WhirledView

Honeymoon in America Off the Beaten Track in and about Woodland, California, Part 2

By John C. Dyer, UK Correspondent

(This is the second of a two-part photo story by John C. Dyer.  The first can be found here.) 

Davis, California

  The City of Davis is best known as the home of the University of California, Davis a world class institution. But it is also a marvelous place to visit in its own right, especially appealing to those who like a traditional city center and village atmosphere. (Photos left: "Village House" and "Detail Village Garden" by John C. Dyer, August 2011). (Photo right "City Street" by John C. Dyer, August 2011)

It is at once charmingly quaint  (Photos left: "Tea house," "Tea for Two," and  "Orange Square" by John C. Dyer, August, 2011).  

 

 

 

Davis is the home to a busy Farmer’s Market, one of the first in the modern Farmer’s Market movement, featuring entertainment as well as veggies for its many customers.  But of course, the University is never far from sight. (Photos right: "Uni student" and "Farmers Market Scene by John C. Dyer, 2011).

 You really could not make Davis up, but to the English eye it offers all that a town centre should, small local shops and restaurants, walking and biking the norm and the Unitrans double decker, vintage, iconic London Routemaster buses.  The farmers’ market is very impressive after the cholesterol loaded offerings of a much smaller market in St Annes. 

University of California, Davis

The campus of the University of California is a delight to visit.  Cork Oaks shade its central square .  Multiple sculptures intrigue the walker (Photos left: UCD campus and photos right:  Intrigue, Using Your Head and Shoe by John C. Dyer, August 2011). The campus consciously connects with England, using London buses for transport and decorating the station with an old Telephone Booth.   Putah Creek winds through campus. (Photo left: "Phone Box," by John C. Dyer, August 2011.

 UC Davis' Horticultural Heritage

The University displays its horticultural heritage with a breathtaking display of trees, plants, and flowers buzzing with bees. 

(Photos above: "Beezy," "Purple Whisps," "Pink on Pond,"by John C. Dyer, August 2011)

Photos right: "Delicacy" "Fire bush," "Redwood," "The Rose," "Trumpets," by John C. Dyer, August 2011.)

  

Labour Day saw a handful of students and very little bike action.  Two days later it was no longer safe to walk in a daydream for cyclists asserting their right to the cycle paths and young people swarming around the town and campus. We bid adieu as the students began to arrive for the Fall.

Thanksgiving 2011

The Slapdash Cook Gorges on the Last of the Veggies

  By Patricia Lee Sharpe

These are the glory days for the Farmer's Market in Santa Fe.  It's chilly at eight in the morning when the market opens.  Jacket weather.  And there was ice in the folds of my newspaper when I retrieved it from the driveway one day last week. 

But the sky was already blue when I reached the Market, and the sun made everything look so promising, cooking-wise, that I wanted to snatch it all up.  I’m a carnivore, and fairly unapologetic about this proclivity, but I’m helplessly addicted to vegetables, too.  I can’t resist them, even in the supermarket with the overhead pipes spewing a disgusting cold mist over everything green. When I’m confronted with the real thing, mere hours its living connection with the earth that nurtured it, I become a ravenous locavore. Uncontrollable.

And how could anyone resist these last fruits  of the season?  Tomatoes, some grape-like, some surely weighing a pound each, all red, red, red. And a precious few baskets of raspberries.  And bunches of beets, deep red violet. And ristra-strings of hot peppers so intensely aflame with color that my inner Carmen wanted  to break into a flamenco on the spot.  Not to mention the orange carrots and pumpkins and the golden squash and the slick green chiles still waiting to be roasted.  And the purple fingerling potatoes and the dark satiny eggplant.   And the pearly white Vidalia onions.  And the garlic that comes wrapped in its own white tissue, like a gift to chefs.  And skinny green beans.  And vases of zinnias and cosmos and marigolds.  Plus apples, of course.  Macintosh.  Rome.  Delicious.  Apples by the pint, by the peck, by the bushel, their skins taut with juiciness that spurts down your chin if you don’t bite carefully, which reminds me of the inimitable taste of just pressed apple juice, set out in little cuplets.  To tempt you to buy a bottle. Or two.    

Talk about cornucopia!  These final weeks of summer vegetables are like the finale at a fireworks display, all the more glorious because the program is almost over. And so, as I walked through the market this morning, exceeding my budget as usual, I gloried in the color, but couldn’t help thinking of the killer frost that’s due any night now. 

Among other delights, including a week's supply of leafy salad mix and a mammoth cauliflower I intended to curry, I bought several pounds of tomatoes, not at all sure what I’d do with them,  except that I'd have to do it fast, because they couldn't get any riper without going bad.  Still, I had to have them.  There's no such thing as a surplus of vegetables in my house.  

Once I got home with my booty, the fate of the tomatoes had already been settled: soup.  What's more, I decided, I’d make the soup, for the first time in my life, without cracking a recipe book.  Slapdash cook style.

Actually, it was a matter of trying to remember a formula I’d already felt the need to improvise last year when I discovered a peculiar and apparently invariable pattern among tomato soup recipes .The hot soups all wanted cream.  The cold soups didn’t.  And—here’s the nearly unanimous and criminal part!— most recipes called for a tablespoon or more of canned tomato paste as well as fresh tomatoes.   Intensity at the cost of authenticity? No way, I decided.  Why disguise the flavor of fresh tomatoes at the peak of perfection?   Ditto for the addition of cream, plus this: why pile on the calories?

Anyway the recipe I’d come up with was so simple I did indeed remember it perfectly.  Better yet,  anyone can follow it without a lot of finicky measuring.  Start with three pounds of tomatoes (so you’ll wind up with enough soup to make the effort worthwhile).  Chop a medium onion and a big stalk of celery and fry them in any oil you want (I use olive) until they’re soft, which means the onions are translucent.  It wouldn’t hurt to add a small clove of garlic, diced, a couple of minutes before the frying’s done.  If you decide to skin the tomatoes, cover them with boiling water, briefly, to loosen the skins, but you don’t need to.  You’ll be blending the soup before you’re finished. Anyhow, dice the tomatoes and toss them into the pot with the sauteed onion, add a quart of chicken stock and boil until the tomatoes are soft.

After the tomato mixture cools a little, blend it until it’s less than perfectly smooth.  (I like it with a little texture.) Then add another quart or two of chicken stock (I make my

Christmas with the Slapdash Cook: The Miracle of Curried Squash Soup

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

A certain person hates the mere thought of Slapdash Cooking.  He’s a mathematician.  Mathematicians like precision. QED and all that. 

Other family members focus on other foibles of Slapdash Cookery.  A very silly Christmas present turned up with my name on it this year. It was a dish towel, with a sad story:  I cooked.  It burned.  I ordered takeout. 

OK, I'm guilty, except for the takeout part.  The Slapdash Cook is nothing if not ingenious about saving the day.

I revel in the rhythms of chopping, dicing, slicing, mixing, blending, as well as in the taste-testing that transmutes raw ingredients into deliciousness. However, I’m notorious for forgetting that food over flame needs to be checked on, often.  We all know that a watched pot never boils.  In my kitchen there’s a corollary. The unwatched pot scorches or catches fire. 

The worst thing that ever happened was an oil fire that licked at cabinets and sooted up the house before it could be extinguished with heaps of baking soda. What a mess from a little oil in a frying pan!  Flame creep is the downside of gas burners.  

The more banal scenario involves singed broccoli or sauce sticking onto pots with enough char to tinge the flavor of what’s technically not burnt.  Those dark flecks in the tomato sauce?  They aren’t flakes of oregano or basil.  And there won’t be as much risotto as expected tonight, because the rest is clinging to the pot. As was much of the oatmeal I meant to have for breakfast this morning.  Oh well!  I overate last night.

Timers, you say.  Why don’t I use them?  Simple.  They don’t like me.  The timer was the first part of my oven’s control apparatus to die.   Replacing the clock mechanism will impoverish me only slightly less than buying a new oven.  Meanwhile, with lots of Christmas cooking on the agenda, I bought a timer from the kitchenwares section of the local supermarket.  Its signal wasn’t musical, but the message got through.  Hey there! Check the cookies!  Unfortunately it died a premature death, shortly after the gang arrived.  Now I’m relying on my Blackberry, which worries me.  If all timers I touch are jinxed, will my cell phone work when I’m stuck in the snow and need to summon a wrecker?

Well, Christmas in Santa Fe wasn’t white this year.  It was brown, which disappointed my snow-loving family.  However, the Slapdash Cook won over the doubting number-cruncher.  How?  With Curried Winter Squash Soup.

Acorn squash.  Butternut squash.  They’re piled high in all markets now.  Either works, but I prefer the deeper flavor of the acorn variety.  Whichever, however, it’s a battle to muscle these things open. I plant a chef’s knife into the belly of a squash, grab a hammer, then pound on point and handle, until the blade deigns to cut through.   The hard-won halves get plopped, seed side down, on a foil-lined cookie sheet, and baked at about 350 ̊, until the flesh is soft. (Test with a skewer—en garde!)  That will take up to 45 minutes. Or more.  Keep (ahem!) testing.   (By the way, given what’s below, I hope you chose a medium-sized acorn or a slightly less than medium-sized butternut.)

Now comes the delectably aromatic part of the soup-making.   Dice a fat onion and two robust stalks of celery. Sauté them, gently, in two tablespoons of oil, plus as much butter as you like or need to do the job.  Once the onion approaches transparency, add an apple, peeled and diced.  When all elements are soft but not mushy, add roughly two teaspoons of curry powder, the amount depending on the oomph of the spice and your love for piquancy.  Fry, stir and scrape long enough to tease out the flavors of the spices without letting brown turn to black.  This is a tricky but key element in all curry Cooking, so you're stuck with another judgement call!  But that’s the nature of Slapdash cooking.  It's not for cowards or the indecisive.  

Finally, squash and spices must be eased into some combination of stock and milk or cream.  I prefer 1/4 skim milk to 3/4 low-sodium organic chicken stock—or, better,  the homemade kind, if there's any around. Now  spoon-scrape the squash from its skin and get that blender or food processor going.   Just remember: the liquid you add determines the soup you'll get—tangy (less milk) or unctuous (some cream, though too much will overpower the curry).  Once the blending’s done, adjust the flavor and texture.  You’ll have about two quarts of soup.   

I’ve made this Curried Winter Squash Soup three times in the last month.  Different squashes.  Different curry powders.  Different dairy/stock proportions.  The final product is never the same, but it’s always delicious.  In short, it's a typical slapdash concoction.  No recipes.  No finicky measurements.  Terrific results.

And here’s the Christmas miracle.  Not only did the mathematician ask for seconds, he asked for the recipe.  What’s more, he declared that he's prepared (um—maybe) to follow the adventures of the—oh, horrors!—Slapdash Cook. 

What more could I ask?  Happy New Year.



    

The Slapdash Cook Goes Ga-Ga over Tomatoes

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

To-may-to?  To-mah-to? 

Hybrid?  Heirloom? 

Which is right?  Which is better?

Who cares?  That’s what the Slapdash Cook says.  Point your Prius toward the nearest farmers’ market and fill your ecologically-responsible, brought-from-home shopping bag with succulent red tomatoes. Or equally juicy yellow tomatoes.  Or even (these days) purplish tomatoes.   Just make sure they’re mere hours from the vine and so ripe you have to handle them more deferentially than eggs.  When you get home, DO NOT stash them in the fridge.  And don’t resist temptation.  Attack!  Chomp down with those dentist-enriching white incisors and slurp! slurp! slurp!

Ahem—for more genteel immediacy, slice a plateful of to- matoes at the peak of ripeness, drizzle them with olive oil, adorn them with fresh basil (from your garden, I hope) and that’s it.  A salad to die for.  Impossible to improve on.  On the other hand, if you have lamb chops or a steak in need of company for dinner, slice the tomatoes in half and cap them with a mix of parmegiano-reggiano, chopped basil and freshly ground black pepper.  Five minutes under the broiler is all it takes to create a savory crust.  To keep the menu painless and consistent with the season, pile a platter with corn on the cob (also just picked, of course)  for everyone to gnaw on. 

What else have I been doing with this season’s heavenly  tomatoes?  Toasted cheese sandwiches: aged cheddar crowned with sliced tomato.  Or a generous grating of the same excellent cheddar (note to cheese snobs: a fine cheddar is not to be sneered at) plus  tomatoes chopped finely with Videlias and Bell (also too often despised) peppers to fill a Sunday breakfast omelet.  Add strong-brewed Sumatra, green chili sausage, a delicate flour tortilla, the Sunday paper and a sun-bathed portale: pure paradise. (Depressing headlines excepted.)

Ah, you say, this is too easy, even for the Slapdash Cook, who’s not illiterate, although she likes to putter around the kitchen as if she were.  To that, I reply: there’s nothing wrong with easy when dining fresh from the garden.  However, for kitchen slaves who suffer guilt from too much effortlessness,  the recommended tomato magic for early September is gazpacho, the liquid salad from Spain. I’ve just finished blending my third batch of the year.

Here I must confess.  When I first made gazpacho I was recipe-bound.   Even so, it wasn’t easy.  How large is a “medium” onion?  How fat is a “large” tomato?  As for garlic cloves, the size range is enormous.  Just what does “three or four” cloves add up to in terms of teaspoons? 

And then, as I gathered confidence, there was the day I was in the middle of a gazpacho and discovered I didn’t have red wine vinegar.  Only white.  And basalmic.  Panic!!!!  Boring or bold? I asked myself.  Characteristically, I  went for bold.  Result: edible, but never repeated.  The emergencies continued.  Last week I’d brought home some sensuously perfect tomatoes, but the cucumber I recalled as hiding under the celery and carrots in my fridge wasn’t there.  Also—sigh!—I had red peppers, but no green peppers.  No problem!  Get that blender going!  As for today, all the requisite veggies were on hand, but I was half a cup short of tomato juice.  Oh well!  Carry on! 

In short, start with the basic gazpacho recipe, then play.  Want it sweeter?  Go with red peppers.  Want it milder?  Increase the cucumber.  Love the piquant?  Double the garlic and increase the chili pepper or whatever you favor for the tongue tingling effect. It’s hard to imagine a substitute for the olive oil (Sesame?  Ugh!), but there are vinegars galore to experiment with.   Probably not raspberry, though.  There are some experiments that even the Slapdash Cook balks at. 

Oops!  I almost forgot the croutons.  Well, you'll have to make them yourself, but it's easy.  Chop some good bread into 1/3" cubes--small is good, with croutons, toss with a bit of olive oil, scatter on a cookie sheet and crisp at about 200 degrees while the veggies are being blended.  Spoon, according to impulse, on top of the gazpacho, along with diced cucumber, onion and pepper.   

But the garnish isn't really necessary.  Make things sinfully easy for yourself.  Serve the gazpacho as a beverage.  With those tomato-graced toasted cheese sandwiches.  And for desert: sliced peaches.  Assuming you haven't  consumed them slurpy-style, which is how ripe peaches (and ripe tomatoes) were intended to be eaten.

The Slapdash Cook Finally Harvests an Apricot

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Despite the best efforts of a brigade of blister bugs who gnawed eagerly at my basil seedlings last month, I gathered my first batch of basil leaves this afternoon.  I’ll be making pesto for dinner tonight.  Then I’ll fill a cookie tray with dollops of pesto and slide it into the freezer.  When the little mounds of pesto are frozen solid, I’ll pop them into a plastic bag and keep them until they’re needed.  Usually that means I’m concocting the classic pesto and pasta, a scandalously easy dinner for hot nights when serious cooking is less inviting than a visit to the  searing sections of hell. 

Equally quick and easy, assuming a willingness to heat up the oven, is this:  insinuate one of those thawed dollops of pesto under the skin of a chicken breast or thigh.  A half hour later, the skin is crispy, the meat is savory and dinner is underway.  Sprigs of tarragon or rosemary, I’ve discovered work equally well.  I grab my scissors, do a little snipping in my herb garden and ensconce the chicken on the sprigs that haven’t been slid between skin and meat.  That way the flavor permeates from two directions.

So I take great pleasure in my herb garden, which also boasts thyme, oregano and mint.  Already I have bunches of oregano hanging from a shower rod.  Whether I’m cooking Mexican or Italian style next winter, I’ll be using my own dried oregano.

Nice. But my pride and joy this summer is my apricot.  Yes, apricot.  Singular. 

Everywhere in Santa Fe now pavements are smeared and sticky from the pulp of unwanted apricots allowed to rot and plop to the ground from overhanging trees.  I don’t understand this.  How can anyone let these luscious apricots go to waste?  The same thing happens during cherry season.  The walkways are littered with pulp and pits. A crime.  A sin.

Happily there are those who take proper advantage of the fact that apricots and cherries, though not native, thrive here.  Their fruity, wholly natural jams and jellies are available at the Farmers’ Market.  Some people present a bottle of wine to the host and hostess when they’re invited to dinner.  I take jars of local jam.  It’s that good.  I also make up boxes of jams for gifting at Christmas. 

I planted an apricot tree shortly after I moved into my newly renovated house.  When spring came, my tree burst into blossom just as it was supposed to. What visions I had!  Bowls and bowls of perfectly ripened apricots.  Golden apricots.  With a pink blush to them.  Me, slurping lasciviously.  Licking my lips and fingers.  Having another.  And another.   Then came a vicious early April freeze.  The blooms went brown.  They fell off.  No apricots that year. 

The Slapdash Cook Throws Together a Pot of Posole

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

When you visit an Indian pueblo on Christmas day, you will be invited to join one or more families for the midday meal.  In fact, you will receive invitations from many families.  No prior acquaintance needed.  Just seat yourself at the table, and you will be served the traditional dishes of the native peoples of the Rio Grande valley.  If you feel awkward, you are suffering from your own hang ups.  Your hosts are hospitality incarnate.

One of the dishes you will sample is posole (pronounced po-so-lay). It’s made of pork, chicos (corn kernels processed much like hominy) and chili peppers cooked in water with oregano.  No magic happens during the cooking.  You’ll be served a stew of discrete elements in a watery broth.  A serving of fry bread, which is just that, adds a little rib-sticking sinfulness to the meal.  And fun.  Poke a hole and steam comes out.  Which gives you hot chili with hot bread. Guaranteed to chase the chill out of a cold December day.  (But it won't look or taste like this pot of posole.)

The Limits of Authenticity

Now when people are extending this incredible hospitality to a complete stranger like me, I am not inclined to be a hyper-critical foodie.  But posole as a side dish in a New Mexican restaurant isn’t much more interesting.  The same insipid broth.  The same non-communicative ingredients.  Boring—unless the peppers are tongue-burning hot, in which case nothing else matters. Still, traditional posole is basic nutrition.  It will keep you alive.  You will get the  same dish when you order posole at the New Mexico State Fair, and it’s the recipe in my ancient recipe trove, a skinny paperback entitled The Complete New Mexico Cookbook.*

So much for authenticity!  Sometimes tradition shouldn’t be tampered with.  Sometimes evolution is a good thing. 

A More Succulent Version

Shortly after I arrived in Santa Fe, I was invited to dinner in an old mountain village called Truchas by an artist friend, who was born in Costa Rica and was raised in Los Angeles.  He served what he called posole.  Rich, succulent, delicious, it did what stews are supposed to do.  The ingredients turned the cooking liquid into ambrosia, yet the underlying  flavor of lime-processed corn and oregano was unmistakable.

So I asked for the recipe, which I received, that very night, but only as a list of ingredients.  No amounts.  No prep instructions.  Still, I knew where I was coming from (the traditional method) and where I wanted to go (my friend’s creative, unlabored approach), so I went to work right away.  By Christmas I could serve my ver- sion of my friend’s version to my family, who converge annually on Santa Fe for skiing and hanging out.  They loved it, and they continue to opt for seconds, every year, except when I get carried away with the super hot chilis.  One year I made the posole so hot even I couldn’t handle it without ladling it over an equivalent amount of bland white rice. 

Anyhow, here’s how it goes, with a bow to Alvaro Cardona-Hines:

Figure on two pounds of stewing pork.  Have on hand a 13 ounce can of diced tomatoes and a 13 ounce can of hominy, preferably Mexican style.  (You can start by soaking the chicos overnight, just as you can soak navy beans for baked beans, and you’ll get a chewier version, but my picky food-loving family doesn’t think this element of authenticity is worth the extra fuss). You will need a cup and a half of the following very coarsely sliced/diced vegetables: onions, carrots, celery, green  peppers.  Ditto with the mushrooms.  For spicing: oregano, bay leaf, black pepper, garlic, hot chilies.  As for liquid, you can stick with water, in which case the stew will be infinitely better on day two, or you can use chicken stock, which, in its commercial versions, is hardly better than water.

Chop and fry the onions in olive oil (or canola or peanut—whatever you want) as you see to the left.  Before they are too transparent, add the pork and stir the mixture from time to time.  Once the pork is mostly white on the outside, add the carrots and the other vegetables.  Add the hominy and tomatoes.  Add 2 bay leaves, 1 tablespoon of oregano, 1 teaspoon of chopped garlic, ½ teaspoon black pepper and fresh green chilies enough for the burn you can stand.  Stir.  Cover with water or chicken broth.  Simmer for two hours, adding liquid, if necessary. Correct seasonings, adding salt if you insist. 

Serve the posole with corn bread and a green salad—and who cares if it’s authentic?  It’s delicious.  And it freezes well.  Make it for yourself and you won’t have to cook for two weeks.

* By Jim Douglass, Santa Fe, 1977.

    

 

Dear Valentine: You Can Have It All

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Note:  Check out Indian Love Poems and the Kama Sutra.

There’s a reason why the guy in your life comes around with chocolates and/or flowers on Valentine’s Day. This husband/ boyfriend knows he has it good.  He’s trying to divert your attention, sweetheart.  It’s like bosses take their secretaries out for lunch once a year.  Big deal!  The assumption is that we women are stupid and haven’t noticed that the double standard is far from dead.

Sometimes, it's suggested, the bribes should be diamonds—in a heart-shaped setting, of course, and maybe diamonds are better than chocolates. They don’t make you fat.  You can pawn them, too.  But the deal is the same.  Who has the gift-giving purchasing-power, according to the ads and commercials?  It isn’t the lady.  

Sure, there are some female CEOs these days, and many universities enroll more gals than guys, but the conventional wisdom, even for female Ph.Ds, is this: you can’t have it all.  Think very very small.

I want to make this mind-numbing truth clear: the person being advised against dreams that soar is female.  The magazines and op-ed pages are full of it. Preachers preach it.  Psychologists reinforce it.
 
To Wit: a woman can’t have marriage AND children AND a career, they say, and be anything but miserably dissatisfied with her performance all round.  We can’t have it all, dear sisters, and be happy.  It’s an impossible dream, babe. 

Hmmmmm. No one tells the testosterone-empowered: choose between self-fulfillment and fatherhood. No one lays guilt trips on guys who don’t score ten out of ten on every life task every day.  Perfect professional.  Perfect husband.  Perfect father.  Sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?  Robotic.  Like something made of plastic.

But that’s what women are supposed to be.  Ten out of ten.  24/7.  When some conscientious working woman scores a mere eight or nine in the mothering category or the husband-pleasing category, she’s encouraged to tear herself apart for having allocated a smidgen of her time/energy/creativity/ intelligence/self to her job.  Foolish selfish greedy woman! We told you so. You can’t have everything.

So here’s the cherry-brandy-creme, supper-truffle secret: the game is rigged.  The standards are radically different for men and women. 

And here’s how it works: 

Look at the families you know, the ones featuring full time wives and mothers, women who believe they can’t (or shouldn’t) have it all, the ones totally devoted (they say) to so-called traditional family values.  Are their children sublimely well-adjusted and always happy and never delinquent?  Are their husbands so divinely happy their lustful eyes never wander and divorce is never on the agenda?  Are their meals perfectly nutritious gourmet productions all the time?  Are their houses always neat and fit to be featured in Architectural Digest? 

Of course not.  So why on earth should working women be made to feel selfish, inadequate and deeply guilty and what all, when their realities don’t equate to some unattainable fantasy notion of ideal family life?

They shouldn’t.   That's my valentine to all of us.

So keep your job.  Enjoy your children.  Construct a well-rounded life.  Along with a partner (if you can find one) who understands it's okay for you to be as human and imperfect as he is.  And enjoy those delicious chocolates, in moderation, all year round.

P.S.  It’s not so bad if you’re the one who buys them.