Easy Living

Mid-year, in the billing cycle, and I got my land tax notice, $160 for the next six months, I just paid my vehicle insurance for six months, $168, and I still have some cash in my wallet. The permanent book sale at the library is a boon, a buck for hard-bounds and 50 cents for paper. I'm looking to have a hundred books in the several piles on the floor that are "books to be read"; I might keep five, the rest will go to Goodwill. It's a good life, food and books, whiskey and tobacco, I never imagined to be so defined, but there you go. Hard rain and the farmers are complaining, fields flooded. I shut down everything in the house twice, when massive thunder storms moved through. Dark as a full moon night. B gave me another stack of London Reviews and I've been reading them all day, interesting articles and reviews. In the evening the storms relent and I'm sure the driveway has suffered a beating. I'll try and get out tomorrow and send the backlog of posts from TR's computer. If that works, then I can get back to whatever it was that I was doing. I cooked a batch of grits overnight in the crock-pot, the lamb-shank chili is great on them. I made re-fried beans and I much prefer them with bits of bean and skins. A day like this, I just keep my plate in active mode, which means I don't wash it, just store it in the microwave, and whenever I want a few bites I scoop out whatever and nuke it. Works for me. I've also taken to storing things in foil covered pans in the fridge; plastic containers are just another thing to wash. And I usually leave the serving spoon right in the pan. My lack of hygiene drives my sister crazy. In her world, everything is a food-born disease. In my world, I might eat something slightly bad and throw up, maybe feel awful for a couple of hours, but not sick, make a note not to eat whatever that was again, and move on. Brussels sprouts came up in conversation recently with the produce guy at Kroger, he was pulling some of them to throw away, the outer leaves had shriveled and they looked terrible. But he made me a bag of three or four packages, for free, and when I got home I stripped all the old leaves off and steamed the little heads, cut them in half and fried them in butter. This was probably the vegetable of the year. Break them apart with a spoon and you can end up with a great pasta sauce. They were always our last crop, in the greenhouse on the Vineyard, long after the next year's plantings. Thinking about eating well. Those same years, on the Vineyard, I had my own private oyster bed. It wasn't actually mine, it belonged to whomever was Secretary Of Defense in 1980, and he didn't do anything with his oysters. I'd found a back way to get to the far side of his lagoon and I could collect a bushel in ten minutes. I sold them to restaurants, I traded them, and I'd keep bushels of them all winter, in large galvanized wash tubs, covered in seaweed that I'd keep damp with seawater. No one else harvested mussels and every time I'd go out for a load of seaweed (we made all of the soil for the greenhouse from seaweed and compost) I'd collect mussels. Memory is such a collage. They had some oysters at Kroger, and they looked pretty good. Expensive, 50 cents apiece (free is my standard), but I bought a dozen. Old time's sake. My shucking abilities have diminished to zero, so I start a small fire in the grill, go inside and make a browned butter sauce with shallots. Put the oysters on the grill, deep side down, eat them as they open, and if they don't open, don't eat them. We were brewing an excellent brown ale at the time, using a toasted barley coffee-substitute as part of the mix, and we bartered for almost everything. A lamb from up island, some lobster; we had firewood (a dear commodity on the Vineyard), great beer, and unlimited oysters. As I think about it, we were too successful, it was too easy, and Mississippi looked like a challenge, and it was, then ranching west of the Rocky Mountains, a goat diary, then a quiet ridge in southern Ohio. Come in to my kitchen.