicely, too, with its runny yolk. Top your dish with grated cheese if you want. Salt and pepper to taste. Can anything be simpler?

And that’s as close as you’re going to get to a recipe on this blog. I’ll let others point to the fancier variations. For that matter, they can even match it with the right wine … or beer.

 

 

 

 

CHEATING WITH TOMATOES

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 12 Comments

Where we live, getting a homegrown ripe tomato before the beginning of August is an annual challenge. And once they start arriving, we face a big battle against blight. In fact, we’ve given up on heritage varieties like Brandywine and Beefsteak and turned to more resistant hybrids.

So when the agricultural school at our nearby state university had its greenhouse open house last year, the opportunity to come home with a healthy tomato plant was an irresistible temptation. We kept it in a sunny window and under grow lights, taking it outdoors on days when the temperature edged above 50F. And just look at what happened into May!

Will we repeat the experience? It’s awfully tempting.

Is this cheating?
Is this cheating?

FROM A WEED LECTURE AND WINE TO SOME WILD COOKING

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Martha Paxson Grundy: Quaker Treasure. Having known Martha since we were both active in Ohio Yearly Meeting (Conservative), and watched her subsequent service in the broader Quaker organizations, I find my admiration upheld in this 2002 Weed Lecture given at Beacon Hill Friends House in Boston. As she observes, unlike evangelical Protestantism, where the emphasis is on personal salvation, the Quaker treasure is its emphasis on the shared experience of the Prophetic Presence. In that, we nurture and guide one another in a living faith.
  • Jancis Robinson: How to Taste: A Guide to Enjoying Wine. Designed as alternating pages of Theory and Practice, this volume was a 2000 update of a 1983 book by a British wine authority. She does a clear job of introducing the differences in the ways we taste, and of linking that to the language of wine, complete with a decent glossary. Also helpful is her survey of grape varieties and the wines they produce, both in France (where they assume geographic names) and around the world. As she speaks of international wines, however, the book dates quickly – Washington State and Argentina, especially, have come a long way since. Even so, an excellent reference book.
  • Kim Stafford, ed: William Stafford on Peace and War. A profound and moving selection of poems, journal entries, interviews, and published excerpts focusing on Stafford’s pacifist faith and witness. Well worth returning to repeatedly.
  • Sheldon Morgenstern: No Vivaldi in the Garage: A Requiem for Classical Music in North America. In this rather strange memoir by an orchestral conductor best known for his role in establishing the Eastern Music Festival on the campus of Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina, some of the best pages examine the strengths and weaknesses of boards of trustees in the non-profit world and, at times, the ill-informed consultants they sometimes hire. Yet he doesn’t shy away from gossip, skewering some of the big names and their inflated fees while lavishing praise on his buddies and students. While he repeatedly dismisses his teacher, Thor Johnson, I suspect he overlooks positive aspects; in contrast, one friend of mine, who had been a regular substitute in a major symphony orchestra, said Johnson was the best prepared conductor he had played under. And while Morgenstern has little fondness for contemporary music, which is the core of American classical composition, he appears ignorant of our rich Romantic-era legacy, which I think is essential for American repertoire in the future. I’m left wondering just how much of this is sour grapes from an almost-ran.
  • Tamar Adler: An Everlasting Meal: Cooking With Economy and Grace. After living more than a decade with a wife who’s a cooking genius and two daughters who follow in their mother’s wisdom there, my own kitchen skills had largely atrophied. To be honest, I’ve never had her knowledge and seemingly intuitive sense of using herbs and spices, and preparing anything I think they’ll be eating becomes inhibiting. Still, now that I’m freed from the office and commuting routine, the time has come for me to pick up some of the meals preparation each week. Nevertheless, it feels like learning from scratch, especially after the Pellegrini readings. So when Adler begins with a chapter “How to Boil Water,” I thought I’d be on the right track – like Yehudi Menuhin learning to play violin all over again as a young adult. Wrong! She quickly veers off into a much different realm of cooking, one loaded with onions, anchovies, and beets (three of my least favorite ingredients ever), and soon seemingly slapdash in all directions. This, from a woman who admits ineptitude when it comes to making bread. In the end, though, this will likely be the volume I keep returning to as we make the best of our garden produce through the season. She has me largely rethinking meals and routines – this, coming from a Midwestern kid whose idea of dinner revolves around a slab of meat, or some substitute in the vegetarian variations. Rice, anyone?

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FROM HISTORY MUSEUMS TO GRACE, ALONG WITH A FEW MEALS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Joy Williams: The Quick & the Dead. This 2000 novel, a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, is built around three essentially motherless preteen girls who are ultimately unsupportable as believable characters. I kept reading, wondering why, only to find the ending simply evaporate. She has her fans, but I’m not one of them.
  • Warren Leon and Roy Rosenzweig, eds: History Museums in the United States: A Critical Assessment. As someone with long familiarity with both natural history and art museums, I have also long visited American history museums without giving them much thought as a separate category until my wife mentioned the cabinet of curiosities concept, based on the trunks seafaring captains were expected to bring home for the enlightenment of their communities. Wonderful insights in these essays into the growth and critical limitations of theme-focused collections, living history villages, historic house sites, shrines, and so on. My favorite rips Disney, especially at EPCOT, to shreds.
  • Kate Chopin: The Awakening and Selected Short Fiction. Despite her glimpses into Deep South and Creole society in the late 1800s, Chopin’s portrayal of an infantile self-centered heroine, like Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina before her, drew little sympathy from me. Tedious.
  • Richard Russo: That Old Cape Magic. A lively, humorous story with a pair of very dysfunctional, professorial parents unfolding in the background of the protagonist’s own string of affairs and failing marriage. In the end, quite pointed, bitterly funny, and emotional moving. Quite different from Empire Falls.
  • Angelo M. Pellegrini: The Food-Lover’s Garden; The Unprejudiced Palate; Lean Years, Happy Years; and Vintage Pellegrini. More than a decade before Julia Child began to transform American cuisine, this Seattle-based English professor born in Italy launched his own arguments for a more delicious, healthier alternative to the dull meals of the era, on one hand, and the impossible directions for preparing pretentious international fare, on the other. For those who grew up thinking spaghetti came out of a can, as I did, Pellegrini’s texts are a reminder that even garlic, zucchini, and broccoli were exotic rarities, when they could be found at all. (As for cheese?) His emphasis remains stubbornly on fresh vegetables and fruit, the essential role of homegrown herbs, and the joys of wines made in one’s own cellar. I love the simplicity of many of his meals – a broth, salad, and bread as dinner, for instance. His stories along the way are delightful. I can see why he has long been one of my wife’s favorite food writers.
  • Anne Lamott: Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith and Blue Shoes. Another of my wife’s favorites, Lamott’s confessions of faith are refreshingly both comic and startling. While the novel Blue Shoes sets out on that light-toned approach, about halfway through it takes on a dark realism that soon parallels Russo’s That Old Cape Magic, complete with the parents’ infidelities.  It’s hard to think of other authors who present children as masterfully as she does, or, for that matter, relations with a parent in mental decline. Her real-life religion admits the realities of adultery, even among believers, and of grace in unexpected encounters. The protagonist’s discoveries about her own father lead to some of the most heart-breaking pages one will encounter, and some of the most illuminating examples of selfless love. A knockout.

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FROM CELIA THAXTER TO CHARLES IVES, WITH ANTIQUITY IN BETWEEN

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Celia Thaxter:  An Island Garden. A delightful book. The Childe Hassam illustrations are classic, and my favorite parts of the text are her descriptions of the sea and island life. Of course, the gardening advice is no slouch, either, especially with her passionate details of battling slugs.
  • Jennifer Toth: The Mole People. A daring demonstration of enterprise reporting by a Los Angeles Times correspondent in New York, detailing the rise of homeless people in the 1980s who retreated to the depths of the city, including those of the subways and railroads. Her investigations ultimately placed her life in danger. A remarkable alternative to my freewheeling, playful Subway Hitchhikers perspective.
  • Antonia Fraser: Cromwell: Our Chief of Men. After all of my Quaker histories and Christopher Hill’s The World Turned Upside Down, this biography provides a third leg for triangulating the upheaval that shaped the Society of Friends. I now see the Protectorate as a subset of the Interregnum, one in conflict with both Parliamentary rights and the political power of the Army (including its Leveller and Digger voices). Fraser’s description of the origins of the New Model Army as “godly men” hints that its span may have had several incarnations; also, John Lilburne’s role within this period, as a vocal dissident, leaves me concluding that Cromwell’s failure to extend the vote for the House of Commons to all free Englishmen (or at least all of the Army, who had fought for its freedom) was the central fatal flaw of the revolution, especially as Cromwell floundered in his attempts to rule with a greatly muzzled Parliament. From Fraser’s perspective, the Quakers were generally just one of the many sects flourishing at the time, and the Nayler trial by Parliament, while troubling in its legal foundation and execution, was not the pivotal event seen by Douglas Gwyn and others. In the end, Fraser is long-winded. What I would now like to see is a definitive treatment of Lilburne, another of the New Model, and yet another on the General Baptists of the era.
  •  James Joyce:  Ulysses. Such a troubling, disjointed work! On one hand, it points straight to Kerouac and William Burroughs in its free-flowing association. Despite many imaginative and wonderful lines and, especially, puns, it’s hard to follow the characters through this single-day pursuit, or to have any sympathy for any of them.
  • Jack Miles: Christ: A Crisis in the Life of God. This ex-Jesuit’s examination builds on his earlier biography of God, and his conclusion that, for various reasons, the God of Israel can no longer deliver his end of the covenant. Miles approaches Jesus exclusively as God Incarnate, rather than any of the alternatives I’ve perceived, and sees the Crucifixion as essentially a self-suicide by God – an offering of appeasement for his failure. Indeed, Miles sees Jesus as repeatedly evading questions about the free Jewish state promised in Isaiah, especially, and calls Jesus an “ironic Messiah.”
  • The Confessions of St. Augustine. His conceit of addressing these to God, as in prayer, even though the deity already knows all the details and more, provides an intimacy for the general reader to whom the work is actually aimed. Of course, Augustine’s ultimate denunciation of the turns that led him to his life in the Church – in fact, his appreciation of those steps – taints the work for me. Too much self-piety, in the end, with all of his destructive role in leading Christianity into the “dark night of the apostasy.” On the other hand, much of this is also a day book for reflection: not the way I handled the volume this time, but perhaps at a later date.
  • Charles Ives:  Essays Before a Sonata, The Majority, and Other Writings. The essays regarding the Concord Sonata and its Transcendentalist inspirations are provocative and insightful. His political writings, however, can be embarrassing, except for the sense of the Emersonian influences Ives is attempting to apply – his naïve faith in a Majority (the People) over an elite Minority (the Non-People) is all the more telling in that Ives (and, for that matter, classical music itself) will never appeal to the Majority in America!

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OF THE GRAVE AND BEES TO PERFUME AND HOLLYWOOD

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Graham Montague: The Stillness of the Grave and the Quickening of the Spirit. Pamphlet by a contemporary British Friend, suggested by Patrick Burns. I love the use of Walt Whitman’s description of attending his first Quaker meeting and sensing the worshipers were as still as the grave — followed by insights of dying to the world around us momentarily and resurrection.
  • Matthue Roth: Never Mind the Goldbergs. Flippant fiction as late-night fun for this reader. One of my favorite teen-angst novels, it has some marvelous insights into religious identity as well as some scathing portraits of Hollywood values and practice.
  • Holley Bishop: Robbing the Bees: A Biography of Honey, the Sweet Liquid Gold That Seduced the World. Although the author spends much of her time following a commercial beekeeper in Florida, she does present a range of fascinating detail on the care of honeybees through history, the evolution of commercial hives, and the place of honey and beeswax over the centuries. A book to stand alongside, Cod, Salt, Cotton, and other basic commodities. Includes recipes.
  • Mandy Aftel: Essence and Alchemy: A Book of Perfume. A beautifully designed and produced book (North Point Press) exploring the history, artistry, psychology, and ingredients of perfume. But do I want all of those recipes?

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FROM BIRDING BY EAR TO GROWING OLDER, WITH OR WITHOUT CHOPSTICKS

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 2 Comments

Continuing this month’s survey of Books Read, here are a few more entries:

  • Peterson Field Guides: Birding by Ear (booklet and audio tapes). Tweet! (OK, I still can’t identify most birds by their singing. Maybe I just don’t know the words?)
  • Stephan Yafa: Big Cotton. Exploration of the impact of another major commodity on world economies and politics. In line with Salt, Cod, Honey, even the fur and tusks that Farley Mowett has pursued.
  • E. Digby Baltzell: Puritan Boston and Quaker Philadelphia. A disturbing comparison of the legacy of two Colonial cities founded on faith. Baltzell’s reliance on High Society and family dynasties gives the work its own twist, so that families that moved away from either city vanish from sight, no matter their continuing contributions to society. Still, many of his conclusions are also disturbing, especially from a Friends’ perspective.
  • Henry David Thoreau: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. A surprising amount of bad poetry here, as well as very little observation of what’s right before him. I find myself dismissing Thoreau as a suburban naturalist, more an antecedent to Kerouac than, say, Snyder.
  • Tom Montag: Kissing Poetry’s Sister. Includes looks at creative nonfiction as a genre. He’s another middle-aged poet who has continued to write in relative obscurity while being employed in non-teaching positions.
  • Elizabeth Lyon: The Sell Your Novel Toolkit. Had this one sitting on my shelf all along, thinking it was another self-marketing guide for once the work was published. Instead, it turns out to have in-depth sections on query letters, synopsis/outline presentations, landing an agent, and the like. As a result, I have reworked all of my materials for the three novels I’m pitching – even renaming two of them. Now, let’s see if it does the trick.
  • Victoria Abbott Riccard: Untangling Chopsticks. A young woman from New England moves to Kyoto to master the cooking and presentation of food that accompanies tea-ceremony. Along the way, she becomes adept in a culture where she would always be an outsider, even after a lifetime. Includes recipes.
  • Tom Plummer: Second Wind, Variations on a Theme of Growing Older. Pleasant essays more appropriate to newspaper or magazine columns, by an understated Mormon.

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FOND MEMORIES OF FORE STREET

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

My wife is a great cook. And so are the kids. This means that when we dine out, the meal often fails to live up to what we can have at home. The chain restaurants strike us as formulaic or bland. In many, there’s much that’s mostly show with little substance, or pretentious and pricy, or simply uninspired. It’s easy to feel we wasted our money.

On the other hand, we’ve also found some marvelous meals at bargain prices in humble places. including some that folks might describe as sketchy. At least until you take the first bite.  I could mention my favorite Vietnamese restaurants in Worcester, Massachusetts, and Hartford, Connecticut, for starters. Or my regular Greek restaurant in Watertown, Massachusetts. Or our favorite summer hangout for seafood and live oldies in York, Maine. Or dim sum in Boston’s Chinatown. Or Latin American highlighting different countries on different days in Dayton, Ohio.

Of course, when we find a truly authoritative operation – one that sets standards for presentation, skill, creativity, and downright pleasure – we treasure the experience. Our favorite is run by two women in South Berwick, Maine. Whenever we’re ready to spring for a great celebration, that’s our first choice and we’re always delighted.

Once my wife and I got away for a weekend stay in Portland, Maine, and the centerpiece of the trip was a dinner at the famed Fore Street Restaurant, which is set in a kind of William Morris former foundry a couple of blocks from the harbor. She can tell you every glowing detail of our meal, including the local sourcing of ingredients. The wait staff was attentive without being overwhelming or stuffy. And most impressive, a sauvignon blanc was suggested to pair with that evening’s selections – and management priced it close to retail, rather than charging the industry standard of three or four times that figure. It was incredible – the word “stony” fits perfectly – and we’ve never found another that approaches this bottle, not even from the same South African winery.

Well, Fore Street was named No. 16 in Gourmet magazine’s list of top 50 restaurants in the U.S. in 2002.

More recently, I’m so glad one of our regular mechanics and his wife were impressed with their big celebration dinner there a few months ago. And we’re so happy to hear the tradition continues.

HEALTHIER BALANCE

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

For most of my adult life, I’ve tended to load up on the fresh vegetables, but fruit’s been another matter. Maybe if you stuck a piece right in front of me, on my plate. Yes, I love blueberries and, with breakfast, a grapefruit. But even after living in an orchard (cherries, plums, pears, peaches, and varieties of apples), I rarely went out of my way for that end of the dietary spectrum. Until I retired.

Maybe it was a sense of reclaiming some of my ashram experience, but once I left full-time employment, I found myself in a routine of setting down for a midmorning meal of fresh homemade toast (with homemade jam or jelly, meaning fruit), fresh homemade yogurt (with fruit), and (in season) an orange I’d just peeled.

And then there are all the goodies from our garden, much of it eaten fresh and the rest, frozen for later, such as the strawberries, blueberries,  and raspberries. That’s even before we get to the trips to the pick-your-own orchards, where we focus on the half-price drops on the ground, such as peaches and apples, or the crab apples we pick from the strips between the sidewalk and some city streets. Add to that a daughter who revels in canning, as well as making jams and jellies.

It may be deep cold outside, but on my table these days, I’m reliving summer. Now, what are we having for dinner?