This was the bonfire that burned last night as our friends’ 21 year old son was remembered. There are many sights to give you pause at a funeral for a young person; for me, the droves of stunned and tearful young men and women scrubbed into respectful attire hit me hard.
It’s common to say that the ceremony of remembrance lays someone to rest. In Rupert’s case, it hardly seems accurate. The roaring flames were the culminating moment of a giant communal effort to launch his boundless spirit into the crackling, infinite universe. Even the incongruity of the uniformed firemen assigned to monitor the blaze felt right to me. The wind whipped, and the flames rose, and here were these earthbound humans with hoses, working to contain this grief and love as it consumed everything that was offered to it and transformed it into something both vanishing and permanent.
It’s hard to accept what is served, sometimes. Hard not to hunger for a different reality.
There are a lot of different kinds of hunger I can write about from a personal or eyewitness perspective: the specific and ravenous appetite of pregnancy; the greedy, snuffling, humming, sighing, leg-pumping bliss of a baby at the breast; the locust-emulating, counter-ravaging hunt for calories of a clutch of male humans after sports; the nibbly, mainly mental urge for a bag of crunchy things (or a chew toy) on a long drive; the nostalgia-fueled imaginings in the lead-up to a holiday meal. But I haven’t ever been desperately hungry, or watched as my children felt the pangs of empty bellies with no relief up my sleeve.
It’s not that I don’t think about food politics at all. In fact I spend a lot of time thinking about my own and my neighbors’ access to calories that are unsprayed, uncorporate, untrucked and unpackaged. But I gawk a little when, after wrestling my tantrum-prone conscience through the aisles of the grocery store, I see a cart at the checkout line with five cases of soda, ten frozen dinners and some Pop-Tarts. I wonder about wanting to eat that way, but I don’t stop to think much about feeling like I have to.
The Giving Table has organized a way to bring awareness to this issue today, by asking food bloggers to direct our attention to the stark reality that the government food stamp program, a reality for 50 million people in this country, posits that less than $1.50 per meal ought to cover things. You aren’t going to get a lot of broccoli on the table at that rate. Assuming you knew enough to want the broccoli, and had reasonable access to a market that might supply it. As a bare-bones measure to try to keep hungry people (especially children) fed, the SNAP or food stamps program deserves our energy to defend it, and it’s now in jeopardy. With about 30 seconds of your time, send a letter to your congressperson urging them to fight for it.
Want to know more? Watch the trailer below, and see the movie in a theater near you, or on demand at home. It’s a good start, and you don’t have to look much farther for some stunning facts which establish a pretty diabolical set of schemes at work, limiting people’s access to what grows in the ground and subsidizing their access to what spews out of a factory and will make them sick. Read more here, here, and here. Get mad about it. Pump your fist in the air and roar, Rupert-style. I feel silly giving you $4 recipes (though I love a pot of beans as much as the next girl), because pretending you’re hungry when you in fact have the luxury of spending your food dollar with a conscience undermines both endeavors, to my mind. But preaching you a little closer to a community garden project in your city or town, or a program like this one–well, that I am OK with.
It turns out that it is not especially difficult, as a person (admittedly self-diagnosed) of approximately reasonable levels of functional sanity, to become deeply paranoid and want to stay under the bed. “The Universe is trying to teach me a lesson” is the kind of thing I might be tempted to think. “Don’t Tell The Universe I Am Under Here” might be scrawled on a sign propped up by the bed. Not that I have given the matter much thought.
Our community is reeling from the loss of a friend’s 21 year old son over the weekend. As we are all learning and re-learning and learning some more, you really do see the best of a community at the worst of times. You really do wish you did not need to be reminded in this manner. You vow to remember it very well, so the Universe will stop feeling the compulsion to teach you again.
Here on the farm, reeling continues with the passing of one of the Founding Ewes of our little flock, one of the last of the inaugural class of sheep here on the hill. Rosie came to us in the family way and was the first ewe to birth under our bumbling care. We checked her constantly, and then came home one day to find her standing, quietly yet obviously pleased with herself, beside two beautiful, healthy white lambs. “Thank God we weren’t home when she went into labor,” I remember thinking. What a mess we might have made trying to help. To give you a sense of Rosie’s presence of mind, here is a story about the time a friend brought his herding dog over to help round up our sheep, who had never been herded by a dog before. Sheep, as prey animals, are not prone to a lot of independent thinking in the presence of danger. One shared brain cell governs the main response, which is flight. The flock flew. After a spell, Rosie peeled off and came up to where my husband was standing. “Are you aware,” she seemed to be asking, “that there is a dog chasing us all around here?” He reassured her. I swear she shrugged; it’s possible that she sighed. She resumed her place among the flock. She was the first ewe I witnessed heading in front of me to the barn when her lambs were picked up in the field. “Meet you in there!” one could almost hear her say. “Just going to get off my feet for a sec while you have the babies!” We had a very fine teacher in Rosie, and we will miss her.
A few days after Rosie went, a weasel found its way into the chicken coop, and in the manner of such things, killed the best and most favorite hen (and two other victims, whose losses should not be overlooked). Mrs. F, though petite and profoundly ridiculous-looking, was by far the best mother hen we have hosted here in 11 years of chicken-keeping. We’ve known some monumental dingbat failures and we’ve known some good ones. Mrs. F was peerless.
We wish them peaceful rest.
I wish for fewer opportunities to feel this way. I know that I can’t stay under the bed, and in my saner moments, I also know that the Universe is not trying to teach me a lesson. No special attention is granted from the Universe. It is just, in its grinding, relentless, gloriously dependable way, teaching all of us. Fleeting, babe. Even the dreariest & most endless-feeling Tuesday full of meetings and root canal is a blip. Reach, taste, savor, cherish. Repeat.
None of this has anything to do with muffins. But I have been stumbling a little through the kitchen motions lately, and then I needed to make muffins for a meeting, and one of the people attending that meeting had recently smoked me a carrot. Not a lot of people will smoke a carrot in order to make a relish that they will tuck into a basket of comforting treats they are bringing to you. Not because the world wants for generous souls–just because not a lot of people will ever smoke carrots. Go ahead and make stoned Easter Bunny jokes. I forgive you.
So when you are making muffins for a carrot-smoker, you aim high. When you are tired and sad, “aiming high” means toasting some coriander seeds, but the bang you get out of that little gesture is tremendous. I made these muffins once with cinnamon, and they were well-received. But for Julie, I toasted some coriander seeds (a few more than I needed, as it happened). You go ahead and steer your muffin ship as you please (replacing the coriander seeds with a teaspoon of cinnamon if you like), but the 90 seconds I invested in the seed-toasting and crushing elevated not only the baking enterprise, but a few other endeavors as well. Once you have a little dish of toasted & crushed coriander seeds on the counter, you begin to dance a little looser in the hips around the kitchen. Bonus ricotta mixture below the muffins. Still a teaspoon or so left of the seeds. Who knows what the weekend may bring. I’ll be under the bed if you need me.
oat bran muffins with coconut & coriander
Heat the oven to 350, and prepare a 12-cup muffin pan by lightly greasing or lining the cups with muffin papers.
In a small skillet over medium heat, toast a teaspoon of coriander seeds for a few seconds, until they smell wonderful. Dump them in a mortar or small dish, and lightly crush them.
In a medium bowl, combine:
3/4 cup milk
1/2 t lemon juice
and let stand a minute or two.
Add, and mix well:
1 c unsweetened applesauce
1 egg
3T mild oil
1/2 c sugar
2T molasses
1 t finely grated fresh ginger
In a separate bowl, combine:
1 c all-purpose flour
1/2 c whole wheat flour
3/4 c oat bran
1/4 c golden flax meal
1/3 c finely shredded unsweetened dried coconut
2 t baking powder
1/2 t baking soda
1/2 teaspoon coriander seeds (generous)
1/2 t salt
Combine these two mixtures, then stir in:
1/2 c dried cherrries
Divide among the prepared cups (they will be full) and bake for about 25 minutes, until the tops are set and springy.
In the past few weeks, I’ve been back in travel-to-see-someone-in-the-hospital mode, which is to say the least kind of disorienting. My sense of reality was not helped one thin iota by getting out of the subway in New York City last week and seeing a group of about 14 man-sized rabbits walking up Broadway. Some had rabbit-heads squarely on their heads, and some had them jauntily tipped back so their human heads were showing, and some had them tucked under their arms. The ManRabbits were chatting amiably about what they saw on TV the night before and the price of coffee and all the regular things companionable pedestrians chat about.
This being New York City, where my mother once came home to report she had seen a sidewalk full of people avert their eyes from a man who was entirely naked except for a red string around one of his ankles, everyone pretending he was invisible even as he systematically set fire to each of the trash cans on the corners between 77th street and 74th, no one but me seemed to notice the rabbits. Nothing to see here, folks.
I cowered behind a pillar and took a picture, which thanks to the miracle of modern telecommunication I was able to immediately text to a friend in Massachusetts. “Please tell me what you see in this photo,” I said, remaining carefully neutral and not leading the witness at all.
Fortunately for my plan not to be fitted for one of those jackets with the wraparound sleeves for a little while longer, she saw rabbits.
As it happened, I could have toughed it out and learned the answer without a data plan on my phone. As I went about my visiting and errand-running in the neighborhood in question over the next several hours, I encountered more and more rabbits. Picketing rabbits. Rabbits filling the upper deck of a big red bus in tidy rows. Rabbits handing out treats. It turned out to be a promotion for a candy company. When the number of rabbits increased and they got kind of organized, the rest of the people in New York besides me agreed to notice them.
Which is all to say, everything will probably turn out to have a simple explanation.
In the mean time, if someone asks you to make chocolate sandwich cookies with raspberry buttercream filling, thanks to me (really thanks to the daughter who requested them for her birthday), you will be ready to rock and roll. When the request was filed with the Birthday Dessert Regulators (me), I looked for a gluten-free cookie recipe because I knew I too wanted to eat one of these things she was describing, and I found one here. Though my pantry lacked the terribly weird flours he called for and I had to substitute flours of lesser weirdness, and the method was unusual, the cookies were quite fine and could comfortably pass as a regular cookie among the glutinous (though the original recipe generously offers measurements for using regular flour if your circumstances demand it).
If you want the tell-tale tooth blackening that my friend Alana rightly praises as the hallmark of the Oreo, then I highly recommend springing for a bag of black cocoa powder. Since you only need a bit of it in with the regular cocoa, one bag will last you through many batches of baking.
To fill the cookies, I made a half-batch of my favorite swiss buttercream and mixed in about 2/3 of a cup of seedless, lightly sweetened raspberry puree. But you don’t have to.
1/4 cup + 2T Dutch cocoa, plus 2T black cocoa, or 1/2 cup Dutch cocoa
1/4 t sea salt
1 cup (2 sticks) unsalted butter at room temperature, cut in 1″ cubes
Mix the egg, egg yolk, ground chia seeds and vanilla in a small bowl. Whisk together completely and set aside.
Combine the flours, cornstarch, milk powder, sugar, cocoa and salt in the bowl of a stand mixer. Using the paddle attachment, mix the dry ingredients on low until they are well combined. Add the butter. On low speed, pulse the mixer on and off, gradually speeding up the to medium low, until the butter has been mixed throughout the dry ingredients (you should see a crumbly, dry mixture).
Slowly drizzle the egg mixture into bowl, with the machine on low. Stop the mixer when the dough forms a lump, and divide it into two balls, flattening each one to make a disk. Wrap well and refrigerate for about an hour (or longer).
Preheat the oven to 350˚F. Roll the chilled dough to about 1/4 inch thickness and cut into the desired shapes; chill again before baking on parchment-lined sheets. Bake the cookies from 10-12 minutes. Cool a few minutes on the sheet, then remove to a rack to finish cooling. Because I never use a timer, some of our cookies were tender and others crisp; a tender cookie filled with copious amounts of buttercream was easier to eat, but I think a crispy one was tastier (even though the filling squidges out when you bite them). In case you are wondering what the right quantity of buttercream per cookie is, the amount (expressed in metric terms) is A PRETTY BIG HUGE GOBBER.
