Ferment everything

Inspired by the ancient Sumerians, my beer-brewing boyfriend, and the evidence everywhere of natural yeasts—in unfortunate places, but including my fridge and socks—I began to ferment items with purpose. I have yet to ferment either of the cats, though one of them lately has begun to smell like a Swamp Thing. But to date:

1. Beer. A precise craft, I learned, at least when the boyfriend does it, but likely not as much so if I ever take the helm. He is accessorized with tubing and gadgetry, which increases his allure. We made a tasty brown ale and bottled it yesterday. A week ago the mother bear who is roaming Starr Hill broke into the kitchen and dragged off thirty pounds of malt grain, but lost interest or hope partway through the drag and left it—or perhaps could not juggle both that with the seven-gallon bucket of animal crackers (the roommate’s) that continues, at this date, to be missing.

2. Sauerkraut. The recipe I jotted down in Trencin, a small town in Slovakia, from a friend’s cousin whose English was terrible but way better than my Slovakian. “Cut cabbage hearts out,” I noted ruthlessly. “Slice. Hard cabbages, the winter cabbages. Mix with a jar of salt (for 12 big cabbages). Wait couple hours. Layer with: allspice [could have been juniper, now, I'm thinking], pepper, bay leaves, apples. Stick in barrel. Squeeze out all air—anaerobic fermentation. [This was a particularly difficult point to translate.] Go to Croatia. [Easier.] Come back. Eat.” The first effort failed completely. I bought five cabbages and followed only the stick-in-barrel exhortation, thinking I’d get to it right after I returned my library books. As they turned black, my roommate and visitors began to avoid that part of the kitchen. The second effort, with new cabbage and renewed determination, used allspice. I don’t have any juniper berries.

3. Sourdough. Starter begun last month as a classic biga, using a bit of store-bought yeast, was at first slow and uninteresting, is now active and interesting. It is mainly used for pancakes, which boyfriend makes for me. The key bit learned so far: a. Mix everything but the eggs and the soda the night before. In the morning add soda-in-water, eggs, wait an hour before cooking. This week we may try screen-printing them, a la the weekly Instructables, with Gov. Sarah Palin’s image and a “Thank you, welfare mom!—$3,269 in 2008″

Except my pancakes will say nothing of the sort. Since I’ve only been in Alaska this time for eight months, I don’t qualify for the PFD—which means, though I’ll be paying just as much for fuel as the next Alaskan gal, I also don’t get the state energy assistance handout. That would be a big deal, more than a month’s worth of income for me. But I’m going to pretend I have an ethic of self-sufficiency through hard work and not whine about it, because I don’t deserve it. It’s hard to do, though, when I see my lazy, shiftless, born-in-Alaska friends raking it in. I’ll just say: Drinks are on y’all this year.

Fortification

I will spend my Saturday morning doing overtime, writing about the death of the Southeast Alaska timber industry. On the side of light and goodness, though, I have excellent coffee and scrambled eggs with cream, arugula, basil, and nutmeg. I cook eggs in the spirit of MFK Fisher’s instructions in the 1942 “How to Cook a Wolf.” She says:

Scrambled eggs have been made, and massacred, for as long as people knew about pots and pans, no doubt.

And then the recipe. The essence: “This takes perhaps a half hour. It cannot be hurried.” I first discovered it in Africa, with malaria and limited rations, when we were really fighting the wolf, and it was one of those dishes I promised to make myself as soon as I got out.

I have almost never had scrambled eggs properly made outside my house. (The exception was someone else’s house in Valancay, France, and the quality of my eggs have rarely approached hers.) As much as I love my diner breakfasts, their eggs are compromised by the proprietors’ decision to serve me in a reasonable amount of time. So I make my own eggs at home, several days a week, before I descend into my harried, often lunchless reporting. They tempt me to another pace and fortify me.

And now to fight the wolf. He comes in different forms.

What would Shackleton have shopped for in Juneau?

Perhaps a bracelet is in order. What would Shackleton do?

I just read the part in Anne Fadiman’s “Ex Libris” where she discusses how Dr. James McIlroy asked the 22 men stranded in Antarctica with Ernest Shackleton what they would eat if they could have one dish. “Marmalade pudding with Devonshire cream,” said McIlroy himself. I don’t know what a marmalade pudding is but anything is good with Devonshire cream. “Syrup pudding,” said James. I was unaware of this English penchant for making puddings out of condiments. I’m ashamed to admit I did a similar thing with ketchup, as a child. “Devonshire dumpling with cream,” said Clark. I imagine the dumpling is made of Devonshire cream, too. I can relate. I spent a year living in a forest, and I have multiple volumes of food fantasies.

This section struck me because I awoke to a glorious day and a middling feeling of guilt. The guilt I experience is somewhat free-floating—it wanders around in my brain searching for justification, until settling happily to munch on something I had previously agreed to not worry about. In this case I realized that my morning coffee, eggs and bagel would require energy—electricity—which has just shot up in Juneau to an ill-placed avalanche over worse-placed power transmission towers. Thinking of my quintupled May bill, I considered microwaving tea and eating raw foods for breakfast. They would of course embark me on a healthier path, too. From now on, I would only eat whole, raw foods. I looked at the dried beans on my shelf. Could they be eaten raw?

Thank god, the coffee was next to the beans. It brought me back. The reality is that I am a (usually) unrepentant epicure, and a certain amount of electricity is necessary to support that. And it’s not so much—it’s not like I’m making elaborate marmalade puddings all day. I think I could shop for a barbeque this weekend, though.

Potted eggs: Getting by in Juneau

Juneau: It’s a fine clear day, the mountains across the canal on Douglas are pink with sunrise.

It’s -16 with the windchill out there, people. My garbage can is overturned on the other side of the house. The top has gone to meet its maker, maybe out on Mt. Roberts. Birds huddle next to the Christmas lights in the trees outside. Bake them chicken eggs with shaved jamon serrano, a mix of taleggio and red hawk washed-rind cheese, and a bit of parsley and fresh pepper. Croissant on the side. That’ll save you!

It saved me. I’ve got more space than I need in this apartment, but less heat. The monitor says 46 degrees; the down button works, but not the up. It’s my second weekend back in Alaska after two years in Oakland, Calif. My toes have not yet forgiven me.

Still, we are adjusting. We — me and the cat. I got myself the requisite pair of Extra-Tufs; the kitten I got a cat. I’m slave-laboring for a newspaper up here, so I’ve hardly gotten to enjoy my new home or get to know the town. I’ve learned more about federal timber sales than the trail two blocks away from my house. Did you know the Forest Service’s first priority is to sell trees? I felt like such a naif …

Bringing up myself

Disclaimer: Dear parents, I know you tried your hardest. Any deep inner flaws are the fault of the author. Or her sister.

I’ve been thinking a lot about parenting lately. It’s that time of life, I suppose. I’m a healthy hormonal 27-year-old female. The other night I dreamt I gave birth to a kitten. It was very cute after we washed the amniotic fluid off it. (My dreams are often physiologically detailed.) We were so proud. By ‘we,’ I mean me and my boyfriend — who in real life enjoys other people’s babies and, if I’m being real euphemistic about it, cats from afar. I have informed him that I do not wish to have babies unless they are kittens. Babies, ick.

Which is why the next part of the dream was a nightmare. The brain riffed; and in the next one-act I had birthed a baby. Mind you, the baby never surfaced in any scenes. One minute I was thinking my pants were getting a bit tight, and the next the belly was pancake-flat again, and it was clear something had exited it. At the time I was on some kind of quest, let’s say a Hajj. The whole thing made me feel hard-core and resourceful, because I seem to have had the baby on the side of the road.

I’m hoping this isn’t my entrance into the Zone. That place women go from 27-33, where hormones rule and babies suddenly stop smelling funny and their minds have an inability to remember how horrible it is when babies, toddlers, or teenagers screech, especially in inappropriate places, embarrassing their parents.

As my friends all know, my plan has always been that I’d only have children if I could take fertility drugs. Some cocktail that would splice the egg, not release a bunch of them. I’d like to have a passel of identical children, so that I can do psychological experiments on them with a sample size to support reasonably good statistics on the results. As a conscientious scientist I would have to send some of them away as controls — to be raised by wolves, penguins, cats or Eugene Oregonians. I have considered naming them all George Foreman, but just for fun. They’d have to have nicknames, too.

I’ve always known, anyway, that I needed a lot more parenting before I could legitimately traumatize another generation. Example 1: Hygiene and tidiness. I was finishing an audio job early this morning; I absently took a sip of coffee from the mug on the right while staring at the screen; but today’s coffee, unfortunately, was the mug on the left. Also, I actively avoid looking at my kitchen sink. Example 2: An overdeveloped sense of fairness, wrought by intense sibling rivalry, which manifests in times of need as an overdeveloped sense of unfairness. Do not eat the last donut alone. You will discover my wrath. It is embarrassing to see my own childishness sometimes.

My own parents cannot help me. They have moved on to cats, themselves. I think they prefer them. The cats are Abyssinians, which respond to commands like ‘fetch.’ That’s more than I ever did.

But I discovered a solution. I will parent myself! I’ve been considering bidding for a video-podcast editing job for a parenting-science center. The example vodcast was a lesson in gratitude. A cheery woman parent explained to her cheery interviewer that each night at bedtime, she asks her child to list three things about the past day that she’s grateful for. Over time she has begun to compile the list during the day. Mommy was most pleased the day that the child declared, upon receipt of an afternoon ice cream sundae, that this would be one of her three things that day. It’s a way to raise a person who is conscious of and grateful for the good things in her life. A glass-half-fuller, the cheery women explained. It’s certainly preferable to having one of those children, and we’ve all heard them, who screeches “But I wanted the PINK FLAVOR!” at the top of her lungs in public.

I’m going to abandon my Inner Taskmaster (who is named Vladimir, by the way) and cultivate my Inner Cheery Mom.

Today I am grateful for:

(1) My adherence to high coffee standards, even in poverty. High-quality work cannot be done on low-quality sludge. And I have already finished for the day!

(2) Pirated software. I can say no more.

(3) My landlord, who brought me smoked-turkey soup last night when I had to work late.

(4) The two kittens I am about to pick up from the SPCA. People who know me, don’t worry — it’s only temporary. I’m becoming a foster cat mama.

But we all know kittens are the gateway baby.

Canning adventuress

1996. My sister, my mother, my father and I descended into the cellar after Grandma Elizabeth died to see a tree trunk, about 10 inches diameter, holding up the house, wedged between the kitchen floor and the cellar dirt. In the darkness beyond, the shelves were lined with fruits and veggies my grandmother had canned, probably in the 1970s. I don’t remember what any of them were. I only remember my father warning me to keep my distance, because they could explode at any moment. The projectile bacterial goop would give us botulism and we would likely die. Botulism was a popular tactical topic in our arguments, as well as an endless source of jokes. My father took it the most seriously. Later it got worse, when he wandered away from physics and toward bioremediation, that is, cleaning up anthrax or other bad microbes for governments or hospitals, and learned a bunch of biochemistry that cannot have been good for his mental health. Worse for us, because there are few ways one can fight the kind of convincingly solid scientific evidence my father uses in his arguments about why we should not eat the toast that fell on the ground. “Hantavirus! Hantavirus!” he would yell, snatching the toast away. My preferred method is bravado. “I have an amazing immune system,” I’d reply, suggesting that if I died, science was welcome to name this new strain of the virus after me.

Hantavirus kategoldenii.

Nonetheless, my father successfully indoctrinated me and my sister with a fear of jars of food with handwritten labels, the year smudged, harboring who knows what. So it was with more than a little bravado, conjured from the past, that this week I ventured into Home Canning.

The first catalyst was that last week I moved into a cottage in the hills that sparks my domestic instincts. It is an adorable cabin, lots of trees, no roommates. I have also begun reading Walden.

The second catalyst was that my grocer was selling almost-overripe strawberries at 79c for a quart pack when usually they are at least $3.99. I bought six of them, congratulating myself for my frugality. And a pack of jars, and the Ball Blue Book on Preserves, which, at $1.79, seems to me an excellent deal for what (so it says on the back) has been the authority on home canning for the last 50 years.

The Ball Blue Book briefly explains the difference between conserves, jams, jellies, preserves, and butters. I have read it several times but I cannot keep it straight. The recipes for strawberry jam, preserves, heirloom preserves, and conserves, seem to me almost identical. I embarked on what was called “Heirloom Preserves,” mostly because it sounded expensive and prestigious and fancy, as opposed to “jam,” which just had another cup of sugar and no lemon juice. What I ended up with was delicious, but it tasted and looked an awful lot like jam.

In the end, it took me two days to get all the jam off the wall. I smashed the strawberries down to compact them, with some difficulty, into 12 cups. I had three pots going. The recipe said to boil “rapidly” until the sugar was clear and the stuff was a thick gel. Trouble began after about 10 minutes, when the stuff really did start to boil. Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble: the foam rose quicker than I could assuage it. I was lifting one pot, stirring another–wait, the third’s boiling over–now the second’s doing nothing, turn that up–fuck, it’s hot–is that my HAIR in the pot? The gel became messier as it thickened, but it never thickened to the point at which it would slide off a spoon in a sheet. And just what was that foam? A disgusting light pink scum that I couldn’t get rid of. After a few hours I stuck it in a big pot in my closet, where, according to the directions, it was to sit for 24 hours. A day later it was nearly solid. Amazing. Still covered with foam, though. What is that foam?

One month later. I light a candle and make a PBJ in honor of dear departed Grandma Elizabeth. As of yet, no apparent botulism.

Autumn salad

red beets, roasted for hours
broccoli raab, sauteed
brussels sprouts, cauliflower, steamed & sauteed
whole-wheat pasta shells (not too many)
pine nuts, roasted
parsley and tarragon, chopped
grana padano
pomegranate seeds
coarse salt, black pepper
fruity-buttery olive oil, tiny bit of balsamic