Our friends Martha and Hank of Lane River Organics gave us a case of their new product to test on our garden. It’s made with an organic substance produced by their dog, Bailey, which is purported to discourage deer and groundhogs from taking more than their fair share of garden produce. And all you have to do is sprinkle it around the perimeter of your garden. So we gave it a taste test and found it wasn’t too bad. Now we will wait and see what the deer think.

She’s about an inch and a half long, and I haven’t seen her or her kind in the garden for several years. If truth be told, she saw me first. I was deep between two rows of tomatoes, bent over to cut the stem on an heirloom tomato about the size of a loaf of bread, when I caught a yellow blur at the edge of my field of vision. Her web was about 2 feet in diameter, and she was at the center of it, vibrating it like a fiend having a fit on a miniature trampoline. It was a move designed to scare me, and it worked. I jumped, tangling a couple of her guy-wires in my glasses, stumbling backwards, heart on the verge of failure until I recognized her and her tribe as one of our dear garden girl-friends.

She’s a Black and Yellow Argiope. Welcome back, sweetie. (Click photo to enlarge)

[Joan wrote this post several weeks ago,
so she's cooked lots of meals since!  --George]

July 10, 2010

I started cooking with my solar Cookit around the end of June, here in New Hampshire. After a year or so of trying to tap into all that free heat by doing things like putting black pots full of water in my black car I finally decided to get serious about my long-term interest in cooking with the sun. I realized that if I ordered a Cookit from Solar Cooking International, my money would go to a good cause and I could copy the design and share with others—which the organization encourages.

Plus, I just wasn’t getting around to putting an effective solar cooker together on my own. And as I would soon discover, the difference between a well-designed cooker and a black pot on the dashboard of my car was the difference between having dinner ready in three hours, or not having dinner cooked at all.

It arrived on my birthday and I got started the next day. I paid about $50 for the Teacher’s Kit, complete with all I needed: a 9” black enameled pot with cover as well as a “pasteurization indicator”, two sturdy plastic oven bags (which enclose the black pot), two clothes pins, and all kinds of posters, journals, instruction manuals, recipes.

These people are working hard to make sure solar cooking is successful. This Cookit kit I ordered is being used in Kenya, Haiti and other sun-bathed countries. It is used for water pasteurization as well as for cooking.

But would it work here in northern New England?

I was surprised by its portability and lightness. It is made from just about the same amount of cardboard used to make an average-sized box. But the Cookit cardboard is covered with mylar on one side. It folds flat and I can pack everything I need in a small shopping bag. I needed to supply a metal trivet to elevate the pot an inch, and a few wooden clip-type clothes pins (to close up the bag, and to use for adjusting cardboard angles).

Here what I’ve cooked so far (as of July 10…but the list grows longer with each sunny day! Without exception, all my meal cooked and tasted good, if not great!

Day 1—Lentils cooked for 4 hours, just plain in water. (GOOD)

Day 2—White sushi rice with carrots, onions and pieces of raw chicken. (GREAT)
I was hesitant to use my usual brown rice because it takes so long to cook. So, I tossed a few cumin seeds and a bay leaf into white sushi rice with the normal amount of water. It resulted in a beautiful well-cooked dish.

Day 3—Indian cornbread—with ww flour, cornmeal, pumpkin (ours) blueberries, etc. Baking this worked beautifully, and now I want to create a solar oven, specifically for baked items. (GREAT)
Day 4—Turkey soup—Just add a chicken carcass (mine was a raw turkey breastbone), throw in some vegetables and spices (don’t add water!) and…wait a few hours on a sunny day. Voila! Take the turkey off the bone and add to soup broth. (GREAT)

Day 5—Raw chicken legs and large breast pieces, marinated, with carrots and onions. (GREAT)

Day 6—Quiche made with raw eggs, frozen vegs, cheese. (Not great—not good recipe)

Day 7—Indian rice—with cumin seed, turmeric powder, coriander. (GREAT!)

Day 8—Campsite Chicken and vegetables. (GREAT)

Day 9—Raw potatoes, cut into quarters, with raw eggs in shells sitting on top. No water or oil added. The beauty of this is that the potatoes (even if you get involved in something else and leave them in the cooker for 4 hours) don’t get soggy and overcook as they would if they were on a kitchen stove in a pan of water. They stay intact and never burn. The eggs don’t break as they often do when cooked in water. Voila! Ingredients for potato salad, the easy way. I tried this twice, using twice as many cooking hours the second time. Not a great difference.

What I’m learning:

–200-250 degrees F seems to be the normal cooking temperature.

–Solar cooking is very “forgiving”. No stirring required, no oil, no water needed for things normally requiring it. Food can be “forgotten” and, because of the low temperatures and enclosure, if it overcooks, it does so…gently. Solid vegetables like carrots and potatoes need no water because they cook so slowly, at low heat.

–It’s fast: 2-3 hours. I had thought that one of the shortcomings was that food was ready at 2p.m.—requiring re-heating at dinner time. Actually, if you are cooking for an evening meal, just start at 1p.m. and come and get it when it’s time to eat.

–Partly cloudy days. I found that cooking was quite effective without full sun, as long as the sun obliges by showing up intermittently.

–Cook anytime between 9 am and 3 pm. While cooking is most intense when the sun is directly overhead, it works from 9-3 pretty effectively. Turning the Cookit for precise solar alignment is not required, though it may enhance heating somewhat. So, you can just face the stove due south and it will work fine. Therefore, you can leave for work for the day and come home to dinner.

I am astounded that this is actually easier than cooking in a kitchen. No hovering, no stirring, no attention needed. Just throw food in and wait.

What I’m wondering…

How can I cook pasta in this? How about dried beans?
Can I cook “big hunk” things, like whole potatoes, or whole chickens?

So while I’m pushing the boundaries of solar cooking, you can get your own cooker and try it for yourself:

Solar Cooker International
Solar Cookers International spreads solar cookers and solar cooking technologies to benefit people and environments. I ordered my Cookit from them: www.solarcookers.org

www.solarcooking.org/sbcdes2.htm
How to build/design a solar box cooker

solarcooking.wikia.com/wiki/Windshield_Shade_Solar_Cooker
Home made solar cookers using windshields.

I filed our taxes electronically yesterday, and in about a week the internal revenue service will return the favor and make an electronic deposit of $172 in our bank account. And that’s all I’ll say about taxes, other than to recall that when I was in my early 20s, living, it seemed, on many edges simultaneously, I’d be shaken from sleep repeatedly around tax time by nightmares of doing jail time for tax fraud. That was 40 years ago. It may be that I never will be audited by the IRS, and I can only hope that it will be another 40 before the Great Auditor comes to look at my books. But speaking of books, our daughter-in-law Crissy Liu brought a strange little black daily calendar book back from Germany and presented it to me as a Christmas gift this year. Its title is Kalendarium toter Musiker, imprinted on the black cloth cover in small, somber gold leaf letters. There’s an additional title in English, The Beat Goes On, which is not, pretty obviously, a literal translation of the German. At the bottom of each day’s blank page you’ll find the names and brief bios of several musicians who died on that day. Today, for example, being Mittwoch, April 14, (I don’t know from German, but mittwoch sounds suspiciously like “midweek”, doncha think?) I find “2005: John Fred (8.5.1945) Sanger der John Fred & His Playboy Band, deren Parodie auf “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” mit dem Titel “Judy in Disguise with Glasses” einst die Beatles von der US-Chart-Spitze etc.
As I said, I don’t know from German, but I do know that a calendar book called The Beat Goes On which marks the deaths of musicians is, for me, a poignant and daily reminder that though Death will whack each of us, there ain’t nothin that stops the music. This odd little book also provides us with a recurrent feature titled Death of the Week. While almost all of the Deaths of the Week are in German, and thus escape my understanding, this week’s Death is in English, and begins, “What do you call a six foot two Australian with a steel plate in his skull, the profile of a neanderthal, the sensitivity of an artist and a blues voice from God? The Guv’nor. What do you call a man who battles terminal cancer for five years, while still managing to play concerts and bring up three kids? A hero. Bruno Adams, born in Bacchus Marsh, Australia, 1963, was one of those rare human beings with a hot-wire to the soul…etc.”
Which for no reason I can put my finger on brings to mind that Dylan Thomas line, which, just because it is one of most oft-quoted lines in poetry in no way diminishes its spooky power: “The force that through the green fuse drives the flower… .” That force, really a vibration at the molecular level, is what drives the yellow forsythia out of its bud, the lilac from its twig, the green shoot of garlic from its clove, and puts the wild beat back into the wings of the ruffed grouse. And it’s that beat I’m listening to just now, around 7 a.m., writing on the porch here in Waterloo, as the ruffed grouse in the woods across the road claps his wings to the tune of his lust. His beat produces a deep, almost sub-audible bass note like the phoomf of hiphop trailing a car on the road. He beats his wings once, then again a second later, then again a half second later, then a quarter second, scaling the rhythm up until he’s producing a continuous thrum, a deep sonic blur that I hear with my heart more than my ear. It is the wild beat of April, the beat that goes on and on. Hear me, O Great Auditor. You can whack us but you can never, through all Eternity, whack our music.

Wildlife experts think there may be more or less one bobcat per town in NH. This Warner cat stood for her portrait in 2008.

Our bobcat's calling card: just like a house cat, but much bigger.

A bobcat in Faith's drive staring down her dogs in early February.

In 1988, when trapping them was outlawed, there may only have been about 100 bobcats left in NH.

Is it a coincidence that we’re seen our Warner bobcats in February and March? Probably not, because that’s when this last species of wild cat to live in NH goes looking for love. House cats, no matter how tough you think you are, take note.

Local link: Kearsarge Mountain CSA
Last year about this time we talked with Warner, NH farmer Larry Pletcher about his new greenhouse and his ambition to sell winter greens to the greens-starved masses of the Kearsarge area (view earlier blog). And in fact, he’s gone and done just that. Imagine! Buying and eating greens in the middle of winter here in Warner, NH. But wait! There’s more! This winter he’s provided some calorie crop veggies to the shareholders of his winter CSA as well: beets, potatoes and a few other root vegetables.

Now, if you are a dedicated localvore, you know that finding somebody in February who’s got winter storage and calorie crops tucked away (potatoes, turnips, parsnips, squash, carrots, cabbage, beets, onions, garlic, etc.) and who is willing to sell them, is the difference between eating mostly local year-round, or breaking your vows and heading for the supermarket.

For some reason, NH vegetable farmers have been a little behind their colleagues in Maine in terms of producing and selling winter storage crops, but Larry is catching up. We visited him in late January, just days after he finished building a new winter storage barn at his Vegetable Ranch on Kearsarge Mountain Road.

Farm manager Stacey Cooper and part-time farm crew worker Beth Thompson were bagging Chioggia beets for the CSA pickup and moving trays of sprouted greens in from the sun porch for the night. Larry will be planting 14 acres this year with a crew of 4 full-timers and several part-timers.

For the past four years Larry, along with Bob Bower and Jennifer Ohler of Kearsarge Gore Farm (go past Larry’s farm on Kearsarge Mountain Road, more or less until you can’t go any more–in your car, anyway), has been running the Kearsarge Mountain CSA for spring, summer and fall crops. But for the past two years he’s offered shares in a winter CSA as well. And next winter, if all goes well, he expects to grow more storage veggies to expand the winter CSA. And if the town gives him the go-ahead, he’ll run a farm stand at the storage barn. Not really a farmstand, he says, but more like a factory outlet for organic vegtables.

I dunno. Maybe we should grow a smaller garden this year and buy from Larry. Let him do all the hard work. For more info, give Larry Pletcher a call: 603-456-3121.

Thanks to our readers and viewers who’ve emailed to find out just which edge of the earth I dropped off. Truth is I’ve been putting any shreds of extra time into getting the new Curiously Local Corner Stores site up and running. And I think that’s a worthwhile endeavor: the goal is to provide access to online markets for locally produced products.

So, do come back soon…
Upcoming blogs:
–Warner farmer Larry Pletcher talks about his new winter storage facility;
–a mini-documentary on old-time ice-harvesting;
–the weekly column on growing a food garden for beginners will resume soon;
–and, Bobcats in Warner! Faith Minton took a photo of one fine big cat, and I’m looking for a bobcat expert to write the blog.

–George

Jane Packard sent us a note from Texas:
On the way home from visiting family for the holidays, we stopped off to visit Flyman, outside Terrell, Texas. His tagline on the bee blog is “all men are equal before fish”.
After a picante lunch at the Gira del Sol,in a renovated Dairy Queen, he sent us on our way with a bagful of goodies from his bees. He had bragged on the delicate clear honey from the mesquite bloom this year. Yet we were not prepared for the sheer golden transparency when the wrapping fell away from two bottles of mead.

Having been warned that the only sin worse than an unopened bottle of mead was unempty open bottle, we decided to test the legend that mead was what motivated the Vikings to pilage England. The warm glow you see in this photo is not only from the beeswax candle behind it. Click for another post on Texan Bees

In November Joan and I drove her father, Denver, down to McCreary County in southern Kentucky, not far from Bimble, the closest town to the little hill country farm where Denver was born and raised. We spent a few days in the Eagle Falls Resort and RV Park, just a quarter mile from Cumberland Falls, a local attraction which has been described as the Niagara Falls of the south. The comparison, believe me, is in no way based on the relative sizes of the two falls.
But small as Cumberland Falls is, it nevertheless possesses some curiously local charms, one of which is the way the river scoops chunks of coal from the seams along its banks, wears them into smooth black pebbles, and deposits them in wide beds along the shore above the falls. A burlap bag and a shovel will get you enough to feed your stove for a week. There’s a restaurant at the Eagle Falls Resort, which feels more like a family kitchen than a place to get real excited about what might be on the menu. But on a Friday night the (new) owner of the motel came knocking on the doors of the handful of paying guests. “You’all come down to the restaurant! We’ve got gospel singers and free drinks!” Well, the drinks of course were coffee and soda, and the gospel was really mountain music done by the Kentucky Mountain Trio, a little group of teenagers whose playing and singing seemed to be handed straight down from their grandparents. I listened for a while, paid for a piece of chocolate cake, and then fired up my camera.
I can’t think of a better way to celebrate the first day of 2010 then to listen to a few songs by Heidi Douglas (click for Heidi’s youtube site), Israel Clark and Cody Canada.