It was good, though, much better than my previous effort which lacked bonito.
I followed the ingredient list pretty near religiously, omitting only the saffron which costs $15 for a tiny bottle because it's a spice obtained from the stamens of a flower! How precious is that?
Not Without My Daughter
Marvelous! and I didn't even have real Dashi. Her recipe for Dashi calls for a 4x4 sheet of kombu and 4 cups of bonito flakes for 4-1/2 cups water, but the stir-fry only uses 1/4 cup of this seasoning. Since I couldn't find kombu or bonito flakes at the Asian market, I substituted a little Atlantic kelp simmered in water.
The appearance and smell are delightful and the first bite makes my tapeworm sing.
As the Israeli historian Yuval Harari observes, the bodies of Homo sapiens were adapted to running after game, not to clearing land and plowing fields. Surveys of ancient human skeletons show just how brutal the transition to agriculture was. Farmers were more susceptible than hunters to anemia and vitamin deficiency. The caught more infectious diseases and died younger. They had worse teeth and more broken bones. ...in the first few thousand years of the Neolithic Revolution, humans lost an average of six inches in height, largely as a result of their inadequate diet.So why did they do it? An old theory says that climate changes at the end of the last ice age (11,700 years ago) forced humans to learn to farm and herd. But the change in climate was slow, while the human transition appears to have occurred quickly. Other old theories suggest that population pressure or over hunting forced mankind to devise alternate sources for food. But the archeological record supports none of these hypotheses.
The trouble with most of these theories is that they are based on the widely held assumption that agriculture came first, and permanent settlement followed as a result.... However, the discovery of Gobekli Tepe and other ancient sites built by hunter-gatherers across the Levant has turned this idea on its head. We now know that permanent settlements came first, and then, many years later, farming arose.The archeological site at Gobekli Tepe, north of Urfa in Turkey, reveals the earliest religious temple we know of, built sometime between 12,500 to 10,000 BCE. It predates agriculture, the domestication of animals, Stonehenge, the pyramids, even the invention of the wheel. Semi-nomadic Stone Age hunter-gatherers wearing animal skins carried and carved limestone pillars on the top of a hill, with no nearby water sources and no nearby settlements. Some of the pillars are thought to represent stylized human figures; they are often covered with carvings of predatory animals. It appears to have been a sacred place exclusively for the performance of religious ceremonies.
Some of the first evidence for plant domestication comes from Nevali Çori (pronounced nuh-vah-LUH CHO-ree), a settlement in the mountains scarcely 20 miles away. Like Göbekli Tepe, Nevali Çori came into existence right after the mini ice age, a time archaeologists describe with the unlovely term Pre-pottery Neolithic (PPN). Nevali Çori is now inundated by a recently created lake that provides electricity and irrigation water for the region. But before the waters shut down research, archaeologists found T-shaped pillars and animal images much like those Schmidt would later uncover at Göbekli Tepe. Similar pillars and images occurred in PPN settlements up to a hundred miles from Göbekli Tepe.I'm not really competent to speak to the author's scholarship or the strength of his theories, but I will note that his writing is cautious and his bibliography is extensive and detailed. This book isn't the final word--and I'm sure he would agree with that--on the matter. But it's got a lot to say.
The garden looks like dirt. Disturbed dirt. Don't be fooled by those scraps of green--those are pieces of Sprite boxes I was using for make a walkway between the beds. Before I started working, there was a good bit of green. Note: Hairy Vetch makes a GREAT green manure. It literally grew all winter. I should have turned it over sooner, to give it more time to rot back into the soil.
The Forest UnseenOne thing was evident: these animals were adorable.On further reflection, he writes:
My zoological self was immediately embarrassed by these thoughts. Naturalists are meant to have outgrown such judgements...I try to see animals for what they are, independent beings, not as projections of desires leaping unbidden from my psyche.
Perhaps I should not have felt so embarrassed at my immediate and strong attraction. What I interpreted as the humiliation of my pretentions as a zoological sophisticate was in fact an education in my own animal nature. Homo sapiens is a face-reading species.He's right, of course. Humans react to faces, especially those that look like ours. To deny our place in nature is to deny our humanity. Earlier in the book he observes,
To love nature and to hate humanity is illogical. Humanity is part of the whole. To truly love the world is also to love human ingenuity and playfulness. Nature does not need to be cleansed of human artifacts to be beautiful or coherent. Yes, we should be less greedy, untidy, wasteful and shortsighted. But let us not turn responsibility into self-hatred. Our biggest failing is, after all, last of compassion for the world. Including ourselves.Not to say that very much of this absolutely adorable book is taken up with philosophical observations. He's as likely to detail the history of a snail as to lecture about humanity. But it's all great fun--this guy can describe the different approaches used by trees in transporting water against gravity and make it sound like a hot gossip item.
Saint AnythingMs. Dessen writes well and I was a little reminded of her other book, Just Listen, in a good way. This is by no means a carbon copy, but it again deals with the themes of speaking out and making yourself into the person you want to be, even if that means you have to disappoint your parents. Be brave; make noise; grow up.But I'm beginning to over analyze, and that's not fair to the book. It's fast and fun and even a little scary; as a young person I would have empathized completely, recognized myself, cried and screamed and smiled and gone a little giddy at the mushy stuff.
Mostly, they like fast-flowing streams with plenty of rocks, because they are odd little birds, like big fat wrens, except they have the unnerving habit of flying straight into waterfalls. And if you go to the right sort of stream, you are almost certain to see a dipper, and if you walk along it for a way, you will see several. [...] Find your stream, and you have found your dipper.I guess I knew these things before, but I appreciate the memory jog. (Jab? Jag?)
I used to wonder why I never saw a nightjar. Field guides tend not to overcommit themselves, for the very good reason that birds often turn up in unlikely places. Any open country, you can read, is good enough for the nightjar. True; but you are highly unlikely to see them unless you go to the right sort of open country, the sort of open country that nightjars like very much indeed.
Gardening has officially begun! The seeds are out of storage; the planting plan is in work; and the first purchase has been made. It's not a very exciting purchase to anyone but me, but it's one I really wanted last year--seed starting lights and the hardware to make a frame for them.
I once met a well-known writer in an airport; he recognized me and immediately struck up a conversation about his favorite subject, himself. Though a jerk, an asshole, and a bore, he was, and he continued to be, an excellent writer; but from then on, I avoided reviewing him. I couldn't forgive the books what I knew about their author.This is not what the book is about, but I read it and agreed instantly. I had a similar experience--an author I used to love and would define as one of my favorites, who seemed to sour in his old age. He became so persnickety and anti-social that I could hardly finish one of his later books; then when I read a biography of him, I knew too much. I don't think I'll ever want to re-reread any of his books I used to enjoy.
Looking back on my twenty years in the capital I now realized that [...] there was a more basic need that kept forcing me to drive away: the small eastern sky. Washington has sky, of course, but it doesn't have nearly enough to still my yearning for the plains. [...]there were many times when, Huck Finn-like, I simply lit out for the territory, to the place where the sky swelled out.Toward the end of the book he has some interesting observations on why we drive. For me, they'd apply equally to why I walk or why I jog:
Being alone in a car is to be protected for a time from the pressures of day-to-day life; it's like being in one's own time machine, in which the mind can rove ahead to the future or scan the past. When I'm about to start a novel I've always found that driving across the country for a few hundred miles is a good way to get ready. I may not be forming scenes or thinking about characters--indeed, may not be thinking of much of anything on these drives. but I'm getting ready, all the same.
Thirty miles west of Albuquerque the 40 seems to rise into air, and it seems fitting that it should do this, for the sky here is so vast that it could subsume all things.
