The Importance of Observation

The problems of the past few days are both symptomatic of the same disease: inattention. I have been too obsessed with other things, like work and the garden, to pay attention to how long that bowl was in the refrigerator or whether I put the plastic windows back in the bird feeder correctly. They were upside-down. There is a groove cut out of one long side so that the bird seed can flow out. I placed the groove up and flat side down when re-inserting the window, thus cutting off the bird seed supply, though the birds could see the seeds. Oh, the cruelty!

Same with the fridge. Husband says I am more sensitive to The Dreadful Odour than he, having sensed it earlier, and still sensing it now, though at a much lower level and only in the freezer. I bought a bunch of lemon-scented disinfectant wipes and wiped down the freezer as much as possible tonight, disposing of all the ice and beans and washing the rank plastic ice bin for the icemaker. Hope it works.

Smelly Fridge III: Revenge of the Smell

Tonight I reheated some green beans and was greeted by the ghastly smell I thought I had removed with several bottles of expired mustards and marinades, and a bad container of "refried" (not really fried, not really DONE, I am still learning beans from scratch) beans, earlier. Winds up that the LID of the refried bean container (glass container, plastic lid) had absorbed the odor, and the butter with which the beans were cooked had, too. Reheat, and WHAM! Nasty. Both were garbage. So were the beans. I went through the fridge and freezer afterward, sniffing all the grains (contaminated, including whole wheat flour, buckwheat flour for pancakes, yummy no more, brown rice, popcorn frozen to kill any surprise insects, muesli, and 12-grain cereal), and dairy products (butter and cream cheese gone- probably milk, too- I did not sniff it). Even some frozen beans were bad. I chucked an entire black lawn-sized garbage bag full of stuff, because I had just opened a new 5 pound bag of flour, and had a lot of cornmeal awaiting transfer to the freezer in the garage. It went to the garage, alright, different receptacle. Plastic containers were history, too, because once they absorb an odor like that, it can be impossible to get out.

Lessons learned:

1. Chalk board needed for fridge. Throw out leftovers after 5 days and everything else WHEN it expires, not 2 years later. Even if it is in a jar and looks fine. Buy what we can use up.

2. Check fridge regularly (like when putting away groceries weekly) for mystery bits at the back.

3. Really old refrigerators may need a Deep Cleaning (take everything out and scrub, maybe flush the drainage system somehow) once in a while.

Home Comforts by Cheryl Mendelson

This is a book every new bride should be given (unless she is given a household staff). I got some spaghetti sauce on a white shirt last week. What woman can eat spaghetti in a white shirt without staining it? I'd like to meet her.

Anyway, I went straight to the bathroom and rinsed the area with cold water. Most of the stain came out. Then I hand-washed the garment with a mild detergent. Only a shadow of the stain remained. I hung the shirt to dry, then washed it today with the other laundry, and the stain is completely gone. In the meantime some rust from an aging bathroom fixture had gotten on the shoulder of the shirt as it was hanging to dry in the bathroom. What to do? Consult Home Comforts. Cheryl advised trying white vinegar. I had some from the summer's canning. Using it at full strength, the rust VANISHED! GONE! AMAZING! Not some high-tech stain removal product, but cheap white distilled vinegar. I rinsed the shirt and threw it in the wash. It will be ready for work next week. Woohoo!

Smelly Fridge II

Didn't work. The disgusting smell remains, and it is getting too cool to keep the windows open at night, so it builds in the kitchen. Husband says it smells like rotten onions, but there are no rotten onions in the house. AARGH!

Smelly Fridge

It is raining today, so all gardening except the nightly Slimer Hunt is suspended. We had an extended power outage a few months ago, and I think it is connected to a Rank Odor that has been emitting from the refrigerator for over a week now. I took out everything that was expired. I removed the veggie drawers and cleaned under them. I sniffed every package in the freezer. It is driving me NUTS! Very disgusting rotting-animal-on-the-riverbank smell. Tonight I will do the shelf-at-a-time, top-to-bottom clean with baking soda and water. Hope it helps. I fear some liquid may have gone down into the drainage system of the fridge when it melted down months ago, and has just reached this level of awful ripeness. I even cleaned the truly disgusting drain pan last night (brown, greasy, crusty-dust, anyone?). I know not what else to do. Oy!

Cleaning Old Wood Floors

This house came with Original Hardwood Floors, according to the realtor. Abused ones that had served as under-carpet flooring for years. People had ripped out the carpeting, painted without covering the floor to protect from spatters, and even waxed dirt into some places. See the before picture here, from a corner between the fireplace and a radiator cover in the living room.

Here is the "after" picture. I took off the paint spatters with sandpaper and a plastic knife, then wiped with a moist rag and re-waxed. It isn't perfect. I need to work on getting the spatters off close to the wall. I did not have the tools to pry an errant staple still sticking out of the floor. But it is better.

Memphis is a Moldy Place

There is mold at work. One cold room is unusable, the refrigerators (and even freezers!) grow black mildew, and we have to maintain constant vigilance to keep it out of the cell culture rooms.

We get mold at home, too. Just last week I had to complete the twice-annual bleaching of the basement floor. After the moisture of the fall and winter/spring rainy seasons, molds and mildew (black and white) start marching across the floor and growing on surfaces. A ten-percent bleach solution in hot water knocks them back until the next rainy season. Today I finished the job by  throwing away a backpack I had stored down there, which was covered with white mold colonies, and cleaning a table on which I had grown various seedlings. On a purple backpack, white spots  are not attractive. 

This is a very humid, fungal city, so if you have a mold allergy, it is probably not a good place to settle. In other ways it can be very nice, especially in our Midtown neighborhood with its picturesque bungalows and cafes, but be prepared to buy bleach frequently. You'll need it.

Napping Without Sweating too Much

This is my Dad as a young man, with my grandfather, in the summer.

We are on our second day of July, AC free. We may not make it through this one, with a forecast high of 94, but we're almost through the hottest part successfully. How do we stay cool?

1. Minimize heat generation. Minimal cooking, no baking or roasting at all, no long-cooking soups unless in a crock pot.

2. Minimal lights on, even at night, especially track lights- you can feel the heat if you stand under them.

3. Turn on a fan. It is too humid here in Memphis for "swamp coolers", involving a fan blowing across a body of water, but the fan itself still does wonders for your perception of temperature. After all, the difference between "warm" and "way too hot" is mostly a matter of perception most days in temperate climates. Don't think so? Place a thermostat in a room full of middle-aged women and walk away.

4. Dress lightly, but do cover up to go outside. The sunshine is not necessarily your friend this time of year, and Grandpa wore long khaki pants, hats, and white shirts for a reason. Natural cotton or linen will wick away the sweat (and cloth like seersucker or Madras cotton does not stick to the skin readily, because of the variations in the weave).

5. Don't get a house with wall-to-wall carpet. Hard-surface flooring is cooler to the touch, and easier to keep genuinely clean. You'd be astonished how many dust bunnies accumulate under the bed that you simply do not SEE on carpet. Nasty. Plus when your feet feel cooler, the rest of your body does, too.

6. Drink a lot of water and tea and lemonade, and accept sweat as a fact of life. Your pores will thank you for giving them something to do.

What Girls Used to Learn in School

This is a picture of one of my great-grandmothers with her two younger sisters. Note the dresses, then look at the picture below from Scientific Sewing and Garment Cutting, copyright 1898 (the youngest sister was born in 1892), by Antoinette Van Hoisen Wakeman and Louise M. Heller.I downloaded the book from Google books. This book describes a sewing program for grades one through eight, in which girls would learn to sew, first by hand, then by machine, including mending rips and patching. By eighth grade, each girl would be able to take a few simple measurements, and using a square and a parallelogram as bases, draft a pattern for a dress in 10 minutes! Modern women talk about being liberated, and being so much better off than their ignorant ancestresses trapped at home, but could your eighth grader design and manufacture any article of clothing from scratch given material, thread, needles, a sewing machine, brown paper, a ruler, a tape measure, a pencil, and pins? 

The description of the work girls did back then makes me feel a bit dumb. I want to work through this book sometime, if only to learn the darning and patching techniques, and how to match plaids. Maybe someday I'll be as smart and capable as my great-grandma was at age 13. We shall see.

15 Minutes Can Change Your Life

At about 4:30 Friday, I was cleaning up after finishing an assay when the sky blackened. Rain poured over the building in sheets. Leaves and trash swirled upward from the construction site below the window. I headed downstairs, despite the lack of any alarm. It was over in a few minutes. The tornado warning alarms sounded for the next half hour. They may have been going during the storm, but we could not hear them indoors.

On the way home, I saw the usual small branches and leaves littering the road. The electricity was out when I got home, but I called the utility company, and the automated service said it would be up in a few hours.

Hours passed. We went for a walk after dinner at the local cafe, which had power. A few blocks south of us, a huge, mature oak had split from the bottom (roots were shallow and black with rot, though the crown was lush and green) and fallen on a thick north-south power line, crushing a utility pole with the transformer and leaving lines in the road. We learned that this had happened all over the city, with winds up to 70 miles per hour, and a tornado suspected in Bartlett. It travelled up Bartlett Boulevard. It hit densely populated areas along the route. Nobody died, and only a few were injured. About 130,000 people were left without electricity. We bought some dry ice and prepared for the worst.

The trucks started coming and going the next day. The neighborhood echoed with chain saws and generators, but was otherwise strangely quiet. The holes for new poles were being drilled by Saturday afternoon. Police cars with spotlights patrolled the neighborhood all night. Wires were up Sunday, but there were other wires down that had to be fixed before they could safely restore our electricity.

The dry ice was gone by Sunday afternoon, and the refrigerator was getting too warm. We went hunting dry ice, but to no avail. We bought regular ice and hustled all remaining salvageable cold goods into the chest freezer in the garage, packing it full so that it would stay cold.

We grilled a dinner of fresh vegetables and thawing chicken in our smoker/grill. We'll eat a lot of chicken and pork chops in the next few days. Fortunately the meat did not thaw completely.

We learned that we are too dependent on the electric company for our basic needs. Freezing as a sole means of food preservation is not good. We lost a LOT of frozen vegetables. We need a battery or crank-operated radio. I'll be canning a lot of strawberry jam in the next few days, as the strawberries thawed, too (but stayed cold). We need to build our emergency supplies. We will.

La Belle Vivre Sans AC May End Soon

Today is most likely the last day in our area with highs below the upper 80s or lower 90s, and a low in the 60s. Those temperatures define my ability to cool the house effectively by "passive" means (opening windows at night, with window fans to encourage air flow) after heating it up by baking or canning, or doing much ironing. I'll be doing all of the above this afternoon and evening, plus running the old dishwasher to sterilize the jars. The kitchen will be HOT by nightfall.

I want to finish my niece's birthday gift so I can send it Monday, finish a pink outfit for me(same thread) I've had in unfinished condition since last year, and try my hand at making blackberry jelly (bought the berries today) and strawberry jam (from berries chopped, sugared, and frozen last week). That should make for a pretty full afternoon, considering that I have gardening and other duties as well. I want to make some cookies for my husband, too. It is difficult to pack a week of homemaking into a few days off on week-ends, especially when they are partial days. But when you know the Heat is coming, things must be done. Cannot bake, starting tomorrow, except in the bread machine. Oy!

First  harvest report tomorrow, with masses and everything! Today I wanted to point out where to go for good recipes.

When you grow your own food, shop at a farmer's market, or join a CSA, suddenly you have lots of veggies to deal with. This is a good thing, but it sometimes necessitates learning new and creative ways to deal with beets or greens. What to do?

1. Your public library is an Awesome Resource. You can check out that book on Italian or French or Indian or Chinese cooking without spending a fortune, only to find out you really don't like that style of cooking very much. Ours is building its vegetarian/ vegetable-based section to a magnificent thing.

2. Blogs galore exist with recipes for every cooking style imaginable. Here are some cool ones:

http://simplyrecipes.com/

http://www.101cookbooks.com/

http://cheaphealthygood.blogspot.com/

These are a tiny sampling of the ones I have bookmarked- family style, Californian, and New Yorker. You can find Indian cooking videos from Manjula's kitchen on You-tube (these are especially helpful, because a lot of Indian cooking is passed mother to daughter, and thus is difficult to get from a written book), and even blended styles in some blogs. 

3. Do not discount the farmer's groups (Northwest Cherries, Sweet Bytes (for sweet potatoes),  The Mushroom Channel, Pulse Canada), which often post recipes to encourage people to purchase their food. I hate to call food a "farm product", though it is, simply because I consider that an inadequate description. Food is ideally something grown with care, nurtured through spring floods, bug onslaughts, and summer droughts, and finally brought to the table in triumph and joy. This beauty a "farm product"? I think not. Go fishing online- you might come up with something good.

Preparing for Summer Food Preservation

How to do it if you are a novice? The USDA and the state/county agricultural extension offices offer the newest, scientifically-based information on how to can, dry, or freeze food. DO NOT go with the 100-year-old books here. They did not know about all the germs we know about now, or how hard some of them are to kill. Here are some trustworthy Internet sites:

http://www.uga.edu/nchfp/ is the National Center for Home Food Preservation at the University of Georgia. They even offer a free, self-paced online course about food preservation. Good stuff.

http://aces.nmsu.edu/pubs/_e/ is another good one. New Mexico State University has a more Southwestern flair, with information about canning green chilies and salsas.

http://foodsafety.cas.psu.edu/lets_preserve.html has information about snap beans, sweet corn, and fruit from Penn State.

Even the canner companies, Presto and Mirro, and the jar companies (Ball has the Famous Blue Book) offer information on their websites. You might want to buy the blue book or another NEW book to guide you, but these free resources really have all the information you need. 

Then you need the appropriate canner(s), jars (recycling those mayo jars will NOT do, especially for pressure canning- keep your couscous away from the bugs in those jars by all means, but don't try to form a vacuum seal except on the thick-walled home canning jars), and new lids with clean rings. Cooling racks and jar tongs and a wide-mouth funnel are also nice.

For freezing, you need containers (freezer bags are fine for a few months, bowls with the appropriate head space for longer). For everything, you need good knives, a cutting board, and ways to wash and sterilize things. I haven't dried anything yet, so I don't know about that- though I may be drying some herbs this summer. Have fun!

Mending

I have let the mending pile up so that I really NEED to spend an hour or so reattaching straps, patching skirts, re-elasticizing waistbands, etc. Maybe a day instead of an hour. But I'll give it an hour and see what I can do.

I stopped by a store here in Memphis a few years ago that is no longer in business. It sold very pretty clothes, unfortunately shoddily made. They were not designed to last a year. The poor souls condemned to make those clothes must have been paid by the piece, and that poorly. Hems were ragged, embroidery was not knotted off (dangling threads), and seams ripped out when the garments were washed. I'm grimly forcing the sturdier of the two skirts to last by stitching up the holes as they occur and re-elasticizing the waist with some more lasting elastic. One beautiful skirt will go ragbagging, simply because large amounts of seam ripped out badly this time. Lesson learned: unless you want to be a good little consumer and buy a new, uglier, more expensive, more shoddily made wardrobe every year, buy sturdy stuff or make your own. I have a collection of older patterns to which I'm turning more and more; even the new patterns fit poorly, have awful necklines, and look nothing like they do on the package when finished.

We all need to tell the fashion designers out there what we want: T-shirts you can't see through (yes, even white ones!! PLEASE!), jeans that actually fit (I'll "distress" them myself by years of wear), shirts that button all the way up, seams that do not rip out, buttons that stay on, and lines that do not make me look like I'm wearing a recyclable bag (on one hand)or lingerie (on the other) in public. Until then I'll be wearing my 20-year old skirts and jumpers and stitching up my newer stuff. Aargh.

Strawberry Season

Today I am slicing and freezing strawberries. It is really easy. You can wash, drain, and freeze the slices (whole small ones can be frozen, but large ones should really be sliced so the freezing is uniform, and you can get them into bags or boxes fast afterward). You can also sugar-pack them in 2/3 or 3/4 cup of sugar for every quart of strawberries. That creates a nice, self-generated sauce for ice cream or shortcake... YUM! The orchard people were selling 8 quarts in a flat for $20. Considering that the quarts are very full, which means roughly 1 1/3 to 1 1/2 pounds of berries per quart, it was cheaper to buy a flat than to go to the U-pick-em site at $1.89/lb. 

No pictures today, but you can download a Powerpoint presentation from www.uga.edu/nchfp/multimedia/slide_shows/freezing_strawberries.ppt . Educational institutions and the USDA are the go-to points for learning how to preserve food safely. 

I hope to take out some of the sugar-packed ones later, for use in preserves when the appropriate eye of my stove is repaired. Woo hoo!

Bones of My Ancestors

This is the Oliver family. William James Oliver, seated in front, was a veteran of the Civil War. Nancy Jane Thurman was his wife. Granny's mother is standing in the back row behind William. You can see that tall-and-skinny goes back in our family a long way on this side.

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I am a Keeper of Memories for my branch of my family. That means that I keep old pictures, interviews, and stories, and try to expand what is known about my ancestral lines as I get time. Previous generations have been generous enough to share their wealth of stories and precious photographs (please, please, please label those for the future, in hard copies, archival quality- you never know what great-grand-cendents of yours will want to know about that wacky summer in France), so I try to save what I can for my brother's children. Looking through the old photos and postcards and newspaper clippings, I can step back in time to a different world. It was a world of much less material wealth, but much closer interpersonal relationships. A world where agricultural time ruled (milking, planting, harvesting, hog-killing, etc.), but everyone knew everyone, and neighbors were there to help if anything went wrong.

I live a few hours away from their stomping grounds now, and miss the hills of home pretty severely sometimes. It helps a bit to go back through the old stories, and stare into the eyes of the stern old men in the photographs, to remedy the lies told in revisionist histories ("they only lived to be 40 years old in the days before modern medicine..." "the Civil War was a regimented affair- we've never seen roving mobs in America..." " we are so much more intelligent/evolved than our ancestors were... the tests tell us so...") with the truth of the actual records in newspaper and copied microfilm and photograph and old family tale. 

If you have no Memory Keeper, and your elder members are aging, start now before it is too late! Interview! Get copies of pictures and newspaper clippings! Collect the arcane memorabilia of the past! You'll cherish it when they are on the other side. 

Rediscovering "Peasant Food"

If you go back far enough, your ancestors probably lived on pretty simple fare- beans, grains, vegetables, fruit, and whatever meat could be had and cured. The meat may have been common or rare, depending on their circumstances. The diet of the very wealthy- white flour, abundant meats and fats, and plenty of sweets- has become our everyday fare now in America, but it hasn't been that way for very long.

All the nutritional research in the world seems to indicate that Daniel and his friends were right, that a "peasant diet" in which vegetables and whole grains predominate is much better for health than the rich fare of the king's table. It doesn't require a nutrition degree, or a pantry full of rare and expensive ingredients, to cook like they did. Dried beans, brown rice, and some veggie seeds (or frozen vegetables or a big head of cabbage and a bag of potatoes) are dirt cheap. Add a few herbs in pots, and a bit of meat to flavor the pot (or not), and you've got it. It's not elitist, or racist, or any other form of "-ist" a partisan would try to bring to the discussion. 

A hunk of cornbread and a bowl of soup on a cool and rainy day can be beautiful. 

Once in a while you have to rhapsodize about lunch.

The Thursday Question

The weather here in Memphis stayed in the mid-to-upper 30s with rain, Thank God. We'll uncover everything tomorrow, when temps are definitely going up again into the 40s. I hope the orchards and farms to the north are OK, too.

Since we've been married, I've done the grocery shopping on Friday night on the way home from work or on Saturday morning early, when the farmer's market is open. So Thursday is the Compile a Menu night- examine the weekly ads, examine the pantry, Ask the Question (Do you want anything specific to eat next week?), and make the list. Sometimes I am inspired by an online recipe or a book from the library to make a particular dish. At other times I use dishes we both like (minestrone, vegetarian chili, roast chicken and vegetables followed by Other Chicken Dishes, oven-baked cereal-encrusted catfish, etc.) and pull from the "standards".  It is our routine, and it works to keep things simple and predictable.

Home Sick

Today I'm home convalescing instead of exposing people at church to the malaise going around at work. On the couch, in sweats, wanting to make a soothing, non-acidic soup to get past my right tonsil, yet wanting to stay on the couch. No talking today, which  can be tough for a female. Box of Kleenex and herbal tea and laptop and me. It's actually good to let yourself be sick once in a while, to slow down and appreciate breathing for the gift it is. Must make the soup, though. the bad thing about always cooking from scratch is that you always have to cook. The canned stuff just won't work after a while. I'll just scrub up and boil some potatoes with onions and garlic and herbs and add soup veggies. Back to the gardening tomorrow.

G.W. Carver Bulletin 32-Meals For Farmers

The posts for the next few days will be from this bulletin. Wisdom if ever I read any!

This bulletin, entitled"Three Delicious Meals Every Day for the Farmer", was written in 1916. It appears to be public domain, so I'll quote it freely.

As we learn more about ourselves, and the relation of food to our well-being, we cannot but agree with those who have made it a study that "the prosperity of the nation depends on the health and morals of its citizens, and the health and morals of a people depend mainly upon the food they eat, and the houses in which they live. As a rule we are wasteful; we do not know how to save. Ignorance in the kitchen is one of the worst curses that ever afflicted humanity, and is directly or indirectly responsible for more deaths than all the armies combined.

He goes on to talk specifically about bad selection of food (not having nutrients to build a body or keep it healthy), bad combinations of food (creating a body "un-nourished and overstimulated"), and bad food preparation (he says 75% of those entrusted with it were deficient- in 1916!). This bulletin could be sent out today, and it would be timely. I would add more veggies to his rotation of meal plans, but as a plan for a one-horse farmer, he has very good ideas.