GrongarBlog – Page 25

Silly, sweet virtual world

It’s funny to perch on this spot on the planet and imagine that there are other people on their own perches doing whatever they’re doing at this particular moment. How often we’re oblivious of each other, busy in our own circles.

Which is one of many reasons why the internet can be so darn fun. At any moment in the day, you can catch a little view of what’s happening in some faraway elsewhere. Lots of cat photos, yes. And way too many videos of people doing things they ought not to be doing (let alone filming themselves while doing it).

But aside from that, there are really interesting, kind, talented people out there, people you’d never know about except that one online friend mentions another online friend mentions another, and soon, stepping stone by stepping stone, you’ve made a virtual friend across the ocean.

One of these new friends is Ruth, who designs lovely things with birds and wildlife, like the sandpiper picture at the top of this post. We’ve never met, or even spoken, but we’ve written back and forth. She reads my blog; I read hers. And, recently, she interviewed me on her blog. (My friends, this is a first. No one–no one–has ever interviewed me for anything before. Ever.)

And the point here is that I want to introduce you to Ruth, and her little birds, and her brooches, and her illustrations, and her thoughtful words. Because this is how we’ve always made new friends, virtual or real, one introduction at a time.

52 Photos ~ Celebration

28 weeks in to this photo project and this is the first one that really stumped me.

This has not been a celebratory week. Things are breaking left and right. Bones, feelings, electronic gadgets, automobiles.

I went marching out today with dog and camera, daring the world to show me something to celebrate.

Then, of course, it was staring me in the face. All of it.

Darn it. Look around.

There’s the obvious sunrise, of course, and the dappled clouds. The foggy hills and leaf littered path. The dog’s happy tail and the crow with its prize.

Then look further.

Microwave popcorn. Thick paperback novels. Shoes that fit. Glass. Ink. Record albums. Soap. Carrots. Mantis shrimp. Mittens. Bricks. Wheelbarrows. Instant read thermometers. Pencils. Wool comforters. Knives.

Gravity. Oxygen. Rotation. Atmosphere. Orbit. Hydrogen.

Carbon.

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This photo and post are in response to this week’s theme for the 52 Photos Project. You should participate, too! Read about how it works here. You can see a gallery of everyone’s photos for this week’s theme here. To see a list of all my blog posts for this project, go here.

One foot in front of the other

The observant will note that I’m not participating in NaBloPoMo this year. I’m doing this for your sake as much as mine. Really, who wants to read (again) my whines about how much I hate November?

Enough of that!

Instead, I plan to honor my rocky relationship with November by writing here just as I have during all the other months of the year: when the mood strikes.

In the meantime, for those who want to read a daily blog entry, I happily steer you to The Scott Expedition where, right now, Ben Saunders and Tarka L’Herpiniere are retracing Scott’s steps to the south pole and back, manhauling, with no ponies, no dogs, no snow machines. Just two men, pulling sledges, each loaded with a bit over 400 lbs of gear and supplies, with harnesses they’ve fashioned from backpack straps.

This expedition has been 10 years in the making. When I first learned about it 10 years ago, Ben was trying to generate funding by offering the public the opportunity to “sponsor” a mile of the journey. Of course, I bought a mile. Silly question. The whole journey is 1800 miles; mine is 1787, right near the end.

1800 miles. On foot. Through some of the harshest terrain and weather on the planet.

I really can’t complain about wading my way through 30 days of November, now can I?

Tongan coconut quick bread

Tonga.

It’s a land of complete mystery to me. All I knew before the My Kitchen My World group selected it as our next culinary destination was that it’s Polynesian. An archipelago of tropical islands sprinkled out somewhere in the vicinity of Fiji (about which I know very little as well, though it features in my mid-December fantasies of palm trees, white sands, blue water).

Tongan cuisine? Even more of a mystery to me. But I had this tube of Tongan vanilla beans in my cupboard, so I went searching for a recipe that called for vanilla.

It surprised me to find that Tongan vanilla recipes are rare. I get the sense that the Tongan people grow vanilla as a cash crop, ship it out, and use the money to buy the foods they really do eat (traditional Tongan cuisine features seafood and pork cooked in earth ovens, and plenty of taro, yams, coconuts, and tropical fruits).

I was also wondering (since I’m me) about Tongan bread recipes. So no one here will be surprised that I finally landed on a recipe for Tongan Coconut Bread. I honestly have no idea if this recipe is something a Tongan mother would make for her family, but I liked the sound of it, and it did feature using whole vanilla beans. And the coconut sounded tropical. I was sold.

This is a quick bread recipe (by which I mean the bread is leavened by baking powder, not yeast; but yes, it’s also a quick-to-make recipe). It goes together in a snap and bakes to a very light golden brown, with a slightly crisp crust.

While it baked, this first of November poured down a gloomy rainstorm, but the house smelled like coconut. Not quite enough to make me believe I was on some Polynesian beach, with the waves whispering shoreward, but enough to distract me from the dismal morning and remind me that, even on rotten November days, there are good, easy things in this world.

I had a taste. It was pretty darn good, especially for the little effort that went into it. It’s not very sweet, and subtly coconuty. It was good on its own, and even better with a schmear of Nutella. How’s that for international cuisine?

Tongan Coconut Quick Bread

Barely adapted from Jasons.com
Yields: 1 regular loaf, or 3 mini loaves

Ingredients
3 cups all-purpose flour (or you can use half all-purpose and half whole wheat or white whole wheat)
1 tablespoon baking powder
1 teaspoon salt
1 cup unsweetened grated coconut
1 egg
1 1/2 cups coconut milk (I used the “lite” variety)
1/4 cup sugar or honey
1 vanilla bean (if you have a Tongan bean, all the better, but any will do)
1/4-1/2 teaspoon vanilla extract (the original recipe called for 1/2 teaspoon of scraped vanilla bean seeds. My bean yielded barely 1/4 teaspoon and I wasn’t about to use four whole beans on this recipe, so I made up the difference with vanilla extract)

Method

Preheat the oven to 350ºF.
Lightly grease one standard loaf pan or three small loaf pans.
In a large bowl, combine the flour, baking powder, and salt.
Cut the vanilla bean in half lengthwise, then scrape the cut sides with a knife to extract as many of the seeds as possible (save the scraped beans for another recipe or for making vanilla sugar).
In a smaller bowl, whisk the egg, then add the sugar, vanilla seeds, vanilla extract, and coconut milk and mix well.
Pour the wet ingredients into the dry ingredients and mix well.
Spoon the mixture into the prepared loaf pans, distributing evenly if you’re using more than one pan. Smooth the batter with a spoon.
For the standard loaf pan, bake for one hour. For smaller pans, bake for 30-40 minutes, until a tester comes out dry.
Cool on a wire rack in the pans.

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To see the round up of the group’s Tongan recipes, visit the My Kitchen My World (MKMW) site. (You can also see where the group has already traveled.) To join in, just make a dish (or more) for the month’s country, blog about it, and put a link to your post in the comments on the MKMW page.

Next month, we travel to Poland, my choice!

October, beguile us in the way you know

October

O hushed October morning mild,
Thy leaves have ripened to the fall;
Tomorrow’s wind, if it be wild,
Should waste them all.
The crows above the forest call;
Tomorrow they may form and go.
O hushed October morning mild,
Begin the hours of this day slow.
Make the day seem to us less brief.
Hearts not averse to being beguiled,
Beguile us in the way you know.
Release one leaf at break of day;
At noon release another leaf;
One from our trees, one far away.
Retard the sun with gentle mist;
Enchant the land with amethyst.
Slow, slow!
For the grapes’ sake, if they were all,
Whose leaves already are burnt with frost,
Whose clustered fruit must else be lost—
For the grapes’ sake along the wall.

–Robert Frost, from A Boy’s Will, 1913

52 Photos ~ Someone I love

We’re camera shy, he and I.

Just another among a thousand things we have in common.

Sometimes I forget all the things on that long list. There are days when it feels like we have little in common, because we know each other too well and the big things get obscured by the squally details of getting through the day.

He puts the drinking glasses here; I prefer them there. I like to plan the route before the trip; he prefers to wing it. He leaves his shoes where I don’t expect them to be. I recycle bottles he’s saving to put cider in.

But, honestly, even while I’m trying to think up a list of those differences, I’m coming up nearly empty. Because I’ve stepped back a foot or two, and the pointillism of our lives has resolved itself into a whole, beautiful painting.

All the big things? We match perfectly. We bicker like any two people who have hung around together for 20-odd years, but down deep, we’re a pair and I don’t know how I’d muddle through the days, nights, weeks, and years without him.

He makes me laugh. He makes me mad. He tells me things I never knew (he does this daily). He cooks us delicious feasts. He trims goat hooves. He cuddles the cat I don’t like. He presses apples for hours on a brittle October afternoon, while the world feels like it’s going to heck. He believes in things, and stands by his beliefs. He’s a terrific father to H. He knows poems by heart. He loves his family. And staring off into the hills, thinking and watching and listening.

He makes me a better person, every day. Just by being.

And, really, I’d be utterly lost without him.

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Friday Five ~ Easily distracted

It’s been a busy few weeks, it has, and my head is spinning. I start to do something and then… oooh! is that a shiny thing?

Sentences are going unfinished, and….

I forget. What was I talking about?

Maybe, instead of trying to write something coherent, I’ll just share a few fun things with you. And we can be all serious and coherent again next week.

Maybe.

We few, we happy few

Last night, we saw Kenneth Branagh in the National Theatre rebroadcast of Macbeth. It was exciting and fun. But not as good as Sir Ken’s Henry V. How cool a coincidence is it, then, to wake up this morning and learn that today is St. Crispin’s day?

This speech chokes me up every time.

Girls just want to have fun

Tonight. She’s here. At our local opera house. Are we going? You bet your bippy we are!

http://youtu.be/KWBp1O8NUFU

Mystery man

Sunday night, as if enough isn’t going on, we’re going to see Hugh Laurie. Because how can you not love this man? He’s going to playing songs from his new album (blues, piano), but maybe, if we ask nicely, he’ll play our favorite….

We will never ever move from Vermont

How can you not love a state that has designated, by law, a state pie? (Many thanks to Tammy at Wing and a Prayer Farm for pointing this out to me today.)

Broyhill or the box of badgers?

I’m delighted to know I wasn’t the only one who preferred the “booby” prizes on Let’s Make a Deal.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

52 Photos ~ First thing I see

http://youtu.be/W3FZkHUjCVg

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These photos and post are in response to this week’s theme for the 52 Photos Project. You should participate, too! Read about how it works here. You can see a gallery of everyone’s photos for this week’s theme here. To see a list of all my blog posts for this project, go here.

52 Photos ~ Starts with a “C”

(Cider apples, from left to right: Wixon, unknown, Chisel Jersey, Medaille D’Or, Bramtot, Kingston Black, Golden Russet, Bilodeau, Foxwhelp)

Regular readers will notice that this is my second apple picture in a row for the 52 Photos Project.

Well, yes. Because it’s apple season. And when it’s the season, you must wallow in it.

For the past couple of weeks, M and I have been picking apples willy nilly, from the old trees in the river valley, remnants of farms that were abandoned to make room for the dam; from the trees along the side of the road (also reminders of ancient farms), belonging to our kind neighbors who let us to take all the apples we can reach; and from the marvelous heirloom orchard at Poverty Lane Orchards.

We’ve gathered nigh on nine bushels of apples, from tiny, lumpy, yellow mongrels to the giant blushing Foxwhelps. And now, commingled in boxes and totes, they’re sitting (“sweating” in cider terminology), developing their deeper, darker flavors, before we press them for cider.

For weeks now, I’ve been thinking about apples. And the abundance of apples. And the shapes and colors of apples. And the overwhelming smell of apples on the porch. I find bits of apple branches in my hair and sweater. There are apple leaves on the floor of the car. We’ve made apple cake, apple pie, and apple turnovers. We’re sitting on an apple-shaped globe, and everywhere we look, there it is: the fruit of myth.

And what my mind keeps returning to is the obvious: that there is a season for things. That this is now and not later, and we must gather now, almost in a frenzy, before it’s lost.

That this is the window when a thing should happen. It can’t be scheduled for an easier time in the calendar. It can’t be put off for a few weeks. The apples are ready now. Everything that has no season must make way for the thing that does. You can feel a sort of frantic grip on your shoulders: gather and preserve, set all the pots on all the burners, wash all the jars, press all the juice you can from what’s fresh and abundant today.

Winter is coming. Another season. The one you want, on a hot summer day, to open with the sharp snap and fizz of a cold soda can. But some seasons aren’t preservable.

So we get to work preserving what we can. Taking a moment of October, crushing it, and bottling it, to sip again next summer, when fall feels as distant as spring does now.

Before we know it, the snow will fly. The moon will cast its shadow on a snow frosted field. And the apple trees will be dreaming dreams of pink and white flowers budding again in season.

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