Tree Houses

Last night I ran across an article on tree houses in the Costco circular: "Life out on a limb: treehouses for the upwardly mobile". I also have a tree house calendar for this year so it seems that this is the year of the tree house. I've always been fascinated by tree houses: the McPhersons out in Bardsdale had one and we'd play in it when Penny and I would play with Susan and Anne ____ when we were kids. What was their name? It will come to me. My grandfather Bill cut down two flowering peach trees trying to make me one and finally put it up in another larger flowering peach tree. It had a trap door and I backed off the side of the platform once (no walls) and fell about six feet. I was scared more than hurt.

The Swiss Family Robinson tree house at Disneyland was interesting but you could tell it wasn't a real tree so I was always slightly disappointed. I think I saw the movie but never read the book, since by the time it was popular, I felt I was too old to read it.

One of my professors at Santa Cruz in the 60s supposedly built a tree house and was living in it with the wife of another professor but there were a lot of flakey and unstable people around at the time. I remember him saying that we students were all losers because the really successful and ambitious high school students were jocks - football players. And I suppose cheerleaders because our high school didn't have any sports for girls. Thank goodness for title IX. That statement was not popular with the students who were overwhelmingly the independent loners. He, of course, may have been right, perhaps speaking from his own experience as a loser.

The article in the Costco circular mentioned these tree house resources, which I will note here so that I don't lose them, since I will toss the circular. I didn't know where else to store them. ;-) And, WOW, are the tree houses at the sites below fabulous, but you can tell they weren't made by kids, shouldn't they be?

TreeHouse Workshop:
http://www.treehouseworkshop.com/
Forever Young Treehouse:
http://www.treehouses.org/
Out 'n' About:
http://www.treehouses.com/
Treehouse Engineering:
http://www.treehouseengineering.com/

It looks like all the domains for treehouses are pretty well taken...

Back to California home cooking

I was looking for a recipe for split pea soup a la Andersen's in Buellton, north of Santa Barbara. At home we always had it out of a can but after I spent 2 1/2 years in Colombia, I learned that you always make soup at home from scratch. In Colombia you don't use recipes, you cook by taste and according to what you have. Evidently Buellton and the Andersens are too far south to make it into Michele Anna Jordan's California cookbook because the closest recipe is one for lentils and seived eggs. Lentil soup, she says, was popular with the 60s' health food crowd but only seasoned with soy sauce and it did not have the "finesse" of today's cooking, which is influenced by French country cuisine. Hm. Lentil soup seasoned with soy sauce. I must try that.

Jordan did have an interesting aside on "How to Kill a Chicken" about Betty Fussell, "author of wonderful cookbooks and of scholarly books on food in America" who grew up in Southern California, a child of the Depression. I'll have to get the book Jordan refers to, Christmas Memories with Recipes for Mother, who also grew up in Southern California during the Depression.

I'll make my own split pea soup, with a ham bone, onions, carrots and celery but I was looking for a little inspiration. I could try the Swedish yellow split pea soup. I wonder what the difference is between the yellow and the green: are the yellow simply more mature? There is a recipe on the web on a site called "cdkitchen.com but andersen is spelled wrong and the recipe only has 3 out of 5 stars so I don't expect much from it. (Oh, wait, that's 3 out of 5 for difficulty (it has 5 stars from 1 review) but the recipe doesn't look great - no sauteeing of the vegetables and a vigorous boiling of the soup. Might as well do their split pea soup mix...) You'd think the cdkitchen site would display the recipes according to the number of stars they got but they just slap them on the page. So much for cdkitchen.

Second stop on the google search was the blog of the Fat Free Vegan's Yellow Split Pea Soup with Sweet Potato and Kale. This sounds interesting because she uses Penzey's Maharajah Style Curry Powder and anyone who uses Penzeys' spices is ok in my book, even if I've heard that you should grind your own curry powder fresh. And look, you can get a printer friendly version of the recipe. I wonder how she did that. I'll have to investigate. Now, what would happen if I made this recipe with green split peas??

Frugality

Frugality has become popular again, only now it is called "sustainability" and it is by no means widespread or everybody's cup of tea. When I was in college in the 60s it was considered anal and it is often associated with being cheap and/or neurotic. Plus if we were all frugal, it would put much of the US economy out of business: less retail, less marketing, less commerce, fewer innovations to get us to spend more money. Frugality also often entails more time and work, something that Americans feel they cannot give.
I grew up in the 1950s and remember my grandmother saving waxed paper. My mother washed her aluminum foil and plastic bags for reuse and still does to some extent. Recently (within the past week) I've decided that I can easily wash and reuse zipper/onezip plastic bags for my lunches. I've seldom used the ziploc bags because they seemed rather expensive but if I reuse them, then they are actually more sustainable than the regular plastic storage bags.
We've never used many prepared and packaged foods. My mother used lots of frozen vegetables, in fact that was her norm even though we lived in southern California. I find I do too but now primarily in the winter since I can get fresh corn and beans at the farmers market. Now that Fernando is letting me compost my vegetable peelings again I feel much holier. And the shredder means that we are no longer putting all our yard wastes in the landfill but recycling everything here in our garden. In the summer, we used to have 2-3 barrels a week of garden clippings: grass clippings, weeds, branches, leaves, etc. and now we have none. This winter we barely have half a can of regular trash since I am trying to recycle everything: newspaper, mail, paper, magazines at the Abitibi recycling bin a the junior high. Corrugated and other cardboard at Construction junction. Plastic bags at giant eagle. Metal cans, glass and plastic in the biweekly recyclables collection. Fresh vegetable and fruit trimmings go into the compost, coffee grounds go directly on the soil, and softer stuff goes in my worm bin. That just leaves meat and dairy leftovers, dirty plastic, and miscellaneous items for the trash that goes in the landfill. Usable items like clothes and appliances go to the Vietnam Vets or to the Goodwill.

Seeds from Italy

Google searches for various squash seeds led me to the Seeds from Italy website where the seeds are a bit pricier but they have some interesting selections that I have not heard of before. For instance: Scuplit - Silene Inflata.
"Scuplit (Silene Inflata). In Italy used as an ‘aromatic’ to flavor salads, egg dishes, risotto. Flavor a bit like a combination of arugula, tarrogon, chicory & other herbs... Widely used in Italy, but not anywhere else." Barbara Damrosch of the Washington Post was similarly intrigued (An Element of surprise for your salad). So maybe I'll just go pick some bladder campion.
They also have Zucchino da Fiore, a zucchini that produces flowers as the crop rather than the squash for things like squash flower soup and stuffed squash blossoms.

Winter Squash

I love winter squash: butternut and kabocha. Amy Goldman has a very interesting book for squash lovers: The Compleat Squash: A Passionate Grower's Guide to Pumpkins, Squashes, and Gourds. It is an oversized book lavishly illustrated with fantastic photographs by Victor Schrager and it is not owned by the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh: I had to borrow it from the South Park Township Library.
Goldman has squashes I have never seen or heard of. She is a particular fan of blue squashes which are popular in Australia, for instance the blue banana squash. In California pink banana squash is very common and slices are sold in supermarkets. Agricultural research stations also use them for growing ladybugs, or so I was told by Fernando Agudelo when I was at Berkeley in the 1970s. The Australian Blue group of squashes and the banana squashes are members of the Cucurbita maxima species. Most U.S. squashes are Curcurbita pepo and Cucurbita moschata.
So after reading Goldman's book, I've come up with a list I'd like to try and I haven't grown winter squash here in Monroeville before.
However, the farmers' market always seems to have a fair collection of different kinds and naturally the ones I want to try are the ones they don't have, like Triamble (8.5 pounds) but the problem is that it takes 4-5 months to mature and our growing season isn't as long as that in Australia.
Marina di Chioggia is Italian and a warty greenish blue.
Olive Vert - looks like and oversized green olive...
Winter Luxury Pie Pumpkin - has netting on its skin.
Rareseeds.com (Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds in Missouri) offers a wide range of seeds.
So I went to Rareseeds.com and picked up most of these squashes and then a couple more, including Jarrahdale and Black Futsu. And so that I wouldn't waste my $3 shipping fee, I ordered some Thai Round leaf Amaranth and some cos/Romaine lettuce (Forellenschluss and Petite Rouge). Romaine lettuce does very well in southwestern Pennsylvania. And then just out of curiosity I picked up some Roselle seeds (Jamaica, the hibiscus that produces the red flowers for the Mexican drink). I don't know how far along I'll get with the roselles as they are more appropriate for Florida and probably won't manage to bloom here. But maybe I can bring it inside...

Manjar Blanco

Manjar Blanco is an alternative name for Dulce de Leche in some South American countries. In Spain, it is a milk-based pudding that is Blanc Mange in England. The most interesting fact about Manjar Blanco and Blanc Mange is that originally it was made with pounded chicken breast. The National Trust's Complete Traditional Recipe Book prints a quote from Sara Paston-Williams's Traditional Puddings: "Chaucer, in The Canterbury Tales, describes it as a mixture of 'minced capon with flour, cream, and sugar'."

The Turks have a famous dessert called "Kazandibi Tavuk Gögsü" which is a pudding made from chicken breast, milk, sugar and rice flour. And yes, it is quite tasty.