Friday, November 27, 2015

JK Rowling and music

I saw a clever meme today that said basically you can tell more about a person by their choice of music than you can by their race, religion or sexual preferences. That sounds pretty right on to me.

I just finished reading JK Rowling's latest book, Career of Evil (Ms Rowling writing as Robert Galbraith).  She quotes Blue Öyster Cult throughout the book in chapter headings and, well, elsewhere in the book - and that's all I'm saying about that. You'll get no spoilers from me. At any rate, I figure that Ms Rowling must like the band.

I closed the book and thought about it a moment. I could't recall a single BÖC tune, even though Ms. Rowling provided a list of song references and permissions at the end that should have prompted even my faulty memory.

If you know anything about me, you know that my musical preferences run towards the instrumental, specifically that of the genius guitarist, Jimmy Page. I don't dislike lyrics, but lyric-heavy at the expense of musical development just doesn't make it for me. Over the years I've gotten more and more picky about it. Back in the day I listened to my share of Arlo Guthry and Bob Dylan, but what really called to my soul was the melodies, the riffs, the rhythms of the instruments - with voice as instrument, not as conveyor of language. 

Real music. Not poetry set to a tune.

So over time I indulged myself more and more until now days and weeks can go by with nothing but music that features Jimmy Page coming out of the speakers. Obviously this means I haven't even thought about, much less listened to, BÖC in years. I liked the book. I figured if JK Rowling likes the band that much I should give them a listen. I tried half a dozen songs on for size this evening.

Oh boy. I won't be listening to BÖC for another 40 years or so. Maybe I'll like them better then. Enough said.

So about that meme. What does Ms. Rowling's musical choice for the novel tell me about her?

Well, BÖC is an American band, for one thing, and that means Ms. Rowling is not stuck on British music. That's nice but not earth shattering. No, what jumps out at me after listening to the band and thinking about her inclusion of their work in the book is that JK Rowling likes Blue Öyster Cult for their lyrics, not their music. 

But you probably figured that out before I did. 

Still, its nice to know this new truth about JK Rowling.  It's not earth shattering but it tells me something important about her that I didn't know before: I probably wouldn't want to be stuck in a car with her on a long trip if we had to listen to her playlist.



Tuesday, October 13, 2015

About Cows

by Lif Strand (c) 1996, 2015

Until I made personal acquaintance with one, I never had anything against cows. I mean, aside from the nasty smell of dairy farms and feed lots - the memory of which I tend to push to the back of my head (especially when in grocery stores) - what’s to dislike about cows?

You see a few black and white bossies munching on green, grassy hillsides and you've got to smile. And who can resist the big Guernsey doe-eyes? As for the vast range land of the West, dotted with Herefords, Angus, or better yet, longhorns - why that’s practically an icon of our mighty country. 

So, until 1996, I thought cows were pretty much OK. Until then I might have even harbored a thought or two about fresh milk in the morning, home-grown steaks, a few calves out in the back 40. I had never had to deal with cows up close and personal, you see.

Then I met Fraulein.

It was our friend C's fault (initial only, to protect the guilty). Retired from ranching, widowed and bored, he’d been hanging out at the dude ranch where I was employed as head wrangler. This high-end management position entailed about 10 hours a day of scooping manure; feeding and grooming and tacking up the dude string; taking uncoordinated, unfit and complaining dude riders on one hour trail rides; and carrying plate scrapings and coffee grounds from the lodge to the chickens. What C found entertaining in all this escaped me, but he spent a lot of time hanging around, making unhelpful comments and generally getting in the way. 

One of his most unhelpful comments involved the superior qualities of ice cream made from fresh, unpasteurized, unhomonogized milk. This comment marked the beginning of the end of my heretofore pleasant and uneventful relationship with cows.

C’s parents had a milk cow when he and his siblings were growing up. Later, C’s wife also had one. While she was into making cheeses, C’s specialty with fresh, raw milk was butter, making it just the way he used to as a kid. C had fond memories of this butter making, and so - even though he himself did not drink milk, and even though he lived alone and thus consumed little butter - he decided it would be a great idea for him to own a milk cow. He also thought it would be a great idea for me to help him find this cow. Over my protestations of no cow husbandry or dairy experience, I found myself using up one of my rare days off for The Great Cow Hunt on the Rio Grande.

My vote for making a few exploratory phone calls first was quickly vetoed, so we headed east and north with no plan that C was willing to share. While we parked and moseyed up to the Lemitar Livestock Auction building, our first stop, I ventured to ask why C thought there’d be any dairy cows at this auction in the middle of beef country. I was informed that there were quite a few commercial dairy farms south of Albuquerque, their lush pastures irrigated by the muddy Rio Grande. C was sure that there’d not only be Jerseys or Guernseys, but they’d be good milk producing cows that would be in calf as well. It defied any logic I could come up with that any dairyman in his right mind would take such a beast to auction, but we were spared further discussion by the discovery that the one dairy cow at the auction had already been sold. I guess arriving 2 hours late for the auction hadn't been such a good idea, but the rickety old trailer C pulled behind his tiny Toyota pickup weaved whenever he drove faster than 35 mph.  The 125 mile drive from his place to the auction a wee bit longer than we’d planned, and hotter, too, because it turned out the air conditioner was broken. 

Never mind, we were in time for the auction's noon break, so we ate in the air-conditioned lunch room and moved on.

C’s newly revised plan involved driving further north to Belen, where he was sure he would find the dairy he’d sold his wife’s cow to 6 years prior. Barring success with that, he’d just stop at the first dairy farm we came to and pick up a cow. Four or five farms and several sweaty and miserable hours later, this approach did not seem like such a good one. If there’d been doors to slam in our faces, our noses would’ve been pretty flat. I was ready to call the whole thing a bust but C convinced me to stop at one more dairy farm, just north of Socorro. If there was no cow here for C he promised we’d get some dinner and go home. C perked up considerably as we pulled into the yard (coincidentally just across the freeway from the Lemitar Livestock Auction of many hours ago). He now recalled that this dairy was, in fact, the one where he’d sold his wife’s cow.

Although the owner apologized for not remembering that particular cow, he did miraculously agree to sell a cow to us. I was skeptical of the whole deal, especially when I saw what the cowman picked out. Like I said, I don’t have any cow experience, but somewhere in the dusty corridors of my memory I recalled that a milk cow should be broad in the pelvis, have 4 even sized udders and good feet. Josephine (the cowman swore that he knew the names of all 300 of his cows) was presented to C as an excellent choice.

She wasn’t exactly pedigreed, the cowman admitted, but it looked to him like she might have some Jersey and some Guernsey in her. He did not point out the thin and flabby udders, nor the small size of her bag, which was quite small compared to those grotesquely distended ones of all the other cows. If milk had ever been in those udders, it was a long time ago. It seemed to me that perhaps these were not good signs. But then Josephine proved to not be pregnant. She was rejected, in spite of her very good feet.

C agreed to the cowman’s second choice, Fraulein, who proved somewhat difficult to catch. I held back comment, wondering how C, with his bum ankle and one lung, was going to handle clever Fraulein in the future. As the temperature had not dropped from the mid 90s all day and I was overheated, short-tempered and hungry, I contented myself with hanging out in the shade of the milking barn while the two men took a great long time to work Fraulein towards an aisle leading to a cattle chute. Of course, I had to sympathize with Fraulein , because I could not imagine that the pregnancy checking process, involving a shoulder length plastic glove for the dairyman and much fecal matter on the part of the cow, was anything Fraulein was looking forward to.

An hour or so later, Fraulein was in the rickety trailer and we were on our way home. C was $75 poorer than he’d have been if he’d purchased Josephine. True, Fraulein anatomy was an improvement over Josephine's, but besides the fact that she was hard to catch there was no calf in her either. This was a minor point that C had tossed aside with a wave of his hand. He had also tossed aside a few questions of mine that I thought were quite pertinent, such as did C have a milking stanchion? (No.) A cow halter? (Why would he need one?) Milking buckets? (Pots from the kitchen worked fine.) What about the fact that Fraulein had never been hand milked before? (No problem). Hmmm.

It was much cooler when we got back to C's place, probably since it hadn’t been daylight for many hours. Miraculously the cow hadn’t suffered any physical damage from the trip even though the trailer had shed a few parts along the way as a consequence of her jumping around so much in the back. She was mightily miserable as we shooed her into a small pen next to C's barn, since she was well overdue for her afternoon milking.

I wondered how C was going to deal with this poor tempered beast in the dark (no electricity in the barn), but this wasn’t going to be a problem for him since since he was planning on heading straight to bed. I looked doubtfully at Fraulein's milk-engorged bag, listened to her groans, and recalled all the stories I’d read as a kid about having to milk that cow on time no matter whether or not Lassie was barking or Fury was whinnying about the danger coming down the road.

And then I made a fatal mistake. I said, brilliantly, I'd milk her myself. After all, I reasoned, how hard could it be? I’d seen it done on TV a zillion times. And I was sure I’d read about it in a book sometime or other.

I won't go into the gory details here. I did relieve some of the cow's discomfort but it wasn't pleasant for either of us. Just let me say that a cow that has only ever lived her life in a commercial dairy has no idea how to be a cow. She’s been milked by milking machine since day one. To put it bluntly, it toughens those teats right up. Fraulein had never had anything as soft as her own calf’s mouth sucking at her much less an inexperienced human hand weakly squeezing and yanking at her swollen and painful teats (only one hand because the other was occupied elsewise).

A cow’s way of expressing displeasure is first indicated by a thrashing tail, said tail generally also holding a quantity of manure like a brush holds paint. Cow manure is similar to paint, too, in that it is mostly liquid and it will color the object that it is applied to. I realized that evening that I much preferred the smell of paint to manure. I furthermore realized that holding a penlight in one’s mouth may lead to unwanted foreign objects entering the mouth. It’s not a memory I like to dwell on.

A cow’s next way of expressing displeasure is the use of her hind feet. You’ve no doubt heard the term cow-kick. A regular kick is one by the hind foot aimed backwards. A cow-kick is one that goes forward, perhaps with a bit of English to the side. It hurts when it connects with a human body part, say a hand that's holding a milk pail. When a cow cow-kicks the milk pail (or in this case, the old coffee percolator I stumbled across in the tack room) it is knocked over, spilling the contents. The loss of the few ounces of milk that had actually accumulated hardly mattered since nobody was going to drink milk that had dead bugs and cobwebs floating in it anyway. It did bother me to discover that milk turns out to be quite sticky when it soaks the knees of your jeans.

A third way a cow expresses displeasure is by leaving the scene. The rope I had looped over Fraulein's neck and fashioned into a crude halter was for roping and was therefore quite stiff. Thus it simply shook loose when Fraulein tossed her head. Even if it had stayed on, I couldn’t have prevented her from walking off, not without having the end of the rope tied securely to something like a freeway support piller. I only wonder why she didn’t do that first thing.

Did I mention cow drool? Did I neglect to note how cow piss splashes as it hits the ground? Never mind.

Here is the horror of it all: I escaped to the dude ranch and left C to the tender mercies of the cow. But then, after just a week or two, he drove up hauling the damn beast in his rickety trailer. He was donating Fraulein to the ranch, he said. The owner actually fell for it when C explained how the guests would enjoy fresh milk right out of the cow, how kids could learn how to milk, how he could demonstrate butter making. 

“But who will milk the cow every day?” the owner asked.

The two of them turned to me. 

“She can milk the cow,” C said, with a grin. “She’s good at it.”

And that, my friends, is why I don’t like cows.

Sunday, August 2, 2015

So Much To Do...

Photo taken from Beaver Creek Guest Ranch lodge porch
...so little time.

I'm going to take a couple days later this week and spend them at Beaver Creek Guest Ranch
in the White Mountains of Arizona. This is the place I've gone to before to get work done on various fabric art projects and even a couple quilts.

I'm not a domestic type person, as you might have figured out if you've read previous posts here. The quilts I've made at these quilting retreats are for my bed, and I don't need to keep making them, so I am free to focus on wall hangings. That's where my creative juices are stirred.

As with my approach to domestic matters, I'm not much for following rules when it comes to quilting type stuff. If I read directions carefully, it's so I can figure out how to deviate from them. Once I've tried a technique the "right" way, it's my joy to see how I can tweak the process to get something very different.

That means, of course, that there are a few failures along the way.

Unlike with my bread-baking adventures (and the BBQ baking method is working quite well, thank you very much for asking) I can't just toss the failures to the dogs or chickens (or compost) to take care of. But that's OK. Quilters have a tradition of always having a few UFOs (UnFinished Objects) hidden from the light of day. These are projects you realized along the way you didn't love as much as you thought, or that required more technical skills than you had at the time, or that you simply haven't gotten around to dealing with because Life Gets In The Way.

Collect enough UFOs and you earn your quilters' PhD (Projects Half Done). I have a few PhDs now. I should get a raise.

So the other day I decided to clear out my sewing tool box, because I couldn't stuff anything more in it that I wanted to bring. Surely there would be a few items from old project that I didn't need to haul around.

Perhaps that box with false eyelashes didn't have to go with me this time. Thumbtacks: Will I need them? Have I ever used thumbtacks at a quilt retreat? I certainly don't need all those pencils and pens, especially since most of the ink in the pens has dried up (a hazard of living in arid country). Ditto for glue. Empty boxes and baggies with holes in them, five sets of tiny straight pins too small to use for anything (but they have such pretty crystal balls at the ends), hooks and snaps and buttons (sheesh, you'd think I was sewing clothes). Oil pastels. Fancy quilters thingamajigs that I've never taken out of the package. 

And even more.

Satiny fabric and metallic fabric and glittery ribbon.
I like sparkly stuff.
In the end, my tool box had tons more room, even when refilled with stuff I know I'll actually use.  Maybe that balances the extra fabric I decided I should bring in case I get inspired to work on something other than the UFOs I'm determined to finish.

Two days.  That's all I'll be up there.  Wonder if everything I want to bring will fit in the car or should I use the pickup truck...


Monday, June 22, 2015

Summertime and the living ain't easy

This morning started out so well. After completing my regular chores I decided to tackle a task I've been putting off for a while. I've got a spot where summer floods have caused enough erosion to expose water line, and I've been avoiding a real fix by having a neighbor come over with a dump truck load of fill. But every summer it rains again and the valley floods again and the fill washes away. This has been going on for several years.

Some months ago I decided to get going on a permanent fix. I placed old tires in the gully, overlapping them on their sides. My plan was to anchor them with t-posts and fill them with rocks, the manual labor for which was not much fun.  After moving the tires I decided I had achieved enough for a while.

Well, now that summer is here the monsoon rains can't be too long in coming. The floods can carry stuff for miles and miles so if I don't get those t-posts in the tires will be gone. The tires aren't worth anything so they'd be no great loss to me -- there are plenty more where they came from -- but they would be litter for someone else. And besides, that would be more work for me.

Last night I woke up in the wee hours worrying about all the stuff I hadn't done that needed doing before the rains start. Top of that list was the erosion problem. I decided I'd do something about it today, and I promptly fell back to sleep.

This morning I remembered my decision and went at it. As you can see from the photo, the project is still in process.

I've just put arnica salve on my left foot where I dropped a t-post on it. I don't know why that's the foot that hurts so much because I dropped two t-posts on my right foot. But hey, the posts only fell a couple of feet - it could have been worse.

My back hurts, too. I got one post in. I guess if I was a buff young cowboy I'd have gotten them all in, but I'm practically an old lady, fer cryin' out loud. I'm proud I can lift the damn post-hole driver at all, much less pound in a post. One at a time is good enough progress for me.

The big question is: will I sleep better tonight or will I be forced to promise myself to pound in another post tomorrow, too? I hope not. I've got weeks and weeks till the rains start and finishing the job now would be so counter to the whole mañana ethic of my life.

Monday, June 15, 2015

A dream of a recipe

I should start out by saying that I am not a Johnny Cash fan.  Partly it's because I can't stand most country
Young Johnny Cash in studio
music (there are a few exceptions - but I even avoid those) and partly because with his nasal voice and his dreary stereotypical subject matter, he epitomizes everything about country music that I can't stand.

So this morning I woke from a bad dream that had Johnny Cash as the focus.  

I dreamed that I was required to transcribe a Johnny Cash music video as it was being recorded in a studio by Mr. Cash.  Although there would be no audience, the recording would be a straight run-through with no interruptions and no retakes.  I talked with the man but briefly, and only in preparation for the work.  There was a lot of pressure on me to get it right.  

And then the very first song that he did was a recipe for Chinese chicken salad.

Needless to say, I woke up before getting into that nightmare of a dream. 

Maybe not so coincidentally I came across an interesting recipe for Asian chicken salad recently that I'm eager to try.  I'll share it here.  I may omit the habanero sauce.  The jury's out as to the hot pepper sesame oil.  Plain sesame would be just fine, seems to me.

Asian Chicken Salad
  • 2 cups shredded carrots
  • 1 head large cabbage, chopped into very thin strips
  • 2 tbsp  cilantro
  • 1 tbsp  sesame Seeds
  • 4 cups cooked shredded chicken
  • 2 tbsp soy sauce
  • 1 / 4 cup white wine Vinegar
  • 2 tsp  ginger (ground)
  • 3 tbsp extra virgin olive oil
  • 2 tbsp hoisin sauce
  • 1 tbsp  hot pepper sesame oil
  • 1 tsp habanero pepper sauce
  • 1 / 4 tsp salt blend
  • 5 whole chopped green onions, green and white parts

In a small bowl or jar with a lid, add soy sauce, vinegar, ginger, olive oil, hoisin sauce, hot pepper sesame oil, pepper sauce, salt and chopped green onions. Secure the lid and shake vigorously.

In a large plastic bag or large bowl, combine chopped cabbage, shredded carrots, cilantro, sesame seeds and shredded chicken. 

Add enough prepared dressing to coat and toss until well incorporated. Adjust amount of dressing as needed.
 
Makes 9 servings @ 1.5 cup.


Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Bread report: Tangy and tasty

I baked the sourdough bread I started two days ago on the wood stove this morning. Grill baking will wait till I can get a small propane tank filled. This dough was from a different recipe for grill baking: the baking temperature is a lot hotter and the dough a lot stickier. But it had risen nicely by this morning and I had high hopes for good bread no matter what.

When I took the bread off the wood stove I let it cool in the pan a bit before flipping it out onto the rack. But oops, the top was still unbaked dough. It stuck to the rack when I picked up the loaf (hence that crustless space in the center).  Stuck to my fingers too. I put the loaf back on the stove, upside down this time, and baked it further. 

It doesn't look too bad and look at those nice holes in the loaf. So far my bread's been kind of evenly grained like store-bought white bread. Eeeeew!  I wanted those holes! So good for catching melted butter when the bread's warm. And yes, so very tasty.

My sourdough starter is nice and strong now, meaning it's very forgiving. Good thing, too, because obviously I need a starter like that!



Tuesday, April 21, 2015

Bread baking adventures - baking on a grill

In another life I was a mad scientist. In this one I'm a modern contrarian.

As those who know me are aware, my idea of fun is to try something new and different without reading the directions. I guess it must be something in my personality, or my astrological chart or some deep-seated neurosis from my childhood.  Be that as it may, reading -- much less following -- directions is so not me.

I decided some years back that because I love sourdough bread, I should make my own. How that developed is a story for another time, but I am now accomplished at baking bread on top of a wood stove (not in a Dutch oven).

That's well and good, but as spring progresses, the days are warming up to the point where I don't particularly want to be building fires in the wood stove, even first thing in the morning. So my most recent adventure is learning how to bake a loaf of bread on an outdoor grill.

Oh no, no, no. Don't you go thinking I'm weird. I Googled it and discovered baking bread on a gas grill is old hat. Lots of people do it (and here I thought I'd come up with something unusual). Besides, this is legitimate research: The other day I got invited to a friend's house to make pizzas in her new outdoor pizza oven. I want one, not so much for pizza (though I'd use it for that, too) but for break baking.

But wow, what an investment in time and labor to build one. Hence the grill. If I learn to use it and like baking bread outdoor enough to keep using it, maybe I can justify building a nice wood-fired oven over in a corner of the yard.

So okay. Research.

Not that I was going to read the directions closely, mind you, but I did skim through a few web pages to get the gist of it. Part of my tendency to skim is because unfortunately much of the info out there for the weird projects I do is useless (poorly written, written by people who've obviously never done it, or the instructions call for equipment I don't have). I figure if the instructions have to be worked around there's no point in reading closely, right? 

And yes, I will have to do some creative work-arounds for baking bread on a grill. For one thing my grill is older. It doesn't have a fancy two-level rack system to keep the bread from getting scorched by the flames, nor does it have a built-in thermometer. For another thing I want to use the heavy enameled cast-iron bread baking bowl I always use, not a stone cloche (really?) or a pizza stone (could I just use a rock?) or doubled cookie sheets (who knows where mine are). 

And for that matter... where is my grill, anyway?

So, earlier today I decided I should be proactive and get the grill out from where it's been stored for several years. I had to use a shovel to dig a hole to lower it so I could pull it out from under... no, no point in going there. Let me simply say I got it out of where it's been stored and tugged it over to my yard next to the house. Opened it up and whoa. Good thing I was being proactive. Lots of dust in there. It would be a good idea to see if the grill would even ignite and hold a flame, and of course doing so would burn off the cobwebs, too.

Then the next question: Which, if any, of my propane tanks actually had gas in it? Hint: None of the small tanks that I can lift. I eyeballed the four-foot tall tank that requires my using a hand cart to move it. I thought about how I'd have to unhook it from what it was hooked up to, and the gymnastics that would entail. I thought about how much easier it would be to get a propane tank filled next time I'm in town. 

See how these things go?

Looks like I will bake this next loaf of bread on the wood stove after all. It's not nearly as warm in the house as I thought. A fire would be nice. Yes it would. Really.