State of the Garden Interrupted

by short vacation.


Big Cedar Lodge is really nice but the grounds are awfully noisy. I think a "cabin" at Beaver's Bend is more my speed.  I went jogging this morning on the 5K trail.  I planned to do two miles, but I seem to have lost the trail on the way out because I never saw the 1-mile marker.  (Saw the .9 mile)  On the way back, I lost the trail again and ended up going a good bit further than I intended.  Basically, I got lost.  I ended up going for over 40 minutes and no clue how far.

By the way: Ozark Mountains trails are not the same as Northeast Texas roads. Guess how?

White River Catfish House is worth a detour anytime you're anywhere near Branson, Missouri or within a 90-mile radius thereof. Get the jalapeno cornbread.  The Hungry Hunter is indeed a good breakfast spot, but watch out for the cinnamon rolls--cream cheese icing.  Too much icing on the cake. Also, no pecans and not enough cinnamon.  Great sausage gravy! Lovely biscuits!  I thought hashbrowns came with my order but either I was mistaken or the kitchen was.  Definite do-over, but I'll make sure I'm ordering what I want and I'll maybe try the French Toast next time.

On the way back we passed Ingalls Road. Could it be?  Nope--coincidence.  Rocky Ridge Farm, where Laura Ingalls Wilder lived her adult years, is farther north. Next time...and maybe sneak in a dinner at you-know-where.

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Why I still read YA at my age

Sorta Like a Rock Star
by Matthew Quick





I haven't cried so much at the end of a YA book in years. I think the author did it on purpose--set out to invent a really cook person in really horrid circumstances just so he could mess with our emotions. He succeeded, admirably.

But the heroine of the tale, Amber Appleton, is just one of many heroes and heroines. There's her mother, who raised an awesome girl under the worst of conditions; her priest, an immigrant from North Korea with an honest bu unbreakable faith; Private Jackson, a Vietnam war vet who writes Haiku to handle ordinary life, her friends from school, misfits who bond over Halo 3; her English language students whom she calls the Korean Divas for Christ; the old people in the home whom she visits with her dog B-Thrice and does a weekly battle with Neitschze-quoting Joan of Old; and Donna, lawyer and single mother of an autistic boy who's a math genius but repeats anything he is told. Just listing those names makes me want to read it again.

But I don't want to have to cry at the end!

I'm sure the book has many flaws but it would sure make a sparking discussion topic for young folk. So many questions and so few answers and still more questions. And maybe, some answers...or should I say suggestions?

Eating my way back home

 

Edible: An Illustrated Guide to the World's Food Plants

by National Geographic Society, Deborah Madison (Foreword)

The first section, on fruits, was awesome.  The foreword was good too, very good--all the info about agriculture, the Fertile Crescent, the Americas...darn. Just writing this makes me want to go re-read it.  Nothing "big" that I didn't already know, but a beautiful fairy tale for a dedicated gardener.

Basically each major fruit received a one or two-page spread, with less common ones getting a half-page.  For reasons unknown they didn't mention that there are a lot more varieties of bananas available that just the single grocery store variety we know. (And they taste better.)  But, sadly, I'm still not sure what that really delicious fruit I ate on Oahu was. My best guess is a cultivated variety of Custard Apple.  Next time I go to the Islands, I'm trying every fruit I see.

The book's treatment of vegetables was just a bit disappointing, and then it went on to to herbs and beverage plants and grains and sugars, and all of these were given short shrift, IMHO.  Only two pages for corn?  I wanted more! 

Which is just plain silly of me. The subject matter would have filled an encyclopedia and this was just a single book.  A nice, big book with pictures out the gazoodle.  I liked, I very much liked.  If I could afford a big library this would be in it.

State of the Garden Report August 7

 I had a ball in the garden today!  I forget how good gardening can make me feel--why haven't I been doing it?

Let's see...95-degree afternoons, a weekend trip to Arkansas followed by a Saturday trip to Houston...okay, I get it. Sunday I finally committed to a fall garden by ordering seeds, so I got out there to start preparing the soil. Yes, it was mid-90s and sunny, but I had plenty of sweat on order.  I pulled two wheelbarrow loads of weeds, dug about four small potatoes, pulled the last of the carrots--



As mentioned before, I'm no longer a carrot-growing disaster.  I can grow carrots!  These were put in late and it's way too late to be pulling them, but they taste fantastic. 
From now on, I'm a carrot farmer and here are the rules:  start early;
mist daily until they're established;
thin rigorously;
and most importantly, plant amid a nurse crop of radishes. (The fast-growing radishes break up the soil and shelter the tiny, delicate sprouts of carrot from sun and rain.(  If you can tickle out a radish or two out without disturbing the baby carrots, all the better, but if not, sacrifice the poor things. Besides, how bad a sacrifice is it to a radish not to get eaten?
 
When I dumped all that green stuff into the compost bin, it was full. So I debated whether to add some soil to the top of the bin or go ahead and turn it over like I'd planned. There was still daylight left and I had the thought--quit talking about turning the compost pile over and just do it!

So there!  I moved the top layers to a neighboring pile and found something magical at the bottom. Seriously magical--compost.  Not as "done" as one might want, but perfectly usable. I took a load and a half to the garden and I'm still not done. See how boring this looks?










It's not boring to me nor to any other gardener. Trust me on this one.


So my fall garden looks like dirt but seeds are in the mail.  How I'm going to plant anything if I can't stand to pull the old plants up, I dunno. How can you stand to pull up a plant that's still blooming?

Enviable pain

Almost Somewhere:

Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail

by Suzanne Roberts

Let me first say that I enjoyed this. I might not place it on my all-time top adventure writing favorites list, but I really enjoyed it. I recommend it, too--it's not always bright and cheery, but it's honest and happy. It's about how three women backpacked the John Muir Trail in 1993, on a 28-day adventure that changed their lives. It may not change yours, but it definitely has points to consider.

So, here are my own particular points. Women traveling alone outdoors are a lot more common than they used to be. We still get stared at, still get unwanted advice, still get creeped out by strangers who stare, or violate boundaries, or simply act weird. Men get bugged by strangers, too, I admit it. But how many men have been whistled at, leered at, or propositioned on the street?  (Outside New Orleans)   These women took it as coolly and competently as they possibly could, and they had a good time despite the occasional weirdnesses.  And they also discovered a foolproof method for getting rid of unwanted campsite squatters--I won't spoil it for you, but if want to know, read pages 231-233.

It reminded me how good meeting a physical challenge can make you feel. After an encounter with a eighty-year-old hiker, Ms. Roberts writes,
A friend's great-grandmother used to say, "If I could do it yesterday, I can do it today. And if I can do it today, I'll be able to do it tomorrow." At eighty-nine she still played golf and practiced yoga.
Yes!  That's an attitude I can live by. Or aspire to, at least--on a sunny day in August when the temperature exceeds 100 degrees (38C), I can definitely NOT run six miles. Even if I did it yesterday. But I might do it next week.

I also noticed and was a little bummed about how desperately these three women wanted to please men. They weren't nutty about it (much), but early on they shared their dwindling food supply with a couple of guys who joined them on the trail, even though the guys had adequate supplies of their own. I don't understand what was going through the heads of the guys, but I know well the conflicting feelings in the heads of the women. " I want to nurture. I want to be generous. I don't want to be a stingy bitch." Possibly even, "If I quit putting out the food, he'll leave."  I know the feeling and sometimes share it, but I don't approve of it. Did they learn their lesson later on, when the guys had left and they were running out of food?  Would I?

The human story, both of the author herself and of the interaction between the three friends, dominated the narrative. That's a good thing--but at times I was sorry not to read much description of the trail. Here's one of the few,

We looped down through a diverse forest of mountain hemlock, silver pine, red fir, Jeffrey pine, aspen, white fir, and cottonwood. A purple carpet of lupine swathed the slope with an occasional clump of yellow black-eyed Susans or red Indian paintbrush. The diversity of the forest reminded me of the mystical Sherwood Forest; I expected Robin Hood and Maid Marian to jump out from behind a tree at every turn. ...Though lovely at that time of day, I wouldn't have wanted to hike through there at night. I imagined the dense forest would be downright spooky. Nightfall would turn Maid Marian's playground into Dracula's wilderness.

In retrospect, that passage isn't all that descriptive. But her pages of day-to-day events are so very detailed, I wonder if she didn't spend a third of every day making notes.  I liked that a lot--it felt like being there.

Wish I were. But now I'm going back to work.

From house slave to glamour girl

Revolution at the Table

The Transformation of the American Diet 

by Harvey Levenstein

Gosh! I'd never dreamed of all the history behind our crappy American diet. Except...it wasn't always as crappy as it is now. The book leaves off in the 70's, so it doesn't fully comprehend our fast food and convenience food explosions. It doesn't mention the extremes of over-processing that makes so much of the food in a grocery store not really food at all. It omits how nutritional qualities and flavor were whittled away as industrial agriculture learned to grow things bigger and faster. And it's not able to tackle the issues of weight gain and adult onset diabetes and other diet-related diseases. I assume these things come in the next volume.

But I'm going to have to give it a rest before attempting the sequel, Paradox of Plenty. This one was heavy going--it wasn't a slog, had no more detail than needed, and was very well-written--but I still found it heavy.  (And the print was small)  Mr. Levenstein did his research well, covering 1880 through 1970, and that's a lot of material.

He writes about how prohibition helped shift our idea of eating out from a rich person's or drinking man's prerogative to and activity that can be done by everyone, every day. Shoppers and shop girls, working men and whole families--they all began to enjoy light meals, sandwiches, cold drinks and ice cream at the soda fountains and cafes.  He writes about how the science of Home Economics was created as a career path for women who weren't approved to work in the hard sciences. He shows how diet reform for the working class people was seldom attempted and seldom successful, but the diets did change, eventually, through peer pressure (school lunches; army mess halls) and aspiration to eat like the middle class. There's a chapter The Rise of the Giant Food Producers all about Campbells and Heinz and Schlitz and the triumph of pasteurized milk over fresh. He spends a chapter on the food fads, frauds, and plain old nonsense that abounded at the turn of the century.

Other than the influence of prohibition on eating patterns, I was most surprised to read about the shifting expectations for middle class women, from mistress of servants to homemaker. I don't know what percentage of middle class women employed cooks in the 1800s, but that percentage dropped steadily and drastically--by 1970 it was rare. Without the cooks and servants to direct, the woman was supposed to do it all herself--to be a good cook, an exacting house cleaner, a careful mother, and a thin, beautiful, sexy lady. Wearing stockings and perfectly manicured nails.  Hows that for a self image goal?

I did get weirded out by one factual error. In writing of Mexican laborers diets, he states that...the processing of the corn for masa, which involves soaking it in lime, removes important nutrients as well.  Huh? I have always read that the preparation of corn with lime water increases the nutritional value of the corn meal it produces. Specifically it allows the niacin to be easily absorbed, and although it reduces the overall protein content slightly, it improves the balance of amino acids. As a side effect it adds minerals, especially calcium.  I'm not an expert on this, but the error seemed rather glaring and it made me doubt his other assessments of traditional diets of immigrants against the American diet they adopted.  So I went back and read that chapter; didn't see anything else wrong. In an earlier chapter he'd talked about Italian, Jewish and other immigrants to the cities of the north; her writes how their diets also changed and in some ways, much for the worse. 

Writing all this makes me want to read the sequel now. We'll see.

State of the Garden Report, almost August

Due to missing two weekends in a row on family business, I thought I was going to have to post sad pics of weedy, bug-eaten, tired beans past due for the compost pile. But instead I found







Peppers!


Peppers, and okra of course, love the heat.  Okra can take hot and dry but peppers prefer a little water, and if you keep peppers watered enough, they're only just coming into their own in the hundred degree heats of July.  The ones on the left are tabasco peppers, which Ed is going to smoke and make pepper sauce with. Then I have just plain old "chili peppers", that liven up my curries and also seem to be one of the cats' favorite toys.  If I leave peppers on the counter, they gradually migrate all over the house.  Not a problem--the cats never seem to eat them, and they're easy to spot on the brown carpet.




And tiny little Thai ornamental peppers. I use them to ornament my intestines, via stir-fry.  We also have bananas, Italian frying peppers, and various sweet salad peppers. But they're segregated from the hot ones. It's all about racial purity.







Then I found this tiny guardian of my last sweet fruits in the tomato patch. I'm told that her sisters build huge webs overnight in the walkways, but she's in just the right place.  Love ya!