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After a steaming, creamy plate of golubtzi with sour cream, a pile of beer batter onion rings is just perfect.

Serve while Notre Dame crushes Miami like a bug.

That is all.

Wilder Wolves

As an undergraduate, I once got shanghaied into an advanced class on autobiography, all modern, secular and gloomy, and theory-laden. I even had to read Derrida! Aaaiiiee! But one of the few bright spots of graduate school was getting permission to take a class from one of the living authors I admired most, and he was teaching a class on Third World prison literature, which was mostly autobiography. He had also been a political prisoner himself in Kenya. The first day of class, he dismissed literary theory with a contemptuous wave of the hand as the useless piffle of privileged men who didn't actually have anything important to write about.

When I taught short fiction writing at Deep Springs, I included a section of autobiography. It went okay, but that's the part I wish I could do over. Since then, I've read Gene Wolfe, and that changed everything.

Mr. Wolfe writes first person fiction. But as he's pointed out in his interviews and essays, it's the consistent, honest narrator who explains everything clearly that's completely unrealistic. Human memory isn't like that, and it's no fun for readers if there's nothing to figure out on your own. So his narrators contradict themselves, lie, might have a mental impairment, and certainly don't explain or interpret everything. Mr. Wolfe is a genius. (And a lot of what he says applies to blogs - the good ones anyway- and a blog/book narrative like Julie and Julia.)

All this colors my reading of the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. I like them, in part because they are much better prose than usually gets foisted off on children. And they are very well constructed. Rose Wilder Lane assisted her mother in writing them (how much is debated) and she was a world traveler, market-savvy writer and journalist. Rose was also among the founders of Libertarianism.

The Wilder books have a good bit of artifice, and that makes them better reading.

The Long Winter is a good example of the artifice underlying the books. To wit:

How are the different perspectives on The Indian Question presented? What assumption do all those perspectives have in common and how does that assumption get presented and supported? That's too well done to have been an accident.

What's Laura's relationship with animals and nature? How does the narrator use nature to control the pacing, tone, and mood? How does this convey a child's perspective?

Ma and Pa are clearly foils to each other, and I think it's more than obvious gender roles. When Ma and Pa differ, what's it tell us about them as different types of settlers?

Right off, economics are much more obvious than any other juvenile books I know, but it's all shown without theory. How are businessmen and business practices presented?

In the same vein, how is government and/or centralized authority shown? How is information spread?

What's are the virtues? How are they acquired and shown? What are the consequences, and to whom, of lacking a virtue?

As soon as I start to answer these questions, it's clear how carefully constructed these stories are. They are certainly not naive productions.

more tomorrow

Sunspots

That's an Indian style of frying vegetables, common in southwestern India. The spice is brown mustard seed, readily available and inexpensive at an Indian grocer or online. Black mustard seed is also used but is harder to find and more expensive. Both are mild and nutty, entirely unlike cooking with European yellow mustard.

Brown mustard seeds get popped in a bit of hot oil. They sizzle a minute and then make a tick as they hop about 6 inches. You'll want a lid on the frying pan!

As soon as they stop popping, take off the lid and add a few shakes of turmeric powder, which will smoke a little. It's a strong smell, so you might want the exhaust fan on. Or not.

Then add any mild vegetable. Cauliflower or potatoes are popular in India, but we often make this with shredded cabbage. With the veggies add a little lemon juice and some water and cover to steam. Salt just before serving.

This is my favorite thing to do with leftover cooked potatoes and they cook in about 4 minutes. But it's also great with cabbage, nutty and subtle, cooked till it still has a little crispiness. The yellow cabbage is great with rice, and we sometimes pair it with a spicy hot tomato-sauced curry. In Indian meals, it's often the cool foil to incendiary dishes. I've seldom seen it in restaurants, perhaps because the turmeric will stain everything it touches.

The popped brown mustard is fragile enough it doesn't crunch, but won't turn to powder with stirring either. It's kinda magic.

Gravy Train

All those black tank cars are full of beef tallow and lard. Thousands of gallons of animal fat.

Hoarfrost church

Hoarfrost berries

Bambini Jesu (panini)

Bambini Jesu: how to

Babies made of bread are an Italian custom at Christmas: Bambino. They're usually pretty big and tapered, a fairly complicated shape to make (especially if you only do it once a year). The eyes would be raisins on a traditional one. The goal isn't to make the face look realistic, but to make fancy swaddling bands.

I hardly bake bread at all now, so it's a big deal to the kids. They really wanted to do it themselves this year. So we made little ones with a basic mock braid.

The only sneaky trick here is the dough, which is a chilled challah. This is challah made with oil rather than butter, so it's pretty stiff without being brittle. Note in the pictures that there's no stray flour on the counter: you want it with just enough flour that it doesn't stick to the counter. I set it in the fridge at the end of the first rise. A couple of hours later it was chilled throughout and ready to shape.

Once it's in flat pieces it warms quickly as you handle it and gets too sticky and stretchy for little kids, so don't dawdle. I made the cuts with a bench knife and showed them how to do the mock braid. The only tricky part is to lay the dough strips gently, without stretching them, and that gets really difficult if the dough warms up. Again, they're on an unfloured surface.

Then they rise on the pan and go into the oven at normal challah temperature. The kids were in bed when the bambini came out of the oven, but they had them for breakfast Christmas morning. These two were each a quarter of a recipe of challah; the other half got braided and baked after the bambini for meatball sandwiches. Challah makes great French toast, too.

Inexplicable

Today I finished reading Wilder's novel, The Long Winter. The thing that got me the most? When they start running short of supplies, Ma Ingalls starts a sourdough, which lives underneath the stove. But as soon as the train comes in the spring, she immediately goes back to baking with yeast cakes.

?????????

There are good reasons to use commercial yeast today rather than sourdough for lots of folks. But none of those reasons apply to her. I noticed in Little House on the Prairie that she actually preferred freshly-butchered longhorn beef to duck and venison (!). There is just no accounting for taste. I charitably remind myself that the poor woman seems to have never even seen garlic.

Quite unaware of what I was reading, my husband made biscuits for dinner.

Macro abstract: light at the end of the tunnel

Little House on the Prairie (Not)

Right now I'm reading 2 books on early Iowa history. It seemed timely to reread Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie as a break from the less-than-luminous prose of professional historians and anthropologists. The whole set comes through the house at least once a year and probably deserves a post of their own, 'though it might tell you more about me (and maybe Deep Springs indirectly) than Iowa: I thought the Indians coming in the house wearing fresh skunk skins and eating everything was actually really funny--surely the Indians did that on purpose, and probably on a bet.

But all this pioneering narrative makes me remember coming to Iowa myself, and exactly the sort of topic Mrs. Wilder never mentioned. That's right, the outhouse.

In the late summer of '06 I moved into rural Iowa. How rural? The photo on my header was the view over the kitchen sink.

My husband commuted and I was home with little kids. There was corn and soybeans as far as the eye could see; most farms are more than a thousand acres, so farmhouses were few. There were two hog operations just out of sight.

Now, I'm not really country, but I've lived in the country enough to be concerned about moving into a house that hadn't been lived in for a few years. But we were assured by the landlord that the septic system was fine. It was built in the 1960s, a brick house with a big basement, reasonably tight for the winter. It had a few quirks--striped carpet in the kitchen, an Austin Powers carpeted bathroom--but a nice little house for us while our house in Michigan waited to sell. The pavement ended just past us. Winter came early.

And then one day I went into the basement to do laundry....But between me and the washer and dryer was a lake some 18 feet across that could only have one origin: the big drain in the middle of the basement floor. The landlord came out and located the top of the septic, which was buried under the snow, by sighting from the eaves. A man came in a tank truck and pumped the septic tank into his truck, checked with me that the basement had drained, and left. All hunky dory. Just a lot of disinfecting to do downstairs.

But a week or so later, it wasn't hunky dory. The lake was back. Further investigation by the experts revealed that the leach field was dead and would have to be dug and replaced in about six months. The ground was frozen and we were without septic until it thawed: two adults, a baby just starting to walk, a preschooler still in diapers, and our personal hygiene, laundry, cooking and dishes. So we conserved water in a major way, and every week or ten days I'd have the following phone conversation with our landlord:

Me: Hi, Bob. It's Foodie. We've got water downstairs again.

Bob: Okay, I'll call the guy. 'Bye.

Then the next day, or Monday if this unfortunately happened on Friday, two guys in overalls with a portable pump would drive around back, pump out the tank and shoot the septic water out onto the snow over the leach field.

Seven months later the ground thawed and a bobcat, backhoe, large bladed tractor, and a dump truck full of gravel arrived to dig and replace the leach field all in one day. For my 4 yr. old boy it was like Christmas! Real diggers came to our house! And that's all he remembers about the situation.

Let's review that winter: outside, the smell of two big hog farms and months of pumped out sewage water. In the house, 2 kids in diapers and super low water use. In the basement, regular sewage floods. They only saw other children (sometimes) when we drove in to the county library. But if he describes to you the 14 months we spent there, he says something like this:

We lived out in (Not on Any Map) a while. There was a big blizzard on my birthday and there was a snow drift all the way up the front door. Daddy had to dig a valley out to take the dog out. It was really windy all the time so we couldn't have picnics, but there were a whole lot of fireflies, like the stars fell down to dance around above the soybean plants. The computer was really slow and I couldn't download big Lego instructions. And then one day lots of diggers came to our house. They dug a big hole and a dump truck dumped a bunch of gravel but then they covered it up. We moved on my sister's birthday but that was okay because there wasn't anybody to invite to a party but Grandma came and we had lunch with her at a restaurant while Daddy and his Dad did the moving truck.

Learning Iowa: Butter

Yet since no actual cash passed into her hands and because she was laboring within the family unit, the frontierswoman was still not officially considered as gainfully employed. This logic extended to her production of surplus domestic goods such as butter and eggs which were sold outside the home for actual cash. Historian Gilbert Fite maintains that butter was a primary cash product on the farmer's frontier, its income often keeping farms afloat during the rocky years.

Riley, in Frontierswomen: The Iowa Experience. The research she cites to support her own is Fite, The Framers' Frontier, 1865-1900.

An anecdote she recounts involves saving large amounts of butter and selling it all at one major trip to town. This is striking because Iowa had settlement going on while there were already well-established towns in Iowa. But I haven't found any references yet to farmers on the outskirts of towns supporting themselves as market farmers. If this is the case, it might explain the lack of CSAs in Western Iowa now.

Lebanese Lentil Soup

This soup is nearly perfect: it's delicious, easy, and cheap. There is a different recipe for this soup for every family that eats it. I'm told it's eaten outside Lebanon and Syria, but I don't really know the details. I first had it at a small but terrific place in Toledo and immediately went searching for recipes. I order organic split red lentils in bulk and they keep forever.

2 cups split red lentils
approx. 5 cups unsalted turkey broth
1 small onion
1 teaspoon salt
2 teaspoons gr. coriander
2 teaspoons gr. cumin
pinch turmeric (optional)

olive oil
fresh lemon slices
red sprinkle (paprika, sumac, or za'atar)

Red lentils need to be sorted and washed, but this only takes a minute. Get a small mesh colander and set it on the counter. Slowly pour the first cup of lentils into the colander while moving it from one side to the other, watching for debris. As soon as you spot something that isn't lentil, stop, pick it out, and continue. Then rinse the whole cup under running water and dump into your sauce pan. Repeat with the second cup.

Cover the lentils with about 5 cups of unsalted turkey broth and simmer until the lentils are cooked. This varies tremendously from one source to another, depending on how the lentils were processed to remove the brown hull and split them. Some batches take only 20 min. to cook completely, and others take an hour. Obviously, if they have a longer cook time you'll need more broth, but if you have to use water it'll still be good. Check and stir. Once the lentils start to turn translucent at the edges they will stick to the bottom of the pot if you aren't stirring often at that point.

Meanwhile, slice the onion and gently fry it in olive oil till golden and sweet.

Once the lentils are completely cooked, turn off the heat and add the salt. Stir well and let sit a few minutes. Then add the coriander, cumin, onion, and the turmeric if used. Grab your handy immersion blender and whiz the whole pot till it's smooth and golden.

Ladle into bowls and garnish with a measure of good olive oil and sprinkle with your red stuff of choice: paprika, sumac, za'atar, or even cayenne.

Serve with wedges of fresh lemon. Diners might squeeze it over the bowl or into each spoonful. The lemon makes the dish; don't make it if you're out of lemons.

It's good with any Middle Eastern flatbread. The Afghan Snowshoe Naan in Alford & Duguid's Flatbreads and Flavors is a favorite.

Reheat gently while stirring. It will thicken a lot and volcano, possibly scalding you, if you don't stir while reheating.

the food critic

Me: So, do you like the new maple pudding?

Montessori Boy: Yes. In the summer you should make it into ice cream. It would go great with the coffee ice cream.

Me: I hadn't thought of that. I was thinking it would make nice pie.

Montessori Boy: Yes. But ice cream, too. Can I have some more?


The apple doesn't fall far from the tree.

hen & chicks 4

Pudding Bliss: Maple Cardamom

You'll need:

2 cups milk
1/4 cup cornstarch (less if you like less firm pudding)
little pinch of salt
1/4 teaspoon instant coffee crystals
1/2 teaspoon brown sugar

3 ounces pure maple syrup, the darkest you can get
ground cardamom

1. On medium-low heat, combine all ingredients except the maple syrup.
2. Whisk while they come to a simmer and simmer for about a minute.
3. Remove from heat, pour in the maple syrup, and whisk hard for another minute or two.
4. Pour into containers to cool, sprinkle with ground cardamom, and chill.

This is very sweet and you might want to omit the brown sugar. But don't omit the instant coffee, which keeps the earthy maple flavors from fading out.

My local grocery store sells miniature graham cracker pie crusts & this would probably make cute and delicious little maple pies.

Oh, and whatever you've heard about folks with Seasonal Affective Disorder craving sugar? Ugly rumors.

Dino Sightings

Pecan Baklava for breakfast

This was my first ever attempt at Baklava, from Sofya's recipe here. After you read this post, go read hers and make it this very night. If you like cardamom, this is an emergency.

I only diverged from the recipe to use brown sugar rather than white because brown sugar goes with pecans. Pecans are what I had in the house. I roasted pecan halves in a pan in a 350F oven till they were a bit darker and had a pleasant nutty smell. It's probably not strictly necessary to do that, but pecans have a lot more flavor when well cooked. After they cooled a bit, I broke them into pieces by pressing on them with the flat side of my bench knife, which gives you fairly uniform small pieces and very little dust.

The dough gave me a bit of trouble, but I think it was a temperature problem and easily correctable. I did this all in one session after my kids were in bed. The next time I make this, I'll break it into short sessions--making the dough disks and toasting the pecans early, and then completing it at night.

The resulting crust is very tasty, layered without being flaky. I liked that it was firmer than phyllo and didn't shatter into tan confetti when bitten into. It holds its own, rather than being a neutral (boring) medium that's texture only. I've had rolled baklava at a Lebanese restaurant and I think this dough could probably be used that way, too.

The filling is delicious. The light brown sugar, cardamom, and maple blend together very well and none of them dominates the other. My cardamom wasn't as strong as freshly crushed, and I went easy on the maple syrup. It isn't sticky-gooey; I could pick it up with my fingers and put it back down again. Pecans are very meaty, rather than sweet like an almond or pistachio, and it's not overwhelmingly sweet overall. It wasn't crunchy but pleasantly chewy.

It's fabulous. But I have to confess the pecan version didn't immediately evoke exotic Azerbaijan. After the bliss glow faded, my first thought was, "damn, I haven't had real barbecue in forever." To my Texas palate, it tasted a lot like pecan pie, only with the clean aftertaste of cardamom rather than the vile chemical trail of corn syrup. It's like pecan pie traveled and got a life.

I had it for breakfast with Ethiopian coffee. After Thai curried vegetables for lunch, I had some more. Definitely a keeper.

Tip: Just before pouring the maple syrup, I ran a thin knife between all the diamonds, and again in the morning. I haven't had any trouble with the pastry breaking as it comes out of the pan.

A Pecan Primer

I grew up around a lot of pecan trees. They get harvested in Nov.-Dec. and pecans are a popular Christmas gift and fundraiser. Most Texas pecans end up in pecan pie, which isn't my favorite. If you simply must have one, use cane syrup (Steen's is a good brand) instead of corn syrup and throw in a little splash of bourbon after the filling is off the heat. Until recently Southeast Texas was a world sugar producer and sugar cane still grows wild in the Houston ditches. The Texas City Disaster exploded a ship of molasses, and the dock site of the terrible fire smelled like molasses for years afterward. As far as I know, pecans are always cooked with brown sugar rather than white.

Lamme's Candies, in Austin, makes gobs of pecan candies. If you want to investigate, start with their Turtles, which are toasted pecans under caramel coated with chocolate. When I sent some to friends in France there was pretty much a riot. But they riot easily.

Pecans should be well cooked and many people prefer pecan pie dark, at the almost-burned stage, esp. if it will be served with vanilla ice cream. It's pronounced puh-KHOHN if you're city and puh-KHAWWN if you're country. It is not said PEE-Can under any circumstances. Pecan pralines, a New Orleans favorite also eaten in Texas, are said PRAW-leens, not PRAY-leens. Pecan praline ice cream is probably the most common ice cream there. If you need a crash-course in speaking Texan (there are 5 diff. Anglo regional accents, but only the natives can tell the difference), just add a lot of H's and W's around the vowels, slow down, get pecan right, and you'll be fine.

All of this is preamble to baklava with pecans.

On Baklava

So, I attempted baklava for the first time (post coming soon). I don't love cooking with phyllo and use it only rarely to wrap & bake cheese. But baklava...I've had it Greek, Turkish, Lebanese, and Syrian, with tiny cups of sweet tarry coffee. And now Azerbaijani, which has several features to commend it, including its phyllolessness (nonphyllotude?).

But baklava as a species is great. How great? I first had it as an adult at a classic Greek diner across the street from my grad school dorm. They kept a huge pan of it on the counter in all its golden glory, and I distinctly remember having it for the first time. And ever since then, when the Tardis stops at a new spot, I check the phonebook for baklava-related restaurants.

Then I phone the nearest Orthodox church and ask when their festival is. Because getting baklava and other butter-laden pastries at an Orthodox parish festival is a sure thing. Years before I became a coffee drinker, I'd have the super strong coffee with it because nothing else tastes right. The Antiochan Orthodox Cathedral of St. George in Toledo has a blow-out festival lasting several days, including a petting zoo of Middle Eastern animals and camel rides.

And then there's Houston. The Greekfest I went to in the NASA area of Houston at a park doesn't have camels, but everything else you could want, from camel statues with clocks in them to icons (both to venerate in a portable chapel and to buy.) They very considerately have a pastry sampler box available, which gets packed while you watch a lady magically fry wet dough marbles into the Greek version of zeppoli. And at the checkout there's a pile of golden bread loaves to take home. There's a dance floor, flasks of ouzo mysteriously materialize after dark, and a whole lot of good time is had till the wee hours. And then nine months later, on the full moon, all 26 rooms of the maternity floor of the Clear Lake hospital are full. I can attest to it personally.

Winter Light

My lighting conditions have radically changed since I got started. What I've discovered is that the lighting in my house, while energy efficient, really stinks.

Upon further investigation, I've found that on dark days (which is nearly all of them for the next few months) and at night, the best light in the house is actually on my stove top. It's going to take some work, and obviously, after I've just cooked something it's not likely to be clean/cool enough for a shooting surface. It's flat, 'cause I have a glass top electric.

I'm also discovering my south wall window is too much on sunny days, especially now that the ground is covered with snow. So I'm experimenting: diffusing the light with the extremely high-tech solution of taping white tissue paper over the window.

And today I've just figured out how to turn off the flash, which pretty much doubles my knowledge of the thing.

Pudding Bliss: Chocolate

This pudding is from Caroline at A Cozy Kitchen. Full instructions here. It's originally from Abi at Vanilla & Lace here. Big thanks to both talented cooks!

It's four kinds of awesome:

1. It's in-your-face Chocolate
2. It is creamy, silky, and decadent while being dairy-free
3. No eggs are involved
4. I don't suck at making it.

It also didn't require a microwave, double-boiler, or thermometer. Prep and clean up were easy. It makes four very rich servings.

The love of my life and father of my children cannot eat any dairy. He sometimes makes pudding from an ordinary mix, using half the amount of liquid milk replacement (soy, rice, or almond), but he hasn't found it very satisfying. Left to my own laziness, I'd never have given up Jello pudding, 'though it's not quite as chocolate as I want.

But this is not significantly slower than using a mix from a box, and it's a different creature altogether. I nailed it the first time. The only thing to note is that it isn't very sweet, so the sweetness of your solid chocolate matters a lot. The recipe calls for chocolate chips (which often contain dairy, btw) but I used a Belgian dark chocolate instead.

Using the Belgian chocolate resulted in a very rich pudding that wasn't super sweet. My kids would not have liked it had I offered them any. It tasted good hot, but the bouquet of the coconut wasn't evident till it chilled. To balance the intensity of the chocolate, we drizzled it with a little fruit preserves. Sour cherry preserves are pictured on the spoon, but raspberry or any other chocolate-friendly fruit would work well.

I think this would also make a very good chocolate pie with fresh fruit in season.

Tip: if you have access to an Asian grocery, canned coconut milk is usually much cheaper there.

Smart Government

The indisputable truth is, that there is no other item of superior, or perhaps equal, importance in the happy and profitable management of any farm, great or small, than that every person on it should be made to understand that deference and respect and prompt and faithful obedience should be paid, under all circumstances, to the wife, the mother, and the mistress;...An illustration: A tardy meal infallibly ruffles the tempers of the workmen, and too often of the husband; yet all the wife's orders were given in time; but the boy has lagged in bringing wood; or the girl failed to put her loaf to bake in season, because they did not fear the mistress, and the master was known not to be very particular to enforce his wife's authority. If by these causes a dinner is thrown back half an hour, it means on a good-sized farm a loss of time equivalent to the work of one hand a whole day; it means the very considerable difference between working pleasantly and grumblingly the remainder of the day; it means, in harvest time, in showery weather, the loss of loads of hay or grain.

"Hardship of Farmers' Wives" in Report of the Commissioner of Agriculture for the Year 1862, (462-470) 1863. From Fink's Open Country, Iowa.

Blizzard Food

Oatmeal, Smothered Chicken and mashed potatoes, drop biscuits with gravy. Meat, starch, and animal fat--it was fabulous. And 5 big mugs of coffee. The windchill never got warmer than -14F today.

And I discovered a new use for my immersion blender: reviving cold, lumpy, leftover gravy. I added a little stock, heated it up, and then whizzed the whole thing to perfection with my Cuisinart immersion blender. I've made a whole lot of organic baby food with it, and it's always what I give for a baby shower gift.

Kate Hundt's Sunday Chicken

I woke up to a blizzard Saturday with a whole chicken in the fridge--clearly a sign I should try Kate Hundt's Sunday Chicken at Sofya's, and the gravy.

It's quite a good recipe. It's a version of the classic Southern dish called Smothered Chicken, which is old-fashioned comfort food. Perfect for a blizzard, followed by several cups of organic, fair-trade Mexican decaf coffee and a couple of chocolate chip cookies.

Cooking Notes:

I followed the recipe closely. The only substitution was in the gravy, noted below. What struck me is that the spices are added by hand during the fry, rather than being mixed into the flour coating. This gives the cook more control and doesn't waste any spice, which seemed very sensible.

When frying the chicken, I cooked it to a khaki/ tan color. I'm not sure that was dark enough because it didn't darken when roasted. In the photos at Sofya's it seemed to darken when roasted but her glorious big chicken roasted twice as long as mine. Next time I'll fry it a few minutes longer.

With a store-bought, all-natural chicken weighing 4.2 lbs., it was fully cooked after roasting 40 min. That's with the two breasts whole. The coating looked kinda damp, so I took the lid off and returned it to the oven for 5 more minutes. At that point the coating wasn't sodden but hadn't started to crisp at all.

Gravy: nice! We've got a lactose intolerance & milk allergy (yes, both) in the house, so I used home made chicken stock instead of dairy. It was quite good, 'though it broke more easily than it would have with dairy, I think. I put it on mashed Yukon potatoes where it was good. I also put it on some boiled red potatoes, where I liked it even more. My husband and I agreed it would be a good gravy for biscuits.

We'll make this again. The only thing I'll fiddle with is to add a little cayenne and garlic powder to the spices, but I'm from Texas and can't really stop myself.

forbidden fruit

Learning Siouxland

What I've learned so far:

1. NW Iowa was the last area of Iowa to be settled. Most of the land was already owned by various "financial interests", so there was very little land that was free to homesteaders.

2. Settlers were commodity farming from the beginning. Subsistence farming has never been normal, and this was planned.

3. Normal homesteads were 160 acres and there was a chronic labor shortage. Policies favored married men because of the labor of the family.

4. Most, if not all, of the "financial interests" behind #1 and #2 were on the East coast.

This sounds a lot like colonialism to me. I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around the idea that subsistence farming never happened here.

Moody Garlic: plaid

Update

Sorry for the slowdown. About 2 weeks after launching this blog, I busted the crap out of one of my fingers & it's going to be months till I regain full use. So cooking goes a lot slower than I'd like.

In terms of my basic goal of photoblogging to find Siouxland interesting, winter's tough. But I did discover some good local history! Yay!! The library actually has a local history department. Of course, you have to already know this, because looking in an obvious place like a map of the library won't reveal its existence. That list of departments on the free bookmarks? Not there. But once I pinned down a Reference Librarian, she did show me where it was.

So, some factoids about Siouxland are probably going to crop up. I'm trying to keep myself from dying of ennui, and I'll try to minimize your boredom, too. In my reading so far butter has come up a lot, which is promising.

Oh, and how did I smash my finger so badly? In a laundry accident. That's right, laundry's not only oppressive, it's dangerous.

Deep Springs Iris in Michigan '06

Even nicer the next year. When we moved, I left them there as a gift for whoever would eventually buy our house.