Giving Thanks The Hard Way

Wile E Coyote: Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Wile E. Coyote, genius. I am not selling anything nor am I working my way through college. 

Bugs Bunny: I... 


WEC: So let's get down to cases: you are a rabbit, and I am going to eat you for supper. 
[warningly] 
Now, don't try to get away! I am more muscular, more cunning, faster, and larger than you are, and I am a genius. Why you could hardly pass the entrance examinations to kindergarten. 
[Bugs yawns] 
So I'll give you the customary two minutes to say your prayers. 


BB: I'm sorry, Mac, the lady of the house ain't home. And besides, we mailed you people a check last week. 
[shuts the door then descends into his home as Wile E. folds up the door and leaves] 


WEC: Why do they always want to do it the hard way? 

IMDB

I wish they made scented candles that smelled like roasting turkey and sage stuffing because I’m not bothering with a turkey this year. I find the smell so evocative that I can remember details of thanksgiving dinners over 50 years ago with greater clarity than I can remember what I did yesterday. It's almost too hard to be thankful about stuff without the smell of turkey.

Today is one of those annual holidays that are as likely to invite depression as joy. You can’t help thinking about past thanksgivings and missing the people that made them memorable. For that matter, you (or at least I) may find yourself thinking dismal thought about what another turn of the entropic wheel will bring by next thanksgiving. The whole going around the table and saying what you’re thankful for routine can become a celebration of passive aggression. Or, possibly, introduce humor so burdened with bitter irony that the thoughts expressed hit the table like the inevitable anvil falling from the mountain to land on Wile E's head.

So I’m thankful to have my long-suffering Tech Support Guy. I'm thankful that I can touch type using all my fingers and not just my thumbs, that I can feed myself (mostly) without drooling, can still make it to the toilet before I pee, that I still take pleasure from working in the yard even though I can’t work as hard or efficiently as I used to. I’m also thankful for my large, rowdy, teasing and loving family; and finally, I'm grateful that I’m still around to remember those who aren’t here today.

Hoc in lacrimis ad finem veniet. (This will come to an end in tears)

“You expected to be sad in the fall. Part of you died each year when the leaves fell from the trees and their branches were bare against the wind and the cold, wintery light. But you knew there would always be the spring, as you knew the river would flow again after it was frozen. When the cold rains kept on and killed the spring, it was as though a young person died for no reason.” - Earnest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast

Pictured above is my century plant, aka agave parryi, on October 11 when I first noticed the flower stalk. I continued to take pictures of the plant a couple of times each week to document the speed of its bloom. I intended eventually to post a sort of time-lapse story of its glorious final days. 

The large agave pictured above on October 17 had grown all of its life beneath the canopy of a pine tree. We removed the pine this summer because it succumbed to prolonged drought and insects,  and finally a branch collapsed blocking the driveway. The round light shape at the base of the agave is the stump of the pine tree. I had dropped a baby agave there about 20 ago when we removed these sharp pointy succulents from our front sidewalk in an effort to make a trip to the front door more welcoming and less life-threatening. Once subjected to the full sun, the green leaves of the agave became a bit yellow with sunburn. Perhaps encouraged by the sunshine, the plant, decided it was time to bloom and die – in that order.

Here (above) it is on October 22. The electrical wires in the background are perfectly located to measure the breakneck rate of growth. This was about as far as we got before nature intervened. The weather turned cold. A century plant is said to bloom in late spring or early summer. This summer, San Diego had seriously messed up weather and it didn’t get really summer-hot until late September. (And by messed up weather, I mean we had mild spring temperatures from March through September, so you can see we had some rough days in paradise. In the Veggie Garden for example, our eggplants are just now producing fruit, and many of our indeterminate tomatoes are just now ripening on their scruffy vines.)

The agave couldn’t take the cold. Here it is on November 1, where it has lost several feet of growth. The plant is at the bottom of a long steep slope from the tip of our roof down through the yard into the street - that slope is perfect for directing the coldest nighttime air into the young shoot. It was just one night of just barely freezing temperatures locally: our thermometer said it was 35F.  But the growth was stopped in its tracks and then the tip simply fell off before I could get a picture of its young frost-blackened corpse.

I know the whole cycle of life thing gardeners are supposed to meditate on watching seasonal changes in your garden. I know that nature is often red in tooth and claw, and now I know nature is sometimes also black in stem and bud.

But I was really looking forward to enjoying the “once in a century” flowering. Century plants bloom once in their lives. The size and energy of the bloom exhausts and kills the parent plant. When in full bloom, these are impressive plants. The flower stem is often taller than a tree, and its shape reminds me of a carefully manicured Japanese black pine pruned into a giant bonsai. Then the flowers dry and turn brown and the stalk eventually dries out and falls over, and the flowers germinate into dutiful baby century plants surrounding the grave of their parent. 

That will never happen in my front yard, at least not for another century. So young, so fresh, so much promise. So dead.  I didn’t expect to be this sad this fall.

Where Are We Going with GMO Food Labeling?

“The ‘Frankenfoods’ debate is coming to your dinner table. Just last month, a mini-war developed in Europe, when the European Union’s chief scientist, renowned biologist Anne Glover, said that foods made through genetic engineering, such as soy beans—about 80 percent of US grown soybeans have been genetically engineered —are as safe as organic or conventional foods. It’s a wholly uncontroversial comment—at least among scientists. But it set off the usual scare mongering from Friends of the Earth, and other like-minded advocacy groups that finds all genetically engineered (GE) foods and crops to be, in their words ‘stomach turning’.”Pamela Ronald, Rachel Carson’s dream of a science-based agriculture may come as a surprise to those who believe that sustainability and technology are incompatible.  

Humans have been breeding and propagating edible foods for a while, beginning with selecting seed from the plants with desired traits to plant subsequent crops. Traditional hybridization and breeding techniques have likewise long been used to modify plants and animals at a molecular level, resulting in plants and animals that have been genetically modified.

These days however, when people refer to GMOs they typically are referring to the use of relatively recent developments in biotechnology more properly defined as genetic engineering that have been employed to alter a plant or animal organism at a molecular level. According to the National Academy of Science “Genetic engineering is one type of genetic modification that involves the intention to introduce a targeted change in a plant, animal or microbial gene sequence to effect a specific result” (page IX)

Next month, Californians will be voting on a ballot measure requiring the labeling of all GMO foods. Notwithstanding what you might read in hysterical foodie blogs or other vaguely sourced material, other experts agree, and this should not be news. Before you vote on this measure, please do your homework. Here is mine.

In 2004, the National Academy of Science publication office, aka the prestigious National Academies Press, published a report entitled Safety of Genetically Engineered Foods: Approaches to Assessing Unintended Health Effects authored by the Committee on Identifying and Assessing Unintended Effects of Genetically Engineered Foods on Human Health, Board on Life Sciences Food and Nutrition Board, Board on Agriculture and Natural Resources, Institute of Medicine and National Research Council of the National Academies of Science.  

The NAS report concluded, “All evidence evaluated to date indicates that unexpected and unintended compositional changes arise with all forms of genetic modification, including genetic engineering. Whether such compositional changes result in unintended health effects is dependent upon the nature of the substances altered and the biological consequences of the compounds. To date, no adverse health effects attributed to genetic engineering have been documented in the human population” (page 8). I should note that the report also identified the need “for a broad research and technology development agenda to improve methods for predicting, identifying, and assessing unintended health effects from the genetic modification of food. An additional benefit is that the tools and techniques developed can also be applied to safety assessment and monitoring of foods produced by all methods of genetic modification” (page 13).

In 2004 the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development published the proceedings of a OECD Cooperative research program workshop on the challenges and Risks of GMOs in Maastricht, The Netherlands.  Biological Resource Management in Agriculture: Challenges and Risks of Genetically Engineered Organisms which included a presentation by a UK biotech expert Katherine Williams entitled “Challenges for the Media: Disseminating Information by Avoiding Hysteria” in which she observed that such challenges include “the audience that is targeted, selection of appropriate language, and finding a balance between points of view. Other challenges that face the media include identifying the stories that genuinely require attention and recognizing those based on hype or false claims” (page 203). She warned journalists reporting on the GMO food debates about the use of inflammatory and unscientific terminolology like “Frankenfoods” and “mutant”. Alas.

In 2003, the International Council for Science published New Genetics, Food and Agriculture: Scientific Discoveries – Societal Dilemmas, which concluded: “Currently available genetically modified foods are safe to eat. Food safety assessments by national regulatory agencies in several countries have deemed currently available GM foods to be as safe to eat as their conventional counterparts and suitable for human consumption. This view is shared by several intergovernmental agencies, including the FAO/WHO Codex Alimentarius Commission on food safety, which has 162 member countries, the European Commission (EC), and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD). Further, there is no evidence of any ill effects from the consumption of foods containing genetically modified ingredients.”

So, how about we heed the Food and Agriculture Organizations of the United Nations and follow their 2012 recommendation to support “a science-based evaluation system that would objectively determine the benefits and risks of each individual GMO”. And while we wait the results of ongoing scientific research to assess safety of GMO foods on a case-by-case basis, I have concluded that I am more likely to be harmed by a crocodile in my backyard pond that I am by eating GMO foods currently available.

I recommend that you refer to established reputable scientific sources for your information on this controversial issue before you reach your own conclusions. Even if you are what you eat, you can still decide what you think.

Don't Worry About This Person, Mitt

"[M]y job is is not to worry about those people. I'll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives." -- Mitt Romney on the 47 percent he says don't pay taxes.

My 93-year-0ld mother-in-law lives in a nursing home because she's got dementia on top of her physical health problems. She hasn't paid taxes for years on her <$1,200/month income. To add insult to injury, her only income is Medicare - so not only doesn't she pay taxes, she's on the public dole.

Thanks Mitt, for pointing out she's an irresponsible old freeloader.

What I Am Offended By Today

“I used to be offended, but now I’m just amused.” Elvis Costello, The Angels Want to Wear My Red Shoes

“Whatever you say, someone will take offense. And to that I say, offense is taken, not given. It’s up to you whether you’re offended. And I’ll add one more thing: Just because you’re offended, doesn’t mean you’re right.” Ricky Gervais

What offends me today:

1. We elected as Vice President Spiro Agnew who once said, “With all it faults, the Unites States is still the greatest nation in the country.” - which doesn’t offend so much as dismay. What’s offensive is that it’s just now that the UN Global Commission on Elections, Democracy and Security  has noticed that the election system in the US “have left it struggling to restore the public's confidence in its elected officials to act in their interest”

2. Local protestors, offended by a billboard recently forced its removal. The offending commercial message was from an eyeglass store, and it said, “We want to sit on your face”. So much for American respect for free speech. The billboard was replaced by one saying “Happiness is Coming”. So much for having the last laugh.

3. Some people cheat at Rubik's Cube by painting each face of the cube a solid color, and some people think that all mind-altering drugs are bad, although in fairness, probably not the same people.

4.  Idiots, e.g.: humorless people who confuse humor with insult; people who are as oblivious about the concept of cause and effect as a four-year-old sticking a fork in a toaster; people with the initiative of a pan of bacon grease left on the stove to congeal; people with the maturity of a powder blue prom tuxedo with 6” wide lapels; people with the mental clarity of a pan of bacon grease left on the stove to congeal; people who flush their pet alligators down the toilet; people who confuse election of the candidate they oppose with the end of the world as we know it 

5.  People who buy alligators as pets

6. If Science can accomplish wonders like curing restless leg syndrome, why can’t it make a banana peel tiny enough to trip angels in red shoes on the head of a pin? Or make a sense-of-humor pill? Or a pair of goggles to wear so you’d know whether people were laughing with your or at you? Or a get-over-it tonic for people so easily wounded by hurtful words? 

What I Am Worried About Today

"What has confession taught you about people?"

"...First of all, people are much more unhappy than one thinks... And then, the fundamental fact is that there's no such thing as a grown-up person..."

Andre Malraux, Anti-Memoirs 

1. Whether I am technically a cyborg because I have some surgical steel plates screwed into my spine. 

2. Weather (sic), when earth’s magnet field reverses, my moral compass will shift and everything good will become evil?

3. Whether, when the drums stop, and an ominous hush descends on the jungle, I’ll remember to say “It’s quiet. Too quiet”  

4. Whether I’m better off now than I was four years ago

5. Whether the percentage of my dwindling IRA that is invested in oil or big pharma makes me a capitalist stooge

6. Whether I will ever be able to provide jetpacks for all my friends

Guest post from SE Michigan

Regarding Global Warming....
It should be fairly obvious to all now that we are in the midst of a global climate change. It is certainly obvious to those in the deep-red sections of the national temperature maps this summer. Extreme or exceptional drought and attendant wildfires are an obvious symptom, but there are others.

Here in Michigan, I had thought we might turn into the garden spot as warm temps moved north. I can already plant for Zone 6 instead of 5. But the transition is erratic. This spring, we had a very early warm-up, which tricked all sorts of things into flowering many weeks early, in March. Then, when perfectly seasonable freezing temperatures followed, all the flower buds were killed. The photo is of my backyard pear and apple trees, which did not set a single fruit this year. The two English walnut trees I planted more than 30 years ago are bearing not a single nut. The neighborhood squirrels, who always impress visitors with their size and robust appearance, are going to starve. My Bing cherry tree’s branches are dying off; it is covered with gray lichen-looking patches and is exuding ruby-red gel. Anyone know what that is or what can be done for it?

Well, this would be sad for me personally, but it’s not all about me. A state Ag person estimates Michigan  lost 95% of our peaches, 90% of apples, and 85% of cherries — and agriculture is extremely important to our economy. Only Washington and New York produce more apples, for example, and we used to own tart cherries (a nearly complete loss this year). Since most of our orchards are family businesses, those families lose their income for the year. U-Pick farms, a Michigan institution, have little to offer their patrons.

Parts of the state, especially the south, have suffered from drought, so corn and soybeans are also doing very poorly. A newer Michigan institution, the Corn Maze, is also endangered. It’s not much of a maze if it’s only knee high. So much for my “garden spot” dreams.

The Log, She Grew

“It is with us as with timber. Every knot and shake in a board reveals some disease or injury that overtook the log when it was growing. A gentleman named Jean Pigeon, who once built a frame house for me, put this in a nutshell. He said: `Everything which a tree she has experienced in the forest she takes with her into the house.' That is the law for us all, each in his or her own land.”

Rudyard Kipling , A Book of Words  XXXIV, Speech to Canadian Authors, Royal Society of Literature. Visit of the Canadian Authors' Association: July 1935. 

I love that Kipling included Pigeon’s gendered French nouns: “with a tree she has experienced… she takes with her into the house.” I also love the idea that I am like a board that reveals disease and injury incurred while growing. 

Tom Robbins once said that when people tell you to shut up they mean stop talking; and when people tell you to grow up the mean stop growing. The name of my blog is based on a premise that, like a tree, my lifelong growth will stop only upon my death.

I may no longer have growth spurts like a young sapling, and I may lean over a bit like the old eucalyptus at the top of the driveway, but I’m still hanging out here in the forest trying to overcome drought, pestilence and the other miscellaneous assorted slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. 

So, technically, even though the rate of my blogging has slowed, this blog, she still grows.

Carrying On

“Are you authorised to speak


For these trees without leaves?

Are you able to explain

What the wind intends to do

With a man’s shirt and a woman’s nightgown

Left on the laundry line?

What do you know about dark clouds?

Ponds full of fallen leaves?

Old model cars rusting in a driveway?

Who gave you permission

To look at the beer can in a ditch?

The white cross by the side of the road?

The swing set in the widow’s yard?

Ask yourself, if words are enough,

Or if you’d be better off

Flapping your wings from tree to tree

And carrying on like a crow?”

Charles Simac, Carrying On like a Crow  

Here are my answers to some of the poem’s questions:

Am I responsible for the dead and dying trees without leaves? Apparently not. We just lost a large, drought-stressed pine tree between the house and the street. We chose euthanasia of a still living tree when the 18” trunk broke and the top 15 feet kneeled slowly and gracefully across our driveway. Our professional tree guy agreed that it was the equivalent of a suicide note from a tree.

As for what the wind does with laundry left on the line, it’s been about 40 years since I’ve hung laundry, so no, I can’t explain.

What I know about dark clouds is that rain is promised but that fickle clouds often move over the mountains to the east before rain falls.

WRT/ ponds full of leaves and old model cars rusting in a driveway I know for a fact that such clutter is like an unwanted side effect of my happy marriage. That I hate clutter goes without saying - it makes me testy. Accordingly, I don’t need no stinking permission to look at roadside litter.

As for finding words to explain images like roadside crosses and swing sets moving in the wind over the widow’s back fence; am I better off flapping my wings in the trees and carrying on like a crow?  To which I respond: Caw!

Animal Fables and Claws of Calamity

“The hand of destiny drew down before the eye of my vision also the curtain of carelessness; and clear-sighted reason, and far-seeing prudence kept me behind the dark screen of ignorance and folly, and thus the whole of us were all at once overtaken with the hand of trouble and the claw of calamity.”

-  Anvar-I-Suhali, or The Lights of Canopus, Being the Persian Version of The Fables of Pilpay; or the book “Lalilah And Damnah”, Chapter III, On the Agreement of Friends and the Advantages of Their Mutually Aiding One Another.

What do you think of when you think of animal fables? Do you think about the tortoise and the hare, and the moral that slow and steady once won the race? An animal fable is a story with a moral conveyed by animals that personify various moral characteristics. Perhaps fables were concocted by teachers to provide moral guidance to students who couldn’t read or write. We don’t need fables these depraved days, and not only because we (allegedly) can read. Fables might have been helpful in the days when we didn’t worry only about what was strictly legal, but also considered moral values like integrity, honesty and compassion. You don’t need Aesop today if you have a lawyer who can interpret tax codes, locate offshore shelters, and crawl through sewers of legal loopholes that serve to enrich hares at the expense of tortoises.

Fables are intended to illustrate such moral lessons as: pride goes before a fall; or how if you’re natural prey, you should be careful before befriending a predator; or how you should never order the meatloaf at a place called Mom’s.  Apart from the fact that most of us don’t know much about the moral characteristics of lions and mice, many traditional animal fables have no moral traction these days. Some fables have been worn into smooth clichés while retaining the animal characters in the underlying story: don’t count your chickens before they hatch; don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

Most of the simplistic stories attributed to Aesop include only two characters like an ant and a grasshopper. Possibly, the simple cast of characters was intended to explain the lessons at their most fundamental and un-misunderstand-able level. I have always liked animal fables, and I wondered how I could make animal fables more appealing to contemporary students.

Perhaps if I updated the characters and the settings, the fables would have more of an impact. A professor at the place I once worked has done that here.  For example, check out a contemporary interpretation of the fable ant and the grasshopper. The problem is that it’s no longer an animal fable – it’s a college student fable.

Or, perhaps animal fables have fallen out of favor these days because life is more complicated. Suppose we just need more drama and interest in our stories than old-fashioned Aesop preached? What about catchy names and places? For example, at least Ambrose Bierce’s fables included politicians, and intriguing proper place names like the City of Prosperous Obscurity. But here again, we’ve lost the animals.

So what if we kept the animals and just threw in more plot twists and complexity? The ancient Persian Lights of Canopus is a good source of more elaborate fables, for example the one about  the Crow, and the Mouse, and the Pigeon, and the Tortoise, and the Stag. There's another bonus apart from having a bigger cast. These animal fables include some of the most awesome metaphors ever, and like the example above, they mix more than a bartender in the Fox corporate suite at a Republican Party Convention. Here’s an example: “…the vessel of my life has fallen into a whirlpool, such that the mariner of deliberation is unable to set me free; and the cord of my existence is broken in such wise, that the finger-tip of thought is baffled in attempting to unite it.”  That really resonates with me although I confess I've always had a soft spot for fingertips scratching my brain.

So, then I got to thinking how about fables with more contemporary characters? I wonder what kind of moral can I make out of the fable of the Flash Drive, the Smart Card and how despite the boasts implied in their names they are outsmarted by the Spambot.  Or how about one where a woman marries a corporation? Upon consideration, this would risk offending those who consider valid marriage to be only between a man and a woman, (including between a 12-year-old girl and her rapist – a marriage that many men in Afghanistan consider to be completely reasonable). Besides, the moral of such a fable depresses me because we’ve all been screwed by a corporation at one time or another so technically, we’re already married, and we know how that one plays out. Besides, no animals.

So, what if I created my own animal fable, but make it even more spectacular by using animals whose very existence is questionable? How about a fable about involving a Squonk Hunting a Snark? Or maybe the Snark should hunt the Squonk?  According to Wikipedia (which is always 100% true) a Squonk (aka, Lacrimacorpus dissolvens) comes from Latin words meaning "tear", "body", and "dissolve". A Squonk is hard to catch. “Hunters who have attempted to catch Squonks have found that the creature is capable of evading capture by dissolving completely into a pool of tears and bubbles when cornered” - which I totally get. And only Lewis Carroll knows what a Snark is. All I have to do is figure out what moral I want these characters to illustrate. But then how could I ever top this? It’s a “fun with fables” site that is structures like a “choose your own adventure” story where you can select for the type of animal, the character trait or the moral of the story.

So, for now, I think I’m out of the animal fables business. Besides, I have to master the mixed metaphor first.  

What You Don’t Know About Chicken Soup

 “People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains… This overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it.”

  - Justin Kruger and David Dunning, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments” (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1999, Vol. 77, No. 6. ] 121-1134, Copyright 1999 by the American Psychological Association, Inc., 0022-3514/99/S3.00 Cornell University)

Yeah, so? Look, I’ve been busy, ok?  We finally moved into our newly remodeled bedroom and love it.  This move emptied out our former bedroom thus making way for a sewing room. No more sewing on the dinning room table and trying to keep track of thread, fabrics et. al. by tucking them between wine glasses in the china cabinet. This means I’ve been sewing and it’s like my sewing machine is as happy as I that it has a new permanent home. On it’s own table. On top of a plastic measuring/cutting grid that fits the table exactly. It’s like I know what I’m doing. My kitty (who will definitely NOT kill me) also approves of the move. That's her head peeking out of a fold in the quilt.

But the big news is I made some killer chicken stock. My journey began at the farmers market, when I asked the chicken lady for chicken feet. She’d tipped me off some time back that the feet add the gel that makes the stock nice and syrupy, and she’s right. So last week when I went to get some chicken feet, she asked if I’d also like some heads. She explained how her grown son – the only family member who apparently has no gag reflex – takes all the unwanted chicken heads and feet and cooks them down in a huge vat. She explained that what you do is, you first blanch the heads and feet, then you skin them, or at least slit the skin so, presumably, the insides can leak through into the broth.

I don’t do well with yucky stuff like chicken autopsies. It’s all I can generally manage to blanch and then cook the feet. When they’re done, they’ve plumped up nicely and look like they’re alive. Chicken feet have these creepy nails that look like they just had a professional manicure. So just cook them, she insisted. You won’t regret it. So I did. I got two bags of feet and one bag of heads for $4. I tossed the parts in a pot of boiling water for a few minutes to clean them off, then rinsed them and discarded the dirty water. Then, I put the parts into nice clean water that will become stock. I’ve found that white wine is a truly good accompaniment for chicken, particularly when cooking chicken skulls. In all fairness, I determined later that when the white wine is gone, red goes just as well.

I’m going to label the dozen 8 oz. jars Chicken Skull Stock.  At some point during the day while refilling my wine glass and stirring the chicken parts, I counted four heads, and we formed a special bond. I named them John Doe, Manny, Moe, and Jack Doe. The problem was that I didn’t know if I was cooking their feet or some other Does' feet. I decided to forgo attempts to name the feet because, you know, without a specific provenance or way of recognizing which feet roll to the top of the pot at any given moment it would be crazy to name the feet. And I’m not crazy; although it did occur to me late in the process that I might get some DNA and try to match them up. Fun fact, some of the feet have a dark brown pad in the middle that feels like the paw of a cat. While I didn’t make an exact count, I’d say maybe 2 sets out of 6. I theorize that these belonged to the drone hens that had to walk guard duty at night to protect their sleeping coop-mates. Or maybe they’re roosters?

Now, even if you take it on faith that chicken skulls make good broth, nobody wants to open a jar of chicken stick and find a head, or even a foot.  When I had the stock at a consistency I liked, I poured it into a clean pot and let the parts drain in a sieve lined with cheesecloth. It was at that point, I realized I had not four, but five heads. Being remorseful by then that I’d named the other four as guys, I named the last one Carmen. Her blind white eyes gazed at me reproachfully as she and the boys and their feet drained. You’re supposed to pour it back into the pot, let it cool, skim the fat, re-boil and then can it, but I didn’t do any of that prior to canning. The stock came out clean and gloopy and without foam or much fat to skim.

In order to can the broth - because it’s technically meat – you’ve got to use a pressure canner, not a simple water bath. The Blue Book says give them 20 minutes at 25 lbs psi. The big pressure canner has a pressure gauge that reads out in increments of 5 from 5 to 20 and above that there’s just a red line that says “caution”. A bit daunting: neither the chicken skull quintet nor I were confident of our ability to master this advanced level of technology this late in the day. I had my huge pressure canner all set to go, but fate intervened. It was at that point that I found I’d lost the damn weight thingie that sits on the top and jiggles to let out steam. I had to use my regular pressure cooker and it took me three batches to do all the jars.

I also made pickles. We harvested the first major batch of pickle cucumbers from the Veggie Garden this week. I took 22 of them and made pickles to share with the veggie gardeners.  I got a dozen 8 oz. jars of what I’m calling Garlic Dill Lemongrass Pickles. I adapted a recipe from Preserving Summer’s Bounty (Rodale) for Kosher Dills. I substituted a blade of lemongrass for horseradish root because, well, because I have some semblance of good taste.  The ingredients included a bit of sweet Maui onion also harvested yesterday. In addition, I used my own home grown dill weed and seeds, and used mostly black mustard seeds instead of boring white. The garlic cloves are from a lovely “rose” garlic we also grew.

There really is something good for the soul to spend a day in the kitchen amid yummy smells and among chicken head friends. I expect the wine didn’t hurt either, but then again, that might just be a failure of my metacognitive abilities to realize how yucky chicken skull soup actually is.

You Think You've Got Problems

"There’s no suffering,
 no shame, no ruin—not one dishonour—
 which I have not seen in all the trouble  you and I go through."

Sophocles, Antigone

The lovely illustration here is Walters manuscript leaf W.692, is from a Mughal manuscript copy of Anvar-i Suhayli (The lights of Canopus), a collection of fables by Husayn ibn 'Ali Va'iz Kashifi (died 910 AH/AD 1504-1505). It dates to the late 10th century AH/AD 16th or early 11th century AH/AD 17th. It depicts "the fate of a man who, escaping from a wild camel, jumps into a well. There his predicament grows even more precarious when he lands on the heads of 4 snakes, grasps in desperation at a bush gnawed by two rats, and looks down to see dragon waiting to devour him should he fall".

He's having a bad day. To which I say, big deal. Except for the rats, I’ve suffered worse.

My complaint du jour is about jam recipes. This is the season for fresh fruit that begs to be drowned in sugar and cooked down to sticky mush and put into jars to savor during the cold dark winters we experience for fifteen minutes each year here in San Diego. Having sampled a number of jam recipe books, I’ve found I especially like the recipes in Rachel Saunders Blue Chair Jam Cookbook, particularly for her combinations of fruit and spices.

Possessing the whiney entitlement of any aging American on Social Security; plus an inborn sense of outrage I modestly claim to be superlative; and compounded by a temperament best described as being a bitch, I have found much to complain about nonetheless.

I recently attempted my holy grail of jam: a sour cherry conserve that includes alcohol. A conserve is a jam that includes a mix of fresh and dried fruit, as Rachel explains, “often with the addition of liquor, spices and nuts.” What’s not to love? But before I begin my complaining: a disclaimer. I’ve never met a recipe I followed religiously: the fun is to use the same general proportions and customize.

I used Rachel’s recipe called “Italian Prune & Cardamom Conserve”. I started with farmer’s market plums that made no pretense about being Italian. I have no idea what their provenance was except that they were grown in California. But I didn’t have enough, so I had to cut the recipe in half, and then still add enough fresh cherries to get to the right measure of fresh fruit. Then I substituted dried sour cherries for the boring white currents which are, IMHO nothing more than albino raisins. Then, instead of using slivovitz “or other dry plum brandy” all I had was blackberry brandy. The added benefit here was that it turns out I had enough surplus brandy to sip while cooking.

Here’s my beef with this woman. She eschews precision. Example:

“To test the conserve for doneness, carefully transfer a small representative half-spoonful of conserve to one of your frozen spoons. Replace the spoon in the freezer for 3 to 4 minutes, then remove and carefully feel the underside of the spoon. It should be neither warm nor cold; if still warm, return it to the freezer for a moment. Nudge the conserve gently with your finger; if it seems thickened and gloppy when you nudge it, it is either done or nearly done. Tilt the spoon vertically to see how quickly the conserve runs; if it runs very slowly, and if it has thickened to a gloppy consistency, it is done. If it runs very quickly or appears watery, cook it for another few minutes, stirring, and test again as needed.”

I’ve always had a lot of trouble dealing with clarity and specific detail. I’m all like, can you maybe vague this shit up a bit for me? The scientific terms like “thickened and gloppy” and “for a moment” are bad enough, but “done or nearly done” kills me. It’s done or it’s not done. One would assume that the person who wrote the recipe would be able to provide more than general clues wrt/doneness. But, my favorite (not) part of the above is when she gets all existential and tells you what the jam should not be like: “it should be neither warm nor cold”.  This kind of specificity would be slightly more helpful if one was searching for an albino cat in a blizzard. (I have no idea why I seem to be fixated on albinos in this post.)

I keep a cookbook/notebook in which I meticulously write down the actual ingredients and proportions of what I'm cooking, so in the unlikely event that I ever stumble on jam recipe perfection I will be able to reproduce my success. After listing my ingredients and specific amounts, I decided to attempt to out-obfuscate Rachel’s instructions:

When the conserve has cooked down for anywhere from 20 minutes to three days, test it for doneness by balancing a smallish smidgen on the head of a pin. The angels on the tip of the jam-encrusted pin should neither stick too tightly together to perform a musical dance number to Michael Jackson’s Killer better than inmates in a Korean prison, nor should the angels slide off in large-ish clumps into the aether while screaming “Noooo!” in tiny angel chorus as they drop to the sticky floor. Did I mention you should make sure your floor is sticky by this point? Do so now. If at least 17 - but not more than 7,856  - angels can do the polka decently in the jam (and by decently, I mean the quality of their polka-ing, not the decency of the gangsta hand signs they make while dancing) then the jam is done. Maybe. Or, perhaps the jam would be better used as spackle to repair nail holes in plaster walls; or to dye an albino gerbil pink; or alternatively, to sweeten and flavor a vanilla Vicoden martini. You decide.

The final product was, by the way, the best jam ever. 

GMO: To Do or Not To Do

"The protestors, thinking they’re attacking some Monsanto-like evil corporation, are so consumed with their hatred of GMO that they are spreading misinformation, refusing to allow scientists to even engage in the research into GMO, and rather than engaging the scientists in dialogue are threatening to just destroy their experiment. This is the worst kind of bullying, extremist, anti-science garbage out there. At least the creationists don’t show up in our labs and start spitting in our test tubes. The climate denialists might make a lot of noise but they aren’t threatening to blow up James Hansen’s computer."

Mark, Denialism blog

I recently posted here about food, and included the link below to an article promoting laws that mandate that all GMO foods should be labeled. I still maintain that GMO foods should be labeled. People are entitled to know what they are eating, and to decide whether or not they will ingest GMO fruits and vegetables. It seems to me even ideological oppononents -  say, Newt Gingrich and Nancy Peolsi for example - would agree about this.

Then, there’s agreeing to disagree. I spent most of my professional career in administrative positions which supported basic and applied university research. I respect science, and like most Americans have directly benefitted from improved health care practices developed through medical research. I subscribe to the wisdom of distinguishing between  facts (which I loosely define here as empirically observable and repeatable results) and opinions (which, for purposes of this argument I define as conclusions based on often conflicting judgements and theories regarding the application facts). As the cliche says, you’re entitled to your own opinion, but not your own facts.

Which leads me to this. I distinguish between the right to know what’s in your food based on the label, and the right to choose what food you consume. To eat or not to eat GMO: that is the question.

There is still plenty of scientific wiggle room on the question of whether it is potentially harmful to humans to routinely ingest food that has been grown from genetically modified sources. My opinion is that I risk substantially more potential harm by gardening without a tetanus shot. But maybe that’s just me. Further research on GMO food is something both sides should support in order to arrive at any discoverable facts about long term effects on humans.

I subscribe to the whole local, organic credo and routinely shop at farmer’s markets. I can taste the difference between real food and processed foodstuffs. My heart wants to side with the farmers, the cooks, the people who still want their food to be fresh, delicious, nutritious and slow. But my head says that anti-science is more dangerous than good science. And facts should weigh more than opinions, no matter how appealingly old fashioned and “natural” those opinions. 

This article, with its appeal to science and reason, persuaded me to think twice about GMO food; and I recommend it: Environmentalism and anti-science, how GMOs prove any ideological extremity leads to anti-science.