On Cooking

I'm not a purist but my cooking does follow a certain seasonal drift. More a product of economics and method than convenience. Case in point, I no longer raise acorn squash or pumpkins, because I get them for free from the various fall displays. They call me, to haul away vegetables before they rot; rotten fruit and vegetables are a pain in the ass. I gardened on the ridge (in raised beds) until the deer ate everything for two years in a row, now I frequent the Farmer's Market, during season, which is actually less expensive, and I get some socializing to boot. If I need to propagate a particular seed, Ronnie will plant me a row. In my current heirloom collection are two pea-beans that I've never seen anywhere. Both, I think, are African, and I've kept them for thirty years. Any given market day (they fold-up shop at noon) I'll be given enough tomatoes to eat several tomato sandwiches and make a sauce for later. And Ronnie grows sweet potatoes. The word potato comes from the Quechua (Incan) papa, more or less the staff of life, where you couldn't grow anything else. They invented freeze-drying 5,000 years ago, discovering that potatoes left out to freeze at night, then smashed and dried in the noon-day sun would keep very well, could be ground to make bread. Starch and sugar. I'd made a note to try and make sense of that. I make a nice potato bread, using the lees of fermentation as the yeast, not a loaf you'd want to take to a future mother-in-law, but a bread I find useful for sopping the corners of a skillet. I use trenchers at most of my dinners, swirling the last piece of bread to gather the last bit of goodness, and I'm sure I look like the hillbilly I actually am. Where I was raised it was perfectly acceptable to use your fingers to use the last bit of biscuit to sop the last of the gravy. I was reading about table manners and got side-tracked by an interesting article, Ketchup And The Collective Unconscious, which is mostly about flavoring bland food. Read a history of the hamburger, another essay on ketchup, some Roman recipes. Split some kindling, examined some buds. The crows were giving me a raft of shit, just being raucous for the hell of it, so I gave them a couple of mice. I wanted a break from stew, and Jerome had brought me these incredible Moroccan sardines, a six pack from Costco; fried some salt-pork, minced it, rough chop the sardines (ingredients are fish, olive oil, and salt), into the pork fat, serve on noddles. If there had been any left-over, I would have had it for breakfast tomorrow, with eggs. I need to study the whole world of egg substitutes, and dried eggs, egg preservation in general, not because I want a substitute, but because I might not be able to get out and I want/need them for cornbread and morel omelets.

New buds, Verbena,
and small birds pecking
at the sweet dark core