Tag: Smiles

Applying the Tao of food

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

The Chinese mystic Lao Tsu, the founder of Taoism, once said, or I think he did, that when it comes to food, we should eat what’s in season and from the region where we live.

Living in a so-called temperate climate, as I have, makes the adage difficult to maintain day to day through a full year, but as a guideline, I’ve appreciated its merits. Besides, it’s not a bad concept to keep in mind when sitting down to ponder seed catalogs and ordering, and then getting the mailings and planting the seeds under grow lights, as many folks do at this time of the year.

Here are some foods as I see them applying. Many but not all are items foodies pay dearly to obtain. Others are the basic reason for gardening – or is the practice itself the reason and any harvest arrives as one more blessing?

  1. Asparagus: I came to love this herald of spring when I was living in an apple orchard. The sprouts grew wild, free for the taking, and glutting out for the month they sprang forth was a delightful challenge. I repeated the celebration with a bed or two in Dover, and do miss those.
  2. Fiddleheads: These ferns are another herald of spring and well worth the expense. We’re hoping to raise our own, as well as asparagus, as we get better settled in here.
  3. Strawberries: Just in time for a few birthdays in June …  
  4. Crabmeat: It’s available if you know where to look, but Betty’s (the best) is available only from late spring to early autumn. Fresh is definitely the tastiest.
  5. Lobsters: Again, year-‘round, but the price does drop as the waters warm. Not that they’re ever cheap.
  6. Blueberries, raspberries, currants, and cranberries: Our county leads the nation in the harvest of wild, low-bush blueberries. Cranberries are a more recent addition at a few farms. Raspberries and currants are whatever we can keep from the deer.
  7. Summer garden abundance: lettuce, sugar snap peas, parsley, basil, cucumbers, tomatoes.
  8. Potatoes: The skins are so tender when fresh, and the insides haven’t yet turned starchy. My, they are sweet and creamy, definitely worth the excuse to head up to Aroostook County, where culls can be a bargain.
  9. Garlic and leeks: We do store these, so the “in season” doesn’t always apply. But they do brighten up what we’re eating through the winter months.
  10. Scallops: Speaking of winter, getting these straight from the fishing boats is heavenly. Those you buy at the market or in a restaurant aren’t quite the same.

Fresh cider and pick-your-own apples, peaches, and pears were things we enjoyed in Dover but haven’t yet located here in Way Downeast Maine. We’re lookin’, though.

Before you start your car, thank this auto pioneer 

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

When we think of many of the technological advances that impact our daily lives, we usually don’t know the names of their inventors, even when we know the businessmen who got wealthy as a result. Elon Musk did not invent the Tesla, for instance, nor did Bill Gates invent the internet or Henry Ford, the auto. The list is actually a long one.

Consider John William Lambert, mentioned in a previous Tendrils.

I remember visiting an early coworker and, upon seeing an old car with an impressive Lambert name in brass across the radiator sitting at an open garage door, I asked, “Ann? Is that car any relation to you?” She replied that her grandfather used to make them but otherwise conveyed no knowledge that he had been so prominent a figure.

Here are ten facts from his life.

This was the breakthrough vehicle.
  1. He invented the first practical American internal combustion gasoline automobile in 1890 in Ohio City in Van Wert County, Ohio, where he tested it on the village streets early the next year. It was the Buckeye gasoline buggy, a surrey-topped three-wheel runabout with one seat. It had a three-cylinder, four-stroke engine.
  2. In 1891, that horseless carriage became the first automobile offered for sale in the United States. Priced at $550, it attracted no buyers.
  3. Undaunted by the buggy’s reception, he turned his attention in 1892 to making stationary gasoline engines for farm and industrial factory use.
  4. Lambert’s base of operations was the Buckeye Manufacturing Company, which he had founded in 1884 as a farm implement manufacturer and moved in 1892 to Anderson, Indiana.
  5. His experiments with drive-train technology led to the Lambert friction gearing disk drive transmission. The gradual, or gearless, transmission became a signature feature on all of his future cars.
  6. His next attempt at an auto line came in 1895 with a model called the Buckeye. It was a four-wheel modification of the buggy but failed to find buyers.
  7. His first marketing success was the Union, released in 1902. About 300 of the tiller-steered cars were sold.
  8. In 1906 he introduced his first Lambert, establishing himself as one of the more successful automakers of the time. Production peaked from 1907 to 1910 with 2,000 cars a year.
  9. Buckeye Manufacturing, which built the cars, had moved by 1905 to Anderson, Indiana. The Lambert Automobile Company was one of its subsidiaries. Touting its Lambert Friction-Drive Automobiles and Trucks, the Buckeye factory mass-produced Lambert’s cars, gasoline engines, and auto components as well as fire engines, railroad inspection vehicles, and steel-hoof tractors before closing in 1917. At its height, the company had more than a thousand employees.
  10. Lambert held more than 600 patents and died in 1952, age 92, in Anderson.
At its prime, the Lambert came with 15 layers of hand-painted color.

 

When it comes to daily bread, the French set a standard

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Among the things we truly miss living on our remote corner of Maine is a first-class bakery, the kind that can turn out genuine baguettes and croissants.

Previous posts here at the Barn have touched on these distinctively French delights, but today the attention turns to matters of what makes something as basic as bread so marvelous.

Consider.

  1. While the roots of the baguette go back at least to the 18th century, the distinctive Parisian staple didn’t even go by that name until August 1920, when the department of the Seine regulated the product, declaring that the loaf had to have a minimum weight of 2¾ ounces and a maximum length of 16 inches and not cost more than .35 francs, making it affordable for nearly everyone.
  2. Today’s baguette has a diameter of roughly two to 2½ inches, a length of about 26 inches, but that can range up to 39 inches long, and a weight of 8¾ ounces. I’m sure the price has been adjusted over the years, even before the euro.
  3. The word itself means wand, baton, or stick. Well, from baguette to baton does make a bit of sense.
  4. French bakers were already using highly refined Hungarian high-milled flour, a compact Austrian yeast, and Viennese steam oven baking. Later ovens heated to more than 390 °F use steam injection to allow the crust to expand before setting. Vive la difference.
  5. Long loaves were already part of French culture. Some of them reached to six-feet long, resembling crow bars, in the eyes of some. Pity the poor maids trying to convey them to their master’s homes.
  6. The airy, chewy, crunchy-crust elongated bread loaves are made of basically flour, water, common salt, and yeast, perhaps with a few tweaks. We’re back to the importance of really good flour and yeast. As for the water and salt?
  7. By French law, a baguette is defined principally by its dough, not its shape. No wonder so many imitators on this side of the ocean disappoint.
  8. Sometime around 1920 (the accounts vary), bakers were legally prevented from working before 4 a.m., making it impossible to make traditional round loaves in time for customers’ breakfasts, as the Wikipedia account goes. (The bakers were also banned from working after 10 p.m.) Switching from the round loaf to the previously less-common, slender shape of the baguette solved the problem, especially since the bakers could no longer work later than 10 at night.
  9. When it comes to consumption, Algeria leads the world, with 49 million baguette loaves a day, compared to France at a mere 30 million.
  10. As far as history goes, we can revisit the classic quip of let the public eat cake when they’re out of French bread, even of the pre-baguette variety. Was Queen Antoinette out of her head? In my humble opinion, cake definitely finishes in second place.

Anyone ready for a dark valentine?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ Leave a comment

Love, if you haven’t noticed, can be very hard to define. Really define.

Here are some examples. Add “Be Mine” at your own risk.

  1. “Love isn’t soft, like those poets say. Love has teeth which bite and the wounds never close.” – Stephen King
  2. “The pain of love is the pain of being alive. It is a perpetual wound. – Maureen Duffy
  3. “Love is a hole in the heart.” – Ben Hecht
  4. “Sex isn’t hard, but intimacy is terrifying.” – Tatiana Maslany
  5. “Love meant jumping off a cliff and trusting that a certain person would be there to catch you at the bottom.” – Jodi Picoult
  6. “But let there be spaces in your togetherness and let the winds of the heavens dance between you. Love one another but make not a bond of love: let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.” – Khalil Gibran
  7. “You are the knife I turn inside myself; that is love. That, my dear, is love.” – Franz Kafka
  8. “I will not have you without the darkness that hides within you. I will not let you have me without the madness that makes me. If our demons cannot dance, neither can we.” – Nikita Gill
  9. “Truth is, everybody is going to hurt you; you just gotta find the ones worth suffering for.” – Bob Marley
  10. “Never love anyone who treats you like you’re ordinary.” – Oscar Wilde

As a postscript, let me add this: “If I love you, what business is it of yours?” – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

So how do you define love?

 

Do I miss the goddess Caffeina?

~ Jnana Hodson ~ 1 Comment

Mugs of coffee laced with sugar and cream have accompanied me from high school on, especially while sitting at a desk writing or editing. Cutting back from my five or so big mugs a day did become an annual health goal, not that I ever pressed that hard. Working the night shift didn’t help, either.

Alas, since retiring from the newsroom, I’ve had to eliminate caffeine altogether from my diet. Doctor’s orders. My favorite drug of choice, it turns out, counteracts a daily medicine prescribed to me.

Here are a few related considerations.

  1. Tea may be the first caffeinated beverage, from 2737 B.C.E., according to one line of argument, but I’ve never found it satisfying. Sorry if you feel a need to object.
  2. Coffee beans are not really beans but the pit of a red or purple Coffea fruit. The leading producers are Brazil, Colombia, Vietnam, and Venuzuela.
  3. Was the first usage of coffee by an Ethiopian goat herder named Kaldi in 850 C.E. after he noticed his goats had extra energy after eating the fruits?
  4. Today an estimated 80 percent of the world’s population imbibes a caffeinated product daily – a number that rises to 90 percent of adults in North America.
  5. It’s also found in some soft drinks and in chocolate.
  6. Add to that cold, allergy, pain, and weight-control medications.
  7. One study found that two to three cups of caffeine coffee linked to a 45 percent drop in suicides.
  8. Significant daily consumption of caffeine in coffee or tea may also greatly reduce the likelihood of Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s diseases. Other health benefits are reported.
  9. The United States is the leading consumer of coffee. I doubt, though, that we can blame that on the Boston Tea Party, which was a tax protest.
  10. Decaf does contain a residual amount of caffeine. Not enough, apparently, to keep me awake.

It’s not like I’m suffering, though. I must say I’ve found some good decafs for my morning ritual, sometimes abetted by French chicory. Still, there are some dull days I would really like that jolt of bitter stimulant to the nervous system.