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barton cole :: veni, vedi, vero scripsi
 Sunday, January 03, 2010
 
[note: not all facts are checked, not all images are formatted and uploaded, but the bones of the story are here... all images but Whitman portrait © 2009 Drew Kampion]
My good friend, Drew Kampion, has been sending out Walt Whitman poems every Tuesday for the last year, a practice instituted on the day of the election of Barack Obama as the forty-fourth president of the United States of America. His selections are pertinent to the times, and have prompted many on his extensive list to explore what the guy had to say, me among them.
I recall studying O Captain! My Captain! (Whitman on the death of Lincoln, which affected him profoundly) in school, but other than that, my exposure was pretty meager.
Along came Drew, though, lighting the Walt Whitman fire.
I don’t know what sort of reaction he was getting with his posts of Whitman’s poetry. I, for one, appreciated it – I have a number of correspondents who are poets, and many who send out poems, which I always enjoy, and sometimes to which I respond.
Also, it was interesting to see Drew’s selections of poems, and their relevance (or not) to our times; or, at least, Drew’s interpretation of it.
Drew has often been out in front in his time on Whidbey Island. He came here in the early nineties (as did I), and soon, established the Island Independent, an alternative newspaper, distributed around our archipelago fortnightly.
[open note to you compulsively-researching Wikipedia editors: why don’t you guys put together a page about Drew Kampion, and one about the Island Independent?]
It was really a great paper, featuring some excellent journalism, and interesting regular features (including, after a couple of years, my food column). A beloved newspaper, for which some still pine.
One of his correspondents, Kim Hoelting, is also a devotee of Walt Whitman. Kim lives out in the Maxwelton Valley, on the southern end of South Whidbey Island, next to a huge, old school, built just over a hundred years ago from native softwood (old-growth douglas fir), and standing strong. Kim uses the hall as his showroom for his imposing lumber selection, which includes book-matched douglas fir planks about three inches thick, three feet wide, and sixteen feet long, and some douglas fir two-by-twentyfours, about twenty feet long, and other large pieces of western red cedar, sitka spruce, Alaska yellow cedar, redwood, maple, you name it.
As I understand it, Kim became a salvage logger after having spent some years as a fisherman in Alaska (Bristol Bay Gillnetters, I think, or maybe a seiner or troller). On his way south, coming down the Inside Passage (relatively sheltered water among the northern end of the extensive archipelago, of which my island is the southernmost), he’d see huge logs on the beach, and began towing them home and milling them up and selling the boards. Often, driftwood, as his supply generally was, are old logs that are completely rot resistant – from natural attributes, and from being in salt water.
Kim began to deal in these specialty planks, and now, does that as his trade. He’s also a construction contractor, having participated in a renovation of the Paradise Inn at Tahoma (known as “Mount Rainier” to the yokels), installing huge Alaska cedar logs along the snow-shedding eaves, low to the ground below a high, steep roof.
Drew and Kim began to talk about working their way through Whitman’s work – which is entirely published in the perpetually-edited Leaves of Grass, deathbed edition, 1892. They had thought about meeting once a week, and continuing until they had exhausted the book, but then came the idea of reading the whole thing in one marathon go.
According to the statistic I saw recently published, the whole work would take about twenty-one hours to read; Drew and Kim made their own calculations (essentially 1.5 minutes per page, having timed various readings with a stopwatch), and determined that the whole thing would take twenty-four hours, one day between sunsets.
They selected a date (I hadn’t thought to ask if it were significant): 28-29 December 2009, beginning at 16:24, the time of local sunset (here in GMT-8 time).
Right on the heels of Christmas, which had me so engaged I hadn’t given his reading a thought, other than to check in when he was looking for recruits to read, and asked for a graveyard shift. I thought I would enjoy that most; I have abundant performing experience, particularly with spoken word, but the idea of not having an audience was appealing – as is my dream of hearing crickets when I get a curtain call, like Daffy Duck would).
Suddenly, it was the day before the event. I had just made arrangements to work in america at my Dad’s house, whipping his garden into shape, and would be leaving for the ferry soon after the reading ended, which felt to me like it was best that I was going to read late at night and early in the morning the night before. I intended to spend the night at my dad’s and commence the garden work the next day, so being short on sleep shouldn’t be too much of a problem. Not only that, but I am as stalwart a campaigner as they come, having slept folded up in the seat of a Fiat to be out of the rain at a trailhead in the Olympic Rainforest, and then hiked twenty miles the next day with a load. Come on, my motto – one of them – is podestis me impedere, sed non me sistere.
"You may be able to hinder me, but you are unable to stop me.”
I checked in with Drew’s email-published schedule (an ambitious piece of work – I have organized poetry festivals, and it’s hard to arrange the timetable), and sure enough, I wa on late.
When I got there, around 11:00 at night, it was well dark, the room dimly lit, and just a few were there. They were nearly two hundred pages into a 455 page book; some hours to go, yet. About a third of the way done.
I hung around until 3:00; I read a bit, I listened a lot.
The book was the culmination of Whitman’s work; originally published in 1855 with a mere twelve poems, it eventually, by the last edition in 1892, featured over four hundred poems, and included the entirety of his published poetry.
The Civil War had a great impact on the nation, and particularly on Walt Whitman. When I left the reading in the middle of the night, they were about to hit the patch of Civil War poems, but I had to go home and sleep, since I needed to get up in a few hours to go off and work.
As tired as I was, I got home just fine; the weather was around freezing, and the roads were a bit icy, but there hadn’t been any precipitation, so they weren’t so bad.
After a mere three hours of sleep, I was up and at it again; I did my morning routine and went off to work for a while.
Around noon, I decided I was too tired to keep working, so I headed back to the reading. They were around page 385; merely seventy pages to go.
Drew and Kim were bleary; Kim’s brother, Kurt, had slept in a sleeping bag laid on a huge plank and piece of foam, so he was fresher than Drew or Kim, but not by much.
Compared to them, I was fresh as a daisy – but still not that fresh; I was quite tired.
I got inserted into the mix of readers – there were about twelve people there, and it was getting down to the end.
With thirty pages to go, Drew halted the proceedings to announce that, and to parcel out the remaining works, so that the ship came into port not by blowing there, but with intention.
I took on a few poems, and was flattered that Kim anointed me to read the last poem, Goodbye, My Fancy.
Whitman suffered a paralytic stroke around 1874; he spent the last eighteen years of his life expecting to die, so much of his poetry from then has an air of finality, and saying goodbye. But not as much as the last.
I read that last poem, and stepped away from the podium. I thought about closing the book, as an act of finality and completion, but left if open, as works of art such as that should remain available for deployment, like an alert fireman.
Silence, for a few minutes.
And then Kim spoke, talking about what a meaningful event it was.
The book from which we read had belonged to Kim’s father-in-law, who died during a marathon reading of it; do you suppose that might have contributed to the power of the event?
People began moving around, and leaving; the twenty-four hours had passed. There was mostly silence. Every word had been spoken aloud; the wooden building would remember it, always.
                            
  
GOOD-BYE my Fancy!
Farewell dear mate, dear love!
I'm going away, I know not where,
Or to what fortune, or whether I may ever see you again,
So Good-bye my Fancy.
Now for my last - let me look back a moment;
The slower fainter ticking of the clock is in me,
Exit, nightfall, and soon the heart-thud stopping.
Long have we lived, joy'd, caress'd together;
Delightful! - now separation - Good-bye my Fancy.
Yet let me not be too hasty,
Long indeed have we lived, slept, filter'd, become really blended
into one;
Then if we die we die together, (yes, we'll remain one,)
If we go anywhere we'll go together to meet what happens,
May-be we'll be better off and blither, and learn something,
May-be it is yourself now really ushering me to the true songs, (who
knows?)
May-be it is you the mortal knob really undoing, turning-so now
finally,
Good-bye-and hail! my Fancy.
Sunday, October 04, 2009
Mortality's been the theme this last week.
On my island, one of my tree-work colleagues was just killed by an alder.
Bobby Stewart was one of those guys who do the work that's too big for me - I'm a horticulturist, a pruning specialist, I work in fruit trees of all sizes, among other things; there's nothing like the skill and finesse and vigilance it takes to be a tree man, and I don't have it. These guys are the top guys, the arborists, the loggers.
As I understand it, he was "wrecking it," which is a logging term for taking a tree down by cutting it from the top, little by little, in situations where there's no room to drop the whole tree. Part of the tree broke off, I am told, and landed on him.
They all call those falling branches widowmakers - my Finnish grandfather, Leo, was killed by one, logging near Coos Bay; I named my chainsaw after him to keep me mindful.
There's very little that's safe about an alder - the only tree I ever fell from, when the only branch that was supporting me gave way, as I climbed high to impress girls - who were not impressed, not even when I fell twenty feet and was arrested by forked branches -- and yet, those of us who really know alders love them all the same, even though they die young and throw branches along the way (I'll write about them next time) - only the idiots call them trash trees, and Bobby, although one landed on him, would tell you it was ready to go.
The next day, one of our sweet friends was experiencing some headache symptoms. I had heard she'd driven herself to the hospital here on the island (she went in an ambulance, I learned; a friend suggested the detail was critical, as perhaps there was an EMT who was heroic, and about whom we don't know, but who would obviously be an agent in the story).
They promptly airlifted her to Harborview, the regional trauma center down Puget Sound, in Seattle.
Turns out she had an aneurysm, and nearly didn't make it.
Later that day, the prognosis I heard was that they were hoping for signs of higher brain function - so it would seem we were about to lose her.
To deal with the pressure of the blood clot, they could either go into her brain via an artery in her leg, or enter her skull the conventional way - which they opted to do. The next day, they operated.
A portion of her skull was removed, and kept in the freezer for later re-attachment; the surgeon said the area "looked angry," and they want it to subside before they seal her all the way up.
She made it through the surgery like a champ, and was even demonstrating recognition of her situation the next day, a day before they intended to bring her out of her post-operative, induced comatose state.
The report I got that day was that she was going to be without this bit of skull for some time, and would be wearing a helmet.
"I think she's going to be just fine," I said.
I remember this from before.
When I was eleven years old, I lived in a little town on the saltwater, much like the town I live in now, but not as bohemian by a long shot.
There weren't that many employment prospects, as we were rather remote - you could either cut grass, or maybe babysit (tried that - the allegedly sleeping infant was actually a profoundly-sociopathic Houdini for two solid hours; I can still see that paltry 37¢ in the mother's fat palm -- "won't be long!") - but if you were lucky, you had one of the few, precious paper routes, delivering the Tacoma News Tribune, published in the city on the other side of the bay.
That was a good income for a kid in the early 70's - hard work, and getting up early on the weekends to deliver Sunday edition, which I would weigh when I finished my route - to determine that, yes indeed, that young guy was walking around with one of those classic, canvas newspaper-delivery bags, carrying upwards of a hundred pounds of newspapers at a time.
You loaded the papers in the bag for a long, looping first leg; the bag was so heavy you had to pull it over the edge of the box the truck dropped the bundles in - and in which you slept if you got there in the morning before the truck had arrived with your bundles. Then you kind of stood up into it and heaved away from the box like a tug from a pier.
You didn't bend over until you were down a dozen or more papers, as the weight of the papers would pull you down, and you wouldn't be able to get up - seriously - it happened more than once. It sounds funny to imagine a kid immobilized by a newspaper bag, legs feebly kicking like a capsized beetle, but it's not. That bag could strangle you, come to think of it.
I had no idea I barely escaped childhood with my life - no, actually, knew it all along, but this isn't that kind of story, so we won't go into it. The history of my scars and scrapes can wait.
I didn't have a paper route at the time, but was hoping to get one - there were only four, one of which was actually prestigious, having the most customers in the shortest distance, and good tippers, to boot (not as compact as a high school friend's route - he delivered papers in an apartment building, and would deposit the requisite amount of papers on every other floor going up in the elevator, then deliver them on the way down, using the stairs - over in half an hour).
My brother, Dan, had the prime route (my other brother had another). He was always an ass-buster, and had rapidly been switched to that one by the manager, and pulled in upwards of a hundred dollars a month, which was a lot for a kid in those days, for an hour's work a day (every day, no days off).
One day in June, I was with a friend, who had one of the subordinate routes. He was going on a trip with his family, so I was learning his route as a substitute, to fill in while he was away.
In the center of my town was a large park, with some great little woods, tennis courts, and a wide-open sports field with a baseball diamond on one side, and goal posts for soccer on the other.
A softball game was going on that day, but nothing organized; not a league, or anything. Just a bunch of grownups playing softball and drinking beer (which was easy to get away with - our town was unincorporated, so only the county sheriff had jurisdiction; we were way off near the county line, and you never saw those guys).
My pal's route went past the field, and then around the corner, looping past the fire station and the doctor's office.
As we approached the doctor's, a van squealed into the parking lot. A fellow got out of the van, ran into the office, came dashing back out, and sped off, around the corner.
"Shit," my pal said, "I'm going to see what's going on - you deliver those next few papers…?" as he ran off. I knew the route already, and was just affirming it for him that day.
He took off around the corner, and was back in a minute -
"Bart! It's your brother!"
I went around the corner to the next street, and could see a cluster of people gathered half a block down on the other side, standing looking at Dan on the ground.
I took the bag off, set it on the grass, and walked across the street to the group of people. I took my time; I was afraid.
I slowly walked up and looked down -
But that's the part I don't remember. I remember looking at him, but I don't remember what I saw.
I was the kid, shuffling that afternoon with his blood-flecked bag and papers, finishing his route.
Didn't know what else to do.
The fellow in the van, one of the drunk softball players, had hit him while he sped down the road - doing fifty in a twenty-five zone. His mirror, we learned later, had clipped my brother in the head, knocking him off his bike and to the ground (ironically, had he been wearing a helmet - they weren't around then - his head would have made it, but his neck would have been broken and he'd be dead).
He lay there, a bloody mess; his newspaper bag was next to him, his bicycle lay there, the front wheel bent. I walked away and sat on the grass.
An ambulance arrived soon after, and he was taken to the hospital in the city, where they hustled him into surgery.
He made it through surgery just fine, but - they took out part of his skull in the process - the part right above the hairline in front. Later, they would insert a plastic plate, but that had to wait until he recovered.
We were able to visit him in the hospital in a couple of days - I was a bit jealous by the attention he was getting, and of all the cool toys with which well-wishers were filling his room.
Dan was fine - I had feared I'd have a vegetable for a brother, but he was fine. Alert, coherent, just the same, but with a big hole in his head.
He came home from the hospital, and life went along just about the same - except that now my brother had this spot on his head with the skin just stretched across it, about as big as a dollar. Right there in front; you couldn't miss it.
He usually wore a stocking cap - a beanie, as the cool set has adopted them now - which made me just a bit less uncomfortable.
And he went about his normal business - he delivered his newspapers, and went to school, and continued his passionate basketball playing.
We had a hoop on the back patio, installed on a huge steel column made by one of the welders at the shipyard where my dad was a naval architect, and Dan would hang out back there, shooting baskets for hours.
He had an odd style of shooting, too - we were soccer players (Little League baseball, although present in our community, didn't have the appeal and cachet of soccer, which was the popular sport - many of my friends went on to have pro careers on the field), and Dan would shoot baskets as if throwing a soccer ball in from the sideline, in which the ball starts behind your head, and with both hands, you toss it as far and accurately as you can.
Dan would nail all the shots, too, uncannily - and had, as a result, an advantage over defenders taller than him, as shooting the ball that way gave him about a foot of extra height, compared to the conventional way of shooting a basketball.
He'd be out there for hours - and you wasted your time if you ever undertook a game of HORSE with him; he'd kick your ass every time.
Once, during Dan's convalescence, the ball rolled under the deck.
"I'll get it!" I said, wanting to protect my gentle, damaged brother. But he was closer, and got the ball, and banged his head when he came back out.
I nearly wet my pants, I nearly fainted, I certainly hyperventilated, afraid that he had damaged himself and was now about to die.
He was rather cavalier about it, though, to the point that he thought my concern and fuss were silly - and I think I'm still getting over that incident, as well.
Two months later, they operated on him again, and sewed this thick, plastic plate in his skull, in place of the missing bone. "Stronger than bone," the surgeon said.
Two operations in two months - a scar beginning above his eye and continuing over the top of his head to the back, from the first surgery, and another going from one ear to the other, the polar route, from the second.
When his hair grew back, rather than being light and rather wispy as mine was (and is still, although much grayer), it was dark and coarse. No one mistook us for twins after that.
And Dan went back to his normal activities, too, playing soccer that autumn, wearing a hockey helmet. I remember parents of the opponents making a stink about it, and my father bitching them out.
Just a few years ago, Dan had a series of small strokes in an afternoon - TIAs, they call them, or "Transitory Ischemic Attacks." He was incoherent, and a girl he was with called an ambulance. He was promptly airlifted across Puget Sound to Harborview, and took up residence for a few days in the same Neuro Intensive Care Unit where my friend is today.
It's a nice place - and a crack trauma center; the finest in the Pacific Northwest (including Alaska and Montana). Our friend will be in nice hands.
But when they told me that she was going to be missing part of her skull for a time, and wearing a helmet, it all came back. "No sweat," I said. She'll be fine - a tough road, but she's a tough dame, and medical technology has advanced in the last thirty years, right?
The medicine of my youth seems ancient and barbaric to me, now - although the administration of it to my numerous lacerations, contusions, sprains, strains and aches (no breaks, I don't think - and I'm knocking wood) is still fresh in my mind.
Perhaps you don't remember pain, but you remember everything else.
Almost.
Perhaps that's best.
Tuesday, May 05, 2009
I'm fond of the Jack-and-the-Beanstalk story; a few casually discarded beans led to a goose that laid golden eggs, and a singing harp…
It's only a slight exaggeration of the magic contained in ordinary things; the moral Jack was to derive from the story was that one mustn't underestimate the potential of small things - actually, I think Jack was so guileless he didn't even need to ponder that, but his mother needed convincing. Perhaps she was convinced; I'm also fond of versions of the story which have her ignorantly making cacciatore from the goose Jack brings home…
Several years ago, a fellow I knew casually was in distress, and asked me for help.
He had come to my island from Philadelphia thirty years prior to be a garlic farmer, but although he raised a successful garlic crop, he declined to grow it commercially after all.
Years went by; he saved out good bulbs to use for seed each year, and grew a nice crop.
Then, he met a woman who lived, frequently, in Hawaii, and began to live there with her, more and more frequently, to the point that he was there nearly year-round.
He continued to grow garlic on this island, having set up an automatic watering system which drew from his well.
One year, though, his well failed, so although the system opened valves to water the garlic, no water was coming out of the ground; dehydrated garlic still grows, but the bulbs get small and rather angry, some of them nearly winking out of existence, if not merely being too small to mess with, let alone plant and expect anything.
So my Italian friend had nearly lost his entire crop, which he'd been faithfully growing for decades. He didn't know what to do, so he called upon me.
At the time, I was, among other things, managing a garden at a retreat center - over twenty large, cedar raised beds, and a dump truck and tractor and concrete soil yard, so excellent compost, so my pal thought I could take what garlic he had and look after it.
He handed me his remainder, one handful of tiny bulbs, not even as big as an avocado pit. Each one had four or five wizened cloves, so about thirty in all. Rather tragic.
It was late summer; I promptly planted the garlic in the ground, although it's customarily planted in the fall (in fact, subscribing to a notion from a devout neighbor, I have planted by the moon for years, planting my garlic as soon after the moment of moon fullness as soon after All Soul's Day - so it's rather like calculating Easter). These things were in critical condition, and needed moist soil.
I grew them in straight compost that year, and harvested some respectable bulbs the next summer. They were a softneck and faintly blushed with pink; I allowed myself the luxury of eating one of the bulbs: pungent and assertive. Nice garlic.
But I ate none of the others, and planted everything in the fall. The soil I had grown in was rich, which garlic requires, and had enabled some large bulbs, some with fat cloves. The garlic had great potential.
That year, I planted them in straight, hardly-aged llama manure. It's a fantastic resource, if one has access to llamas: they cooperate by crapping in one spot in the field, or maybe two, so there's a central pile to load from; the manure is olive-sized pellets, which are easy to work with; you can put it on fresh, like rabbit manure, and it doesn't burn.
Those bulbs that year were outstanding. I harvested about two hundred, as I recall, and saved most of them for planting. I also entered them in the county fair that year - five identical specimens are required for entry, and I had five huge, uniform, gorgeous bulbs. During the fair, I heard from friends, who wanted to know "what kind of elephant garlic was that you entered?" but it wasn't elephant garlic. Just huge bulbs.
I won an award of merit rosette that year, which was far larger than the largest bulbs I grew, but what do you know? When I went back at fair's end to collect my entry, it had disappeared. Funny, the Superintendent of Vegetables was a commercial garlic grower… and it happened again the next year, which was my last. Don't need rosettes. Five bulbs are better.
The next year, I harvested over two thousand bulbs, large and uniform, and gave a bunch of it away to other gardeners to plant, and supplied all my needs and the needs of the retreat. What had been a paltry ember had become a roaring blaze, and was being broadcast far and wide. The garlic was in no danger of passing away.
I had also determined that it didn't have a name, and that the source, all those many years ago, was forgotten, so I got permission from the fellow who gave it to me to name it myself.
I called it Rosina, after one of my cats (who was named after one of Rossini's characters in Il Barbiere di Siviglia). Now, people were growing Rosina garlic everywhere.
Magic beans, magic garlic…
My most recent experience with this amazing phenomenon came through my sister. She knew of my fondness for Wanda primroses (primula officinalis Wanda); they're the old-fashioned, prolific ones that get planted with King Alfred yellow daffodils around trees in the yard, masses of purple blooms in the early Spring.
They get planted as long borders, and I had always tried to cadge some from my step-mother's, but she was always using her surplus to fill in gaps in the border.
They're pretty accommodating when it comes to making offsets: each little plant will generate about four or five little ones, which can be carefully pulled from the parent in the late summer, grown on, and then planted out in the fall.
So I never had any - I'd see them, occasionally, at the nursery, but they were always expensive, like five bucks for a four-inch pot. So I'd pass them by, since it would take so many to get a border going.
My sister gave me three of them as a Christmas present a few years ago, so that was, at least, a start. I kept them in the four-inch pots, and planted them into gallons in the spring.
In the late summer, each one of them had made six or seven offsets, so I divided them into little pots, and planted them up into gallons in the fall.
You can see wehre this is going: each year, I patiently divided them, and grew the divisions on, some few months later dividing them, until I had enough to plant out.
I have a little bed with a large forsythia and an unfortunate old lilac - two years ago, a spastic ran into it when his car went off the road - actually, he was an epileptic, not a spastic (sorry if anyone was offended) - no idea why they let him on the road - so one large trunk remains, and is working really hard.
I dug out all the turf, and planted out about one hundred and fifty Wandas, from four-inch pots (which were available at the nursery at the time for five bucks, so I had a value exceeding six hundred bucks, if you can imagine me getting a quantity discount had I bought them). Not only that, but I had two flats left over, and about twelve gallon pots I hadn't divided, so at least another two hundred plants.
Once I divide everything I have (including the two flats of four-inch pots), I'll have over three hundred plants, estimated conservatively, which, if I execute this during the spring, will generate more offsets by the end of summer, so I could easily coast into next spring with well over five hundred plants. I'm already determined to donate five flats of them to a non-profit garden nearby, and what the heck? Might as well sell a few…
So talk about the goose that laid the golden eggs, eh?
And this doesn't even include the paltry few seeds of "peasant" arugula (aka Silvetta) an old friend managed to send my way; now I have a jarful, and have given many away. Same with lettuce seeds, and the list goes on.
 Along those lines, I am also preparing to go out on my annual expedition to round up maple seedlings.
I got interested in bonsai some years ago (will write about that profound topic another time), and a mentor I had stumbled upon suggested that landscape Japanese maple seedlings were a good source of material. I had unsuccessfully tried to grow seedlings from seeds I had collected, but he suggested that I simply let nature decide which ones would grow, and go collect them.
I began doing that several years ago, and now, have some well-pruned, respectable small trees (once I put them in containers, they'll be bonsai; until then, they're merely small trees). I also have a weakness for vine maples (Acer circinnatum), which are native in my area, and lovelier deciduous hardwoods are hard to find.
So I collect those as well. They're a bit trickier to keep small, since they're fast-growing trees, but I also have let some of them put on size, and have planted a few out in my landscape, as well as maintaining a slowly-burgeoning nursery bed of them.
A woman I know is replanting a reclaimed area (reclaimed from the bramble, Himalayan blackberry, Rubus discolor, which is about the only thing around her you'd have to reclaim anything from) - she wants to put in natives, and asked if I had any vine maples for sale.
I think I can spare her some (got to get out and get some more to replenish my supply and feed my craving), but I also found out she bought a Western Hazelnut to plant in this hedgerow sort of area, and that she paid forty dollars for it!
Unbelievable. I had to rip out some deck boards to liberate a Western Hazelnut that had been planted by a squirrel under there a year or two ago - as of last fall, it's planted out in the landscape, and flowered this last winter…
There are Hazelnut groves here in town, and many specimans here and there planted by the squirrels, both native and Eastern Gray, and also by the Steller's Jays. They come up frequently in my yard, and one sees them - as well as English walnuts - coming up all around.
And yet, when I heard of this high price these common volunteers were fetching, I couldn't think of a grove of young ones I could liberate, but will just have to go out and look. There's a conglomeration of Jays at one end of town, which isn't far from an old hazelnut orchard, so I suspect there must be a lot of young ones over there.
Sunday, March 08, 2009
I live across the street from a fifty acre pasture, with a copse of douglas firs in the middle, and houses clustered at the northwest end. The land is contoured like the Palouse, to the degree that it would nearly be better for sheep, and is divided into a few fields with hotwire fences, cedar and barbed wire along our road.
I was out working today; a week or so ago, I took out two of three wild plum trees along the north fence. They were shading the neighbor’s garden, and the birds didn’t even eat the fruit!
They’ll be replaced by blue elderberries (we only have the red, poison kind in abundance around here), which, if I don’t manage to make jelly and wine out of them, will certainly be favored by waxwings and jays, and even those horrid, thrush-chasing robins. Now, there’s a pile of branches and brush in my yard. In a day or so, I’ll get to renting a chipper and turning the brush into mulch, but all the decent-sized wood I saved out – to deliver to, among others, a friend who put the word out a couple of months ago that he needed firewood – he got a supply, but needs it for next year. I was out there today, having cleaned out the back of the truck, cutting the long branches shorter so I could deliver them down the alley.
While I was standing there, having deposited a load of wood down at the mathematician's trailer, and at the editor's woodshed, and having put bar oil in the saw, an eagle came low over the neighbor’s house, and right past the truck and across the road, barely skimming above the barbed wire, and fifty feet later, a gentle lift above the perpendicular fence, with a twitch of the tail like a marsh hawk, across the pasture just a few feet off the ground.
For about four years, eagles have nested in the firs in the middle of the pasture, having certainly been enticed by the abundant rock doves who visit my birdfeeders. As the eagle skimmed across the road, I looked ahead to see what it might be preying upon, but there were no rabbits, just the cows, and he didn’t have his gear down, anyway. His flight was rather laconic and coasting, indeed, as a marsh hawk.
The cows have worried a section of the field at the crest of the slope into a bare basin two meters in diameter; the eagle was headed for this.
One of the cows along the fence over which the eagle had glided, and just up the hill a bit, saw the eagle moving over the grass, and as the eagle neared the basin, the cow had already begun to move, like a fat cop spilling his coffee and gathering headway.
The eagle landed, backfilling with its huge wings, and by now, the cow was nearly there, like a linebacker charging the quarterback, and two calves were even in pursuit.
The eagle looked up, and here was this cow bearing down on him, and I imagine it will always be fresh in the eagle’s mind, the memory of that treacherous sight, and the massive, glistening, foaming nostrils, and the brisket flapping from side to side, and into the air leaped our brave hero, the eagle, barely having avoided being trampled by a cow.
The calves arrived on the scene as the eagle flew south, and by now, the ten or so other cows were in on it and charging after the eagle as if it were several apples I had thrown, and then –
There was a cow, like there always is, the one far from the herd, nibbling grass that had some odd taste that only it favored, or just being a loner, or needing some quiet time, but you’ve seen them there, the cows, the lone ones away from the others, and this girl got in on the act, too.
She was far away from the eagle, and by the time she intersected the cows, the eagle would be in the forest, but our clever girl made a move in a flash, as if she were in the backfield covering a receiver, and made the move to intersect the eagle’s path, and she did, and the poor eagle, our national symbol, came this close to being mobbed and beset by misery and at the mercy of cows.
I never would have thought you could tell a story that had cows and eagles in it, a friend said later, when I told him the story.
It brought home to me, too, the importance of being outside. That’s where the miracles and ironies are happening, and you have to be out there to catch them in the act.
I'm glad I banded with the squirrels and the crows and their ilk, and join them when I can.
Later, it snowed.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Okay, chicken broth.
The other day, I wrote about beef broth, jus de beouf, one of the foundations in the French (thus, any appropriate) kitchen.[1]
I went on at great length to describe the procedure; if one were to look it up in The Joy of Cooking (a favorite, handy reference - but use the old edition - you can check by looking in the index for possum recipes, which the old one has, but has been edited out of the recent edition - why?), no doubt the recipe would occupy less space on the page than a realtor's ad - but I took the Escoffier-on-absinthe route, and wrote and wrote about it, like I'm doing here, only in this case, I'm writing about something else.
Entirely.
As I mentioned at the close of my gasbag essay on jus de beouf, making chicken stock is a whole different ballgame, and it is.
It's another of the fundamentals in a French kitchen, but rather than being called, "jus de poule," it's known as fond blanc. "The white foundation."
Chicken stock, fond blanc, is the basis for a family of sauces, just as jus de beouf is the parent of families of sauce.
From chicken stock, one can deviate into veloutes (basically, gravy), not to mention a host of soups, sauces, and other perfect contributions to a wide variety of dishes. Cooking rice in chicken stock. Chicken stock in a pan of fresh, sautéed spinach, with a beaten egg swirled in it, and a slice or two of radish, to make a simple spring soup…
Chicken stock, in that archetypal kitchen, is a staple. One must always have it on hand.
By my own reckoning, I believe I have an unending string of chicken stock stretching back about fifteen years; I have not run out in all that time. I've come close, but always make a bit in time, and add the old stuff to it, and always have, so there are always a few molecules of that vintage chicken stock in everything I prepare.
Once, I lived up the road from a store that had, I discovered, chicken backs-and-necks for nineteen cents a pound. This beat the price I was currently paying wholesale, forty-nine cents a pound for a fifty pound box, which was what we were using to make chicken broth in the restaurant.
So I would get off the bus on the way home from work, and clean them out and buy all the backs and necks they had; usually, I went home with about twenty pounds a week.
Sacré bleu! That's a lot of chicken stock!
You're not kidding, but on top of that, this store also sold oxtails (beef) for forty-nine cents a pound, and they make the best broth you can imagine, so I was cleaning them out of those, too.
I constantly had broth on the stove (this was in the days when I was a bachelor and had a tap room with a refrigerator full of home-made ale on tap), much more than I was able to use.
What to do?
Well, I make a couple of gallons of stock at a time, so I reduce it until it's thick and down to about two quarts. Then, when using it, I likely will have to "reconstitute" it.
But in the case of way too many gallons of broth, I kept going - I boiled it until it was reduced and thick - about two gallons reduced to a quart - which was like deep miners drilling to the edge of the rocky mantle - and kept going.
I had the heat on low, as low as possible, since the stuff was so thick and syrupy that it would easily boil over. When it was so thick it was in peril of being scorched, I poured it into a pie plate, where it made a layer about 1/8" thick. It rapidly set up, gelatinous, and within a day, was a solid, barely pliable sheet which I could peel up from the plate. I cut this into strips and packed them in jars of kosher salt, where they became like dark, brittle toothpicks of broth.
I've used them for boiling up a batch of soup when hiking in the mountains - my goal, being, always, to eat better on my old Optimus stove in the mountains that the rest of the folks are eating down on the shore. I've added them to terrine de viande (you might think it's like meatloaf). All-purpose, and a way to satisfy my broth-junkie behavior.
My wife claims that I pray over the stock pot, and that calls up a nice image, and one that's close, I suppose, to how I feel about broth, and my role in conjuring it.
However, she's misquoting me, having heard me say, "Making stock is how I pray."
That's exactly true. It's a devotional activity, and connects me to the lifeline of the kitchen, and to the lineage of what I intend to do when I'm there.
Beef stock makes much of roasting everything to get a deep flavor, and a deep, brown color, but chicken stock goes the other way - fond blanc. So the emphasis is on flavor without saturating the color.
Chicken stock the way I make it
I generally make a batch of chicken stock when the freezer is at its limit of how many chicken carcasses it will hold. I always buy chickens whole, and take them apart, using the hindquarters for this, the breasts for that, and saving the back, the neck, and often the wings, wrapped up in plastic in the freezer.
When I have three or four of these, it's time to make stock.
Out comes the pot, filled with water, about three gallons. In go the carcasses - nothing cycles through the oven at all. The emphasis is on flavor without color, so I won't even save bones from a roasted chicken for the stock pot (I'll send them, ad hoc, into some other soup application).
I bring the pot to the boil and turn it to a gentle simmer - now is the time to being clarifying the stock. Much scum gets thrown off at first - in fact, it's also customary to bring it to a boil and discard that first pot of water, taking all the scum with it - but I don't want to lose that flavor, so I skim, and run a little, fine sieve across the top, scooping scum along the way.
After I've taken out as many of the impurities as I can, I begin adding the vegetables.
I'm quite specific about what goes in, nearly as if sorting clothes into different piles to wash them.
I'll add onions, but not the peel, and celery, but no carrots. Too much color; makes the broth look like it has jaundice - for that matter, no onion skins, either, under any circumstances - even if someone has a gun to your head No broccoli stems, or any other vegetable scraps - not even turnips, which some misguided afficionados suggest. This is liturgy, as much as a sacred text.
Get some garlic in there; crush it with the flat of your knife. Scallions are great, and leek greens, but go easy - you'll make your stock green. The onion flavor hides nicely in the background. A lovage leaf maybe, but go easy. That stuff's potent. And of course, parsley.
So get the bones simmering and skimmed, and get the vegetables (the onions and celery) in there simmering, too.
Add a bay leaf, and a boquet garni isn't a bad idea - this is a little bundle of thyme and chervil and parsley in a short cylinder of celery stalks, tied in a bundle. A few peppercorns, and as with beef stock, add a bit of salt, but use a gentle hand; you might want to severely reduce the broth, and don't want it to end up too salty.
You need to let this simmer for six to eight hours, but I'll often let it go about twelve, letting it simmer overnight; stir it every hour or so. You can skim off the fat, since there will be a lot, but it's also handy to save it, pulling it off the cooled stock later.
I don't bother to top the pot up as it simmers, but let the level go down, since it won't be on the stove that long, and I want it thick and concentrated.
In the morning, not long before pulling it off the stove, I'll throw in a leaf or two of sage, and stir it up.
When it's all done, put it through the finest strainer you have.
Here's the same procedure as described in on making beef stock: And I pour it, when it's all done, through a fine strainer, fresh off the boil, into clean, quart mason jars, and screw the lids on right away (be careful to wipe the rim if you mess it up, but be clean about it). I label the lid with the date on masking tape and stick it in the refrigerator right away; although you won't find this recommended in a USDA pamphlet, and should hold me blameless if you use my method, I have never had broth rot if bottled this way and kept in the refrigerator. I have kept broth for over a year this way, and no spoilage.
However, as soon as you open that bottle to use some broth, which should be nice and congealed, too, if you had favorable bones, it will begin to spoil. Once I open a bottle of it, I either use it within three days, or bring it to a boil and put it in a clean, smaller jar and put it away promptly. Keeps indefinitely, again.
You can open the bottles after they've chilled to take off the layer of fat - this is how stocks are routinely defatted, by chilling them and lifting off the congealed fat from the surface - but it contributes to the air seal, so don't worry about it until you're ready to use it.
I have seen many references that suggest the easiest way to store broth is to freeze it in ice-cube trays, and keep them in a bag, but the freezer is the worst place to store stock, as it's a harsh-flavor environment - nothing emerges from the freezer with its flavor intact, and in the case of this rather robust, but really demure and gentle beef broth, you don't want to treat it that way. Keep it in jars, fresh, in the refrigerator, and be sure to pasteurize it if you open it. I didn't mention what I do with the discards; in the case of the beef stock, I took a few of the shin bones over to a dog friend, and absolutely made his day. The rest went out to the crows.
I routinely dump everything from the chicken stock pot out for the crows; they take everything away. I'm not patient enough to pick through the meaty stuff and fish it out for use in soup; besides, the goal was to extract the flavor from it, so it's not much worth saving. Give it to the crows.
If you don't have crows, maybe you keep pigs? I'm sure they would love the stuff. Failing that option, I don't know what you'd do.
When I make a new batch of stock, I add the old stuff to it, during the reducing stage.
And I always have it; of course, everyone knows about how well chicken broth works as a medicinal, and here's how you do it:
Add a spoonful of concentrated broth to a cup of broth, and simmer it with a hearty amount of salt - up to a half teaspoon - and a couple of cloves of minced garlic. Simmer for about ten minutes, and then off the stove and into a jar, or into a mug for the invalid.
[1]I'm not arguing that only French food must be prepared, but the kitchen benefits from being managed in the French manner.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
As I sit down to write this, I'm poised to make my son a couple of crêpes au chocolat for breakfast, as soon as he emerges from the shower. It's standard bill-of-fare; the kitchen is the early productive one, at my house. That and the cat, who's already been outside patrolling in the dark, twice.
I've been pondering beef broth. I just made a batch, and as always, was reminded of an early food mentor, Jeff Smith, who was the well-known and notorious Frugal Gourmet on television in the 1990s. I hooked up with him early in what became my long-and-checkered culinary career; his influence guides me often, still.
I had left home at eighteen, and was living near my old school in North Tacoma. I had plenty of money saved from my work as a restaurant cook (I had begun cooking in restaurants when I was seventeen), but my parents were still apparently concerned about my financial state, so although I didn't need to work, they thought I should get a job.
I assured them that I had excellent prospects. In fact, I told them, "It looks like Jeff Smith wants to hire me," but I hadn't even been in to talk to him. I just wanted to give them something they'd want to hear to get them off my back.
Jeff had a cooking show at the time, but only on KTPS 62, the Tacoma Public Schools channel. He also had a kitchen shop and café right across the street from the high school, where I was finishing my senior year: "The Chaplain's Pantry."
The next day, I thought I should at least give some truth to my white lie, and went into Jeff's shop to ask about work.
He hired me on the spot, and set me to work as the evening cook at his restaurant in downtown Tacoma (just at the onset of its renaissance), "The Judicial Annex." It was a huge dining room and little kitchen next to the University of Puget Sound Law School, hence the name, and hence the extreme lunch business. Jeff made good food, and they thronged to it.
The downtown core was dead at night, so the place would have rare customers, but he needed prep work to support the lunch business, like bakers working in the middle of the night. This was to be my job.
On my first day there, in the spring of 1981, he asked me, "Do you know how to make beef stock?"
I did, theoretically: roast bones, simmer, strain, reduce - but had never done so, and told him.
"Okay, Cole," - he always called me that, like he was my junior-high buddy -
"I'm going to show you how to make beef stock. This is the only way to make it; you're always going to make it this way, you're never going to make it any other way."
Rather emphatic, but - as if I had knelt in the mud and the rain, while the lightning flashed, I swore a solemn vow: I never did make it any other way.
This was the first of many of the foundational skills I learned from Mr. Smith. A cook must know their way around a knife, and have a sound culinary background, familiarity with the fundamental principles and patterns - from making the stock all the way to improvised preparation of pastries.
From the beef broth that day, we made soupe a l'oignon, French onion soup, with the classic Gruyére crouton broiled on top. Cut a lot of onions for that one.
He served potato salad with the sandwiches, as an optional side, so that meant cutting up fifty pounds of potatoes every couple of days. I didn't yet have my own Henkel chef's knife, but spent a lot of time using one, cutting vegetables and occasionally myself.
I went on to have a career in restaurant kitchens, and relied upon the culinary lessons from my years with Jeff throughout. Years later, I maintained a friendship wth him, and would visit his condominium above Tom Douglas's restaurant, Etta's, in the Pike Place Market. We'd sit and have wine, or a martini, and talk about food. I saw his last television episode there; it had been shot and edited a year or so before his final broadcast, so I had a sneak preview.
I had some experience with his cooking show, early on, before he got picked up by PBS and was not only broadcast nationwide, but acquired an international reputation. When he was still doing the KTPS gig, I would occasionally be the one to assemble the dish that would emerge from the oven, in that time-compression of the TV cooking show: "In the oven it goes, and [forty-five minutes later,] when it comes out it looks like this."
But I would drop in to visit him at the market; he kept a low profile, being a national celebrity, but was a notorious resident of the public market - exactly where a guy like him should be found, deep in the middle of the culinary scene, right at the sources of the food for the table.
Once, my colleagues and I, from out on our island, went into America for a field trip, which included spending the day at the Public Market, followed by lunch at a fish restaurant.
The market is a popular destination with tourists - including the gruesome public spectacle of Pike Place Fish, where the fishmongrels throw the customer's fish up to a guy who wraps it. People flock to see this ghastly spectacle, just like filling medieval squares to watch an execution.
Having run a kitchen a few blocks away, though, and having spent three or four days there a week, I had seen what I needed to see of the market, so wasn't as enthusiastic about the prospects of spending my day there. [1]
No problem - I called Jeff and made arrangements to spend the day with him.
He took me to lunch, too, at the fish restaurant underneath his place. A patron bought us a nice bottle of wine (celebrity has perks, it would seem), and after lunch, he said, "Let's go visit the kitchen," just like he was on TV. He got up, beckoned me to follow, and into the kitchen we went.
I thought it was quite a liberty; I don't think he had made arrangements. I've been in kitchens that were slammed, and it's not generally a nice environment for visitors. And yet, I have been visited in the kitchen by celebrities, and busy or not, it's nice.[2]
But there, behind the hot line, was a guy I had worked with, briefly, some fifteen years before. He came through as a cook for a time in a kitchen I worked in, and here he was, fifteen years later - you could see this pass through his mind as his eyes fell and his shoulders slumped - still just a lunch cook - and there I was, visiting his kitchen, the guest and companion of this famous guy.
Later, I met up with my chums and had lunch at this fish restaurant, but I was sated and had eaten a great meal, so I got by with fresh ale.
One time, a friend invited me and my wife to dinner at Campagne, a nice, if too tiley and loud, French restaurant at the market. We'd have a long drive to get there, and would be travel-rumpled, but I thought maybe we could stop by Jeff's for a cocktail and change into our nice, dinner clothes.
He thought it was a great idea, too, so we made the plan.
The evening arrived, and it was a nice one. We dropped in on Jeff.
While we were having our martini, we were talking of food (of course), and I told him of that first day working for him, making the beef broth. I told him I had, as promised, never deviated from his procedure, and had, in fact, gone on to teach it the very same way to countless other young cooks, some of whom have gone on to run kitchens of their own, and are teaching it to other young cooks, and here I am: one, in a long chain of cooks, passing down the foundational secret.
Jeff responded by getting choked up (as he was fabulously prone to do) and said, "Let me tell you about the guy who taught me how to make beef stock," and told me of the fellow who ran Tacoma's LH Bates Vocational College's Culinary Arts program, which was highly-regarded then, and still is.
A long chain of cooks.
Beef stock, the way I make it
My wife was advised by an acupuncturist to have beef broth for her pulmonary complaint. "It's easy," she said, "You just get a beef bone and boil it in some water." When I was through cringing, I told her I had a different approach. Here it is.
You'll need a large kettle - at least four gallons - for this procedure. If you have nothing that size, use the largest you have and scale the recipe accordingly. Start out with about two gallons of good water in the pot - I use filtered water; it's worth it, even if you have to buy jugs of water, to use the best water you can, since you'll be boiling it down. You'll need about three gallons of water to make a gallon of broth.
Start with about ten pounds of beef bones - just buy the sliced leg bones, usually labled as being for dogs. Meaty neck bones are also nice, but the leg bones contribute more to the body, so make sure and have some, at least half. If the bones are really chunky, ask the butcher to cut them with the saw. Ideally, the bones are splintered into chunks, but don't get carried away. Whatever you have is fine, as long as you have enough.
You'll also need mirepoix, which is a standard component in the French kitchen: celery, onions, and carrots. If they are to appear in a sauce, they are diced, but in this case, they can be cut as coarse or as fine as you like. I slice everything small, usually using about four large carrots, five or six stalks of celery, and two or three onions (reserve the peels).
If you've been prudent and frugal, you'll have been saving scraps of these vegetables, as well as herb stems, in a bag in the freezer, in anticipation of this day. Not much I like better than being able to pull green leek parts out of the freezer for the beef broth pot.
Arrange the bones in a roasting pan, or in two or more 9x13 cake pans; you'll need the high sides later. Put them in a 400° oven for a couple of hours, turning them once or twice to brown them evenly. Be careful when you slide the pan out to turn the bones - lots of fat will have been rendered off, and that day when I was making it with Jeff, some of the hot fat sloshed over the lip of the pan and onto my palm and burnt the crap out of it.
After the bones are nicely browned, add the mirepoix, stirring it among the fat that's been rendered, and spreading it out over all the bones, and roast that, too, for an hour or more, until the vegetables are also well-browned. Check in on them once or twice and turn them, too. If anything gets a bit burnt, that's fine. Contributes to the flavor and color.
 When everything is nice and roasted, take the bones out and set them in the pot, into which you've placed the two gallons of good water, and under which you've turned the heat to high, to bring it close to boiling as the roasting came to an end.
Use a utensil to transfer the bones, taking your time. I prefer tongs, but a large spoon would do, or even a pancake-turner. But you don't want to dump them in the water, as it's messy, and there's all that hot fat in the pan. So set them in, and now that the pan is empty, it's your chance to pour off the fat. If you're unable to safely remove it at this stage, though, don't worry: you'll have a number of other opportunities.
Don't set the roasting pans in the sink - you want to extract that flavor from the bits that are roasted on, so put about half an inch of water in each pan and return them to the oven for about ten minutes. This is deglazing, an important step.
Meanwhile, you'll have the bones and mirepoix coming to a boil; this is the best time to skim the broth to remove the scum that it will throw. You'll want a nice, clarified stock, so it's best to work at that from the beginning.
After the pans have roasted with water, pull them out and scrape off the bits with a spoon - when I finish deglazing a pan, it barely needs more than a wipe to get clean; all the roasted on bits have been dislodged, helped along by the hot water. It all goes into the pot.
When the pot comes to a boil, lower the heat so you have merely a simmer - if you remove the fat at this stage with a ladle or a baster, you'll see barely more than a ten centimeter disc of clear broth at the top, when bits are thrown clear of it by the gentle simmering action - an indication of the appropriate fire.
And keep that fire on it for hours - from six or eight (not enough, in my opinion) to twenty-four or even thirty-six hours. I usually run mine for at least twenty-four hours, not a lot longer than that. You'll need to top it up, and keep the fire on it at night - but if you can't, just let it sit, cooled, on the stovetop overnight. You can resume the simmering in the morning, and you'll be safe.
During the boil, throw in the onion skins, and several cloves of garlic, unpeeled but gently smashed (the onion and garlic peels contribute to a dark color). Toss in a bayleaf or two - I like to use them freshly-dried (not too fresh; the flavor is too coarse until they've been dried), so I snag sprigs when I see a nice shrub, I don't care whose shrub it is. Add some peppercorns, whole, a dozen or so. You can add a bit of salt, but go easy - you might be concentrating the stock by boiling it down, and you don't want it to be too salty - a little salt enables better clarity, though, so add half a teaspoon or so - Celtic salt, if you have it, in which half the periodic table is represented.
Add some sprigs of thyme, but avoid sage or rosemary - too strong, and they'll limit what you can do with your broth - you want it on the baseline side.
And of course, parsley - you can never throw in too much parsley.
Keep that gentle simmer going, stir it now and then.
Once the simmering is done, it's time for the tricky part of straining it. If you're well-prepared, you have a large strainer or two (I have one with mesh so fine it appears merely translucent to my aged eyes, called a chinois, or "Chinese hat.") - if so, set that over a pot or bowl large enough to handle the two gallons of broth you'll have, and gently pour the broth through, watching that the bones don't tumble out in a messy pile. If you like, you can remove them as carefully as you set them in the first place, and then strain the broth.
If you don't have another large pot or bowl to strain into, then carefully remove the bones and mushy vegetables, and strain into the largest bowls you have, filling as many as it takes. You can also do this if your strainer is on the small side. However you do it, don't fuss over it. DO try to eliminate any solids, but you'll still have a chance to catch any that slip through.
Now, you can either bottle it up and store it in the fridge, or you can reduce it by boiling and then store it - better to do the latter.
Put the pot on the stove and bring it to a boil - if you like, start the boil out slow, and keep the pot off to the side of the flame, so any impurities that made it through can be skimmed off to the side and removed.
Once you've done that, bring it to a boil and boil away. It's a good idea to keep the largest whisk you have close by, and even set in cold water - if the pot begins to boil over, you can just plunge the whisk in it, which cools it below the boiling point rapidly, giving you time to turn the burner down and not freak out.
I boil it down by half, ending up with four quarts of broth from my original two gallons of water and ten pounds of bones.
And I pour it, when it's all done, through a fine strainer, fresh off the boil, into clean, quart mason jars, and screw the lids on right away (be careful to wipe the rim if you mess it up, but be clean about it). I label the lid with the date on masking tape and stick it in the refrigerator right away; although you won't find this recommended in a USDA pamphlet, and should hold me blameless if you use my method, I have never had broth rot if bottled this way and kept in the refrigerator. I have kept broth for over a year this way, and no spoilage.
However, as soon as you open that bottle to use some broth, which should be nice and congealed, too, if you had favorable bones, it will begin to spoil. Once I open a bottle of it, I either use it within three days, or bring it to a boil and put it in a clean, smaller jar and put it away promptly. Keeps indefinitely, again.
You can open the bottles after they've chilled to take off the layer of fat - this is how stocks are routinely defatted, by chilling them and lifting off the congealed fat from the surface - but it contributes to the air seal, so don't worry about it until you're ready to use it.
I have seen many references that suggest the easiest way to store broth is to freeze it in ice-cube trays, and keep them in a bag, but the freezer is the worst place to store stock, as it's a harsh-flavor environment - nothing emerges from the freezer with its flavor intact, and in the case of this rather robust, but really demure and gentle beef broth, you don't want to treat it that way. Keep it in jars, fresh, in the refrigerator, and be sure to pasteurize it if you open it.[3]
Don't assume you can do chicken stock the same way; it's completely different, and fish stock is different from that. All are critical foundations, and I have procedures for them all. I'll get to them…
[1] I used to walk through the market early in the morning, having gotten off the bus from North Seattle - that was when it was at its best, in the winter, puddles everywhere, the smell of fresh fish, hand trucks, cigarette smoke, activity - behind the scenes, at its best.
[2] My favorite was Jim Whittaker, the first American on the summit of Everest, and a boyhood hero.
[3]160°F /72°C for thirty seconds to pasteurize. Boil it if you like.
Saturday, January 31, 2009
I was a cat guy, early on. I grew up with a cat, who came to us when I was a wee toddler, and died when I was nineteen and had left home long before. I never knew a day at home without that cat, Chessie (named after the mascot and logo of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, since she resembled it so much in demeanor and color - and her name was technically, "Chesapeake and Ohio," which you would deploy if you wanted to scold her - at least I did, since I was the youngest of four and had no authority over anyone but the cat - okay, I have since learned that the cat is at the top of the hierarchy).
Chessie was a great sport, and served, as many cats do around children, as the ambassador for all cats, so I became a cat guy.
After leaving home, I didn't live with a cat, but that changed.
Back in 1983, I had a friend who had a cat. He lived on Seattle's First Hill (known as "Pill Hill," since that's where all the hospitals were - I was born in one of them, so was my son…), and one stormy night, a little black-and-white kitten followed him out of the rain and into the lobby, into the elevator, and into the apartment.
The cat stayed.
A few months later, my friend moved into the University District, which was my neighborhood; he and the cat moved into a house just a few blocks south. Several of us young guys hung out there - we worked in a restaurant, so we kept odd, late hours, and drank a lot of beer. And played with the cat.
I was the only one who seemed to have much regard for the cat - all the other guys would tip him out of their laps if he made a move that way, but not me - the little cat and I were buddies.
So, not long after the cat arrived in my neighborhood, he had to move again - this time, into an apartment with a no-pets lease.
My friend called to give me this news, and to ask me if I could look after the cat; "Just for six months - I only ask you this since I know how close you and the cat are."
I knew it would be a responsibility, and, being young, knew that I wasn't sure I wanted to hinder my functional irresponsibility. But the cat needed me, I thought, so I relented.
We became rapidly close. During the six months, my friend never visited the cat, and when his lease was up, he called to say he was coming over to pick the cat up.
"What cat?" I asked.
He thought something had happened to it.
"What do you mean? Where is he?"
"Well, if you're talking about a black-and-white cat, yes, I have one. You don't, but I do."
I wasn't going to give the cat up, which was the right thing to do -- think of the welfare of the cat; should he live with someone who was devoted to him, or with an ignorant buffoon? As a result, the friendship was terminated, but I didn't care - I had gotten the better deal of the bargain.
He was quite something, that cat, and I soon named him, "Figaro." People thought it was cute, that I had named him after the charming kitten in Disney's Pinocchio, but that wasn't the case. I had named him after Figaro, the Barber of Seville, from Rossini's opera, Il barbiere di Siviglia.
Figaro's great aria: Largo al factotum della citta… "Make way for the great factotum of the city!" That was the way my cat Figaro was, a factotum. Brilliant cat. He would climb up the cedar that grew outside my bedroom window to get in at night, and would even leap the twelve feet from the landing of the upstairs duplex next door to my windowsill. I saw him do it once, and was astonished.
Everything about him was astonishing - including how handsome he was.
The U-District is crawling with rats, more than a wharf, and Figaro would catch them. I saw him drop one at one end of a sheet of plywood leaning up against the house - the rat, spotting freedom at the other end, would make a break for it. When he arrived at the edge of safety - Bam, there was the cat! Back the rat would go, and Bam!
Or another time, I saw Figaro batting a rat, spinning around and around, like a hockey player on the icy street.
Figaro was a clever cat; you knew he was the boss, and he loved me. In fact, I maintain that he taught me to love myself (cats having such a capacity to be avatars), which enabled me to love others, which enabled me to fall in love with the woman who became my wife and mother of my kids. Their existence can be directly traced to a cat who walked in out of the rain.
Everyone knew I was devoted to this cat - beyond Damon and Pythias, even. We were close. So when my future wife fell for me, she knew that she had to get the cat's approval, first (authoritative cats are nothing new; see P.G. Wodehouse's short story, The Story of Webster). Sure enough, though, Figaro fell for her, too, so all was well.
In 1989, I lived in a house next to a woman I had gone to school with in another town; she played the clarinet in the Symphony (we had played together in the band at school - she kept playing hers, mine sits in the corner to this day), and traveled in the summer. She would let Figaro into her house, although her husband was allergic - he was some cat; he had that kind of appeal.
When they would go on trips, I'd look after their mail, and water their garden, and would always be paid with a bag of cookies on my porch the day they left.
One day, I came home, and there was a bag of cookies, and a note, and an art card, a painting of a cat. She had included the card since the depicted cat reminded her so much of Figaro.
We became quite fond of that card - ironically, it was from the Kirsten Gallery, just a couple of blocks away from the house I lived in when Figaro came to live with me in the U-District, but I rarely went there.
Once, though, my wife and I, when she was pregnant with our son, visited the gallery, and while looking around, came upon a framed print of the painting that was the image on the card, by Nicholas Kirsten-Honshin.
Zen Cat Meditates on Essence of Moon and Essence of Iris - All is One
My wife and I looked at each other, wondering: Should we buy it? Could we?
We thought about it. Kept walking around.
And then, just around a corner, there it was: The Original. Much more expensive than the print, but just above the painting was a sign on the wall: "All art may be purchased on time with no interest."
Wow. We had to live with it.
We went upstairs to the desk to make the arrangements; Nicholas was there, and came out to meet us.
"So many times, that painting has almost left, but then, the people changed their minds - and now I know why: it's supposed to be with you."
They took down all my information, but not even a credit card number, and we began contemplating making the payments until we could hang the painting in our home.
But they asked, "Is your car parked in back? We'll wrap up the painting and take it out there."
What? They were letting us take the painting without even a down payment? Yes, indeed they were. An odd transaction, but clearly, we were supposed to live with the painting.
You can still get prints, and art cards (contact the gallery), but you can't get the original. It lives with me.
It's one of Nicholas's well-known works, and one of a few that feature the handsome Zen Cat. We even got to know the actual cat, Crowley, who once favored me by sitting on my lap.
After having the painting for several years, it had acquired a bit of moisture-spotting on the inside of the glass, so we arranged to bring it to the gallery for re-framing. Nicholas's father, Richard Kirsten-Daiensai (much more on him another time), was having a festive art opening, and as my son carried the painting through the garden to the gallery, you could hear the guests fall silent. Someone whispered, "That's the original!" It really is a stunning asset, and, as Nicholas has pointed out, it's done better than the stock market!
Figaro died in 1996, which was a heartbreak. My son's first word, when pointing at the cat, was "Fo." He was enmeshed in our lives, and had changed everything. We still invoke his Number One Rule: "Walk in like you own the place."
I have lived with other cats in my time; Rosina, who was named after the femme fatale in Rossini's opera (she and Figaro were pretty tight), and then Gioacchino, named after Rossini himself, and who was superbly handsome and soft. There was Sophia, who was small, and fey, and had a short life, and then Akira, who was all black, clever, but didn't come home one moonless night.
We were without a cat for some months, and after a while, we noticed that we were tending to get on each other's nerves just a bit more often, and needed that tranquil lightning rod of a cat. It's unseemly for us to go out and try to acquire a cat, but we figure that if we just let the cosmos know that we're open to having one (derived from our standard philosophy; see my previous essay, good dog cosmos), then a cat will appear.
After a few months, we received a call. A woman had a cat who had come in out of the storm, and had been hiding out in her basement for a week, coming up at night to eat her cat's food. When she finally discovered this stowaway, she invited her to join the household, but her own cat wasn't having any part of it - you know how cats can be.
So she called us.
She didn't know that we were in the market for a cat; she worked at the Kirsten Gallery, had for years, and since the cat reminded her so much of the Zen Cat, and she knew we had the painting, she called.
Let me spell out the irony for you:
The painting came into my life since the featured cat resembled my cat, and now a cat was coming into my life since it resembled the cat in the painting.
We collected the cat, and soon named her Guinevere. How nice it was to have a cat again.
The problem was that she had obviously been abused by a man; any time my son or I would go into the room where she was, she'd dash into hiding. She was close and cuddly with my wife, but wasn't going to tolerate me or my son.
This was frustrating. "The hell with it," we would say, "let's just get a kitten so we can have a cat."
 Months of this tragic behavior went by, but I kept trying - I'm the one who feeds the cat, and always endeavor to be close to animals - it's my notorious nature - and eventually, my attentions paid off, and we're now not only close, but closer than she is with anyone else. She's like my girlfriend - she likes me to leave a sweater on the bed sometimes, so she can lay on it, and when she sees me in the garden, she comes running; we always spend some time when we're out there together, her rolling around in a patch of grass under the apple tree, and me rubbing her belly and running my hand from the top of her head all the way down her tail.
She's another clever one, too, and lately, we've said to each other, "Are you getting a 'Figaro' hit from Guinevere like I am?"
They are much alike, with one prominent difference - I heard Figaro meow maybe fifty times in the thirteen years I lived with him, but compared to that, Guinevere is a regular chatterbox, meowing maybe a dozen times a day (not like the famous Gioacchino, though - he meowed all the time, with a marvelous voice; once, I thought I would count how many times he meowed in a day, and after an hour, he was up over seventy, so I gave up and called it five hundred for the day).
The best way to get out of this essay? Wrap it up and go to bed - Guinevere's waiting…
Tuesday, January 27, 2009
I was raised by a woman who lacked emotional nurturing skills, but she was a great cook, with an amazing repertoire - even while working full time, she was able to present a varied menu, items often not being repeated for a month or more.
She was good at all the classics, like Beef Stroganoff, Toad-in-the-Hole (Yorkshire pudding baked with embedded sausages - !), and Macaroni-and-Cheese.
Here, Macaroni-and-Cheese was actually not macaroni at all, but rotelli pasta with a light béchamel (a thickened sauce base made with milk), to which she added grated Tillamook Cheddar (THE cheese, in my part of the world - and back when I was a kid, it was coated with thick wax) - so it wasn't actually a Mornay sauce, being made with cheddar, rather than gruyère and parmesan. All this was assembled in a shallow dish, topped with bread crumbs, and baked.
I had no idea that mac-and-cheese meant something much different to most people until I was a guest at a friend's house for dinner; I was about ten.
"What's for dinner?" I asked his mom.
"We're having macaroni and cheese!" she said, knowing that she was in the process of scoring huge points with her son's little friend.
"Oh boy!" I said, "that's one of my favorites!"
We had a Betty Crocker moment, she and I - I'm sure her hair was in a beehive or something like it, and she must have had an embroidered apron, no doubt, and I'm sure she looked great.
I was presented with that stuff in a box (which, although appearing radioactively orange, is colored - or was - with annatto, the same stuff used to color real cheddar). Rather gluey, bland, no plate appeal…
Of course, I was polite, and claimed to enjoy it.
Indeed, though, I'm sure I did enjoy it - if something's tasty, I want some - and although I have eaten the finest caviar (from Columbia River Sturgeon, made, briefly, by an artisan in the 80s), along with all the other great dishes made from excellent ingredients, I can still enjoy food that's served on the Low Road (see my epigram, High Road or Low?, at geniusweirdo.org).
When I got home:
"You won't believe what she thought macaroni and cheese was supposed to be like!" I sniffed, outraged.
My step-mother replied, "It's best, sometimes, to not ask what's for dinner." How true.
But I was raised surrounded by passion for food. And not like a big, Italian family, everyone carrying on around the pot of freshly-made pasta, but just with the simple, but pervasive notion, that food was supposed to be tasty, nutritious, varied, and you were supposed to cook it yourself.
We had - this being the 60s and 70s when I grew up, and six mouths to feed - margarine and Minute Rice at the table; I secretly relished having dinner at my grandmother's house, because it was real rice, and butter.
I knew what I liked.
So there was good food around, but I think I also was predisposed to be interested by it - the only thing I didn't really like, and would push to the side of my plate (which, two generations away from the Great Depression, was nearly unheard of - waste not, want not, and all that) - were raw mushrooms in the salad. I'm not too keen on raw mushrooms anyway - although I did have some raw truffle once, which I apparently was sharing with a squirrel, but that's another story for another day…
I ate everything. Even the unrecognizable tiny black cubes in the tuna casserole - which I later learned were canned, diced mushrooms. Didn't matter what it was, I ate it.
Once, my step-mother made a meat pie. "What kind of meat pie?" I asked, intrigued and eager.
"I'll tell you after you eat it."
Now, that right there would have flashing red lights and warning bells and alarms - like a flooding submarine - and nobody would eat anything after hearing that:
I'll tell you what it is after you eat it.
But she was such a reliable cook, and I was apparently open-minded, so I merely said, "Okay."
It was fantastic - what kind of meat pie was it? I still didn't know.
"That was steak-and-kidney pie," she said, and it was the first of many I have eaten and baked, and thought about…
"Well, it was great - and next time, could you just tell me what I'm eating? I'm going to eat it anyway, you know that," and she always did.
Food is my dearest, fondest love.
And I'm not one of those portly trenchermen, as one might assume - no, we're blessed with a high metabolism, so we burn right through it - which means we're almost always hungry, like a shrew. But we love to eat! So we get to do it more often! How nifty is that?
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
inauguration 2009
Sunday, January 18, 2009
The other day, I wrote about dogs, and how capable they are when given a clear job description (see The Good Dogs).
I promised to make an ironic leap with the topic, so here's my stab at that:
I have a good friend, a Zen priest in fact, which I suppose makes him more the master and me the disciple, but neither of us looks at it that way - he's a fellow crow devotee, which fostered our relationship - at any rate -
He travels with his sons to Las Vegas when they attend conventions (they're in the art publishing and gallery business), and unbeknownst to the casino managers, who see this frail old man and give him a complimentary room, he rakes it in on the slots.
How does he do this?
He whips out his jizo statue and sets it on the machine, and then, if you were watching, you'd see him lean in and caress the slot machine, the way someone does with a favored horse, and whisper; he's making a connection with the machine.
"What people don't realize is that even though a man made it, the machine has a soul," which he treats with respect, and is rewarded with consistent winnings.
Really, he's just tapping into the cosmos's willingness to accommodate our needs.
I've spent a lot of time around theaters, have appeared in a lot of plays, have learned tons of lines. Fortunately, I'm good at the memorization, but for others, it's tough; I do all I can to help my fellow actors out, running lines with each other, until we're all comfortable that we know them.
I was running some scenes with a friend who was in a challenging play; most of her lines were long, non sequiturs - tricky to learn, as you can imagine: having a thread in the dialogue gives the actor some handholds, but working with random monologues is tough - you have to memorize it until your body knows it, and then deal with the chaos of the scene.
Needless to say, my friend was having trouble, which was why she called me - so I could help her run the lines, over and over.
Still, she was having trouble, which was really frustrating for her.
{note - this is funny - I know what my point is supposed to be, but I look at what I have and wonder if I'm getting close to making it, which shines a light on what would seem to be one of my approaches as a writer - if a topic is difficult to pin down, throw enough words at it to smother it).
"I'll never get this line!" she said.
No.
She won't; she can't, with that attitude.
You see, I regard everything that we say to be a prayer. Any statement can be easily recast to highlight this; in the case of my friend, the frustrated actress, her statement translates, with hyperbole intact, as:
"Please, O provident Cosmos - don't let me learn this line, please…"
I prefer to approach that situation with this prayer:
"Man, this line is a bitch - but I'll nail it down; I'll keep working on it."
Really, it works that way.
Around here, we really try to avoid negative statements, as a corollary of this approach, urging one to remember something rather than admonishing them not to forget.
It works in all kinds of ways, too, such as finding one's car keys - say it out loud - "I really need to find my car keys in the next five minutes, since I don't want to be late…:
And it helps, as in that case, to be specific. I was talking with a friend who runs a non-profit, who said the institution depended on a miracle.
My notion is that they'll get their miracle, but not until she states clearly just exactly what kind of miracle it is.
Of course, it helps to be vague at times, too - since, if there's any order or structure to the cosmos, one might assume that the providence can be obscure but authentic.
Still, if one is willing to be clear with the cosmos, it will endeavor to provide.
Just like a dog; it only wants a good, clear job description.
And that's as easy as talking to a dog.
Friday, January 16, 2009
Once upon a time, I was a "cat person." That's right - I was devoted to my cats, but didn't have time for dogs, and couldn't, in fact, understand why someone would want to live with one and deal with all the work: the walking, the dealing with the crap…
Still, there were some dogs that I admired, but as a rule, I was pretty ambivalent about dogs.
Part of my awakening as an adult over the last twenty years or so has been a constant and deeper embedment with my natural surroundings - I pay more attention to the flora and fauna, and couldn't be happier than I was today, for instance, when I was working in the woods, and chirped at a winter wren, encouraging it to be interested and follow me, which it did (they're my favorite small bird - which may be on the quiz). Not long after, a douglas squirrel (native to woods in our region) got my attention by chirping at me from a few feet higher on a douglas fir. I was on my way to my truck for a tool, so I told him to hang on: I'd have some nuts for him in a few minutes…
[NB: I keep nuts - usually pistachios, since everybody likes them - and birdseed - blend of black oil sunflower and cracked corn - and dog biscuits stashed in my truck, so I can feed whoever might be around - occasionally, chickadees, which are highly gregarious, will eat out of my hand]
But I never had time for dogs, as devoted to animals as I felt I was, and declared myself to be.
Eventually, I realized I was nothing but an elitist - ever the trap, especially when humans think about animals, or in the case of Orwell's Animal Farm, when animals think about themselves: "Four legs good… two legs better!"
I made a rational decision that I needed to embrace dogs, and be curious about them, and get to know them, and include them in my personal zodiac (circle of animals).
It wasn't that I got to know a special dog, who made me feel deeper about dogs, but being a Capricorn, I was rational (I believe I tend to be, although I'm sure I could find dissent), and decided to feel deeper about dogs.
And for this task - to be the ambassador for all dogs everywhere in my life - I chose the nastiest, little dog I knew - an obnoxious Chihuahua that belonged to a nutso woman that I worked with.
He was one of those dogs that didn't understand my boundaries, and would leap in my lap spontaneously - even when I had seen him coming and tried, discreetly, to actively discourage it (had to be discreet - it was politically unwise for the nutjob dog's nutjob owner to realize that this particular nutjob - me - didn't like her dog - in fact, would have moved slowly if an eagle were swooping down after the dog…)
I decided that I would befriend this nasty little dog, and that by having through this intense hazing ordeal, this trial by nasty dog, I would be welcomed in the Dog Clan (as I am in the Wren Clan and Squirrel Clan, as noted above, and if you follow me…).
Quite an undertaking, really, but insert your own mental montage of me befriending the dog, giving it treats of my own when I declared my satisfaction with its behavior, which improved… you may complete your montage with me sitting on a bench next to the dog looking over the East River at Manhattan and the sunset, but that's just a bit too much of a stretch. Suffice it to say that I did become friends with this little dog, who also befriended me.
  A few years later, I met my cousin's dog, Mauritz, in Germany. He's a Hofawart (Hoe-fuh-vart) which means "farm guardian" auf Deutsch), and was bred in East Germany, known for breeders and trainers of gentle dogs, while the West Germans bred them for police work.
A big dog, Mauritz was also handsome, with the false eyespots and the black-and-tan gorgeous long coat.
I had learned that the best way to approach a dog, when meeting it, was to ask it to do something, and praise it when it complied.
I gave Morris my standard suggestion, "Sit." But he wouldn't. Most dogs, in my experience, know that one - in fact, I am usually stunned when I meet a dog who won't simply sit.
Oops - I remembered where I was, and asked again, quite politely, "Mauritz, setzen Sie, bitte," and he promptly did.
I met another dog on that journey, an Irish dog living in Hamburg, who spoke no German at all, but his English was quite good...
I got to know Mauritz well during the two weeks I spent with him, and discovered that he had a fundamental understanding of geometry:
Like many dogs, Mauritz was into "The Ball." He would prance and leap through tall grass, which was splendid to see, and dash across the yard after it; a favorite game was to walk around the yard with a beer (a Flensburger Pilsener), kicking the ball for Mauritz, who would scamper after it, and return it, tossing it with a flip of his chin to give it a little air, so it would bounce a bit, so you could boot it farther.
But if the ball were on the ground, and you were poised to kick it, Mauritz would line himself up with it about three meters away like a lineup for a soccer penalty kick.
If, as you addressed the ball, poised to kick, you stepped to the side, Mauritz would shift himself accordingly, so that all three components were on a line, geometrically. A small step by the one with the ball, but he would have to step a couple of meters to the side, which he would do with gusto. The game was economical that way, giving Mauritz much sport as one did a slow foxtrot at the ball, beer in hand.
Although a rural resident, I saw Mauritz in action in an "urban" environment, walking in a little town near Denmark - he stopped at all the curbs until instructed to proceed, a skill he learned when young and living in Hamburg.
These dogs taught me that they have an excellent capacity for complying with instructions, but like anybody, they need the instructions to be clear.
Today, I was at the lumber yard getting some quotes on materials; while I leaned on the counter, one of the staff asked me, "Do you have a black dog?"
I raised an eyebrow.
"No," I said, "why?"
"There's one just walked by the door, outside."
"Oh," I told him, "If I had a black dog, it would be right here with me, and you'd be amazed at what a good dog it is."
What's a good dog?
A dog who does just what you tell it to do. You give a dog a clear job description, and they're off and running, eager to get the task done. All you need to be is clear (a subtle Zenmaster thing that dogs can do, similar to the Zenmaster thing that cats can do, showing us ways to live - in this case, by seeking mental clarity - if you can explain it to your dog, you can understand yourself).
 I know another dog, my friend Choux, who was described to me, when I met her, as "a really dumb dog."
Well, in my experience, dogs aren't dumb - they're good at doing what they're told to do. If you think a dog is dumb, maybe you're dumb. The Zen mirror again (which, being a Zen mirror, is Empty).
Within five minutes after meeting this "dumb" pooch, she was looking at me, waiting for the subtle shift of eyebrow and nod to indicate that she could now eat the cookie that was sitting on the ground between her two front feet, which she was too nervous to even look at, fixating on me instead.
She has since learned how to hold a cookie on her long, slender nose - cross-eyed dogs are particularly charming - and wait for the nod. Smart pooch.
And I dispense lots of loving to my dog friends, knowing that I will start out, as a default, right up at or near the top of their hierarchy, and that they will want lots of jovial praise.
Dogs, like lots of other animals, tend to like me, and I like them.
I see a couple of guys who walk by my house with their dogs; neither of them uses a leash, but the behavior is totally different.
One of the guys walks in the morning, past my house every day, no matter what the weather, with his old Russian wolfhound walking alongside, the two of them in tandem, connected like Fred and Ginger, even when the dog is checking out who peed on the fence post, then picking up and catching up.
I enjoy this simple evidence of mutual respect, how the two of them pay attention to each other, and walk together.
This other dude, though, is a different story. The dog, an old golden retriever, comes in my yard and carries out his annoying dog business, and eating the food left out on the shrine for the crows to eat, and I holler at him to leave and he won't . I holler at his dude, who often walks along reading the local newspaper, "Hey, get your [goddam] dog out of my [goddam] yard!"
Both the dudes in this scenario, human and dog, aren't paying attention.
But if you work with a dog, and make it clear what you like and don't like, you can encourage them to engage in all kinds of fun, proactive behavior, and find fulfillment by completing the task you have set out for them.
And of course, I am obligated to make an ironic leap out of all this, but I will do that tomorrow.
Thursday, January 15, 2009
 I couldn't think of anything else to write about, so I'll write a bit about the source image I used for this page - the Crow Screen, a hallmark of the collections at Seattle's Asian Art Museum.
They're a pair of painted, six-panel screens, about fifteen feet long (each), and six feet high? Something like that.
As many times as I have stood in front of the screens when visiting the museum, I have never counted how many crows are painted on the screens, but I would guess there are about one-hundred-fifty in all?
The screens are usually on display at the Seattle Asian Art Museum (SAAM), being, as I mentioned, featured items there.
Once, though, I confessed to a woman I knew, when she asked me what I wanted for my birthday, that I would like to see the Crow Screens when they are not available to the public - a private viewing, I suppose.
Rather bold of me, I was told, but my friend, who worked for years at the Seattle Art Museum, might yet have connections that would enable me to have my wish fulfilled.
It took some doing - such as fielding questions about my credentials, and worthiness for such a private viewing, but my friend apparently held me and my desire in high enough regard to influence the museum staff, her old colleagues, to set the screens up in the basement.
Years ago, my dad was heavily involved with the Puget Sound Maritime Historical Society; the officers would meet weekly at The Museum of History and Industry (which has the iconic stuff polar bear seen widely), and I had the run of the museum.
Among other things, in the summer, I would use the working periscope, which was installed on the roof, but penetrated to the main floor, from which you could see the view outdoors, to stare at girls taking the sun over at the ship canal embankment in their bikinis.
My favorite thing, though, was to scout around in the basement.
That's where the action is, at a museum. Think of it - you won't see more than about ten percent of a museum's holdings on display at a time, but to see the rest of the iceberg, stored some floors below the galleries, is astonishing.
And to see the Crow Screens set up in the basement, under poor artificial light, was magnificent. I was close enough to caress them with my eyelashes, although I made a point of not touching them.
And to see the brushstrokes; the painting is clearly a devotional work, painted by a passionate observer of crows and their demeanor.
For the theme image, Mr. Corax (the graphic designer who does much of our work) copied a section of the screens from a scanned image, then replaced the painted background with a stylized facsimile. You'll recognize the style of the original in the version Andy Corax set up for this site, but his is just enough different, I think.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
You can make alcohol out of anything that has fermentable solids - sugars, that is. Anything.
POWs making booze from potatoes? Sure, if you have barley (you need the enzymes to convert the starches to sugars - see barley).
Making the alcohol is easy - you just add yeast.
The yeast digests the sugar, converting it to carbon dioxide and alcohol.
Alcohol, as we know, is toxic - if it's too concentrated, it will kill the yeast, which generally can only handle around 8%. Some yeasts, such as those used in winemaking, might be able to manage higher concentrations, say 15%, but that's about it.
What about whisky, which is up above 40% alcohol?
[a note about "proof" - pure alcohol is 200 proof - which is unattainable, really, since alcohol absorbs moisture from its surroundings, so even pure alcohol is adulterated with water - 195 proof is as high as one can purify alcohol.
"Proof" refers to the first method employed to assess the alcohol content of a liquid - if a puddle of it caught fire, it was considered "proof" - as in, proof that the alcohol was sufficiently concentrated. This became known as "100 proof," which is 50% alcohol.]
The only way to make the alcohol more concentrated than where the yeast left off is to remove some of the water from the solution, to concentrate the alcohol.
Or, put another way, one has to pull the alcohol out of the solution. How is that done?
It's simple - in a solution of liquids of different boiling points, the solution will begin to boil at the lowest boiling point on the list of its contents.
"Boiling point" refers, of course, to the temperature at which the liquid overcomes the pressure pushing down on it and begins to escape the liquid - few days in a high school chemistry class will tell you that the energy of the molecules (from added heat) has now encouraged them to be so active they leave the solution.
Once that first solution has been entirely evaporated, the temperature of the solution will raise to the next boiling point on the list, and so on, until all the solutions have boiled out, and you're left with the ultimate solvent, water.
This is one way water can be purified, with the caveat that solids will still be in the solution - only the distillate, the liquid that has been evaporated, is really pure.
How can we exploit this concept with our freshly-fermented alcohol?
Perhaps you recall that the boiling point of water is 212° Fahrenheit (100° Celsius).
Yet the boiling point of ethanol (ethyl alcohol) is only 173°F (about 78°C).
So if we bring a jug of wine to the boil, it will boil at 173°F until all the alcohol has evaporated, and then, the boiling point goes up to the next one - in this case, to 212°F, since all that's left is water.
All that alcohol evaporated as steam (highly flammable, too, in case you attempt this at home); if only we could have captured it somehow, and condensed it back into liquid…
That's easily done, too - I think we all have the mental picture of a still, with a coil of copper tubing being somehow involved.
Of course, you can guess what the copper tubing is doing - the steamy alcohol is directed up it, and it condenses, by cooling off (the longer the tube, the more cooling you get - since you've increased the surface area of copper that can transfer heat from the distillate to the room). Out the other end drips pure alcohol.
My own still has a copper coil coming out the top, as well as an old outboard-motor heat exchanger, so I get excellent condensation - it is possible to have such a vigorous boil that the alcohol comes out the coil as steam, but it never does with my still.
I made mine from an old pressure-cooker, which, if you've worked with one much, has three holes in the lid - all with a function:
There is the pressure gauge, and the spring-loaded safety valve - basically a ball-bearing held down by a spring, but which, if the pressure climbs unsafely high, will allow pressure to escape by being budged out of the way.
And there is a little stop-cock, a tiny valve that one opens to let the air out, as it fills with steam, at the onset of pressure cooking.
[NB: pressure cooking works by being able to cook at a higher temperature - remembering that a boiling point represents a liquid's ability to overcome the atmospheric pressure keeping it in place - raise the pressure, and the boiling point goes up.]
To convert the pressure cooker to a still, I wouldn't need the pressure gauge, so I replaced that with a threaded piece of copper pipe, which was then connected to the condenser (the copper coil and heat-exchanger).
I kept the safety-valve, having heard stories about exploding stills (which generally happens when the grain in the mash - from which distillers don't remove the fermentable solids, but brewers do) clogs the coil. Pressure goes up - boom.
But the last little port, the little stopcock valve in the top, I replaced with a meat thermometer inserted into a cork, for a tight seal.
Why the thermometer?
Well, as soon as the alcohol is all evaporated, the thermometer would show that the temperature was rising, so I'd want to shut it down, not wanting to dilute my distilled alcohol with distilled water.
Once, I had made some cooking wine from a can of grape concentrate, but the protective covering on the fermentation vessel fell off, and it was in the sunlight for some days - all kinds of things started happening to the flavor, so it was unsuitable as cooking wine.
Didn't want to waste that alcohol, though - think of it: in a five-gallon batch of wine, with, say, a 10% alcohol concentration, that's a gallon of 100-proof booze. Let's get that out of there.
So I ran it through my still, and had some nice brandy - a bit raw, but nice. Did the job. I felt good, too, by rescuing an asset from what would seem to have been all waste.
Of course, the principles of distillation are easy to exploit - and anything sweet can be fermented - so read on, to learn about an adventure I had, once upon a time, during my long-and-checkered career as a mercenary cook:
I was the sous chef in a restaurant in Seattle. We did a huge Mother's Day brunch business (a big day in the restaurant year, as I'm sure you can imagine), but even though we served hundreds of plates, we ended the day with about eight gallons of fresh-squeezed orange juice left over (out of about thirty or so).
I noticed them every day in the walk-in refrigerator, wondering what to make from them that we could sell.
A few days later, the jugs began to swell - clearly, fermentation was already beginning… which gave me an idea:
I instructed one of the cooks to prepare a large pot by sanitizing it (washing it out with bleach - didn't want any microbes in there other than the yeast), and then to dump in the orange juice.
To make sure our efforts were more than worthwhile, I also had him dump in about five pounds of sugar, and stir it up.
Then, some yeast from the baker, cover the pot, and put it away (discreetly - it was fun to imagine we could do this without the chef knowing).
Fermentation doesn't take that long, if the conditions are favorable (room temperature is excellent) - in this case, I determined that fermentation was complete after about a week.
Meanwhile, there was a curious, fruity fragrance emanating from the storeroom - which the chef noticed and asked about, but after telling him that none of the rest of us could smell it, he ignored it.
Okay - now we had converted orange juice into orange wine - how to get the alcohol out of it?
Fortunately, I am blessed with attributes that would benefit me on a desert island, or in prison… I know how to make things: alcohol, soap, bread, cheese…
And, being a devotee of alcohol manufacture, I knew the principles behind distilling, and could utilize them to our advantage, using materials one would find in any kitchen.
Let's think it through - there is alcohol in the orange wine that we want to remove: simple to do, merely boil it out.
But we want to condense that vaporized alcohol and collect it - also simple to do: merely put a lid on the pot - the steam will condense there and drop back into the pot.
We want to remove the alcohol though, so how can we prevent it from falling back into the wine?
In my reading on distillation , I've learned of an old desert trick for getting water: dig a deep hole in the ground, cover it with a tarp that has a rock in the middle of it. Put your hat in the hole, under the depression caused by the weight of the rock.
The heat from the sun evaporates any moisture in the soil, which condenses on the tarp, and runs down to the low spot, created by the weight of the rock. From there, it drips into the hat. Now, you have water to drink with.
In our case, if we set up a bowl, rather than the pot lid, that was larger in diameter than the open top of the pot, we could condense the steam, which would run down to the low spot - the bottom of the bowl - and drop back into the liquid.
If there were another bowl below the drips, to catch them, like the hat in the desert pit…
So we set up an old colander in the pot, down in the wine, which supported a smaller bowl, and kept it up out of the boiling wine.
We filled the large bowl, which was serving as the lid, with ice, to enhance condensation.
Fired it up, and an hour later, had a nice two quarts of orange brandy ("brandy" being the generic term for distillate from fruit wine).
Everything worked as planned. It was easy, amazing, and empowering for the staff, since they had just done the impossible - turned orange juice, about to spoil, into alcohol, and distilled it.
All with items one would find in any kitchen.
Tuesday, January 13, 2009
Once upon a time, we had two ways to be found: our telephone number, and our address. If you wanted, you could have an unlisted number and a PO box; you could keep a pretty low profile.
Now we have email addresses, too, and often, more than one.
And a business line, and maybe also a fax, and of course, a cell phone number - I think about Tony Robert's character in Woody Allen's film, Play it Again, Sam - constantly leaving numbers with his secretary so she'd know how to reach him - but now, we have many addresses that hook us into the web.
Many now have a presence on the web - a MySpace page, or the Book of Faces, or a blog, or maybe they're real mavericks and have their own website.
Here I am, for example, writing in this blog - which I'd rather not think of as a blog, but as a venue for essays - since that's what I like - and intend - to write. I mean no disservice to the devoted "bloggers" out there, but I just don't want to think of myself as one. An essayist, but not a blogger -
I have other sites, too:
A personal favorite is geniusweirdo.org - I've realized that many of the items which might appear here would also be good to have on that site (visit it and you'll see what I mean), and no doubt, some of the stuff on there might show up, in some form, here.
Another web concept I'm working with is Argyle9. Check it out. I wouldn't know how to begin describing it, anyway.
Sue Frause, a friend of mine, writes a blog; mostly about her travels, she also writes about life here on our island. Once upon a time, Sue, who has been around in the publication business for some time, wrote for the local paper. Each week, she'd have a little sidebar featuring her Best Bets. I was headlining a poetry reading, and Sue wrote it up (the favorable attention definitely contributed to the size of the crowd - thanks, Sue). However, my name was spelled "Baron," without the "t" that makes it "barton."
I wrote a reply:
"While I am flattered to have been mentioned in your "Best Bets," Mrs. Frause, I must point out a slight error: You refer to me as a Baron, but I am actually a Viscount (a mere notch above a baron in the peerage), a title conferred upon me by Rex Incognito,the Very King of Langley Himself.
Protocol dictates that use of my title is optional at all times."
Often, if a local is engaged in something she finds noteworthy, she'll interview them and feature them on her blog.
Apparently, I'm the noteworthy one this time around.
The local arts center is having a fundraiser show called "Something to Crow About," and I learned, via the invitation in the mail, that I was to be the entertainment. That's appropriate, I suppose, and appropriate, considering that it's a show invoking Crow Energy, that I found out in a weird way -
Sue had mentioned something about it some months ago, last year, but then it was rescheduled, and I hadn't heard much about it.
"This show has had more glitches," Sue said when I brought the curious disposition of my recruitment to her attention. "You know? I think it's the Crow Thing."
"Gee, Sue - do you think?"
So she interviewed me for her blog today; we met at the Useless Bay Coffeehouse, here in Langley, on Whidbey Island, off the northwest coast of America. As befits an interview, I was actually interviewing her for my blog -
 I did learn much about Sue during our hour-and-a-half together, but it's personal stuff, so I'll leave it for now.
One thing that was a bit comical - she wanted to take my picture, as she does, but pointed out that Gary, who owns Mukilteo Coffee Company, out in the woods, chided Sue for conducting her meetings and interviews at Useless Bay Coffee Company here in Langley. "I don't even want to mention where I met them any more," she said, "but people will be able to tell from the picture," sweeping in the surroundings as if washing them off glass.
"I know - "I told her, "I have a picture of myself in just about the position you find me here, but at a table outside a coffee bar on the Boulevard du Montparnasse in Paris in the summer."
I went on to suggest that we met there, so she could use the photo and claim it as her own.
Monday, January 12, 2009
I live in a little town, across the street from a pasture. I was telling someone who had asked where I lived that I was on "Cemetery Road [our name for the road that leads to the graveyard], a few houses up from the corner."
"On which side of the street?" she asked.
"Well," I said, "since I'm not a cow, I must be on the left."
She was a bit put-off by my smart-alecky remark, but it was a silly question.
You get to know the cows. When the apples are ripe, we'll toss windfalls over the fence - "Hey - want to see a stampede?"
There has been a black cow standing in attendance over her black calf, who has had some challenges. It's a small, new guy, but one day a week or so ago, I saw it just laying next to the fence that divides the pasture, and by the end of the day, I was concerned that it was even alive, since I hadn't seen it move all day.
It showed up elsewhere, so it was somewhat mobile, but two nights ago, its mother was bellowing, and keeping it up for hours, all night.
Yesterday, there was activity at the gate; Jans, the farmer, had driven his truck into the pasture, and so had another large truck; I heard Jans holler from across the field, "You don't have to close the gate, Doctor…" so the vet had arrived.
I was working on cleaning out the truck at the time, so was outside when this was happening.
I was curious about the activity - three trucks were across the pasture, parked side-by-side, next to the calf.
Soon, the vet was driving away. I figured that was either a good sign, or a bad one.
I looked out across the pasture and saw that Jans had moved his truck, apparently, so he was parked next to the calf, and facing north - it had been south before. I saw the calf making some motions, as if it were trying to get up, and looked away. Went back to work on the truck.
A few minutes later, he came driving across the pasture and had parked his truck across the road from his fence. He was over to close the gate.
I went out to see what was going on.
"Hey," I said, "my guess is that you fellows were attending to the calf? We'd noticed its mother bellowing all night…"
"Yeah," he said, "the vet was here…"
"Is everything okay with it?"
"No, it's dead."
By this time, I had approached close enough to see that he was upset by it.
"I'm sorry," I told him.
"That calf was born on December 16th, and it's never been right," he said. I mentioned that I had seen it most days just laying in one spot all day.
"It had septic arthritis in both front legs," he said.
"I had to knock it on the head."
I realized that I had witnessed some of its death throes - and that Jans had likely parked his truck next to it to obscure his deed from view of the houses across the road.
"I'm awfully sorry," I said.
"Well, the only bright side, if there is a bright side at all, is that it was a bull, and not a heifer - they're going to be my replacement cows in a few years…"
I thought about the cows there now, some of whom I feel close to, recognizing from afar, designating thrown apples for…
"I had five black calves, now I have four."
Meanwhile, I had helped him get the gate back on the two pegs, lined up like hinges. "You ought to try to do one of these yourself," he said, unaware that I may be a bohemian, but I know my way around farm work.
I reached out and shook his hand - the hand that had raised a hammer to strike the calf - I felt compelled to take some of the energy away with me, so it wasn't all his…?
"What's your name again?" he asked.
"I'm Barton Cole, I live right here," I said, gesturing at my little house.
"Yeah, I know where you live, I'm just real bad with names," he said.
"That's okay - I can keep track for both of us," I said, which has become my stock thing to say when someone says that.
"If you ever need anything, here I am," I said. "Just let me know what I can do to help you out."
A couple of times during our conversation, I had glanced at his truck; the dead calf was in the back, but I couldn't see it.
A bit later, I heard the ravens over at the corner of his land; no doubt something had come their way, too.
Sunday, January 11, 2009
"Though I do not believe a plant will spring up
where no seed has been,
yet I have great faith in a seed.
Convince me you have a seed there, and
I am prepared to expect miracles."
-- Henry David Thoreau, Faith in a Seed
A seed is a package that conveys the plant's genetic material into the future, like a slingshot or a slow, persistent rolling ball, but forward -- think of a pod traveling through deep space, drifting among the stars, eventually arriving at landfall and deploying itself on its mission, which is to create the machine that makes more pods and shoots them into the future, again and again...
They're perfect machines, seeds. I find myself constantly amazed at the means by which they travel from the source plant to their destination. They store the instructions on how to deploy the mechanism, and how to utilize a native energy source efficiently. They just arrive, set up shop, and get busy.
Some seeds take longer to arrive than others: some plants rapidly grow and distribute seeds (think of dandelions, et al), while others seldom do, and perhaps not many seeds.
The seed; a projectile aimed at the future. And essentially, its goal is to propagate its genetic material into the future in a successful, self-replicating mechanism.
This is much the same as a book, isn't it? A repository for data, to propel it into the future, with the added imperative to propagate itself.
An idea is the same way - this, and the preceding notions, are outlined cleverly and compelling by Richard Dawkins, in his book, The Selfish Gene. His concept of a self-replicating idea, an abstraction, is called a meme.
This essay is a meme; a moderately successful one, I hope - i.e., able to self-replicate.
I learned, yesterday, that Monsanto had acquired Territorial Seeds; which, if true, meant that we sensitive organic gardeners would have a hard time doing business with them; Monsanto has long been accused of aggressive, global, agricultural terrorism, and our organic dollars are unable to support that.
The situation was hyperbolic, and before making scattershot, reactionary statements, I needed information.
Naturally, the search engine retrieved my downed fowl in nanoseconds, and I learned some of what was going on…
Monsanto had indeed acquired Seminis, the world's largest vegetable seed company. This gives Monsanto, the developer and promulgator of the "terminator gene," control over the largest quantity of vegetable genetic material on earth.
Without genetic diversity, most people on the planet would experience profound deprivation and famine in short order - imagine the square miles, upon thousands, in the Midwest United States, all planted with the same crop - say, corn - and all the same strain, likely from the same source.
Plants are under constant barrage from pathogens, just like everybody else. By being resistant to fungal and viral diseases, plants succeed in launching their projectiles into the future, blindly, although they might be launched into the bellies of the world.
If, however, a pathogen develops the ability to affect this up-to-date, genetically-modified foodstuff, there goes an area larger than the state of Illinois, not producing any food. Not only that, but likely providing a successful host for the pathogen to make landfall, so to speak.
Our cornucopia is in peril.
Botanists are constantly trying to stay one step ahead of the pathogens by breeding in resistant genes from strains which show favorable characteristics. Where do they get those? Often from "landraces;" strains grown in some remote valley far off in the world, and kept as heirlooms.
The fundamental right of our relationship with seeds is to be able to hold that projectile for a moment in your palm before you send it on its way to the future. It mustn't die, quivering its last, in your palm.
If Monsanto acquired Seminis, how does that affect Territorial and Johnny's? Not to mention all the other completely reputable seed companies out there…
Well, I have learned that, as you can imagine, seed production and distribution is complicated. For one, if a farmer is growing fields of cabbages that are seed crops, they mustn't be within a certain distance of any other of the cabbage family (broccoli, kale, Brussels sprouts, and on), lest the plants cross and the field produce some unintended hybrid seed.
Of course, this shuffling of genetics is how diversity generates new strains, with favorable traits or perhaps not, but it doesn't, in this case, serve the interests of the seed farmer - he wants to produce a wagonload of valuable, consistent, dependable-performer seeds, not some random hybrids. So they've got to work together, to ensure that they're not risking pollen "contamination" from neighboring fields. They plan and cooperate; the avenues of communication and resource development are serpentine and complex.
That's merely the arcane and complicated network and cooperation of the seed producers; the seed distributors are another layer in the web.
So companies like Territorial, et al, sell products generated by Seminis all the time. They have their own sources, true, but to fill in their inventory, they purchase it from a broker, who's getting it from the producer - being the world's largest seed producer, that's often Seminis, directly or indirectly.
Personally, I will do nothing that will line the pockets of Monsanto; consider this syllogism:
1. Monsanto has developed, patented, and deployed the "terminator gene," as well as other dangerous genetic modifications;
2. Monsanto now has control over the world's largest producer of plant genetic material;
Therefore, Monsanto is in a position of dangerous power...
The enlightened concern has been the issue of water rights, but what about the rights to genetic material?
It's no small leap to putting this plot in an international intrigue scenario, complete with the desire for world domination…
Think of it - if you control the access to seeds and genetic material, you control access to food.
Essentially, you have control over the human population of the world.
I won't support Monsanto. I won't, therefore, support Seminis. I think that also means that I won't support Territorial, and others.
What's to be done?
For one, as I discovered has already begun to happen, consumers should put pressure on seed companies to disclose, in their catalogs, who produced the seed, so they can make informed choices and support Territorial's own production of seed, and not support Seminis or its subsidiaries.
As our right to have access to genetic material, we also must demand access to information about its provenance.
Second, gardeners should endeavor to save their own seed.
I've been saving seed for years, among them, the garlic I replant every year, and also a lettuce of which I am quite fond that I have casually (but successfully, over some years) selected for cold-tolerance (it's a Cos type that handles snow just fine), slow-bolting, and superior flavor. It's also attractive.
I grow what other seeds I can, considering the need to isolate some plants and varieties, as described above.
There are many other gardeners who save seeds; now, they're aggregated into a successful network of their own, like the big producers: the Seed Saver's Exchange.
Members grow seed crops and make them available, essentially trading them with other gardeners for other seed crops.
Diversity is maintained - I have acquired dozens of different lettuce varieties from a gardener in Monroe, Washington, USA, who raises over four-hundred varieties of lettuce - that kicks the seed catalog offering way in the ass.
Many of the seeds available through the Seed Saver's Exchange are venerable, often nearly-forgotten heirloom varieties, many of them noteworthy for the home gardener, although unsuitable for market production - hence their marginalization - growing such plants enables gardeners to participate in the noble business of carrying on the genetic diversity, and thus saving the planet.
Again, the Action Steps:
1. demand that seed companies provide the provenance for the seeds they offer;
2. encourage legislation to demand it by contacting your elected officials;
3. save your own seeds, and propagate those projectiles, the future-seeking pods;
4. Join the Seed Saver's Exchange today.
Don't let a menace take away our access to genetic material.
Protect our seeds. A seed is the ultimate expression of hope and faith;
be a seed yourself.
Saturday, January 10, 2009
Let's represent a sugar molecule like this:
X
Although there are many different kinds of sugar (glucose, sucrose, fructose…), we'll keep it simple.
Take a little leap, though, and think of the molecule as C6H12O6 (six carbon molecules, twelve hydrogens, six oxygens - put together like building blocks).
String a bunch of sugars together, and you have a starch (just a long chain of sugar molecules):
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
A much longer chain of them gets you cellulose, which is wood fiber:
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
Starch is an excellent way to store sugars for energy, which is why grains are starchy - they need that sugar to get the sprout up and out of the ground; the plant needs an energy supply until it can get some leaves photosynthesizing and making its own energy.
To break the starch down into sugars, you need enzymes - they take the chain apart.
The enzymes that take sugars apart are called amylases; enzymes that deconstruct proteins are called proteases, and fat-breaking enzymes are lipases…
There are two principle amylase enzymes: the alpha and the beta. The alpha assesses the starch molecule, finds the middle, and cuts it there, like this:
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX becomes
XXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXXX
It keeps doing it, too - it will take those two halves and halve them again.
The beta enzyme works from the end of the starch molecule, taking off two glucose molecules at a time, like this:
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
becomes
XXXXXXXXXX XX XX XX XX XX XX XX
Barley is loaded with these enzymes, much more so than any other grain, an attribute we can exploit, as we'll see.
But it doesn't serve barley for the enzymes to convert its own starches to sugars until it needs them, so it has a meager supply, basically, until the seed gets "switched on," and its time to utilize that efficiently-stored energy (the starch molecule takes up far less room than the sugar molecules it's composed of, since it's kind of like a neat coil inside the grain, a tightly-packed chain).
How do you switch the seed on?
You sprout it.
In the case of barley, you soak it in water until it germinates, and the little, ambitious "acrospire" (the sprout) emerges.
When the acrospire is about ¾ as long as the grain, the enzyme count increases dramatically, much longer, and the enzymes will begin digesting the starches in earnest, but you want to hold off a bit…
So you switch the seed off. How?
You dry it out, so the acrospire withers, and that's that.
The barley you began with has now been "malted," and you now have "malted barley." That's all there is to it.
Beer is made from malted barley. How do you do that?
Beer is a fermented beverage, which means that the sugars have been converted to alcohol by yeast, which are simple organisms. Yeast digests sugar (just like we all do, fundamentally), excreting alcohol (C2H5OH) and carbon dioxide (CO2).
If you're into it, do the balance sheet -
Sugar: 6 C 12 H 6 O
Alcohol: 2C 6H 1O
Carbon dioxide: 1C 2O
If you balance it out, you see that one sugar molecule generates two alcohol molecules, and two carbon dioxide molecules, nothing left over.
(For extra credit, ponder how plants use CO2 and water [H2O] to make sugars, including chains of starches, and obviously, cellulose [plant fiber, remember?]).
Looks like making alcohol is going to be pretty easy - start with malted barley, get some yeast…
You've got to make conditions favorable for the enzymes in the barley to convert the starches to sugars; turns out that the ideal conditions are wet heat - around 150°.
First, though, you have to render the grains into a form that makes it as easy as possible for the enzymes to get at the starches, so it gets crushed by passing it between rollers.
If you add water that's hotter than 150°, and plan it out ahead of time so you start with water of the right temperature, once you add it to the crushed, malted barley, the temperature settles into the favorable range. Of course, it's also possible to apply heat to the wet, crushed grains to get the temperature into the zone.
This is called a "mash."
I always wanted to know what one was; see rapid research.
And the enzymes get busy - soon, they have converted all the starches into sugars, which is easy to verify: pull out a spoonful of the grains and drop some iodine into them - from chemistry class years ago, you may recall that iodine, which is red, turns black when it contacts starch - one simply tests for the presence of starch until it isn't present any more, maintaining the temperature of the mash in the favorable range.
Now, you have a mass of wet, crushed, malted barley that is now sweet - all the starches have been converted. Bootleggers go this far and add yeast, fermenting it until the yeast activity ceases, once the yeasts have converted all the sugars into alcohol and carbon dioxide. Then they distill it (a topic for another day, but a dear one, to me).
Brewers, though, start the same way, but have to get the sugars out of the grains - who wants porridge in their beer?
Usually, they'll put the mash in a pot that has a screen bottom, and wash the sugars out of the grains with hot water, collecting the water and putting it in a pot.
This is called "wort," and once it's boiled with hops (a perennial vine with bitter flowers growing in clusters like grapes), it can be fermented and will have become beer (sake, generally called "rice wine," having been made from grain is actually "rice beer").
Pretty straightforward stuff, really. Beer has been around for over four thousand years, having been invented in Mesopotamia.
How would someone know what to do to the grain to make beer out of it, though?
It was either advice from the alien overlords who seeded the earth with people and ideas, or it happened accidentally, which is easy to imagine:
Let's say you have a sack of grain, and it rains. The grain sprouts.
But you want to eat it, not plant it, so you try to rescue it by drying it out.
Darn it, though! It gets wet again, but this time, you don't catch it until it's been there for a couple of weeks, the grains floating around, and now yeast has gotten at it - which is common, there being so many yeasts drifting around.
It's really ruined now, but not wanting to throw it out, you eat some of the grains, and discover alcohol in the process.
For extreme extra credit, consider this:
Agriculture began in the Fertile Crescent, around the Middle East. Grains were grown, stored, and marauded by rats.
Cats to the rescue!
This is when cats became our companions - by protecting the grains by hunting the rodents who were eating and spoiling it.
What if cats hadn't come on the scene?
Rats would have had their way with the silos of grain, and people would likely have given up growing grains.
"Forget this agriculture thing," the early, pissed-off people might have said.
"Let's go back to hunting/gathering."
Without cats, we might have abandoned agriculture, and that would certainly have meant no beer!
So we have cats to thank for beer getting off the ground in the first place.
The next time you have a beer, raise your glass to the cat and shout its name.
Friday, January 09, 2009
The other day, I wrote about technological compression (see kilobyte, mb, gb, tb, pb...); I was talking with someone about barley and alcohol, and thought some more about how our tech tools have given us so much of what would seem to be power…
Being the youngest of four children (in five years! My mother was pregnant nearly the entire time…), I absorbed all that I could from my siblings - including learning how to read, which I did when I was three (my only claim to precocity).
Once I learned how to read, I never stopped. I read everything I could get my hands on, and lived in a bibliophilic house, so there were lots of books around.
Librarians have always, apparently, recognized my passion for books and reading, and one of them frustrated the hell out of my step-mother: she never charged me overdue fines, since she didn't want to discourage my devotion to reading. My step-mother, on the other hand, wanted me to learn responsibility. Sorry - looks like the dreamers win again!
I read all kinds of stuff, but acquired an early interest in science-fiction; fostered, likely, by watching Neil Armstrong stepping onto the moon when I was six years old, so I grew up in the space age.
An early favorite was John Christopher's excellent Tripods Trilogy, in which humans have been enslaved by aliens, The Masters, who traveled in little vehicles with three, long, tall legs - when I was a boy, we used to pass a water tower standing among the firs by the highway, and it would f*r*e*a*k m*e o*u*t.
Three boys evade being "capped," a rite-of-passage in which the young submit to The Masters' mind control, becoming like all the adults. They meet up, learn of the Resistance, hook up with them, and volunteer to endeavor to infiltrate the alien city, hoping to discover a weakness.
Which they do - don't let me spoil it for you -
The Resistance learns that the Masters are extremely susceptible to alcohol, and manage to communicate this to the lads, who are enduring heavy servitude in the alien city, the gravity being artificially enhanced, and the atmosphere poisoned, to duplicate the home planet of the aliens.
All they need to do is introduce alcohol into the Masters' water supply - but how to smuggle in the alcohol?
Impossible. They'll have to manufacture it.
How?
By making a mash of the starchy biscuits they are given to eat, and then fermenting it.
They do, and the plan succeeds.
So there I was, six years old, and wondered: what's a mash?
I was completely intrigued - a "mash" must really be something, if one is able to make it out of crackers and ferment it.
Books in the library were no help - I remember asking an uncle, but he had no idea.
I grew up with this quest, occasionally and profoundly curious.
Finally, I don't remember how, I learned that a mash was a means of heating crushed grain in water until enzymes had converted all the starch to sugar - which you can ferment.
I suppose it took me about twelve years to answer that question (and once I had the information, I began brewing beer, and never looked back - in fact, perhaps tomorrow I'll write about how one starts with a field of barley and ends up with pale ale, or lager).
Not long ago, I was curious - how long would it take to answer that question with today's tools?
Twenty seconds - I used a stopwatch, even.
That's about 19,000,000 times faster.
It took more time to open Firefox and type in the Google search than it did for the browser to return the links.
Never take access to information for granted.
Thursday, January 08, 2009
In December, we had over a foot of snow, the snowfall spread out over a few days, which was uncommon for my region (although more common in the last several years - is that what the onset of an Ice Age looks like?). It hindered Christmas travel plans, so there were parties and events we didn't get to - since we seldom have much impact from snowfall, the authorities are underprepared - hardly any snowplows, and when they did come through town, they just skimmed off the recent snow to get back down to the dangerous, icy layer.
Looking at the weather reports, I could see that rain was forecast for the week after Christmas, beginning Christmas Day. The National Weather Service pointed out that the temperature wasn't going to rise dramatically, so there wouldn't be a rapid melt, which would result in flooding for sure.
This week, though, things are different. We had a bit of snow the other night, but it was wet and minimal, and now, the rain has begun in earnest. Out on the Pacific coast west of me, they're expecting up to twenty inches of rain over the next few days, with as much as three inches in the interior - where I am, poised on an island north of Puget Sound. That's a lot of rain.
We can use it - on our island, we have a "single source aquifer," which means that all our drinking water comes out of the ground. The only way to recharge the aquifer is rainfall, so we're looking at our future tap water.
And the temperature is up in the forties - call it 5°Celsius. So the snow in the mountains to the east is rapidly and unseasonably melting; the metropolitan areas get their drinking water from reservoirs, filled by snow-melt. As has happened in recent years, the snow melts too much in the winter and spring, so the reservoirs get low in the summer. Too bad for them!
Of course, all this snow melt means the water has to go somewhere, so it does, flowing down the rivers to link back up with the sea. The weather service upgraded the status from "Flood Watch" - which means conditions are favorable for flooding - to "Flood Warning," which means the rivers ARE flooding. I heard flood warnings for several Western Washington counties, including Island County, my own.
I find that rather comical - I live on an island - there are streams, but no rivers, and the highest elevation is around five hundred feet - so there isn't a snow cap that will melt. We're going to be just fine. Nothing to worry about.
Certainly, one of the benefits of living on an island.
And even if the ice at both poles of the earth melts and the sea level rises (unfortunately, it's possible, thanks to our way of living and our impact on the planet and its ability to regulate its temperature), I'm still up at one-hundred-fifty feet - so maybe I'll be able to dig clams just down the street, instead of having to go all the way down the hill to the beach.
An island has other benefits: to get here from America, I have to take a ferry. It's a short crossing, us being only a few miles from the continent, but enough to provide a nice, psychological distinction between the Island and the rest of the world. I recall that in Dracula, the vampire's prey, in London, was able to elude him by exploiting his inability to cross moving water - Dracula could only cross the Thames at the moment of slack tide, when things were briefly static. So the ferry crossing keeps the vampires out, which is comforting, since they manifest themselves in all kinds of metaphorical ways.
I used to live in Seattle - was born there; I grew up in a little town on the water about thirty miles south. I lived in Seattle as an adult, with my family; we gradually moved north, away from the city. The house we lived in from which we moved to the island over fifteen years ago was ten blocks north of the Seattle city limits, in a town called Shoreline, but we still referred to it as Seattle.
That's the way it is with a city. The border is arbitrary, and can even change, when the city annexes neighborhoods, increasing its size and tax-base. Not so with an island - the distinction between what is the island and what is not is pretty clear - you go down to the water's edge, and that's the end of your island.
Islanders, in my experience, are pleased with being so. It's a special thing, to live on one. Culturally, we think of an island as remote and disconnected - the Latin words, "insulate" and "isolate" both refer to the condition of an island. We're isolated, yes, although a mere twenty-minute boat ride to America. And as remote as we need to be.
Wednesday, January 07, 2009
I read an article in a recent New Yorker about a fellow who is ferreting out the dimensions of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan to end the Pacific theater of WWII. An interesting point jumped off the page: a day on which the crews were training to drop the bombs was the fortieth anniversary of Wilbur and Orville Wright having demonstrated that powered flight was possible.
Merely forty years, and a plane was able to fly high and drop an instant sun.
That seems like pretty extreme technological compression - forty years? From limping along the sand in North Carolina and packing the bits of airplane in barrels afterward, to flying high over the ocean and destroying cities.
Add another twenty-five years or so, and Neil Armstrong was landing on the moon.
Other technological marvels include the news I just received yesterday: my brother, the Luddite, not only has a computer, but is online. He called me with the news, and left a message saying he wanted me to give him some links of my web design work; since I had missed the call, he thought he might just get the information from my sister.
Well, jeez, pal, why didn't you just tell me your email address?
I frequently tell my son how things we take for granted didn't even exist when I was his age. There weren't calculators (unless you count an abacus), I seldom saw a color television, personal computers were relatively far off, and there certainly wasn't an internet.
I had an IBM pc back in the 1980's - I bought it used from a friend for $700 (which seemed like a pretty good deal).
The hard drive was massive, for those days - 256 kilobytes. That was the hard drive. The machine I'm working with at the moment has a 320 gigabyte hard drive, which is over 1.3 million times the capacity.
A mere eight years ago, I upgraded from a machine with a 1 gigabyte hard drive to one with an 8 gigabyte drive, and I thought I was really stepping up.
Over the recent holidays, one of my nephews was excited that he had just acquired a 500 gigabyte external hard drive.
"Is that all?" I said, "I recently picked one up that's 1.5 terabytes." -- (that's about 6.3 million times as large as the drive in that old PC, and the unit is about half the size of a box of facial tissue).
Twenty-five years ago, I couldn't even conceive of a gigabyte. I might as well get used to petabytes [about a million gigabytes, which is a bit over 8.5 billion bits - a bit being the binary unit, a zero or a one - on, or off]). And exabytes: a bit over a billion gigabytes - and zettabytes - over a trillion gigabytes. Yottabytes? That's more than a billion terabytes, which is more than a million megabytes, which is more than a million bytes, which is eight bits. That is a huge heap of zeros and ones, and they all will have something to do, one day.
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