• A quick pop-in


    Just popping in here quick. I don’t have much to say and my brain feels kind of fuzzy, probably because I was up too late watching Taxi Driver.

    Right now I’m sitting on the green sofa. I just finished off a slice of blackberry pie and an iced coffee. And before that there was a plate of roasted corn and cherry tomatoes for me, and eggs (one duck), toast, and apples for the kids. The oven keeps clicking on and off—there’s granola in it. Fans are whirring, birds are twittering, and the noise machine is doing its thang.


    This morning the kids and I went to the dam again in search of blackberries because just the thought of all those berries going to waste out there in the middle of nowhere kind of put me in a tizzy. More! More! More! my inside voice yelled at me. Go get ‘em!


    So we did. We got a little over two gallons this time. They are sooo good, sweet, soft and melty, and thick with juicy sweetness. They kind of taste like honey.


    We discovered a Really Good Picking Spot down close to the water where you can get six to ten berries in one swipe. I had to tear myself away, both literally and figuratively, since I had waded in way off the beaten path.


    I grew up thinking that blackberries were junk fruit. My mother didn’t really like them (her distaste extended to red raspberries, too). Black raspberries were the only good raspberry berry, according to her. Even so, one year she put up 88 quarts of blackberries. Maybe that’s why she doesn’t like them?


    I don’t harbor any such prejudices towards my berries. I love ’em all and am thrilled beyond measure with my berry patch find. I’m actively dreaming of more blackberry pie; there’s another recipe at the top of my mental queue and it looks like it might just be a winner. (Last night’s was good, but not good enough.)

    hot pie on a hot, hazy afternoon

    And…
    *I’m reading Watership Down to the kids. It’s slower than I thought it would be, and I’m getting kind of tired of reading about rabbits. But I might as well get used to it since it’s a long book and, well, all about rabbits. The kids like it.

    *Last night I learned that some of my friends are addicted to Glee. I did not know this! I thought I was the only one watching the silly high school parody and therefore was a little embarrassed about my addiction. But the friends who are hooked are whip-smart intellectuals—one of them has read Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek THREE TIMES THIS WEEK. So to discover that she stays up till 1 am most mornings watching Glee made my day. Because this means that I’m a whip-smart intellectual, too, right? (Never mind that I’ve never read Pilgrim at Tinker Creek.)

    *It is dry and hot and the garden is officially going to pot. The flowerbeds are filled with giant weeds, but I can’t bring myself to weed them when it’s so dry. And we don’t mow during a drought so the yard is a wreck. We have become Those Neighbors That Everyone Is Embarrassed To Live Beside.

    *I commented on SouleMama’s post about raising meat birds. At first some people were really upset by what I said (that we enjoy butchering day), but then some others chimed in to back me up. It’s an interesting group of readers over there. I like being one of them.

    *We had the spring rolls for supper last night and no one liked them (except me). And I went shopping for the ingredients, did all that chopping, and made a scrumptious spicy peanut dipping sauce, too, and all for naught. I hate when that happens. Now I have a whole stack of rice wrappers. In order to use them up, I think I’ll have to fry them. Which should be pretty tasty, I think.

    *I live for my daily cold bath. Lately I’ve been reading MFK Fisher’s book, The Art of Eating, while I chill. Did you know that the average male will, between the ages of 20 and 50, spend more than 800 days and nights eating? Some people find that disgusting, but just the thought of that much food—and getting to eat it all!—makes me feel safe and happy.

    *Another interesting fact, though not food related: only 1 percent of blog readers leave a comment. Go on, folks, prove that statistic wrong! I dare you!

    *Did you know that a big bag of Peanut M&Ms costs nearly five dollars? I did not. In spite of my sticker shock, I bought them anyway. And a bag of Twizzlers and assorted Snickers, too. Because Mr. Handsome was taking the two older kids to the Harry Potter movie (part of my daughter’s birthday present) and the kids insisted that large quantities of junk food were a vital part of the experience. So I indulged them. (And myself. Two of the bags were already open when I handed them over to the movie goers.)

    This same time, years previous: Indian pilaf of rice and split peas

  • July evening

    Last night’s perfect July evening was ours for the taking, and we ate it right up.

    There were blue skies and frolicsome breezes to go with. There was pool time with friends, the moms (and dad) sitting on the side talking about butchering turkeys, kids’ schedules, and make-you-own spring rolls (my new craving). There was corn on the cob and the first tomato sandwiches for supper. And there was an excursion to a never-before-seen-by-us destination in search of our own little bit of blackberry heaven.

    We—Mr. Handsome and I, plus the two older kids (the younger two are visiting their grandparents’)—put on long pants and sneakers, gathered assorted plastic containers and extra long-sleeved shirts, and set out on a pre-bedtime adventure.

    We had no idea where we were going, really. Our friend Kathy’s directions were vague—drive down a certain road, cross a river (but not the second one), and look for a pull-off on the right with an old gated road on the left. No signs were involved.


    Amazingly enough, we found the pull-off without any trouble. We struck off into the dark woods (it was a full ten degrees cooler than at our house, so said our car thermometer), came to a river which we crossed on rocks, and then crashed around in the woods for a bit until we found the trail again. We hoped it was the right trail anyway.

    “Just go until you come to a place where the trees open up,” Kathy had said.

    And then suddenly, the sky growing big above us, there it was!


    The hike up the dam was steep. The view was exhilarating.

    climbing backwards—it’s a lot steeper than it looks

    I was a little concerned about what I would find on the other side. Was the water up to the brim? Would we just fall straight over and down to our watery death below? What if the dam suddenly crumbled?

    When I had asked Kathy how safe the dam was for the kids, I was thinking about falling and drowning and getting lost, so she caught me completely off guard when she said, “Well, there are black bears.”

    “No way!” I squealed.

    “Oh yes,” she said. “Just this morning when we were picking, one popped up not twenty feet from my husband. He yelled at it and it moved off. But then a little later it got in between where we were both picking. They’re really not dangerous, but last year there was a mama with her two cubs and that could be dangerous, of course.”

    “Well, yeah!”

    “And there’s snakes, too, but we didn’t see any this morning.”

    Clearly, falling into the dam and drowning were not the pertinent risks. My worries needed to get more … wild.

    We didn’t see any black bears, sadly enough. Or snakes (not one drop of sadness there).


    What we did see was a spectacular view and lots of sweet juicy blackberries. It was a little slice of heaven on earth.


    A prickly heaven, yes, but heaven nonetheless.

    The kids meandered all over the face of the dam, picking berries, throwing stones into the water kersplunk, and chattering to us about all sorts of stuff, their clear, happy voices echoing off the water and bouncing back up to where Mr. Handsome and I were battling thorns and bugs with a focused intensity that children aren’t yet capable of.


    The evening light fast fading, we collected our containers and headed back down the dam and into the now quite dark and spooky woods.


    We used the homemade log bridge to cross the creek, and I was as skittish as a city slicker, my kids running circles around me and jumping on the logs till I wailed at them to please stop.


    This morning’s breakfast was blackberries and granola. Later there will be a blackberry pie. And maybe a cobbler, too.

    July has a sweet side and I have found it, o happy day!

  • Muffins for my bran

    In the midst of the corn husking (and much to my husband’s irritation), I got the urge to do a little cleaning of the freezers. I had to make room for all that corn, after all. Plus, it was a pretty cool place to hang out on such a hot day. (I’m so sneaky!)

    Mostly though, I wanted to consolidate all the bags of grains that were banging around in the two big freezers and fridge freezer. I knew I had a lot of stuff, but I wasn’t sure exactly what it was. And how in the world is a person supposed to use anything up if she doesn’t know what that anything is?

    So I did a quick reshuffle of the applesauce, spinach, and blueberries to make room on the top freezer shelf for the grains. As I shoved the bags into their new home, I jotted down each item. The upper shelf was quickly stuffed to the gills, so later when I got around to emptying out the kitchen freezer, I had to put all those little bags of grain into a brown bag and into the chest freezer. So I’m still not totally organized.

    But it is much better.

    Here’s what I found (most everything is under 5 pounds): hulled oats, nutritional yeast, hulled buckwheat, chickpea flour, semolina flour, cocoa, seven-grain wheat-free flour, spelt flour, rye flakes, maseca, dark rye flour, buckwheat flour, barley flour, yellow couscous, white couscous, millet, quinoa, ground flax, oat bran, pearl barley, amaranth, orzo, poppy seeds, cacao nibs, and ten pounds of wheat bran.

    Clearly, it was time I made some bran muffins. So I made two kinds, both from Marion Cunningham’s breakfast book.


    I am in love with that cookbook. I want to marry it. I’ve read the whole thing, and still I find myself picking it up and ruffling its pages in my spare time. I’m dreading the day when I have to return it to the library. Tears will be shed.


    First I made the hardcore variety, bran muffins straight up—lots of bran, whole wheat, honey, molasses, buttermilk, and raisins. The batter was kind of dry and crumbly, like moist sand, and I was afraid they would taste like bran rocks and then I would have to fall out of love with Marion’s book and I really didn’t want to do that. So I was quite relieved to discover that the muffins were absolutely delicious—moist, sweet, dark, and deeply satisfying. I ate two (and a bite) for breakfast and was full till noon.


    The kids, on the other hand, weren’t impressed. The boys each had one and mostly did not complain, and the girls each had part of one and complained a whole bunch, but none of them fussed about being hungry till the sun was high in the sky, thus proving that every cloud has a silver lining.


    Which reminds me, I never heard what Mr. Handsome thought about them, so right now, this very minute, I am calling him at work to find out what he thought about the muffin I sent with him this morning.

    It’s ringing…ringing…ri— “Hello?”

    “What did you think of that muffin I gave you this morning?”

    “It was good.”

    “You liked it?” I fished.

    “I think so. It didn’t strike me as dry or unpleasant to eat.”

    Pause.

    “It was good.”

    Pause.

    “I think I liked the other ones better, but then, you did, too.”

    [Editor’s note: I never said I liked the other ones better.]

    Pause.

    “What are you doing?”

    “I’m writing it down.”

    “You’re writing it down?”

    “Yep, every single word. You want me to play it back to you?”

    “No. I don’t want to know what I said.”

    Pause.

    “Are you still writing it down?”

    Pause.

    “Are you there?”

    So see? It really is a good bran muffin recipe. The man who doesn’t like super-dense foods even said so.


    The second recipe, one that I made that afternoon and we ate with our supper of fried potatoes and sausage and scrambled eggs, was a much lighter, kid-friendly recipe. The recipe involved bananas and cake flour and butter and white sugar. It’s like a glorified bran muffin, still plenty good for you, but not whack-you-over-the-head bran-y. Everyone was very happy with them.


    Did you know that bran muffins crackle when you put them in the oven? The bran actually talks, goes all snap and pop as it dries out. Or does whatever it is that bran does in an oven. It’s quite entertaining. And with the amount of bran in my freezer, it looks like I’ll have a bit of cooking snap-and-pop entertainment to keep me happy for a good little while.

    Now I just need to figure out some good muffin recipes that call for barley flour and amaranth. Ideas, anyone?

    Classic Bran Muffins
    Adapted from The Breakfast Book by Marion Cunningham

    2 ½ cups bran
    1 1/3 cups whole wheat flour
    2 ½ teaspoons baking soda
    ½ teaspoon salt
    2 eggs, beaten
    2/3 cup buttermilk
    1/3 cup neutral-tasting oil (I used canola)
    1/3 cup molasses
    1/4 cup honey
    1 cup raisins

    Stir together the dry ingredients and then stir in the wet. Add the raisins.

    Spoon the batter into 18 greased (or lined) muffin tins. Bake at 425 degrees for 12-15 minutes.

    These are best fresh, but leftovers are good, too. They freeze well.

    Banana Bran Muffins
    Adapted from The Breakfast Book by Marion Cunningham

    Marion suggests adding any or all of the following: walnuts, orange zest, and granola. I did none of that.

    I made 12 muffins and two small loaves of banana bran bread which I topped with coconut and chocolate chips à la my favorite zucchini bread recipe.

    12 tablespoons butter
    2/3 cup sugar
    2 ½ to 3 cups mashed bananas (about 4-5 ripe bananas)
    3 eggs
    2 cups cake flour
    1 ½ cups bran
    3/4 teaspoon salt
    1 ½ teaspoons baking soda

    Cream together the butter and sugar. Add the eggs and mashed bananas. Mix in the dry ingredients.

    Spoon the batter into 24 greased (or lined) muffin tins and bake at 375 degrees for 15-20 minutes.

    This same time, years previous: spicy Indian potatoes, blackberry cobbler