a little red hen

Is this any way to bake bread?

Yes.  If one is challenged to fit two loaves into a 19.5 inch oven.  And if you have very good eyesight and turn your head slightly to the right, it's possible to note that the oven thermometer registers about 355 degrees.  Effort was made to reach 475 but opening the door may have altered that--or not.

In spite of it all, two delicious loaves were produced from another new recipe, Sourdough Whole Wheat and Rye with Seeds.  Two years, almost to the day, Ron and I went to a class at Bob's Red Mill.  Our teacher was Alan Maniscalco who had partnered with Ken Forkish to begin Ken's Artisan Bakery which then expanded to Ken's Pizza with Alan in charge.

We had returned from another great trip to California.   It was starter-refresh time. Decided to branch out, develop a new rye starter from my white one.   Having two starters in the fridge takes me back to the days in my large Baltimore kitchen with its commodious regular stove whose size I never thought about.  Ah, the past and things one took for granted.

What particularly intrigued me on Alan's recipe was the soaker (link to The Fresh Loaf site and useful explanation).  Mine contained:

pumpernickel flour, sunflower seeds, flaxseeds, and water.

Similar approach--Chad Robertson's adaptation of a recipe from his book, Tartine Bread.  More memories of last year's visit to Tartine in San Francisco. "Flour Water Salt Yeast" is title of Ken's new cookbook.  Only just discovered his series of videos--very useful.  I now know why his breads are so dark.

His kitchen very nice; I should get friendly.  Thinking I might try using two small Dutch ovens--if I can find them.  Might solve small oven issue.  

California?  The Redwoods this time to meet up with granddaughter Roxie and her parents.  More soon.   

Related articles

Loaf 1: scalded rye from Lithuania

Bread Baking 3: Baking the Bread!

Types of Rye Bread

Review: Bob's Red Mill Gluten Free "Wonderful" Bread

Bees, You and Me...Earth Week 2013

 

Bill McKibben narrates a short, mellow video, "Dance of the Honey Bees."  Planning an evening program for my retirement community about what's happening with bees, my search for resources turned this up on a Bill Moyers show.  Sadly it ends with the dark side about honey bee demise.  The link is from TruthOut, with transcript included along with a pledge you can sign to let Bayer (aspirin company) know you want them to stop killing bees. 

Recently a number of scientists have identified neonicotinoids, a pesticide produced by Bayer, as the major culprit.  Meanwhile, EFSA ( European food safety watchdog) has identified neonicotinoids as "an acute risk to honeybee health" but not to colony collapse.  Bayer and Syngenta, major producers of the pesticide, have suggested their own plan to avoid the ban of the product that many are demanding.

Environmental groups in England and some other European countries appear more public in their demand for a ban than those in the U.S.  In the past week, England has rebuffed this concern.  Since Bayer is a German company, there is more interest in protecting it as an important player in the economy.

In this country the XL pipleline and fracking currently take front and center in the media.  Speaking for the bees, the voices we hear in the U.S. are largely beekeepers and farmers and there are many in Oregon.  Tom Foster, a neighbor of mine, had bee hives, sold honey before he moved here.

 

We're working on a program for June.  Following his own deep history with bees--his father and grandfather were also beekeepers in the Northwest--we'll show a 20-minute excerpt from "Vanishing of the Bees."  We hope to stimulate bee-connected interests among our members to buy local honey, maybe consider a bee hive on the roof of our building (where we grow tomatoes).  Or, more modestly, borrow my copy of Foodopoly by the Wenoah Hauter, Exec Director of Food & Water Watch.

This informative and engaging 90-minute documentary, produced in the U.K., will be shown in Albuquerque, New Mexico in the next week.  For a delightful, funkier take, an American one, try "Queen of the Sun."  I'm hoping to find others as fascinated by bees as myself, an urban person moved to think more about the earth since connecting with a backyard in mid-20th century Baltimore.

Chris Hayes: what was that on your table?

Having moved his desk at MSNBC from his weekend UP show to the daily ALL IN, Chris Hayes appears to have settled in quickly.  And told his audience that working weekday evenings is preferable to 8 a.m. (ESTt) on Saturdays and Sundays.  

My concern was that his excellent format of three to four guest would change to one more like Rachel Maddow's show.  Now I am a fan of Rachel also; the link is to her blog.

What Chris does in a very special way for me personally is fill a space for intelligent conversation among informed people--often with a person who is not of the progressive persuasion.  The "space" is one my spouse and I often discuss: most of our social interactions are pretty light.

Happily, Chris  has successfully retained his design from one many of his viewers appreciated and I think contributed to his success.  So what was it on his table on the UP show, the view of which both surprised me and grossed me out? 

Yes, those platefuls of sugary breakfast "treats."  On one of his last UP shows, the subject was improving school lunches--not one of his finest.  And I recall a remark, maybe from the visiting chef about the lackluster offerings on his table.  Maybe at 8 a.m. (the actual time the show began in New York) some assistant producer thought guests and Chris needed this kind of fuel in addition to the coffee.  Some fruit, nut bread loaves might have been too p.c. for this very politically correct show.

The set is entirely different at ALL IN--  slick glass desk and foodless.  I'm with that.

A mid-20th century romance began, endures...

 

THE LONG-TERM MARRIAGE

At last she’s happy, reigning with her creams,

rubbing his scalp’s roof until it gleams.

As the squamous-cell carcinomas sprout,

the local dermatologist cuts them out

 

or frosts the lunar surface with liquid nitrogen.

The creams come from West Fourteenth Street, Manhattan,

FedExed from their adopted son’s boyfriend’s home,

a relationship that remains, to them, unknown.

 

Their Oriental rugs are steeped in piss

from the bulldog barking like an activist.

Bickering over misplaced books, the tchotchkes

lost, and how she re-remembers her stories,

 

they wait with an unfinished, finished look,

and note how honeysuckle crowns Old Saybrook

and thistles overrun their last garden.

The dash between their dates is nearly done.

                                                                -Spencer Reece

Published in The New Yorker,  April 13, 2009;  on my bulletin board since then.

On a spring day in Portland, Oregon, I celebrate  meeting my spouse in Manhattan.  March 1966,  a large, airless room at a counseling conference in the Commodore Hotel. He was presenting; I was in the audience determined to get my question answered.  He took me for an ice cream soda at a nearby Schrafft's on 42nd Street..  It was a lovely day; we walked twenty blocks south.

We lived four blocks apart--Ron in a  classic 8-story 1930s building--one-bedroom, rent-controlled  ($110) on East 24th. Mine was a smaller studio ($160), in a new 21-story high-rise.    We married in his apartment October 29, 1966--the same year NOW began.  The word "femnism" was not in my vocabulary at the time.  We disagreed on the war in Vietnam.  We moved quickly toward working on equality between women and men--and being very opposed to the "American war," as it's known in Vietnam.

Two children, four grandchilddren, several moves--Oberlin, Ohio then Baltimore, Maryland, then back to New York City before landing in Portland.

The Commodore, built in 1919, was renovated inside and out in 1980.  Unrecognizable to us in its current state. Schrafft's is gone.  We are still New Yorkers in spirit, almost 50 years later, in Portland, Oregon.  

Greatest thing since sliced bread?

Saved this page from New York Times Sunday magazine.  What was it about a slice of bread that was so compelling?  That the shrinking, obsessively up-scale newspaper paid attention to an object from everyday life?  Just a slice of  a pre-sliced white, the kind my father described as "punk bread."  He was good an naming things he disdained, ideas and objects favored by people different from him.  It's a trait passed along that I must be cautious about in my judgementalism.

The article is part of a "Who Made That?" series in the Times.  It is filled one page of odd facts that tie together many aspects of the influence of the industrialization of America in the early 20th century.  Last year a social history, White Bread, by Aaron Bobrow-Strain (oh, people, why did you do this to your offspring; the hyphenated name is sure to create relationship problems) was published.  [There it is-- the too judmenta...sigh]

"The sliced loaf becomes a kind of small, edible promise of a better world."

Much more interesting to me than recent explorations about  cod or salt, I now intend to purchase it from Alibris for hardly any money (as the almost-free economy moves on).  In a New York Times review of the book, titled  "Against the Grain," there was further exploration of how problems of unsanitary public bakeries led to the business solution:  industrialized bread. What would another review deliver?

Libby Copeland wrote a longer essay a harsher title, "White Bread Kills".  Subtitled-- "a history of a national paranoia," she addresses the present-day "...backlash against white bread" and the growing interest in gluten-free products and increase in people receiving a diagnosis of celiac disase which afflicts one in 133.  She points out that little is known about how gluten sensitivity may effect the majority of us.

In turn, there was another book also published last year, emeritus Canadian historian Harvey Levenstein's Fear of Food: Why we worry about what we eat.  This one, as one food writer explains its message, 

"...from the ‘germophobia’ of the 19th century to concerns about cholesterol and chemical residues in the 21st. Read this book and you’ll understand why warnings about the safety of your food should always be taken with a pinch of salt. (Just a pinch, though — too much could be bad for you.).”

Even though my results are not always edible--like this one (left) which looked much like the one in the book (middle), and filled with many good pumpkin seeds, I'm working on getting comfortable with major mishaps.  The successful ones are always better than packaged and pre-sliced American white bread.  In Mexico, similar product is Bimbo!

ADDENDUM  Every now and then, not often enough, bread-making is enhanced by doing it with Zoe, our seven year old granddaughter.  I have a sense that she is learning something that will be long gone by the time she has her own household.

Something grander than Google will speak to her about what the ancients once did in kitchens.

Sourdough + Buttermilk = delicious bread

How much I'd missed making bread.  My baking enthusiast friend Molly visited in February and this was to be an opportunity.  We had so much to talk about that--classes at Portland State, whether she would take a college loan because three (!) jobs and 16 credits were too much.   I refreshed my starter and sent her home with some.  

Politics intervened.. Nationally it has been all the efforts to counteract efforts to withdraw women's agency-- the equity and freedom we worked so hard to achieve in the 20th century. Petitions to sign, phone calls to make to D.C.

Locally, it's support of improved gun control legislation in Oregon.  The other local political activity was the dive I took into running for the board of my retirement community.  Though I lost--which might be for the best--the experience was a good one.  Much positive feedback from neighbors and the chance to encourage conversations among residents on ideas they had for improvements.  

Finally, actual bread-making had its moment.  B uttermilk around (do you buy certain food items that have a special appeal then have to figure out new ways to use?) that needed attention.  Found a recipe that put it together with my starter.  "Golden Sourdough" was its name and Shelene Wilhelm of Cheyenne, Wyoming, was the baker. I owe her well-written instructions many thanks.

Reduced the recipe by half though used even less  salt (1Tbsp.). Otherwise followed her lead--   expanded the starter overnight. Probably crucial to how well it turned out. Produced two pretty 8x4x5 inch loaves and a mini-loaf, great sourdough taste, more delicious over a few days.

It's a lot of bread for two trying to keep waistlines from spreading.  Shared slices with neighbors, gave entire mini to another friend.  After trying others, I've settled over the past year or so on Fairhaven white organic flour from the state of Washington.  Discovered since moving to Portland where there are better choices on local shelves than in New York.  

What I'm finding as I move toward 80, is the need to be less ambitious.  Recipes that were challenging a year or two ago leave me tired when contemplating.  This one only had some combining of ingredients before long kneading with dough hook attachment on trusty 1980s Kitchen Aid.  Ron helped when bowlful of dough became too heavy for me to hold/scrape at same time.  He does much of the cooking and looks to me for recipe selection.  That works!  

 

 

My political life requires a placeholder...

Too much going on to be a frequent poster here...or infrequent.  Yet I want to stay with blogging as a practice even while I need more thought on its structure for the future. 

My neighbor Joella demonstrates a perfect solution for all those buttons we collected in second wave activity in last century--coast to coast.  Hers in Oregon, mine mostly Baltimore and New York.  Gun control is a shared focus through Ceasefire Oregon.

Marian Wright Edelman on Inauguration Day 2013 in conversation with Melissa Harris-Perry wears image of Sojourner Truth.  Takes our feminism back to the 19th century struggle for African-American equality.  Read Ta-Nehisi Coates in the March Atlantic on why the re-election of Obama matters even more than the first. 

Speaking of blogging, the life in bread has not had enough attention here. It has not had as much attention as I would wish.  Here's a whole wheat sourdough made in October 2011.

My personal challenge is should I emulate one of my favorite, 19th century feminists, Frances E. Willard of the WCTU (Women's Christian Temperance Union).

"Do Everything" was her motto. Is it mine?   Her unusual book,  "A Wheel with in Wheel: How I Learned to Ride the Bicycle" used that newly-introduced contrivance as a metaphor for women's lives.  An excerpt HERE  with comments by a contemporary blogger.

And so you have it: Black History month (a young friend recently pointed out is the shortest month of the year) and the upcoming Women's History Month.  Both of which call out for celebration more often.  I hope to do my part one day soon but till then...  

Portland, when it's good for old people

Oh, it is a challenge to keep batting away like summer mosquitoes our national bad news. Especially when I start the day by reading the local, daily newspaper.  The Oregonian shapes its content to appeal to dwellers on some far-off planet. Many of them live right here in oppostion to the trendy, very young and hip types celebrated on Portlandia.

If mine were one of those everybody-reads-blogs on Huffington Post, I'd run a contest to name the group of dailies across America that ignore/disparage all ideas sensible people hold dear...gun control, CHOICE, climate change.  I wish Rachel Maddow, an excellent "namer" would come up with something.  See her post "This Week in God" for the latest on a a favorite category she calls, "the God Machine."

However, in the tradition of  What Would Rachel Maddow Do? Let's turn to my good news.   As privileged old lady and man, we take advantage of our reasonably good health (thank you Medicare and Maryland retirement system) and disposable income to go to the theater often. [Too many disclaimers but often have company at Hattie's Web.  Especially today it turns out.]  Since we're drawn to what we knew in New York as "off" and "off-off Broadway," the cost of the habit is reasonable.

"The Road to Mecca,"  presented in a small space by Profile Theater was one of three we've seen in the last week.  (Overdosing due to baby-sitting schedule.)  Glorious photo by Jamie Bosworth; enlarge it to see the perfect set--worn rugs, many glass bottles on tables, hanging from above.

Made me think of Grandma Prisbrey's Bottle Village, how many of us fill space, aloneness with  objects endowed with special meaning. Portland Monthly's useful, thoughtful review here.  

It was invigorating to be with actress Eileen DeSandre, who embodies aging perfectly as Miss Helen, the central character, has found her own bliss through non-traditional art-making.  Of course, I could very much identify with that.  Though South African playwright Athol Fugard writes about his own country, it could be mine. The other two actors played parts familiar to many of us.  There was Elsa, played by Amanda Solden, the young friend, both powerful and gentle, who wants Miss Helen to embody personal strength she seeks in herself.   David Bodin was an oppressive church minister, determined to convince  Miss Helen to move to an old people's home. He had more dimension than we'd expected as he ultimately revealed a softer side wrapped in his judgemental exterior.

Talkback.  As I've written elsewhere, Ron and I gravitate toward these.  How else can strangers in a city, women and men who may never meet again, share our pleasure, our questions about a theatrical experience.  Last night's included two of the actors, the young director (how do they have so much insight so early), and Katy Liljeholm, Artistic Director of Well Arts, an arts-in-medicine nonprofit theatre company.  "Voices of Elders" is one of their life-review projects at a local senior center.

We were a most suitable audience for her:  a mostly over 50 group, mostly women, with much to relate to about our own roads to Mecca.  Great evening...preceded by that other thing Portland does well: FOOD, delicious, moderately priced for happy hour (unknown to us in New York), a short walk from the theater at Accanto.

 

 

2013 & what's to love?

It is as if I have bought into the worldwide, or at least nationwide malaise of the end of 2012, the start of 2013.  That's about how long it's been since my last appearance here. Do you look for reasons for how you feel--something in the air, something beyond your personal space? I do.

There's the personal/political that always envelops me.  There were so many things pleasureable in December 2012.  Introducing two granddaughters to the idea of giving to others as a way to mark the New Year.  We spent a December Saturday night looking at the possible animals that could go from Mercy Corps to help families in other parts of the world.

Elie was convinced she was getting her very own sheep.  That's a four year old.  Zoe, always the older, clarifying sister, explained otherwise.  Later the two of them visited our retirement community which surprised me with a screening of the original "Snow White & the Seven Dwarfs"  film.  Elie was only momentarily frightened by the Wicked Queen, and probably the menacing music.  Then enjoyed it along about 20 other children.

Family--I am very fortunate-- was a soothing distraction from Hurricane Sandy and the gun violence here in Portland and in Connecticut. Stunned by all that, it turned out that sulfa medication was part of the reason for my two-week lethargy.  I'm beginning to return to a more energetic feeling.  And school started again! 

 

Fressen! Fressen Brot!

Discovering Fressen Artisan Bakery at the nearest Farmers Market  extended my knowledge of German. Fressen means "eat" and "brot" is bread.  In truth there are more subleties for fressen (and its companion "essen") but I leave that to Marianna at Hattie's Web to explicate.

Some Saturday's at the market we get a roll or rye bread there and combine with pate from Chop, vending nearby.  This one is "Farmhouse" pate with pistachios.

For the past year I've talked with the young woman who works at the bakery's stand about our shared interest in taking a class with Edgar, Fressen's owner and baker. Now I've met the baker himself because he's opened a cafe next door to the ovens. Which makes him even busier than before though he assured me that after the beginning of the year, he plans to schedule a workshop.

Ron and I have lunched twice at the cafe.  In addition to the selection of "handcrafted German baking," big loaf--or half-loaf

form--there are sandwiches, frittatas, and soups, salads. Pickles include tomato, zucchini, pumpkin this time, probably will vary.  

Sandwiches we split--cheese/avocado and a hot dog (rare indulgence)-- are on their popular salt pretzel rolls; these also come as actual soft pretzels and rolls. Such delicious pastries--plum, pear, other sesonal fruits.  We could get addicted to Fressen's mochas.

A  cafe, however, is about more than the food.  Next time I'll take more and better pictures that reveal its modest ambiance along with the engaging people who work there.  Non-intrusive music! Because it's a few blocks off northeast Sandy Boulvard, the main street, you'd have to know about it to arrive there.

After our first visit, we had an encounter unusual for our life in Portland.  Standing outside, looking at the bakery production space, another customer and Ron began to talk about how much we liked the bread.   He'd come to the U.S. some years earlier from Germany to work as a tool and dye maker in Connecticut, "day and night...for a Jewish guy."

Made enough money to buy his own plumbing company in Idaho.  While his personal journey was interesting, most enjoyable was that he and Ron talked in languages familiar to each--German and Yiddish.  I stood around, was impressed, periodically asked questions in English, my only language, about his ideas on retirement.