Canning with my mother's ghost

Canning with my Mother’s Ghost by Stephanie Greene

The garden has been producing at such a pace that I have been canning and drying food for weeks. I figure that if Mother Nature can serve up all this bounty, the least I can do is use it.

I’ve put up jams, chutneys, relishes, diced tomatoes, and enchilada sauces. I’ve dried shallots, peaches, apples and tomatoes.

It all makes me think of my mother, Janet Greene, who wrote Putting Food By with Ruth Hertzberg and Beatrice Vaughan). She often had me chopping rhubarb for rhubarb ginger jam or stirring a vat of boiling peaches on some sweltering day when I’d have much preferred bobbing in the West River with my friends.

My mother loved murder mysteries and she loved to cook, so food preservation, with its botulistic edge of danger, united these two enthusiasms rather elegantly. She would often expound on the crafty Botulinum bacterium which lives in soil. Its spores are extremely hard to kill--merely boiling water won’t do it. Plus, they thrive in an absence of air, and in moist environments.

This was an enemy worthy of respect.

When she was working on the book, which went into four editions, we would race down to the PO and pick up her copy of the MMWR, The Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, published by the Centers for Disease Control out of Emory University. Once home, it was read out loud. All too often there would be an account of some housewife who’d reused old mayonnaise jars (or worse, their grungy lids) to preserve tomatoes and had killed off her entire family.

This would get her going on the litany of bad practices it was her duty to scold people out of. Tepid boiling water baths, haphazard time keeping, slapdash sterilization could all send you to an early grave.

It was when I embarked on canning diced tomatoes that I really began rereading my mother’s book in earnest. I recalled her lectures about the dangers of low acid tomatoes, since acid and salt can kill bacteria unfazed by heat alone. For once, I followed her directions carefully. I even got up one morning and redid some roasted green tomato jam with more vinegar, more salt, more heat.

Nobody else could get such a bang out of a pickle, or make canning so exciting. After all, unlike reading Elmore Leonard, the next corpse could be yours.

Campaign 2010

Primary season here is slowly heating up. We have five good candidates for the Democratic gubernatorial ticket.The primary vote has been shifted two weeks earlier to August 24, to make it easier to get all the absentee ballots returned and counted in time for the ballots to be printed for the general election November 2.

It’s an awkward transition between utilizing the traditional and the new communication technologies. Candidates for Governor all have web sites, and all tout the importance of getting high speed internet into the state. But there the similarities end.

I ran a voter registration and info table last night at Gallery Walk in Brattleboro. It’s a monthly downtown party, basically, in which a couple thousand people stroll the streets, look in on exhibitions set up in stores, which stay late. There are lots of vendors around. It’s fun; people seem to have a good time. A week before, I contacted all the candidates for Governor, and for the contested state senate seats in Windham County. The difference in the way candidates responded was very telling.

Doug Racine sent out material right away-- an appropriate amount of small pamphlets and bumper stickers to share space on a double card table. Peter Shumlin called me back, and arranged for me to get in touch with his daughter, who would get me the materials. I never heard from either Deb Markowitz or Susan Bartlett. Dunne had three email addresses on his contact page, each one promising a faster response. I wrote to all three, but got no material.

The day of the event, I was on a conference call and thought I’d regale my listeners with the results of my requests. I must have laid it on a little thick about Mr. Cyber Space, because about 20 minutes after hanging up, I got an email from Dunne’s campaign, saying they were sorry to have missed my email[s]. One of the conference callers happened to volunteer for Dunne, and she’d emailed him right away. I was a little chagrined, and called the cell phone listed in the Dunne campaign manager’s email. I told him where my table would be.

Later, when I was hurriedly getting dressed, the guy called again for the name of the store. I told him, and explained where it was.

When I arrived in town, I delivered a chocolate zucchini cake to the new Democratic Headquarters for their opening, met someone for tea, and set up the table at about five. Another volunteer showed up, and we shamelessly pressed mini chocolate cupcakes on passers-by, whom we then chatted up, registered voters, and had a good time.

No Matt Dunne campaign lit showed up. Finally a volunteer went over to the Dem HQ and picked up a handful of leaflets. I did spot some young guy strolling down the street with a Dunne pin on, talking on a cell phone. Whether he was actually part of the org, I have no idea.

I collared someone passing out Deb Markowitz stickers and asked him if he had any leaflets for our table. All he had was stickers. He made it sound like they had decided not to print them! Voters would get the info they need from the Internet....

This seems to me very optimistic. Very. Perhaps Internet info will be the norm in 2012, but right now, I don’t see people taking it on themselves to research candidates. We’re all used to candidates coming to the voters, even those of us who consider ourselves well informed.

It’s also hard to compare candidates, unless you go to debates--or forums, which candidates seem to prefer, big surprise. What happened to the League of Women Voters? Their website, vote411.org, provides the dates of VT’s primary (AUGUST 24, people!) there’s no comparison of the candidates, what they stand for or have accomplished. VPR did interview the candidates individually and has those interviews cached @ VPR.org.

My conclusion is that technology hasn’t necessarily made research easier. There’s loads of info out there, much of it bogus, or useless (like Matt Dunne’s three unanswered email addresses on his website. You still have to plug away, think critically, bird dog people to get at reality. Technology does not make people more communicative, although it may “connect” us.

As far as politics goes, face-to-face rules. You pick up signals of sincerity or dissembling, entitlement or humility. Going door to door is hard work, it’s humbling. So is just showing up. Voters get that. If someone is willing to do that, he or she may actually serve constituents.

To finish off the Matt Dunne story, I sent a searing email to the latest address I had, and then got an abject apology via phone from one of his campaign people. Good luck to them all. We’re all trying to figure this out.

Bounty

Bounty

End of July in the garden-- every day brings new evidence of the earth’s generosity. I am so touched that plants and soil respond to what I do there-- the mulch, the half-baked weeding. Snow peas are yielding enough every day for delicious cocktail hour crudites. French radishes are coming in, and the purple beans will join them soon. Even the cantaloups, which huddled in their layer of leaf mold for weeks, looking stunned to find themselves in a New England mountain garden, have taken off. The tomatoes are growing (though not yet red), the cucumbers are responding to my efforts to train them up trellises, and the fennel is feathering out, gorgeously. Red currants are ready to pick.

What could be better than to go out into the garden barefoot and come back with most of dinner in your arms? I am awed every time it happens. It seems to be a collaboration after all between nature and bumbling Yours Truly.

But it’s the zucchini which push everything over the top.

I used to be unable to grow it, which puts me in a smallish club, I guess. Our last house was built on clay, in the shade. The zucchini would have just enough nutrients to leaf out, but it was our secret that I still had to slip over to farmers’ markets for the vegetables themselves.

Zucchini are heavy feeders; here they are flourishing, way too many plants of them, in my failed asparagus bed, triple dug with layers of manure, compost, and everything yummy for plants. Why should I be surprised, let alone resentful?

I have gone from queen of the garden to its slave. No evening meal passes without zucchini in some form: parmesan-crusted oven “fries”, zucchini pickle, the celestial tasting but strange looking slow cooked zucchini, and then zucchini-chocolate cake. To make matters worse, no one is happy to receive zucchini at this time of year. One’s generosity is received with a sigh, as the desperate hand-off it really is.

How quickly the scale tips from joy at all the bounty to feeling overwhelmed at having too much. I have to force myself to welcome the cooking chores my garden demands in return for its bounty. The necessity for canning and drying sessions is much more satisfying than say, meeting tax deadlines, because it is real. Things will rot if you don’t pick them, or spoil on your counter if you don’t do something clever with them.

It is paradise to pick your dinner minutes before cooking it. It feels like hell itself to be in a hot kitchen on a summer day, putting up 30 pints of anything. And yet, that is the small price the garden requires-- respect for your food, ingenuity and skill to transform or preserve it, gratitude.

In closing, a favorite quote from Irma S. Rombauer:

“It is a thrill to possess shelves well stocked with home-canned food. In fact you will find their inspection-- often surreptitious-- and the pleasure of serving the fruits of your labor comparable only to a clear conscience or a very becoming hat.”

----The Joy of Cooking, 1931

PS: If anyone wants a zucchini recipe, I’ll be testing them. Meanwhile, pick them while they’re still small.

One Greenhouse Problem Solved

One Greenhouse Problem Solved

I know it’s obnoxious to whine about the brevity of our growing season, especially as the earth heats up. But it’s a fact of life up here that May can freeze new leaves on maples so they resemble wilted seaweed and September can bring frost just as you are picking your first marble sized tomatillo. So we are talking three months of more or less crop friendly weather. It’s perfectly true that if I stuck to the plants God meant me to grow, rhubarb and lichen, there would be no problem. However, I’m afraid gardening is about hope and promise, not about sticking to the rules. Even wise gardeners try to grow scrumptious plants from warmer zones in the mad hope that they harbor some wedge of tropical microclimate on their north-faced land.

There is also the issue of seed starting. Some people are consistently solicitous of their seedlings’s needs. They remember to water, they don’t leave the flat outside in the snowplow’s path. Alas, I am not one of those people. I’m very glad there is no DSS patrolling for plant neglect.

Obviously, what we need is a greenhouse. Actually, what we need more is heat in our own east wing, forget the plants. Any loose money will be going toward insulation.

I can’t recall where I read about the solution to these dilemmas, but it’s wonderful: mini greenhouses made from gallon plastic milk jugs.

Use the more translucent, rather than the opaque jug. Cut the jug midway up, around three sides, leaving one side as hinge. Poke some holes in the bottom for drainage. Add potting soil, seeds and water. Re-close the jug, taping the open sides closed with duct tape. This does not have to be a tight seal. Two pieces of tape will suffice. You just want to prevent the seeds from drying out. Leave the plastic lid off the top of the jug. Be sure to label your greenhouse with its contents. Water when you think of it.

Your greenhouse will retain moisture, endure temperature variations with grace, and produce seedlings reliably. When it’s time to harden the seedlings off, pull off the tape and leave the “roof” open, remembering to water more regularly. Transplant into your garden when ready. Gloat quietly. Pictures below.

Love Potion

Love Potion

I have two new hives of bees, one Italian, one Russian. Teachers often recommend having two, so you can compare them, learn more over one season by so doing, and if one hive’s in trouble, use frames from the stronger hive to bail out the weaker.

I’m examining the hives more or less every week as they get established, and I couldn’t help noticing that the Russians are building up really fast. They’ve almost filled one hive body and happily moved into the new one I added last week, and started laying in honey.

In contrast, the Italians didn’t have any capped brood. I couldn’t even see newly laid eggs, evidence that the queen is doing her job. There was uncured honey--cells of uncapped honey that had yet to be evaporated to the correct density to cap and store. There were also lots of bees, but that was sort of it.

Luckily we have a local bee expert, Denny, who agreed to come by with an extra queen and see what was happening in my hive. There is nothing, in my opinion, as useful as looking at your own frames with someone who can tell you what you’re seeing: the queen, excellent; laying workers, terrible.

It was the latter we saw today, in the Italian hive, with no evidence of the former. When I first emailed Denny with my suspicions, he told me to take a frame of open brood from the Russian hive, brush off the bees, and put the naked frame into the Italian hive. The brood would give off a pheromone that would retard the development of laying workers.

Laying workers are, Denny announced, the worst thing that can happen to a hive. Besides, maybe, bears and RAID. When the queen isn’t laying, or has died, workers begin laying unfertilized eggs. Those eggs hatch into drones, boy bees whose only enthusiasms in life are eating and mating with the virgin queen. Since virgin queens are in relatively short supply, that means eating, not putting up honey, or producing more girl bees who do all the work--and that spells death for the hive.

People have been extrapolating from their knowledge of bees for centuries, anthropomorphizing like crazy, using the hive as a metaphor to kiss up to whatever monarchs or political systems happen to be in power. So I will resist belaboring the obvious feminist parallels that may suggest themselves, and leave those to my gentle readers.

Anyway, you do not want laying workers. And once they start, you can’t just introduce some fragrant uncapped brood in the hopes that the workers will desist. Nor can you introduce a new queen, because these laying workers are not going to revert. They’ll kill her, no matter how good she smells.

Denny, bless him, had an idea. It seems that laying workers do not fly very well. We could take the Italian hive off into a field, shake off the bees. The laying workers would not be able to fly back to the hive’s original location (where we’ve helpfully left some empty frames); the regular field bees will beat us back there.

We tried it. I, of course, was suited up. Denny wore a short sleeved shirt, no gloves or veil. He took out a frame, gave its edge a smart smack on the ground, and a thousand shocked and possibly quite angry bees fell onto the grass. I couldn’t help recalling the repeated advice I’d heard just last week at a Bee-a-thon at UMass, about moving slowly and gently, lest you rile the bees and turn your hive into a permanently aggressive sting-fest. I asked him if these bees would ever be calm again. He assured me that wouldn’t be a problem, so I started whacking frames, and brushing off the stragglers with the bee brush. We carried the frames back to the hive and reinserted them, along with a frame of open brood (carefully crushed off) from the Russian hive.

He worried about introducing his queen into this roaring hive. A queenless hive really does roar. He thought he’d bring her back home, do some research, then be back in touch with the next steps. But when he went to his truck, he discovered the queen’s attendants had escaped. He picked them off the side of his truck one by one, (again, fearlessly) put them back in the box holding the queen cage. Then he had another idea.

He took the queen cage in its little box, with its few recaptured attendants, over to the bee dumps, where plenty of bees were flying around. They flew to her like she was a new soft serve stand. When Denny ran his finger over the cage, the bees didn’t cling aggressively to the cage, but climbed up over his finger and down to see her again. This was a very good sign-- they seemed curious, even fascinated. possibly (we hope) falling in love, rather than plotting her demise.

So we introduced the queen cage into the Italian hive, suspending it next to the frame of open brood, the cork stopper still firmly guarding the candy plug the bees will eventually eat through to free the queen.

I go back on July 4th to pry out the cork and allow her by then besotted subjects to get to her. Keep your fingers crossed.

Coming Back to Dodge

When I was growing up in Brattleboro, in early ‘60s, it was very much like other rust belt mill towns-- staid, careful, a little suspicious of anything new. It was made up mostly of people of northern European extraction. There were four churches downtown: Catholic, Methodist, Baptist and Congregational. A few blocks north were the Unitarians and the Episcopalians. Bratt was pretty white, and very buttoned down. If you didn’t get your spaghetti from a can, you were just odd.

Somehow, a few brave newcomers fell in love with the countryside, moved in, and managed to take their neighbors’ world views with an amused grain of salt. The Laines, gifted French chefs, started a lovely little French restaurant out on Putney Road call “Le Chanticlair”. I was about eight, and was once brought out to dinner there by my parents, who enjoyed a long and delicious meal. I tried to stay busy, but finally went outside and wept in frustration and boredom, quite sure that we’d never leave, ever.

The restaurant lasted maybe five years. It was too far ahead of local New England Boiled Dinner taste. Finally the Laines returned to Paris. But maybe their spirit lived on somehow, when the next ambitious restaurant came in, it didn’t meet so much resistance.

Some credit for crowbarring open local minds is due to The Experiment in International Living, founded in 1932 up on Black Mountain Road. It started out as an exchange program, in which students travel to foreign countries and stay with families for three weeks. The cultural and linguistic immersion is invaluable to broadening horizons, and in return the area welcomed more than a few visitors in homestays as well. There was also the influx of cultured tourists coming up for Marlboro Music, the chamber music festival started in 1951 at Marlboro College, bringing artists like Rudolf Serkin and Pablo Casals.

By the mid 1960’s things had begun to change. My junior high art class was taught by one of the best teachers I’ve had in my life, Hugh Corbin, an African American who not only listened to FM radio, scandalous enough to us teeny boppers, but unimaginably, ate raw eggs. His art history classes got me through high school and college courses that were considerably less inspiring. He taught sculpture, allowed a toothy employee from my father’s bookstore to stage a “happening”, (which, honestly, I don’t remember at all, beyond some vague discomfort and resistance on the part of the squirming student body). But Mr. Corbin’s example stayed with me, backward though I probably was: if he could do what he did here, I could attempt a few things wherever I was.

Then I went away to high school and college. When I came back, it was only to pass through. It wasn’t until the end of college and into my adult life (and the temptation to put adult in quotes is almost overwhelming) that I noticed my hometown had become much cooler than I was. I couldn’t come home and regard my roots with the sort of condescending pity one finds in coming of age memoirs--the desks in one’s old school are so tiny, the once immense distances but a block, etc.

Brattleboro was now home to the Free Raoul Wallenberg Committee, well regarded writing groups, scads of massage therapists, even an Indian restaurant!

It continues: we have at least five yoga studios, three books stores, two record stores...well, I’m bragging. At a recent Gallery walk, on a beautiful evening in May, Main street was closed off to traffic. There were singers, belly dancers, circus performers, and from Circus Arts, based in Brattleboro. We had dinner at an authentic Mayan restaurant, Three Stones. It was scrumptious.

Yes, there is crime, and there are drugs. But they are everywhere. At least Bratt has drugs and bookstores; most small towns are not so lucky.

Someday I’ll understand how the diverse population of Brattleboro can work together so well. I don’t dare announce everyone works toward a shared vision. It may be something as basic as working toward visions that are more or less complementary.

I’m just trying to become as cool as my once very un-hip home town.

A Coward's Guide to Beekeeping

A Coward’s Guide to Beekeeping

Some people jump out of planes for excitement, some climb Annapurna. My foray into nerves, high blood pressure and profuse sweating is the gentle art of beekeeping. Usually I dislike the things I fear, but I adore my bees. Nevertheless, it took an enormous surge of willpower to get suited up to visit the bees and make sure last week’s hiving went well.

The idea, as you may recall, is to get the bees out of their package and into the hive, where they fly around getting used to the queen, who dangles in her own cage, nibbling at the candy plug, as the bees outside eat their way in. Presumably, all this eating and smelling her pheromone make for love, and when the plug is consumed, she is welcomed into the hive to lay eggs and found a dynasty.

Things can go wrong, however. If you come back a minute before a week has passed, the hive is likely to blame the disturbance not on you, the nosy giant, but on the new queen, and when she peeks out of her cage, kill her.

Yesterday would have been the day to visit, but I “forgot”, being so taken up with gardening. Today was just as sunny, with less wind, an ideal day to open the hive and see what’s been going on.

With some reluctance, I suited up. Some beekeepers saunter into their bee yards wearing shorts and t shirts. I didn’t have a suit for the first year, and that made me nervous and neglectful. I’d lift the top of the hive, see a writhing mass of bees, say a quick hello, close ‘em up again and sprint home. Needless to say, I didn’t have the faintest idea of what was actually happening in the hive-- was the queen laying properly? Were there queen cells (a sign of an impending swarm)? Were the bees drawing out comb, storing pollen and curing honey? These are all questions a beekeeper should ask and be able to answer.

So I got a suit, and still managed to get stung, through the mesh of the headgear, no less, about 20 times, by bees I had managed to enrage to the point of suicidal vengefulness. When bees sting, their stingers and venom sacs are torn from their bodies. The sacs continue to pump venom into their victim, which is why one should try to pluck them out, if at all possible. That time, I didn’t succeed because my neck and ears were underneath the “protective’ head gear. If I opened it, I would allow the other 200 apoplectic bees access. Puffing smoke around my head to disguise the alarm pheromone emitted by the stinging bees (which signals a Situation to her warlike sisters), would have been a great idea, had my smoker not gone out.

The smoker resembles a coffeepot with a bellows attached, and I have never gotten mine to work reliably. You build the fire in the belly of the pot, the smoke comes out the spout and you aim it at bees you want to calm, or sting sites you want to camouflage. If there is some clever designer out there with a better idea, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

To cut to the chase, the queens are out. I didn’t find them. That’s the next task, a kind of moving Where’s Waldo?, only the queens are inconsiderately not wearing red and white striped t shirts.

What I did find was a lot of burr comb. This is the free-form comb that bees build in the wild (see photo). I had neglected to put back enough frames in the hive to prevent the bees from getting creative. Normally there are ten frames in the hive, leaving just enough bee space for the bees to move between frames but not so much that they can design porches, bridges and other inconvenient architecture.

Last year, I did not immediately clean out the burr comb, out of a combination of ignorance, cowardice and laziness. I thought it was pretty and interesting. Last year’s bees built more of it, hid the queen in it, and I discovered too late she hadn’t been laying eggs at all, she had been so busy decorating. She had to be replaced.

Having learned my lesson, today I cut out the burr comb, replaced all ten of the frames, added a pollen patty (a delicious patty of pollen and honey that stimulates brood production), changed the water in the feeder (bees need fresh water, and had consumed almost a quart over the week), closed up the hive and with a huge sigh of relief, left. A week’s bee effort had been wasted on comb I had to take out. I left it by the hive so they could clean it out. Next week, I’ll bring the cleaned comb home for making lip balm.