Category Archives: Meditations

Adventures in local food

When we moved to New Bedford, we got introduced to a new variety of turnip by the farmers at our local farmers’ market — the Wesport Macomber Turnip, a very mild white-fleshed turnip that I’ve never seen for sale anywhere else. Last time I was at one of our local supermarkets, I saw they had some for sale, erroneously labeled “Cape White Turnips.” I bought two and tonight we ate one.

Carol had figured out that the Wesport Macomber tastes as good raw as it does cooked. I quartered one of the large turnips, and cut thin slices off for us to eat raw. Eaten raw, they’re sweet and succulent, with a faint peppery taste not unlike the peppery taste of turnip greens — it’s a nice combination of flavors. Better still, the flesh is crisp and firm and juicy, a little harder than a really crisp apple. It’s far enough into the winter I really craved that kind of crisp, juicy sweetness; and somehow it felt far more satisfying than the fruit that gets shipped to supermarkets from the southern hemisphere at this time of year.

We cooked the rest — boiled for about five minutes until it was firm but tender, and served drained and with a pat of butter on top. Cooked, the flavor is richer, more like rutabagas or purple-top turnips than radishes, but much lighter-tasting than any other turnip I’ve ever had.

According the Web site of Less Market in Westport, Adin and Elihu Macomber developed the Westport Macomber in the 1870’s by crossbreeding radishes and rutabagas, and it seems to have gotten the best of both parents (more history here). Whatever its history and antecedents, it’s a local delicacy that’s perfect for this time of year.

Cold

Carol and I went out for a walk this afternoon. It was pretty cold, and there was a stiff wind — stiff enough that the harbormaster had hoisted the gale warning flags. There was ice forming in the shallow, sheltered parts of the harbor. The bitter cold felt good. I’ve been longing for some serious cold, especially after the too-warm fall we’ve had, and at this time of the year, when you can finally sense that each day is a little longer than the day before, the bitter cold doesn’t seem so dire as it does when the days are at their shortest.

Adventures in local food

It’s hard to eat local food in the winter here in New England — only one or two growers are as adept as Four Seasons Farm at growing vegetables year-round in our climate. So unless you live near Four Seasons Farm (which we don’t), if you want to eat local food in the winter you have to figure out how to store it yourself.

That can be difficult for those of us who are apartment dwellers. Without a basement we can’t have a root cellar, of course. This year, Carol and I bought some extra local apples and carrots to store in the bottom of the refrigerator, but those were gone by Thanksgiving. We bought half a dozen extra Butternut squash and some pumpkins, but the ones that were left by Christmas time had begun to spoil and we had to throw them out. But this fall I also got a Hubbard squash at Verrill Farm in Concord. The blue-green rind of Hubbards is so thick they keep well for months, even at room temperature. We decided to cook ours yesterday.

A Hubbard squash is big, typically weighing five to twenty pounds. They can be tough to peel. The way I usually open up a Hubbard squash is to whack it with a hatchet. Then I chop it into manageable chunks, which we cook (rind and all) until the orange part is soft and you can scoop it off the rind with a spoon. But when you hit that Hubbard with a hatchet, little chunks of squash rind fly everywhere: in your face, off the walls, down the hallway. It’s a mess.

This year I had a better idea. I held an axe on the ground with the sharp edge pointing up, and Carol dropped the Hubbard onto the axe. The squash split open, but without little pieces flying everywhere. We did that a couple more times to break up the pieces. Then I attacked those smaller pieces with a chopping knife (think “Samurai chef!”) until they were small enough to cook: whack! whack! whack! whack! It was very satisfying.

Now we have several pounds of cooked Hubbard squash in the freezer. Sure, we could have gone to the supermarket and gotten little boxes of the same stuff. It wouldn’t have tasted nearly as good, it would have used gallons of Diesel fuel to truck it here, and I wouldn’t have gotten out all my aggressions (whack!).

Next year, I’m going to get three Hubbards.

Winter

Today, for the first time this year, I saw ice floating in the harbor. Even though today the temperature almost got above freezing, you can finally see the effects of the cold snap of the past week. There was a shelf of ice in a sheltered area on the Fairhaven side of the harbor. The wind broke off small pieces of it. Three gulls sat on one such piece, drifting along towards Pope’s Island, surveying the world as the piece of ice spun slowly around. On the other side of Pope’s Island, I watched two Harbor Seals playing in the deep water of the main shipping channel. With the cold weather, the seals have moved back into the harbor again. One stuck its head and neck up out of the water; through the binoculars I could see its dark eyes and its whiskers dripping water.

Life in the city

The coldest day so far this year: it got down to three degrees Fahrenheit last night in New Bedford. It was thirteen degrees when I went out for a walk this afternoon, with a twenty mile an hour wind. A Harbor Seal surfaced in the channel just below the swing-span bridge. Lots of ducks huddling together in the water on the lee side of Pope’s Island. The Buffleheads are usually wary and fly away before I get within a hundred yards of them, but today they just paddled out a few more feet and stayed there, keeping an eye on me. A Lark Sparrow, its feathers all fluffed up, let me come within six feet before it flew up into the shelter of a pitch pine. Bitter cold winter days are the best days to see animals in the city: with so few humans walking around, and no dogs, the birds and some of the mammals become quite tame.

***

This past week I’ve stayed at home, studying and writing, and I haven’t moved my car in all that time. I was going to get some groceries for lunch, so I went over to the Elm Street parking garage to get the car. I noticed broken glass on the pavement and then realized that the front passenger’s side window was smashed in. Whoever had done it had rifled through the glove box and the junk I kept in the bin under the cheap car radio; they took a portable CD that was broken, and left twenty dollars in quarters. Go figure.

The police were polite but bored when I called: “We’ll send a cruiser out. Where will you be?” “How long will it take?” I said, thinking to myself, It’s cold out, I’m not going to stand around waiting for the cops to show up.” “Um, why don’t you leave us a phone number… Or you could come in and make a report…” I said I’d come in to the station, knowing I wouldn’t bother. Instead, I called my insurance agent and got immediate and friendly service: “Call this number, it won’t cost you anything, no paperwork.” I called the glass company, and the window was fixed within hours.

***

At lunch time, my car was getting a new window, and Carol was busy writing her next book. “I’ll buy you a sandwich,” she said. That sounded like a good idea. We walked two blocks up to Cafe Arpeggio, where Carol got some kind of Portuguese soup, and I got a sandwich. Lunch hour was in full swing, and the cafe was packed: people coming in and slowly shedding coats and hats and gloves; people standing up to leave, wrapping themselves with scarves and sweaters and coats. It was a great way to get out of the house on a frigid winter day.

Then this evening, Carol walked across the street to the monthly “After Hours” social event at the Whaling Museum, with music by a local blues band. I decided not to go — I can no longer tolerate loud music due to tinnitus. But I stood in the window for a while and entertained myself by watching the people coming and going.

Outdoors

Psychologist Howard Gardner has hypothesized that “intelligence” must be measured on more than one linear scale. There are, says Gardner, multiple intelligences; for example: linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, bodily-kinesthetic, musical, interpersonal, and intrapersonal intelligences. Gardner also postulates a naturalist intelligence:

A naturalist demonstrates expertise in the recognition and classification of the numerous species — the flora and the fauna — of his or her environment. [Intelligence Reframed, Basic Books, 1999, pp. 48 ff.]

You could argue that this intelligence is not highly valued in our society. When the majority of the population was rural, the naturalist intelligence would have been highly valued. For most of us human beings, this is no longer the case:

…the naturalist is comfortable in the world of organisms and may well possess the talent of caring for, taming, or interacting subtly with various living creatures. Such potentials exist [in the roles of biologists and environmentalists, and]… with many other roles range from hunters to fishermen to farmers to gardeners to cooks.

Fewer and fewer people hunt or fish these days; farmers make up less than five percent of the population; many of us live where it’s impossible to have a garden; and cooking has been reduced to opening packages of pre-prepared food. Yet it is a human characteristic that if we have an ability, we will want to practice it, and there will be consequences if we don’t practice it. Sherlock Holmes needed opportunities to practice his highly-developed ability for criminal investigation (a combination, perhaps, of logical-mathematical, interpersonal, and intrapersonal intelligences); without such opportunities, he reached for his seven-per-cent solution of cocaine.

For those of us who have some measure of it, the naturalist intelligence will find expression, even in the typical urban or suburban landscape where there is little in the way of biodiversity. In a debased form, it may be what drives some people to be able to identify the year and model of a Harley Davidson motorcycle glimpsed from a distance. My older sister keeps a horse and my younger sister has cats; the evening attendant at the Elm Street parking garage raises pigeons. I live in the middle of the city with almost no space for a garden; what saves my sanity is birdwatching and house plants; those two things, and I take an hour-long walk every day instead of going to the gym, for I would rather be outdoors in the worst weather than cooped up in a sterile gym.

I have fantasies about quitting ministry and going back to work as a carpenter. At least then I’d be working with wood, which even when cut is a living material. At least then I’d be outdoors much of the time.

It was impossible to ignore the cold weather today. I couldn’t ignore the raw northwest wind. I couldn’t ignore the chill that worked its way through the heavy coat, the warm gloves, the long johns. I realized that I have been ignoring too much of the world, I have been focused too closely on abstract ideas: congregational administration, organizational dynamics, the link between economic and ecological solutions to global climate change. Some people are at their best with abstract problems. I can get lost in abstractions.

So I stopped thinking about the abstractions. I noticed that clouds were moving in. I noticed that the sun is setting later and the daylight is noticeably longer now. I noticed the flocks of starlings wheeling overhead and lighting on the cranes on Fish Island.

That annoying voice

The writing happens first in my inward ear, which hears the words spoken, intoned, canted, preached, recited, depending on what’s being said. Then the task is to remember that inward voice, and make sense of it on the written page. Sometimes the inward ear starts hearing things at odd moments, like this morning when I was crunching on a piece of toast until Carol said, interrupting, “You know you said you could, well could you do it something like this,” and she showed me what she meant, and we talked about it, and I said, Yes, I would do it. By then, whatever that inward voice had been saying was lost, but who cares? What Carol says, no matter how mundane or matter-of-fact, is always worth more than something that is meant to be written down. The problem lies in the voice which speaks in the inward ear; I can ignore it for a time, but the best way to keep it under control is to keep writing. Now you know why I write too much for this blog.

Instrument set

Carol needed an Xacto knife with a sharp blade, so I pulled out the drawer that holds the wooden box with Xacto knives, along with the log-log slide rule, the regular slide rule, and the drafting tools: French curves, triangles (including two that belonged to my grandfather, the naval architect), erasing shields, architect’s and engineer’s scales, a lead holder or two, and the instrument set. Somehow I managed to upset the instrument set, and had to spend five minutes putting all the tools back in the case.

I bought the instrument set maybe twenty-five years ago at Charette, which sold architect’s supplies, at their store in Woburn. I was working in a lumberyard by day and taking art classes night, and every once in a while I’d pick up a little extra money doing some drawing or simple drafting on the side. For some reason, now long forgotten, I needed a compass. The salesman at Charette tried to sell me the instrument set: a slim black plastic case with compasses and dividers.

“You can buy this for only a little more than that compass you asked about,” he said. He was only a few years older than me.

“Why, what’s wrong with it?” I said.

He showed me where one corner of the box was broken. I still couldn’t believe how low the price was, and said so.

“I can’t sell it with the box broken like that,” he said. The architects, the pros, they wouldn’t buy it that way.

But I would. It cost more than I felt comfortable spending, but I bought it. I still remember my excitement as I walked out of that store: I finally owned an instrument set.

I have a vague memory of using a compass for something or other half a dozen years ago, but I really don’t do drafting any more. Yet everything’s still in the case: the small compass, the large compass with the quick-release mechanism, the extension arm to fit on the large compass, the dividers, the little case with leads, the pen nibs for drawing circles in ink, the lead holder, the tiny screwdriver so you could repair things; each item nestled in its slot in the flocked interior of the plastic box. The large compass has one or two tiny spots of rust now.

Surprisingly, you can still buy the Charette #471 instrument set. Who buys them in this era of computer assisted drafting? I suspect a few architects buy them out of nostalgia, and play with them in their spare time.