Grow your own popcorn! January 13, 2009
Posted by ourfriendben in gardening, homesteading.Tags: growing popcorn, heirloom popcorn, homegrown popcorn, popcorn
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Here at Hawk’s Haven, winter and popcorn just naturally go together. Enjoying fresh, hot buttered popcorn and mulled cider and watching a favorite movie in our own living room is such an affordable luxury that Silence Dogood and our friend Ben indulge in this treat often. (See Silence’s earlier post, “The joys of air-popped corn,” for her favorite popper and technique.)
But enjoying the end result is only half the fun. The other half would be growing your own popcorn. Interest in gourmet popcorns means that your choices aren’t limited to the standard yellow or white, either. Not that our friend Ben is dissing white or yellow popcorn—red, blue, purple, yellow, white, black, or multicolor, I’ll enjoy it as long as the popped corn is tender and flavorful and most of the kernels pop. But there’s no question that the colorful ears are more fun to have around.
Here are a few varieties that are readily available:
Calico. No two ears look alike on this colorful popcorn, which rivals any Indian corn for decorative effect. As one source, Territorial Seed Company (www.territorialseed.com), says: “This hard-to-find gourmet popcorn is midway between miniature popcorn and Indian corn in size. The 6-inch ears have colorful kernels in shades of yellow, brown, white, purple, red, and blue.” It matures in 90 to 105 days.
Chires Baby Corn. Jere Gettle of Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds (www.rareseeds.com) came upon this variety while searching for a good baby corn for Asian dishes. But the ember-bright red-orange kernels make great popcorn if you allow the ears to mature. Best of all, each plant produces up to 20 mini-ears, as opposed to the one or two ears you get on normal corn plants.
Dakota Black Popcorn. This one’s a gorgeous red-black. I quote the Baker Creek Heirloom Seed catalogue: “Dark reddish-black ears are quite attractive for fall decorations, or popping into tasty popcorn! This variety is easy to grow, and does well in almost all growing climates. Fun for children’s gardens.” ’Dakota Black’ is also carried by Seeds of Change (www.seedsofchange.com).
Early Pink. This gorgeous pink-kerneled popcorn produces a harvest in just 85 days. One source, Territorial Seed Company, sings its praises as follows: “A great choice for short season popcorn enthusiasts, this early variety yields beautiful pink kernels on 5-6 inch ears. When popped, the colorful kernels explode into a white, fluffy popcorn treat. Plants grow to 5 feet tall. The dried ears are wonderful for crafting or fall decorating.”
Japanese White Hulless. “This selection of an old favorite has medium size kernels that pop pure white and are very tender with no hard centers. Vigorous stalks produce 6 to 7 inch ears,” says one source, Jung Quality Garden Seeds (www.jungseed.com). Popcorn is ready for harvest in 85-105 days. As you’ll see below, yellow-kerneled ‘Tom Thumb’ is considered to be the same as ‘Japanese Hulless’, so our friend Ben is confused. Maybe the key lies in the description: “this selection.” If you can enlighten us, please do so.
Miniature Rainbow Popcorn. Like ‘Calico’, this popcorn comes in many colors. Even the husks can be colored red or purple. Jung Quality Garden Seeds, which offers this variety, describes it this way: “Tiny 3 to 5 inch ears are filled with shiny kernels in a wide range of colors.” It matures in 110 days.
Robust 128YH. This F1 hybrid (the other varieties listed here are all open-pollinated) is a favorite with the folks at Johnny’s Selected Seeds (www.johnnyseeds.com) despite its comparatively long growing season (112 days). Here’s why: “7-8″ long ears on 8-9′ plants are well filled with glossy yellow kernels. Its high (45-1) expansion ratio makes this an extremely tender popcorn.” Jung Quality Garden Seeds offers both ‘Robust 128yh Gourmet Yellow Popcorn’ and its white equivalent, ‘Robust 21-82 Gourmet White Popcorn’.
Strawberry. You’ve almost certainly seen these vaguely strawberry-shaped cobs of garnet-red kernels offered for harvest season decorations. But you may not have known they make great popcorn, too! Admittedly, the tiny kernels aren’t going to pop into giant movie-size mouthfuls, but the diminutive bright-white popcorn is tender and delicious. Plants grow 5 to 6 feet tall and produce two to four 2- to 3-inch-long ears per stalk, taking about 100 days from planting to harvest. Some seed sources include CherryGal Heirloom Seeds (www.cherrygal.com), Jung Quality Garden Seeds, Botanical Interests (www.botanicalinterests.com), and Abundant Life Seeds (www.abundantlifeseeds.com, which carries it as ‘Two Inch Strawberry’).
Tom Thumb. This well-named New England heirloom bears 3- to 4-inch-long ears of yellow popcorn on plants just 3 1/2 feet tall, making them well suited to small-space gardening. Another bonus is that it matures in just 85 days. Also known as ‘Japanese Hulless’, ‘Australian Hulless’, and ‘Dwarf Baby Rice’, this heirloom is available from CherryGal Heirloom Seeds and Local Harvest (www.localharvest.org).
So once you’ve chosen one or more popcorn varieties and ordered seed, how do you grow it? Well, pretty much like any corn. Direct-seed outdoors in spring once the soil is warm (at least 60-65 degrees F, corn seed will rot in cold, damp soil), at least 1-2 weeks after your last frost date. Don’t panic about waiting to plant ’til the soil warms: not only will you get better germination, the corn will grow fast and quickly catch up to its early-planted cousins.
Keep this in mind: Like all corn, popcorn produces relatively few ears per stalk (‘Chires Baby Corn’ is an exception), so to get a good harvest, you need to plant plenty.
Plant seeds 1/2 inch deep and either 6 inches apart in blocks, ultimately thinning to 1 foot apart, or in large hills of 4 equidistantly spaced seeds. Corn doesn’t transplant well, so be patient and wait to direct-seed your popcorn outdoors. Corn is wind-pollinated, so you need to grow a bunch of plants together to get good pollination—which translates into well-filled ears—rather than stretching plants out in one or two long rows. But because corn is wind-pollinated, pollen from other varieties growing nearby can blow into your crop and contaminate it, causing any seed you save not to come true. To prevent this, grow each variety at least 250 feet from the nearest corn patch of a different variety. This is obviously not an issue with hybrids or if you don’t plan to save seed.
Every American child grows up learning that the Native Americans taught the Pilgrims to plant corn seed in hills with a dead fish in the bottom of each hill for fertilizer. Corn is a hungry crop, and the Native Americans knew what they were doing. You can still fertilize your corn patch with liquid fish emulsion or a combination of fish emulsion and liquid seaweed. Compost, well-rotted manure, or a balanced organic fertilizer also work well. If, like our friend Ben, you live in an area where field corn is grown, you’ll doubtless have noticed that plants can literally grow several inches every day. This is a good reminder that those hungry plants can take a lot of food! Pile it on when you’re preparing the area for planting, and then side-dress your plants with compost tea, manure tea, fish emulsion, or liquid seaweed monthly while they’re growing.
When should you harvest your popcorn? Wait until the leaves and husks start drying down and the corn kernels become hard and glossy. You can use the dried popcorn on the cob, husks and all, for Hallowe’en and harvest decorations, in bunches or on wreaths, or hung in a cluster over your front door (a traditional symbol of good luck and abundance). Just make sure you keep them protected from moisture if you plan to pop the kernels later! You can also hang whole ears in a cool, dry place until you’re ready to pop them, or husk the ears, spread them out in a dry, well-ventilated place, and allow them to cure for several weeks before shelling them and storing the kernels in large glass jars or airtight plastic containers like Click-Clacks. Or just leave them hanging until you need them and either shell them or, if you have a microwave, put the whole dried ears in a paper bag, fold the top, and pop.
Ready to go, I mean, grow? Me, too! I can practically smell that mouthwatering popcorn now. And if you have favorite varieties, growing techniques, or sources I’ve overlooked, please let our friend Ben know!
Money down the drain. January 12, 2009
Posted by ourfriendben in Ben Franklin, homesteading, wit and wisdom.Tags: financial responsibility, frugal living, Gary North, money lessons
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Parents, listen up: This tip was so good our friend Ben simply had to share it. It’s from Dr. Gary North’s Tip of the Week e-mail, which is free and often contains excellent ideas for saving money (sign up at www.garynorth.com). This time, however, the tip is about wasting money, but wasting it in an excellent cause.
Dr. North received the tip from one of his subscribers, who had hit on a way to teach his daughter the value of money. When his daughter was home from college for a break, she’d rented some DVDs and failed to return them in time, racking up fees. The father returned the DVDs, calculated the amount she’d run up, and confronted his daughter. But rather than asking her to reimburse him, he told her to get the money and flush it down the toilet!
His horrified daughter begged to be allowed to give the money back to her father, to no avail. Reluctantly, she tossed the bills into the toilet and watched them wash away. He reports that she has been much more responsible about financial matters from that day forward. Talk about a graphic lesson!
Our friend Ben draws the following moral from this story: Sometimes the most memorable lessons come from doing the opposite of what you hope to teach. Keep this in mind next time your kid is careless with money. It might work for you, too!
Frugal living tip #2. January 12, 2009
Posted by ourfriendben in Ben Franklin, homesteading, wit and wisdom.Tags: cheap groceries, frugal grocery tips, frugal tips, smart grocery shopping
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Silence Dogood here. It’s Monday, and that means it’s time for another frugal living tip as part of Poor Richard’s Almanac’s 52-part series to help everybody (and that includes us) get through these tough financial times. This week, let’s talk about grocery shopping. Here are ten tips to help you stretch those food dollars and cents:
1. Avoid impulse buys. With hundreds of thousands of products cramming grocery aisles, it’s easy to see a new flavored coffee or deli dinner or ice cream or shampoo that you simply must try. Oh! That magazine cover looks interesting. Wait, aren’t those collapsible measuring cups intriguing? And, look, aren’t those mangoes over there? Didn’t you see this cereal advertised on television? Maybe you should buy that new wonder cold cure you read about just in case… Impulse buys can triple your grocery bills, which is bad enough when you’ve got the cash but inexcusable when money is tight. Worse still, many impulse purchases go uneaten or unused, which means you’ve not only wasted money, you’ve thrown it out. I’m not saying you should never try something new, but how about making a deal with yourself to buy one impulse item a month, and then try to make sure it’s something your family will really like?
2. Clip those coupons. Yes, it’s boring and it takes time. But coupon savings can add up, especially if you have a coupon and apply it to a sale item. Set aside half an hour one day a week to go through the coupon pages of your paper or “super saver” mailers and cut out the ones you need. (If you like to download coupons, make sure your grocery accepts them.) But don’t, do not, succumb to coupons for products you don’t use, however tempting. That’s impulse buying. Sure, you’ll save $1.35 if you clip that coupon and buy Cheeze Wheeze, but if your family doesn’t already eat Cheeze Wheeze, and you don’t buy it, you’ll save $4.87!
3. Know what you already have. If your kitchen cabinets are bursting with cans, boxes, and bags, and you can’t even see the back of your refrigerator shelves (let’s not even talk about the freezer), you may be wasting money buying stuff you already have, while that stuff expired six years ago and is still taking up shelf space. Forget spring cleaning, get a start on winter kitchen cleaning now. Tackle one cabinet or refrigerator shelf at a time so you don’t get overwhelmed. Pull out everything and set it on the counter, table, or floor. Sort into three piles: what’s gone bad, what’s still good, and what you’re really never going to use even if it is still good. Toss the stuff that’s gone by, making a note of anything you need to replace. Pack up the stuff you’re never going to use—that jar of lemon curd Aunt Martha gave you, the can of hominy you bought because you remembered having hominy as a child, but haven’t been able to bring yourself to actually open, the gourmet tomato-pepper pasta you got for Christmas that you know you’ll never eat—and take it to your church or bank or local food bank or wherever there’s a food drive. Now, inventory what’s left. Challenge yourself to think of meals you can prepare that will use that bag of stuffing or box of frozen spinach. Stores you already have are like money in the bank.
4. Use the oldest stuff first. Once you know what you have, sort it by expiration date. Don’t let any more food go to waste! If you have one can of kidney beans that expires in a week and one that won’t expire ’til next year, make chili with the oldest can. Organize your stores so the oldest stuff is in the front of the cabinets rather than the back. Yes, it is a real pain, since that means you have to pull stuff out and reorganize every time you shop for staples. But on the plus side, it keeps you up-to-date with what you have in addition to saving money. You’ll never buy something you already have again!
5. Read the sales sheets. Every Friday, we get a free ”Weekender” edition of our local paper that includes sales brochures from the big groceries near us. Take the time to go through these and see what’s on sale this week, again focusing on food and other products you actually use. This is not only a good way to plan your menus for the week, it’s a great way to shop for staples that you need but that aren’t time-valued, like canned goods. Stock up when they’re on sale! Our friend Ben and I are big on salads, but those greens can be expensive, so I always look for “buy one, get one free” or “two for $3″ sales and try to buy a couple of kinds on sale—checking carefully for freshness—to mix together for a more interesting, flavorful salad. (Buying a bag of salad on sale helps offset the price of favorite salad extras like peppers and scallions, too.)
6. Make a list and check it twice. Once you know what you already have and what you need to replenish, you know what’s on sale this week at your local grocery, you’ve clipped your coupons, and you’ve planned the week’s menus, you’re ready to make your grocery list. Do not, ever, go to the grocery without a list. Not only does list-less shopping lead to impulse buying and wasteful spending, since you’re bound to forget what’s on sale, but if you forget necessities and have to go back, you’ll be wasting gas and time.
7. Shop with a calculator. On Saturday, I was thrilled to see a woman shopping at our local grocery with her calculator in hand. It’s incredibly easy to rack up twice the amount of money you’d planned to spend on groceries, even if you think you’re being careful. There’s nothing like that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach when the cashier announces the total and it’s way more than you’d expected. A calculator is an easy way to avoid sticker shock. Determine a realistic budget (it won’t help you to decide that you’ll spend $15 on groceries every week if you really can’t feed your family for less than $115), add each new item’s price on your calculator as you put it in your cart, bag, or basket, and get the total. When you’ve reached your spending limit, if you still have items left to buy, you’ll need to prioritize: Return the ones that can realistically wait another week to the shelf or bin and replace them with the items you really need now.
8. Buy generic. I was brought up to believe that brands were as essential to shopping as the products themselves. You bought Coca-Cola or Hellman’s Mayonnaise or White Cloud Toilet Tissue or Black Diamond Cheddar, and that was that. And yes, I still believe that Coca-Cola tastes different (and better) than any other cola, that Hellman’s tastes better than other brands of mayo, and that Kleenex is softer than other facial tissues. So if I’m buying a brand where the flavor or texture matters, I wait for sales and stock up (why pay $1.89 for a 2-liter bottle of Coke when you can get it for $1?). But I have retrained myself to look for deals when the outcome is the same. If the store brand of canned veggies or cheese or sour cream or butter is acceptable, if I can find an absorbent paper towel at a great price, if I see that The Queen of Clean endorses low-cost Purex as a great detergent that’s as effective as the pricier brands, well, I listen up. Buying the generic or low-cost brands of most things helps justify spending money on the brand-name stuff you feel really does matter.
9. Buy big—when it makes sense. Stores around here have whole aisles devoted to “family-sized” products, from huge cans of tomato sauce and corn to giant jars of pickles and bags of rice the size of Texas. And every store has huge multi-packs of paper towels, toilet paper, and other paper products on sale. Even the produce section succumbs to the “bigger is better” mentality, with huge packs of mushrooms and giant bags of salad greens. When does it make sense to buy these, and when should you pass them up? If you have the storage space, buying big on imperishables like paper products, soap, and detergent always makes sense—as long as the big packs are really a bargain. Make sure you check first! If you have a large family and know you could really use that giant can of baked beans or ten-pack of pizzas or 2-pound chunk of cheese before it goes bad, go for it (again, only after comparing the bulk price to the cost of smaller containers). You can often justify luxuries like black olives or maraschino cherries if you buy them in the giant cans or jars, but you need to be able to split them up and store them in smaller containers in the fridge until you’re ready for them. Do you have the space? Ditto for big freezer bags of vegetables and fruit. If your family can eat a whole bag at a sitting, or eat half at one meal and the rest later in the week, good deal! Otherwise, stick to the smaller size and avoid waste. Always check before you buy, even if your family is large, to make sure the super size is really cheaper. Sometimes it is, but sometimes it’s not. And remember to buy what you really use! I’ll buy a big box of mushrooms if they’re on sale, since mushroom lovers like our friend Ben and I can certainly eat them within the week. But if they’re not on sale, the smaller boxes are often (surprisingly) a better deal. Sometimes whole mushrooms are cheaper, and sometimes sliced mushrooms are. It pays to actually look rather than just buying the same thing every time.
10. Walk the aisles and stay alert. Believe it or not, generic and store brands aren’t always cheaper than name brands. This past Saturday, I was in a small local grocery and needed to get some zipper-closing plastic bags. I went to the appropriate aisle and did some comparison shopping. The generic brand had a big tag announcing that it was on sale—you could get 120 bags for only $2.79, a 32-cent savings! And needless to say, even at full price it was way cheaper than the name-brand products. I put two boxes in my basket. As it happened, I needed to get a loaf of bread for our chickens (we buy cheap loaves of bread to supplement their diet in the winter, since, unlike us, they could use the extra calories), so I went to a different part of the store. And there, on an end rack, I saw that 120-bag boxes of Ziploc bags were on sale for $1.99 a box! Good grief. To say the least, this experience taught me a lesson. The Ziploc bags were not anywhere near the bag aisle. Had I not happened to need chicken bread, I would never have seen them and would have thought I was getting a great deal by buying generic. Instead, I got a far better deal with the name brand! From now on, I plan to walk the aisles when I’m grocery shopping to make sure I don’t miss something. But this could expose me to expensive impulse buying, so I’ll have my list in hand and avoid anything that’s not on it.
That’s it for today’s frugal tips! Plase let me know if you have any grocery-shopping secrets that I’ve overlooked. These days, we all need all the help we can get!
‘Til next time,
Silence
Ben Picks Ten: Heirloom Vegetables January 11, 2009
Posted by ourfriendben in gardening, homesteading, recipes, Uncategorized.Tags: best heirloom vegetable varieties, best heirloom veggies, sources of heirloom vegetable seed, vegetable seed catalogs
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- Suddenly, it seems like everybody’s reading my vintage post, “Ben Picks Ten: Tomatoes.” Given that it’s the dead of winter here in Pennsylvania, when I’d as soon eat a rubber ball as a tomato, and probably couldn’t tell the difference between the two, I was at first bemused by this. But then, in the immortal words of a friend’s mother, our friend Ben had a rush of brains to the head: It’s seed-ordering time, and gardeners are trying to make the best selections for the coming growing season.
- Our friend Ben is by no means a purist when it comes to choosing vegetable varieties. I love ‘Silver Queen’, a white hybrid corn variety that has never, in my opinion, been surpassed, and I have yet to taste a tomato with better flavor than the orange hybrid cherry tomato ‘Sungold’. But in most cases, given a choice between a modern hybrid and an open-pollinated heirloom, I’ll take the heirloom every time.There are many reasons for this, from flavor, texture, and color to distinctiveness, adaptability to your location, long harvest season, and specific uses (cider apple varieties spring to mind, but we’re talking about vegetables here, so let’s say waxy potatoes like the fingerlings that are so perfect for potato salad). But I’ll highlight just two.
- First, hybrid vegetable cultivars (that’s a made-up word combining “cultivated” and “varieties” that you should always use if you want to be taken for one of the horticultural cognoscenti) are so, well, corporate. They’re determined to hog all the profits for themselves, and to hell with the little gardener. You can’t save seed of hybrids and have them come true when you sprout and grow them, unlike open-pollinated vegetables that come true to type every time. You can’t take your own-grown seed to seed swaps or (God forbid) sell it at a flea market or plant sale to make a little much-needed cash to buy that prize peony or a few cloches. (Can you say “Monsanto”? Or, maybe, “lawsuit”?) You have to buy seed of hybrids every single time you want to grow them. For self-reliant and/or budget-conscious types, this is just inefficient, and offensive, too.
- Open-pollinated heirlooms, by contrast, are frankly Libertarian. Anyone can get them, grow them, and save the seed to do with as they like—sell, swap, give away, tinker with for generations until they create their own unique strain. And once you’ve bought that first seed packet (or swapped for it), your seeds are free as long as you’re willing to go to the trouble to save them.Like cogs in the corporate wheel, hybrids tend to be all alike: They drink Starbucks and ludicrous martinis, ski and skydive to show how daring and original they are, wear whatever’s trendy for their particular position, watch the “in” shows, gobble up the latest designer supplement or nutraceutical. God forbid that they should still be doing Pilates when they should be Bollywood-dancing. ZzzzZZZzzzz… Oh, yes, what was I saying?! Unlike hybrids, open-pollinated heirlooms tend to be rugged individualists. They’re not like anybody else; they don’t mind being different, eccentric, or even bizarre; they’re nonconformists. They tend to have fascinating histories. (Do you know the story behind ‘Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifter’ tomato?) You can always single them out in a crowd. And unlike hybrids, whose growth is limited to their physical maturing, heirlooms are open to growth and change on all fronts. They’re willing and able to evolve. So many great vegetables, including ‘Prairie Blush’, a golden-fleshed, blush-skinned potato selected by tiny Wood Prairie Farm in Maine, were literally discovered in somebody’s plot or home garden.
Our friend Ben has always been ready to fight for the underdog, be it our beloved golden retriever Molly or a little-known but amazing heirloom vegetable variety. I enthusiastically recommend that you try a few heirlooms in your vegetable garden this season and see what you think of them. To help you out, here’s a list of ten (plus, of course, one) favorites of mine. I try to grow as many great vegetable varieties as I can squeeze in every year, and like everybody, I love to try new things. But I make sure these 11 veggies are in my garden beds each and every year. Trust me, you won’t go wrong with them, either.
1. ‘Brandywine’ tomatoes. As you’ll see if you check out a seed catalogue, ‘Brandywine’ is more like a family than an individual variety: There are yellow, black, pink, and red Brandywines, some with broad, thick “potato-leaf” foliage and others with more typical tomato foliage. Brandywines aren’t the most prolific tomatoes, but they’re certainly the best-tasting. These luscious heirlooms have won blind taste tests across the country, year after year. For what it’s worth, they’re our tomato-addicted chickens’ top pick for tastiest tomato, too. ‘Brandywine’ rules! (See “Ben Picks Ten: Tomatoes” for more great tomatoes, including another must-have, ‘Yellow Plum’.)
2. ‘Dragon Tongue’ beans. The name of this fresh bean cultivar is as eccentric as its appearance: The flattish pods are pale yellow and covered with purple flecks. Our friend Ben is tempted to wonder just what the person was on who named this incredible bean (hey, when was the last time you saw a dragon’s tongue?), and to make matters worse, it’s apparently identical to the racy if oddly spelled ‘Dragon Langerie’. (Maybe dragons do wear lingerie, but I don’t want to hear about it.) But don’t let the names put you off. These bush beans are the best ever, so tender and flavorful, they put regular green and yellow wax beans (both dearly beloved by our friend Ben) to shame. Best of all, they retain their tenderness and flavor as they mature, unlike many green and yellow beans that are only good young and small. (Note: As with so many vegetables, the purple disappears during cooking, leaving luscious pale-yellow beans. No fears of freaking out dinner guests with those purple streaks.)
3. ‘Golden’ beets. Our friend Ben thinks you either love beets’ rich, earthy flavor or you hate it. (And our friend Ben thinks that whether you love or hate it has a lot to do with how much salt and butter you’re willing to slather over hot beets.) Our friend Ben happens to love beets, and will consume any quantity of shoestring beets or small boiled beets or big roasted beets or pickled beets, as long as I don’t have to prepare them and deal with that deep red color bleeding all over everything. Maybe that’s why I love the gorgeous golden-orange heirloom ‘Golden’ beet. It packs a rich beet flavor without all the “blood”! I know that many folks are enamored of ‘Chioggia’ beets, with alternating red and white concentric circles, but while they’re fun to look at, when it’s time to eat them, they seem kinda, well, anemic to me. Give me a deep bloodred beet or a rich orange ‘Golden’ beet any day.
4. ‘French Breakfast’ radish. Our friend Ben loves a nice, crunchy radish, and the hotter, the better. This Gallic variety dates back to the 1880s, and is torpedo-shaped with a red top and white bottom. Silence Dogood and I are not prepared to eat them for breakfast—that seems a bit much, even for devoted radish enthusiasts—but we do enjoy them French-fashion, sliced onto a crusty buttered baguette with a pinch of salt. Ooh la la!
5. ‘Sugar Snap’ pea. ‘Sugar Snap’, ‘Super Sugar Snap’, ‘Sugar Ann’, ‘Super Snappy’, ‘Sugar Bowl’, ‘Sugar Sprint’, lalala. There are many cultivars of sugar snap peas—the fleshy, edible-podded peas that you eat raw in salads or as a dipping veggie or lightly steamed with butter and salt—and our friend Ben adores them all. Oh, yum, the ecstacy of perfectly steamed snap peas with melted butter and salt, raw snap peas adding just the right crunch to a salad, or snap peas dipped in the perfect dressing. (See Silence’s post on “homemade” lemon-ranch-pepper dressing, “Fabulous easy salad dressing,” for a great dipping dressing.) Our friend Ben realizes that it might be a stretch to call a vegetable that was first introduced in 1979 an heirloom, but it totally transformed my (formerly strongly negative) attitude towards peas and added a new taste sensation to my menu. And yes, sugar snaps are open-pollinated!
6. ‘Moon and Stars’ watermelon. Geez, first our friend Ben is claiming a 1979 introduction as an heirloom (well, hey, it’s a future heirloom, anyway), and now I’m listing watermelon as a vegetable! Sorry about that. We eat watermelon as a fruit (even Southerners like our friend Ben who salt every bite to bring up the sweetness), but grow it as a vegetable, so I’m listing it here. I was introduced to this gorgeous variety as an Amish heirloom, but the Baker Creek catalogue insists that it was introduced by a seed company, Peter Henderson & Co., in 1926. Whatever the case, this watermelon is too good and too beautiful to pass up. Who could resist growing a watermelon with a dark green rind splashed with small yellow “stars” and big yellow “moons”? Not our friend Ben. Like ‘Sugar Snap’ peas, this famous watermelon has spawned a number of offspring, including ‘Moon and Stars Yellow Fleshed’, ‘Long Milky Way, Moon and Stars’, and ‘North Star’ (developed for cold-climate gardeners). Try one that appeals to you!
7. ‘Purple Dragon’ carrots. No, our friend Ben doesn’t have a thing about dragons. Much as I love The Hobbit, even in sixth grade, I found Smaug the least interesting part of the story (with the elves a close second). Plant breeders, on the other hand, must find dragons mesmerizing: besides ‘Dragon Tongue’/'Dragon Langerie’ beans and ‘Purple Dragon’ carrots, there are ‘Dragon Wings’ begonia, ‘Fire Dragon’ maple, ‘Silver Dragon’, ‘Red Dragon’, and ‘Dragon’s Eye’ persicaria, ‘Mount Dragon’ lily, ‘Dragon Chip’ phalaenopsis, ‘Dragon Bronze’ paphiopedilum, ‘Black Dragon’ coleus… the list is endless. But I digress. ‘Purple Dragon’ carrots rate their place on my top ten list because of their dramatic coloring—dark purple skin with a bright orange interior—and excellent flavor. Like the other cultivars on this list, they’re open-pollinated. I recommend slicing ‘Purple Dragon’ carrots raw into salads, or to feature on a plate of crudites to amaze your friends. Obviously, you don’t want to peel them, so grow or buy organic, please. And don’t make the mistake of cooking them with anything else, since the purple color runs during cooking. You may not mind a mud-colored stir-fry, curry, or even carrot side dish, but I do. I suggest roasting them instead. Our friend Ben applauds the renaissance of colorful carrots (it took a long time for orange to become the official carrot color; the first carrots were white). Now you can buy or grow yellow carrots like ‘Yellowstone’ or ‘Amarillo’, red carrots like ‘Atomic Red’, even white carrots like ‘Lunar White’ and ‘Snow White’. Vive la difference! Note that ‘Purple Dragon’ appears to be identical to another cultivar, ‘Cosmic Purple’. But read carefully before ordering! Some colorful carrots, such as ‘Rainbow’, ‘White Satin’, ‘Creme de Lite’, ‘Purple Haze’, and ‘Deep Purple’, are hybrids and won’t come true from saved seed.
8. ‘Speckled’ lettuce. Our friend Ben loves lettuces and salad greens of all kinds—arugula, spinach, kale, watercress, frisee, and mustard greens are favorites—so it was horrifically hard to choose just one. This lovely lime-green lettuce with red-purple splashes made the cut because it’s stunning, it tastes great, and it originated with the Mennonites of Lancaster County, just a hop, skip and jump down the road from our home, Hawk’s Haven. An old variety—it dates back to the 1700s—’Speckled’ is still, in our friend Ben’s opinion, one of the best. But don’t overlook the wealth of other great heirloom lettuces out there—’Merveille de Quatre Saisons’, ‘Rouge d’Hiver’, ‘Big Boston’, ‘Forellenschluss’, ‘Parris Island Cos’, ‘Oak Leaf’, ‘Black-Seeded Simpson’, ‘Lollo Rossa’, and many more. As for you gardeners who turn your collective noses up at ‘Iceberg’ lettuce, it too is an heirloom, dating back to 1894. So just stop it and enjoy the extra crunch in your salads! Yes, it’s less vitamin-rich than darker lettuces, but think of all that fiber. Fortunately for lettuceholics like OFB who just can’t limit ourselves to one, or even ten, kinds of greens, there are tons of great mixes offered by seed catalogues that you can harvest early for mesclun or baby greens, or thin for salads, ultimately saving a diverse assortment to mature into big heads. I don’t know about you, but our friend Ben is especially partial to the spicy blends. I just have to order a few blends every year along with individual lettuces and greens.
9. ‘Golden Wax’ beans. Oh dear, another bean. But our friend Ben loves fresh beans, harvested at the ideal stage and cooked to precise perfection, then drained and shaken hot in the pan with butter and salt and served. I grew up with green beans and am a relative newcomer to yellow wax beans, but I have to say that I love them even more than their green cousins. Best of all, I love a colorful mix of green and yellow beans (don’t try this with purple-podded beans, they turn green when they’re cooked and may bleed purple onto the yellow beans for a muddy result). Our friend Ben actually prefers bush to pole beans, since I think they’re more productive for the space, so I’m happy that yellow wax types like ‘Golden Wax’ and ‘Buerre de Rocquecourt’ are bush beans. Pair them with a bush green bean like ‘Contender’ or ‘Blue Lake Bush 274′.
10. ‘Early Prolific Straightneck’ summer squash. Other great open-pollinated yellow summer squash include ‘Early Yellow Summer Crookneck’ and ‘Golden Zucchini’, apparently the only open-pollinated yellow zucchini on the market. These squash are prolific, and will keep producing as long as you keep on harvesting. We enjoy them as a side dish, sliced and boiled with diced sweet onion, then drained and served up with butter, salt, and fresh-cracked pepper to taste (yellow squash is a perfect side with mixed green and yellow beans, carrots or sweet potatoes, and corn or cornbread). But they really shine in Silence’s Super Squash Casserole. Check out her earlier post, “Super summer squash recipes,” and try it for yourself. Yum!!!
Okay, when Ben Picks Ten, I always give you a bonus. But narrowing the selection this time was even harder than usual. Some of my favorite veggie crops, including onions, potatoes, asparagus, and garlic, didn’t even get a mention in the top ten picks, though I grow them with great enthusiasm each and every year. I didn’t talk about crops like sweet or popcorn, broccoli, broccoflower (a huge favorite), pumpkins, or winter squash, since they take more room to grow in terms of harvest produced than a small garden like ours can justify. (Though we loved our compost-bin volunteer ‘Butternut’ squash last season, which turned out to be way more prolific than we’d ever have expected.) Nor did I list faves like heirloom limas, dried beans, or okra. Thank heavens for the local farmers’ markets, farm stands, and CSAs, which provide all the faves we simply don’t have room for. How to choose an eleventh vegetable? Well, it turned out to be a no-brainer, thanks to our friend and fellow blog contributor Richard Saunders, a hot pepper fanatic from way back. Our friend Ben and Silence tend to go for the bell peppers, which we especially love if they’re red, orange, or yellow, and enjoy stuffed or in spaghetti sauce if they’re green. (Keep those thin-walled purple peppers to yourself, please.) But Richard would never forgive our friend Ben if I didn’t list a hot pepper as #11:
11. ‘Lemon Drop’ habanero pepper. Left to my own devices, our friend Ben would probably vote for a decorative pepper like ‘Fish’, which grows on bushes with green-and-cream variegated foliage and produces variegated peppers as well (geen-and-white maturing to orange-red). Richard would doubtless go for ‘Bhut Jalokia’, the world’s hottest pepper. Instead, let’s head for the middle ground. ‘Lemon Drop’ is a prolific teardrop-shaped lemon-yellow habanero. Now, the mere word “habanero” is enough to make our friend Ben’s hair stand on end, with visions of being carted off to the burn ward close behind. But last summer, Silence made a batch of salsa for Richard that featured ‘Lemon Drop’ peppers, and you know, it wasn’t bad. In fact, it was good. Nice and flavorful without that horrific macho burn-your-tongue-out idiocy. Because ’Lemon Drop’ is a small pepper, it dries quickly and easily, too, and you can pulverize them for a condiment or hang them up in bunches until you need them. Note that the “lemon” in the name refers to the color, not a lemony flavor.
So there you have it! Look for these at your favorite local garden center, hardware or general store, or Tractor Supply, or order them from one of the seed catalogues that specialize in vegetable seeds. Some of our faves are Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds (www.rareseeds.com), Renee’s Garden Seeds (www.reneesgarden.com), Wood Prairie Farm (www.woodprairie.com), Johnny’s Selected Seeds (www.johnnyseeds.com), John Scheepers Kitchen Garden Seeds (www.kitchengardenseeds.com), Burpee (www.burpee.com), and Park Seed (www.parkseed.com).
Our friend Ben realizes that favorite vegetables are a very personal choice. If you have faves that I’ve failed to list, or favorite sources of seeds that I’ve overlooked, please, oh please, let us know what they are. We want to try them, too!
The curious case of the gruntled calendar. January 9, 2009
Posted by ourfriendben in chickens, wit and wisdom.Tags: calendars, curious holidays, humor, word play
3 comments
Our friend Ben and Silence Dogood acquired a free Berks County Community Development Office 2009 Calendar yesterday from our local library in nearby Kutztown, Pennsylvania. We were in hopes that it would highlight local activities that we might be unaware of, but as our friend Ben flipped through the pages, I began to see that it featured a number of rather curious “holidays” instead. Intrigued, I took a tally to see just what the calendar compilers were up to.
Now, National Hotdog Day, Donald Duck Day, Fasnacht Day (known elsewhere as Mardi Gras), National Grammar Day, PA Fish for Free Day, National Checkers Day, National Garage Sale Day, and even Daniel Boone’s Birthday ((November 1st, 1734) may not strike you all as particularly quirky, though (fond as I am of Daniel Boone) they were almost too much for our friend Ben. But how about National Single Tasking Day, National Blah Blah Blah Day, National Honesty Day, Juneteenth, National 21st Amendment Day (our friend Ben had to look up the 21st Amendment to learn that it was the one that repealed Prohibition), National Bad Poetry Day, Dogs in Politics Day, Sweetest Day (October 17th, for reasons unknown to our friend Ben; it seems to me that Hallowe’en might have been more appropriate), National Buy Nothing Day, National Cat Herders Day, Festivus for the Rest of Us, and—our friend Ben’s favorite—National No Socks Day (celebrated on May 8th)? Not to mention National Win with Civility Month (August) and—let’s all celebrate!!!—National Chicken Month (September). (Oops, Silence points out that this may refer to eating chicken rather than raising chickens, but let’s hope it’s a celebration of the joys of backyard chickens instead.)
The back of the calendar is taken up by a list of “Frequently Called County Numbers,” beginning with the number for Adult Probation (our friend Ben trusts that this was just an alphabetical coincidence). The list also features a phone number for a title one doesn’t encounter every day, Prothonotary. Not being in the legal profession, our friend Ben’s acquaintance with this word had formerly been limited to the prothonotary warbler, whose name, it turns out, does not refer to the bird’s legalistic tendencies but rather to the supposed resemblance of its plumage to the prothonotary’s traditional yellow hood. (A quick check of my faithful Webster’s New World College Dictionary reveals that a prothonotary is “a chief clerk in some law courts” or, in the Catholic Church, “any of the seven members of the College of Prothonotaries Apostolic, who record important pontifical events,” in case you’re wondering.)
All of this was enough to cause the bemused Ben to wonder if someone had been celebrating National 21st Amendment Day a bit too enthusiastically when the calendar was being composed. But it was one day on the calendar, July 13th, National Gruntled Workers Day, that inspired me to write this post and share the hilarity with all of you.
Gruntled. How many times have you used or heard this word? Disgruntled, yes. Gruntled, no. It made our friend Ben think about how many other words were used only the negative rather than both the negative and positive forms. In Britain, I gather that people talk about clement weather. In the U.S., we might say the weather was inclement, but Clement is reserved for a proper name, one you’re grateful your parents didn’t bestow on you. (We have nice weather instead.) We refer to untoward occurrences but not to toward events.
Words that begin with “dis-” often fall in this category. We may call an act or comment disingenuous if we believe its perpetrator is playing the innocent to deceive us, but would never say that a knowing act or comment was ingenuous. We are distressed but not tressed; disgusted but not gusted; dismayed but not mayed; disturbed but not turbed. Distraught but not traught, disputatious but not putatious, distracted but not tracted, discomfited but not comfited, discombobulated but not combobulated, and on and on. (Though this is not a rule of thumb by any means. We discredit and credit, disclaim and claim, disconnect and connect, feel discomfort and comfort, are discontented and contented, etc.)
English is a difficult and curious language, to say the least. (Most bizarre to our friend Ben are cases where a word and its apparent opposite actually mean the same thing, as in flammable and inflammable. But I digress.) Our friend Ben is certain that many, many instances of a negative term being in common use without a positive equivalent have slipped my mind here. So please, if any spring to mind, share them with us!
Gardening by inches. January 8, 2009
Posted by ourfriendben in critters, gardening, homesteading, recipes, wit and wisdom.Tags: city gardening, small-space gardening, square-inch gardening, urban gardening
6 comments
If you’re a small-space gardener, whether you live in an urban apartment or, like our friend Ben and Silence Dogood, have a limited amount of the full sun necessary to raise most fruits, herbs, and vegetables, you know that every inch counts. So our friend Ben was delighted to find a new book at our local library called Fresh Food from Small Spaces: The Square Inch Gardener’s Guide to Year-Round Growing, Fermenting, and Sprouting (R.J. Ruppenthal, Chelsea Green Publishing Company, 2008).
I was especially pleased to see that the first chapter was called “Creating a Food System for Your Space,” a necessity if you have little room and are trying to be productive. And I was thrilled to see later chapters called “‘Cultivating Mushrooms,” “Raising Chickens and Honeybees in the City,” and “Making Compost and Partnering with Worms,” all topics dear to our friend Ben’s heart.
The author mercifully makes the case for organics and renewable resources (not always the case with small-space garden authors). And he packs the book with real-life tips that convince our friend Ben that he really has been there, done that. (In the mushroom chapter, for example, he says that if you need to sterilize sawdust for your mushroom medium and nobody wants you “cooking” sawdust in the kitchen, wait ’til the rest of the family’s gone out and get to it.) I found his section on sheet-composting on a concrete patio excellent, and his chapter on “Survival During Resource Shortages” thoughtful and practical. And his discussion of how to decide what you should grow when your space is limited is eminently sensible.
The other great thing is that Ruppenthal gives you a wealth of resources, including plenty of online resources, to go to if you want to try your hand at earthworm composting, mushroom growing, raising bees and chickens, sprouting, or making your own yogurt, sauerkraut, kefir, or kimchee. Silence was of course intrigued by the sprouting and fermenting recipes, including Sprouted Lentil Burgers, Vietnamese Sprouted Spring Rolls, Korean Soybean Sprout-Miso Soup, and Napa Cabbage Kimchi.
As experienced small-space gardeners will quickly see, Fresh Food from Small Spaces is a wonderful resource for beginners, and perhaps less useful for seasoned small-space gardeners. But if you’d like to expand your “urban farm” into new territory, be it earthworm composting, mushroom growing, raising a few chickens, or trying your hand at sprouting or making yogurt, you’ll find lots to love here, too. And if you’re a newbie, it’s a great place to start.
Things to do on a rainy day. January 7, 2009
Posted by ourfriendben in critters, gardening, homesteading, pets, recipes, wit and wisdom.Tags: great indoor ideas for winter, rainy day activities, useful indoor activities
4 comments
Silence Dogood here. Winter often sends us awful weather, and today we’ve been confronted with one of my least-favorite combinations, sheet ice with a slick coat of rain on top. Perfect conditions for a broken wrist, leg, or neck. Plus, it’s dark as pitch, making the whole day seem like evening. It’s enough to make anyone crawl back in bed, pull the covers up, and call it a day.
Now, I have nothing against napping as a good way to refresh and renew, but even the most fervent napper (are you reading this, Ben?!) can’t sleep all day. Besides, I had a good night’s sleep last night, so today’s dark, dreary, treacherous weather just makes me feel demoralized, not sleepy.
However. Every cloud has its silver lining, and being stuck inside all day when it’s yucky outside is a great opportunity to get to things that otherwise get put off. I decided to take the challenge and try to think of how many things I could come up with to do on a rainy day. I came up with so many, I’m going to share them with you. And then I’m going to plunge in and see how many I can get to! Just thinking of the possibilities has made me feel recharged. Let it rain! Here’s my list. See what you think!
* Make something crafty. I like to knit, bead, and make wreaths. I’ve started a scarf for our friend Ben’s brother to match the one I made for Ben, but got derailed in all the holiday chaos. This would be a great day to put on some of my favorite music, make some hot chocolate or rum-infused hot cider, and make some progress on my knitting.
* Make something yummy. A whole day to cook is the perfect time to make something that takes a lot of time, something you might not have found time for on a day when you could get up and go out. Homemade bread or yogurt, applesauce or apple butter from those stored apples, long-cooking spaghetti sauce or soup, jam from those bags of frozen fruit… So many possibilities! Or you could get some sprouts going or make a big pot of stock to freeze in individual (labeled and dated) containers to use later.
* Take inventory. How long has it been since you really looked at your spice rack or in your kitchen cabinets, pantry, or (shudder) fridge? This is a great time to explore your stores and see what you have, toss what’s gone by, and make lists both of what’s still good and what you need to replace. In our tough economic climate, it’s more important than ever to make the most of what you already have. But to do that, you need to know what you have.
* Clip some coupons. Every weekend, our friend Ben and I get a free newspaper in our mailbox that includes ad sections with coupons and sale products from two of our larger local grocery chains, Giant and Weis Markets, as well as from Dollar General. Now, my beloved mother, rest her soul, was very opposed to coupon-clipping, bargain-hunting, and the like. I grew up with “shop at the best stores, buy brand-name products, coupons are for poor people,” and so on being drummed into my ears. My mother thought that the waste of time and gas spent clipping coupons and driving around looking for bargains would more than pay for going to a good store and buying brand-name products. I see her point, but I also see the savings that smart shopping can provide. If, like us, you have several grocery stores near you, it’s not a waste of gas to drive to the ones with the best deals—as long as you know what those deals are in advance. A rainy day is the perfect time to spend a half-hour perusing those sales pages, clipping coupons, and making lists of what you need and where to buy it. Generic and store brands work for us on staples like rice, pasta, and beans. Where we feel strongly about brands, as in Kleenex, Coca-Cola, and Hellman’s Mayonnaise, we try to find a coupon and combine it with a store discount.
* Organize your seed stash. If you’re like me and our friend Ben, you order and buy new seed packets every year, but you don’t plant everything you buy. So you end up with seed packets that date back a year or several years. With new seed catalogues pouring in, this is the perfect time to look at what you have, see if it’s still viable, check your garden notes or notebook to determine what cultivars you really loved, and make notes about what you need to buy and what you already have in your stash. Use the oldest (viable) seed in your stash first, and you’ll save yourself money. Organize your seed stash by flower, fruit, herb, or veggie and by date, oldest first. You may have to sow older seed more thickly to get the germination you want, but you’ll have saved on seed this year and will have actually used the seed you bought previously. Some seeds need to be planted the year they’re ordered in order to germinate, though, so make sure you check a good resource to see if your seeds are still good and avoid disappointment.
* Read a good book/magazine/catalogue. Dark, rainy days are perfect for catching up on your reading. If you have an overflowing pile of magazines and catalogues on your coffeetable like we do, this is a wonderful time to finally read them and pare down the heap. It’s also a good time to curl up with an afghan, a cup of hot tea, and that book you’d been meaning to get around to.
* Get in touch. Dark, dreary days when you’re trapped inside all day are also unlooked-for opportunities to catch up with your friends and family. Write some e-mails, make a few calls, send a letter. I don’t know about you, but I love seeing photos of friends’ and family members’ kids and pets, projects, and, if I haven’t seen them in a while, of them, too. So attach some digital photos or printouts when you send your e-mail or letter!
* Pamper your pets. If you’ve been meaning to replace that filter in your aquarium or clean the birdcage or make some homemade dog biscuits or order a few catnip toys for that wicked little kitten, now’s a great time. It’s also a great time for talking to your beloved pets, grooming them, or just spending a little quality time with them. They love you so much, it would mean everything to them.
* Try something new. Order a movie you’ve thought about watching but haven’t gotten around to; check out your cookbooks and make something completely different; contemplate a new skill or board game that you’d enjoy mastering and do some online research. Plan the trip of your dreams. Being “trapped” indoors is a great time to think about expanding your horizons!
* Pay your bills. I’m amazed by how many people I know who put this routine chore off. A dark, dreary day is a great time to make yourself “just do it!” You’ll feel great when you get that burden off your back.
* Tackle the big stuff. Gulp. I don’t recommend this lightly, but if you find yourself with a day off and no idea how to use it, think about heading up to your attic, down to your basement, or out to your garage. Look around and see what’s in there. Do you need to shovel out? Could you use some shelves or other organizational tools? Could you use some tools, period? Are these areas dry and mildew-free? Can you walk through them without tripping or crashing into stuff all over the floor, or worrying about crashing though a flimsy floor yourself? Is there plenty of light? Can you fit your cars in your garage? Now’s a great time to take a close look at these important but often overlooked areas.
* Kick up some dust. You’re right, I’ve been saving this for last, but housecleaning is one thing that seems custom-made for dreary days. Dust those shelves and walls, look for cobwebs and dead bugs on ceilings and windows and in light fixtures, clean the bathroom tiles and kitchen counters. Boring? Yes. But you’ll love the results!
Well, I’m motivated now. How about you? Are there things you love to do to combat the winter gloom that I’ve overlooked? If so, please share them. At this time of year, we all need as many options as we can get!
‘Til next time,
Silence
Lemon sponge pie: An Amish specialty January 6, 2009
Posted by ourfriendben in homesteading, recipes.Tags: Amish cookbooks, Amish pies, Amish recipes, Amish-themed novels, Beverly Lewis, lemon sponge pie, Wanda E. Brunstetter
4 comments
Silence Dogood here. Living as our friend Ben and I do out in Amish country (in our case, in the Pennsylvania countryside), we often encounter the “Plain people” as we go about our lives. We’ll pass a boxlike family buggy or open courting buggy as we travel back-country roads, or see a buggy, with its horse quietly waiting, tied to the inevitable railing in front of virtually every store in nearby Kutztown. We buy homemade cheese, pickles, jellies and baked goods and homegrown produce from the Amish at their farms or at the weekly Kutztown Farmers’ Market. We admire colorful Amish quilts at local fairs and shops.
Living in Amish country and wanting to live as simply as possible ourselves, embracing as we do the philosophy that “happiness is believing that whatever you have is just enough” (as opposed, of course, to feeling that you’ll always be unhappy unless you constantly have more, better, different), our friend Ben and I have long been intrigued by the Amish and their approach to living. We have read Amish history and biography, watched documentaries and Amish-themed films (our favorite, of course, being “Witness”), and studied Amish crafts and lifeways.
I confess that I have taken all this a step further. I love the Amish novels of authors like Beverly Lewis and Wanda E. Brunstetter. They are so wholesome and grounded, and of course, like Amish life itself, they feature a whole lot of gardening and cooking. Both Beverly and Wanda have written Amish cookbooks, too, which I own and cherish, The Beverly Lewis Amish Heritage Cookbook and Wanda Brunstetter’s Amish Friends Cookbook.
Coming as I do from the South, many of the recipes in these Amish novels and cookbooks—and in Pennsylvania Dutch country as a whole—were unfamiliar to me. And my, people seemed to eat a whole lot of dessert! Five out of six recipes seemed to be dessert-focused. But when I thought about it, it made sense: The typical large Amish and conservative Mennonite families mean lots of kids, and lots of kids means lots of dessert. (And of course, plenty of “big kids” love desserts, too.)
Many local favorites figure prominently in these novels and cookbooks, including shoo-fly pie, AP cakes, snickerdoodles, and whoopie pies. But the one that really caught my attention was lemon sponge pie. It not only featured prominently in several novels, but in one of Wanda Brunstetter’s, the hero actually courts and wins his true love with his home-baked lemon sponge pies! Now, I had never seen or tried a lemon sponge pie. It was never one of the pies offered for sale at farm stands. Nor could I picture it. Looking at my kitchen sponges while doing the dishes, it hardly seemed like an appetizing prospect, but still…
Finally, this past Christmas, I had an opportunity to try lemon sponge pie for myself. The Goschenhoppen Historians’ Christmas Bake Sale featured a wealth of traditional treats, and lo and behold, there were three homemade lemon sponge pies. I grabbed one, my friend Rudy grabbed a second, and Rudy’s sister Carolyn snapped up the third. (“You’ll like this,” Rudy assured me.)
Well, sure enough, I did like it. In fact, Ben and I loved it. If you love lemon bars or lemon chess pie, you’ll love it too. Here’s the recipe, from Wanda E. Brunstetter’s wonderful book, The Simple Life: Devotional Thoughts from Amish Country Featuring Recipes. No wonder her hero won his sweetheart!
Lemon Sponge Pie
1 tablespoon butter
1 cup white sugar
1/8 teaspoon salt
2 tablespoons flour
2 cups milk
2 eggs, separated
juice and rind of 1 lemon
Preheat oven to 375 degrees F. In a large bowl, blend together butter, sugar, salt, flour, and milk. In a separate bowl, beat the egg yolks. Stir the yolks, juice, and rind into the first mixture. Beat the egg whites until stiff and fold into the main bowl. Pour into an uncooked piecrust. Bake for 30 minutes or until solid. (Recipe courtesy of Mrs. Eli Yoder.)
Try this Amish country favorite and see if this easy recipe becomes one of your favorites, too!
‘Til next time,
Silence
Frugal living tip #1. January 5, 2009
Posted by ourfriendben in Ben Franklin, wit and wisdom.Tags: free TV, frugal living, frugal tips
4 comments
In the frugal spirit of our mentor and blog hero Ben Franklin, and in light of our recessionary times, our friend Ben and Silence Dogood have decided to start each week of 2009 by posting a frugal tip. Today’s tip is from Gregory Karp’s column “Spending Smart” in our local newspaper, the Allentown, PA Morning Call.
We all know that old-style analog TVs won’t work anymore after this coming February unless you update them with a converter box. (Er, we assume they’ll still be fine for watching DVDs and videos, even without the converter box, but if you want to keep your analog set up and running, you can get a $40 coupon for a converter box at www.dtv2009.gov.)
But here’s something we didn’t know: If you have an HDTV set with an ATSC tuner (and Gregory Karp assures us that that’s pretty much everybody with an HDTV set, unless it was one of the earliest models), you can now get free TV! Uh, what?! Well, free broadcast TV—stations like PBS, NBC and Fox—as opposed to cable. But for folks like us who refuse to pay for cable or satellite and therefore get no television reception at all, this is a great leap forward.
How does it work? To quote Mr. Karp, “You just need a normal set-top or roof antenna. To choose an appropriate antenna, go online to www.antennaweb.org and click ‘Choose an antenna’.” Wow. Thank heavens we didn’t get rid of our old set-top antenna when we got our new TV!
Stay tuned for more frugal tips in the weeks to come. And feel free to send us your favorites!
A very silly post. January 4, 2009
Posted by ourfriendben in wit and wisdom.Tags: blog bloopers, blog humor
2 comments
Silence Dogood here. Since our friend Ben has decided to tackle a philosophical post today (see “Exits and entrances”), I thought I’d head off in the opposite direction and celebrate one of our favorite aspects of blogging, getting to see the search phrases that people have used to get to our blog, Poor Richard’s Almanac.
Admittedly, most of these search phrases are quite relevant and sensible and link directly to the subject of one of our posts. And it’s also true that when they’re not at all sensible, they still link in some odd way to the subject of one of our posts. (Admittedly, we’re still trying to figure out the origin of “shining purple salad dressing.”) But the nonsensical searches also make us laugh, and of course, that cheers us up no end.
Today brought us an especially rich mine of these. We had “Scrooge’s feelings on the poor.” (Two guesses.) “Who are the 2009 nominators of the MacArthur Awards.” (If you happen to know, our friend Ben would very much like to speak with you.) “Stink bug allergies.” (As faithful readers know, I have an ongoing war going with the wretched stink bugs. Just yesterday, after a welcome hiatus, I saw a stink bug on the side of one of our bookcases. No matter that it’s about one degree outside, there it was, hovering over my computer and glaring at me. As I write, it appears to be gone, but since I know that at any second it will blast off from wherever it’s hiding and land on my shirt, this is small consolation.) “Do-good sourdough bread recipe.” I, Silence Dogood, must confess myself to be flattered that someone would search for any recipe that appears to be named in my honor. Maybe it would do someone good, but not being a fan of the “sour” part of sourdough bread, that someone wouldn’t be me.
The best and worst of today’s searches, however, stood my hair on end: “fresh amazon parrot eggs for sale in pen.” Let us hope that this was submitted by a parrot lover who wanted to buy a legally bred parrot hatchling in Pennsylvania to hand-raise, as opposed to someone who thought that parrot eggs fresh from the pen would make an absolutely scrumptious omelette or something. As a dear friend would say, “Yikees!!!”
At any rate, thanks to all who continue to keep us laughing—especially appreciated given today’s bleak economy—and thanks to everyone who cares enough to come onto our blog for whatever reason. We hope you stay and visit awhile!
’Til next time,
Silence
