Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving. My favorite holiday. It’s all about the food. I was up early to start the preparation. I wanted to start the pie crust, but I use the food processor, which would have woken Terry for sure. I dug the cranberries out of the freezer and put them in a saucepan with a cup of sugar and a bit of water to keep them from burning. I turned the heat on low and turned my attention to the mise en place for the pie crust.

I cooked the cranberries just until they popped and put them in a serving bowl to chill. Cranberries, check.

Cranberry sauce

Terry was up at 6:15. The pie crust was done and resting in the freezer by 6:45. After mixing the pumpkin (Well, okay, it was really butternut squash. No one was the wiser.) I took a breakfast break until it was time to roll the crust at 7:15. The pie was done by 8:30. Check.

Pumpkin pie

While the pie baked, I got the turkey ready. A week ago, I had started defrosting the third of the three turkeys we raised last year. This was the smallest of the three, weighing in at a mere 20.5 pounds. That should be enough to serve 5. I used the same recipe I used in September, which bakes the bird in a bag. To make a flavorful gravy, I put chopped carrots, celery, and onions in the roasting pan with chicken stock and wine. I put on my coat and went to the herb bed to get three sprigs of thyme. The chickens ran out to greet me, but I had forgotten the carrot peels.

I hung up my coat and put the thyme in the roasting dish. I read the recipe again. I put my coat back on and went to the herb bed to get one sprig of rosemary. I remembered to take the carrot peels for the girls. They were not so excited to see me a second time, but they came a-running when I called and threw their Thanksgiving treats in the run.

I hoped to get the turkey in the oven by 9:00. I was 20 minutes late. I made the stuffing next. Where had the morning gone? I had just enough time to exercise and take a shower before the turkey was done.

I had the same issue I had last time. The breast and legs were done before the thighs. I pulled it out of the oven, covered it with foil, and got to work on the gravy. Will I ever learn to read the recipe all the way through? Probably not. I had skimmed to find out how long the turkey had to cook, which was 3 ¼ hours. Now I noticed that it was supposed to rest for an hour. Lunch was supposed to be at 1:00. I had 15 minutes.

The last of the turkeys we raised

When Jane arrived, I put her to work stirring the gravy so I could carve the breast, wings, and legs. My plan was to put the back and thighs back on the rack in into the roasting pan to finish cooking. I forgot my plan and filled the roasting pan with soapy water. Then I remembered my plan. New plan: I will wash the roaster and then put the back in it to roast. It turned out that Terry offered to help and took on the washing of the roasting pan. I put the turkey in Hilda’s oven upstairs so we could keep an eye on it while we ate.

Lunch was late, but it was worth the wait. Hilda made mashed potatoes and a casserole of finely chopped broccoli and cauliflower with cheese and bread crumbs.

We took a break from eating to play 5 rounds of Mexican Train. Hilda made coffee. We ate the pie with freshly whipped cream. I floated some whipped cream in my coffee too. Hey, it’s Thanksgiving.

Jane left at 4:00 so she would only have to drive halfway in the dark. I picked the rest of the meat off the turkey carcass and put the bones in the slow cooker to simmer overnight. I washed the pans and serving tray and loaded up the dishwasher for the second time.

I am now comfortably in my chair, filled with the satisfaction that comes from taking uncooked food from the refrigerator, making it into delicious things to eat, eating too much, and putting the leftovers back in the refrigerator. A perfect day.

Wild yeasts

Homo naledi ate dirt. A study summarized in Science News (9/16/17) examined the 300,000-year-old (plus or minus 35,000 years) teeth of this South African hominid and found an unusual amount of chipping. The damage, the researchers suggested, was consistent with eating nuts, seeds, and grit-covered roots and tubers.

This was one of those news tidbits that captured my imagination. H. naledi dug food out of the ground and ate it. And why wouldn’t they? In parts of South Africa, they would be hard pressed to find enough water to drink, let alone wash their food. What fascinated me was the thought that somewhere along the line in human evolution, someone said, “Hey! Let’s take these tubers to the river and rinse off the grit!” Someone had to invent food washing.

Someone invented cooking. Much later, there was farming. Grains would have been cooked whole at first, until someone got the idea of crushing them with stones. I imagine there was not a whole lot of intentionality in these developments. Certainly folklore suggests many happy accidents. The milk stored in a calf’s stomach changed to cheese. The cheese forgotten in a cave changed to Roquefort. The food may have been considered spoiled, but it was eaten anyway. There may have been nothing else.

Flour mixed with water and left out started to ferment. It got baked anyway because there was no food to waste. The bread was no longer flat! It could be that the first person to try it said, “Man! This bread tastes just like an old, wet dog!”

I am, of course, building up to my own recent experiment with sourdough. As the recipe promised, the smell did improve. A few days after the old, wet dog smell, the starter underwent the transformation described in the directions. It doubled in volume rapidly and took on a boozy, vinegary odor.

Starter, Wednesday evening

Starter, Thursday evening

Close up of the air pockets in the bubbly starter

 I was not the only one to notice. One morning, there were two fruit flies under the plastic wrap. Fruit flies? In November? Where did they come from? This is the sort of thing that made people believe in spontaneous generation.

The starter seemed ready to go by Sunday. There is nothing fast about sourdough. First, the starter has to be fed and sit at room temperature for 5 hours. Then it has to be refrigerated for 12 hours. The starter is thinned with water and mixed with flour and salt. And it sits for 12 hours longer. Due to a math error, the starter was due to be made into dough at 1:00 Monday morning. Oh well. These days, I’m up anyhow. I measured everything before I went to bed so I could throw it together quickly and get back to sleep.

When I got home from work Monday afternoon, I punched it down and put it in a parchment-lined Dutch oven for the final rise. It smelled unpleasantly sour, and I feared my two weeks of effort was a bust. Still, like my ancient ancestors, I pressed on, not wanting to waste. I often make a similar recipe in which I do the final rise in a linen towel and tip it into a pre-heated Dutch oven. This time, the cold dough and Dutch oven go into the cold oven, and everything heats up together. I was skeptical, but it came out great. It tasted good too! It was only mildly sour, and had a great chewy texture.

The final product--the white spots are flour

 I’m sold! I will keep my wild yeasts and lactobacilli, feeding them every week. Maybe I can find some other things to make with it. 

Here we are at Thanksgiving already. As we gather at the table, we are thankful for good food, good company, and good wine. This year, I’m going to remember to be thankful that I don’t have to eat dirt.

Reine de Saba

What a dreary day it has been. It started with drizzle, which changed to snow about 9:30. The first snowfall is always cool, of course. It even stuck for a while on the garden and the trunk of the fifth oak. The snow stopped and melted. Fog came in under a uniformly gray sky. It feels much like winter. At 5:15, it is pitch dark.

The pullets have FINALLY started to lay. Such cute little pullet eggs! I thought the event was much later than last year, but in the middle of the week, a picture of a pullet egg popped up as a Facebook memory from a year ago. Apparently I thought it would never happen last year either.

The first pullet egg next to a hen egg.

Not only are the pullet eggs cute as a bug’s ear, they are also more intensely colored. I don’t know why the color fades over time. The Black Star eggs are a beautiful chestnut brown.

Three pullet eggs and three hen eggs

I’ve been battling the winter blues as the weather has gotten cold and damp and the days shorten. I needed a project. There are no tadpoles available this time of year, so I thought I’d try my hand raising wild yeast. I saw it on America’s Test Kitchen and downloaded the instructions. Last Saturday, I mixed all-purpose flour, whole wheat flour, and water, covered it with plastic wrap and let it sit. The next morning (16 hours), it looked like this.

Wild sourdough starter at 16 hours

Monday morning, it was getting even more bubbly.

At 36 hours

By Monday night, it seemed like it was time to feed it. The black spots on top were a little concerning. I stirred it up, removed 2 ounces to a clean bowl, added 2 ounces of water, and 2.5 ounces of the flour/whole wheat flour mix.

At 48 hours, blubbly and with suspicious blackish patches on top

Every day, I repeat the feeding steps. It looks like this right after the feeding.

Starter right after feeding

And it looks like this the next day.

Starter after 24 hours

Right now it smells exactly like an old, wet dog. I am not certain that this experiment will be successful, but the folks at ATK said that it smells “funky” at first but after two weeks will begin to smell more like normal yeasty bread dough. The idea is that the desirable yeasts and bacteria out compete the stinky ones. We’ll see.
In a more successful experiment, I tried one of Julia Child’s recipes from The French Chef. It was called Reine de Saba (Queen of Sheba) and was subtitled “chocolate, rum, and almond cake.” I found an 8” cake pan, which I buttered and floured. I also put parchment paper on the bottom even though the recipe didn’t say to. Nobody knew about parchment paper in 1968. I wanted to be sure the cake would come out of the pan.

Then I had a problem. One part of the cake involved creaming butter and sugar. Another part was beating egg whites. I have but one hand mixer. One stick of butter would be lost in the bowl of my stand mixer. If you have experience with egg white beating, you know that the bowl and beaters must not have any trace of fat or the eggs will not develop the proper structure. To use the hand mixer for both would require a thorough cleaning of the beaters in between. I hate washing beaters, especially with the pressure of removing every molecule of butter.  Julia said you could cream the butter and sugar with a wooden spoon. I didn’t believe it, but I knew she did her research. I tried it. I soon had balls of sugar-coated butter. I changed tactics, mashing the butter into the sugar with the back of the spoon. That went better. Quite suddenly, as if by magic, it all came together and was easy to stir vigorously. Julia was right!

From there, it was simple to add the melted chocolate, rum, ground almonds, almond extract, egg yolks, and all-purpose flour (It was supposed to be cake flour, but I keep four kinds of flour in stock at all times, and I have to draw the line somewhere. )

The recipe called for adding cream of tartar to the egg whites to stabilize them. To my amazement, I had cream of tartar on hand. I can’t imagine why, but it was a pleasant surprise. I got the egg whites to shiny white peaks and folded them into the rest of the cake. Into the oven.

After letting the cake cool for two hours, I made the glaçage au chocolat (chocolate-butter icing). Really it was more of a ganache, but nobody knew about ganache in 1968. I melted 1/2 cup semisweet chocolate chips with 1.5 tablespoons dark rum. I beat in 6 tablespoons of softened butter one at a time until it was perfectly smooth. Best. Icing. Ever. The cake was good, too! It reminded me of Europe.

Reine de Saba

10th Green Living Expo

Saturday was the 10^th Green Living Expo at MCC. Pat and I have done vendor check in at the crack of dawn for several years now. We’re a good team because we are not only good buddies but also outdoorsy types who know how to dress for the weather. One time I had to bundle up in coveralls and pack boots. Last year, we were practically in shirt sleeves. At 5:00 Saturday morning, I heard rain on the window well cover. Shoot. The radar looked like we were in for wet conditions at least all morning. The temperature was in the mid-40’s, too cold for my waxed cotton coat. I thought that my winter coat was fairly waterproof. I also put on my new Gander Mountain rain pants, wool socks, and my Big Lady winter boots, which are warmer than my Wellies.

Kim, our Sustainability Director, took this picture of us at 7:50 (the clock was conveniently in the background) when we were still dry but about to take our post.

Pat and me ready to take our post outside

Our job was to stop the vendors, give them a packet that included a map to where their table was, point to the door where they were to unload, and ask them to please move their car as soon as possible to the parking area so others could unload. We set up a tent so we would have some shelter from the rain, there was too much wind to put the tent where it could be seen from the road. I watched the entrance road for potential vendors and left the shelter of the tent to hold the vendor check-in sign where they could see me as they drove in. The rain, blown horizontal by the wind, hit me in the face. I stopped the car (sometimes with vigorous flagging down) and shouted the company name to Pat, who located the packet while I pointed out the doors. Then we cheerfully thanked them for coming and hoped that they had a great day.

My coat was not as waterproof as I thought, but I made it through the two hours of check-ins without it soaking through. The rain pants were definitely a good decision. The only point of weakness was my mittens, which were more absorbent than repellant. When it got too hard to get them on and off as needed, I left them off.

We still had a bunch of envelopes left at 10:00. Leslie, another volunteer, went through them and found several who had slipped by us. We figured anyone who had missed the check-in window would just have to get their packet inside. We’d had enough. I went back to my office to take off my coat, boots, and rain pants and put on my shoes. Pat did the same in a room near the Expo. We joined Nancy, who had been hanging around all morning waiting for Pat to get done, and proceeded to the Expo.

New this year was the Artist Walk. These tables in the hall were less expensive than the vendor tables in the gym to attract people who repurposed materials as hobbies rather than businesses. One of our colleagues signed up for a table to sell pillows made from old quilts. Another co-worker was selling nature photographs. There were also a couple of women who made jewelry from old buttons, golf tees, and other small things. There was also a table of ceramics. I wasn’t sure what the sustainable angle of that was, but the bowls and plates were lovely. I was impressed with the quality and creativity of the objects for sale.

The Artist Walk

We were just getting started in the gym, when here comes Hilda. She was nearly done and headed home. After hugs all around, she went on her way. After we did the circuit, Nancy went back to the soap vendor to pick out three bars at $8.00 each. It was her birthday splurge. I am not much into smelly soaps, but some of these smelled quite good.

Nancy picks out soap

In the course of conversation, I mentioned that I planned to buy lunch at the Expo. Pat immediately invited me to join them for Nancy’s birthday lunch at BBQ King in Woodstock. Pat had a $30 gift card, and a third person would be just about right to spend that much. They were going to go to a kitchen shop in Crystal Lake before lunch. I told them to go ahead. I hadn’t see the tiny house yet, and I can always find things to do in my office. They could text me when they were headed to lunch.

I put my coat back on and went out to the tiny house. It was still raining, but the tiny house was getting a steady stream of visitors. The Green Living Expo had an unfinished tiny house with a loft two years ago. Last year, the tiny house didn’t make it because of a broken trailer hitch. That was a bummer because we’d done a good deal of promotion based on the tiny house, and there were people that came to the Expo for no other reason. This year’s tiny house was completely decorated. I liked all the windows. Tiny houses are so cute. I might be able to live in one by myself. More often, I think I would like one as a writer’s studio/guest house. Probably I will never get one.

Tiny house

This is the tiny bathroom. The toilet has a bag to collect the equivalent of 25 flushes (or thereabout). The bag then needs to go to a high-temperature compost facility. It has a full bath with shower.

The tiny bathroom

This is the tiny kitchen. A fold down table is opposite the sink/stove/refrigerator.

Tiny kitchen

And here is the bed and TV. I would not have a TV in my tiny house.

Tiny bedroom

I went to my office to wait for Pat’s text. I still had some trouble getting my cold hand to work as I fumbled with my key. I checked my email and did a little work before I got the message that they were on their way.

 We had a fun lunch. When I got home, I wanted nothing more than a nice cup of hot tea. That segued nicely to a little nap. Even though I’d been dressed appropriately, I was exhausted from spending that much time being pelted with cold rain.

When I lay down to sleep last night, I stretched out between the flannel sheets under the quilts. I am not always present in the moment, but right then, I could only think, “I am warm. I am dry. I am out of the wind.” It was a great feeling.