Porridge

My Scottish grandmother is 89 years old. She still lives in her own house near my family in England. A few years ago, she had ovarian cancer and survived the subsequent surgery. Last year, she had a particularly nasty fall and survived concussion, hallucinations in which she imagined white rabbits jumping out of her handbag and subsequent hip-replacement operation.

My father asked her what the secret to her longevity was and she said her morning porridge. I think she said porridge because the McKaye whisky she also takes daily might be more of a detriment.

Scottish-style porridge for one: very slowly boil half a cup of oats with one cup of water over low heat for 10-15 minutes, while stirring with a wooden spoon. Take this time to catch up on some reading with the other hand. There's no reason why you can't do some decent thinking while you stir. You can add other ingredients like bran, flaxseed or raisins. If you add half a cup of bran, add another cup of water. Once a thin layer of porridge has stuck to the bottom of the saucepan, it's time to spoon it into a bowl.

Garnish with a tablespoon of milk and some honey. Live forever, come hell or high water.

Last time I shared a whisky with my grandmother, I told her, optimistically, that she's probably got at least another ten years left in her, to which she replied: "god, I hope not".

Prague

Leaning In & Out

This past Monday, I interviewed the wonderful Laura Silverman, writer at Glutton For Life, about life, work and food in the Catskills. Silverman is a fellow writer for Hudson Valley Edible. We talked about having a more meaningful, sustainable life up here in the Catskills.

As a perfect antidote to Lean In, a new book is out entitled Homeward Bound: Why Women are Embracing The New Domesticity. Written by Emily Matcher, it's reviewed by Ann Friedman of the New Republic here.

It's not only women who are rejecting big city life and retiring early to the countryside, however.  Next Monday, April 15th, I'll be interviewing Peter Barrett, blogger, accomplished fine artist, writer, photographer, Food and Drink Editor at Chronogram based in the Hudson Valley, about roughly the same thing. Listen to our interview here on Monday at 9am New York time.

Lean In

Sheryl Sandberg's Lean In has suffered a lot of criticism and, having anticipated this, she's at pains to tell us that she really means well. She's a geek who uses statistics to prove her position: at this stage there should be more women in positions of power in world and why isn't there? Lean In is a feminist economic manifesto. Sandberg's goal is to have 50% of the positions of power occupied by women as soon as humanly possible. She kindly details where we are failing.

Nevertheless, the only thing that bothered me while reading the first few chapters of the book is that to attain a position of power these days, or at least a "managerial level", one has to work in an office and who wants to do that? Offices are mostly awful places, in which only the upper echelons of management have their own space. The rest of the proletariat do their time packed into cubicles like cattle, sharing a tiny kitchen space. The fluorescent lighting is as harsh and unforgiving as the tight suits and the hard leather heels into which you are obliged to shove yourself before trudging off for an hour-long commute, unceremoniously pressed up against your fellow man who reeks of the dinner he had the night before.

Sandberg wonders why more women are leaving the corporate world. I don't. Harvard MBAs might get their own office right out of college. Career Academics, who end up in positions of power, might have the pleasure of a beautiful campus, but most people get their start by leaning into the cubicle and staying there for a long time.

Is there anyone out there who absolutely loves squeezing into an expensive costume and getting on the train at 6.45am, with about a million other people (for an hour in a pair of high heels), so they can sit in a cubicle for ten hours?

Changing Medical Care

The Daily Dish, Andrew Sullivan's blog, began an experiment a little while ago. It asked for paid subscriptions. I've complained in the past about nobody paying for their content any more, so today I put my money where my mouth is today, and bought a subscription to read the blog of one of the most informed journalists in the US today.

If you've ever tried to get the lab price of a simple medical test in advance and, even after roping in the efforts of your doctor, you've come up with naught, then you'll like this new development in healthcare.

The Onion

The priceless piss-take, courtesy of The Onion.

"Say, for example, that your passion is painting. Well, what are you waiting for? Get out there and buy a canvas and some painting supplies! Go sign up for art classes! And when you get so overwhelmed with your job and your personal life that you barely have enough time to see your girlfriend or boyfriend or husband or wife, let alone do anything else, go ahead and skip classes for a few weeks. Then let those paint brushes sit in your room untouched for six months because a major work project came up and you had a bunch of weddings to go to and your kid got sick and money is tighter than you thought it would be and you have to work overtime. And then finally pick those brushes back up again only to realize you’re so rusty that you begin to question whether this was all a giant waste of time, whether you even want to paint anymore, and whether this was just some sort of immature little fantasy you had as a kid and that maybe it’s finally time to grow the fuck up, let painting go, and join the real world because, let’s face it, not everyone gets to live out their dreams. "

And:

"I can’t stress this enough: Do what you love…in between work commitments, and family commitments, and commitments that tend to pop up and take immediate precedence over doing the thing you love. Because the bottom line is that life is short, and you owe it to yourself to spend the majority of it giving yourself wholly and completely to something you absolutely hate, and 20 minutes here and there doing what you feel you were put on this earth to do."

Local Sugar

It's maple season; maple trees are being tapped and maple syrup production is in full swing. Having attended a couple of maple houses at the weekend, I now have a new respect for the producers and understand why it's so expensive. It's one of the fussiest and most complicated ways of harvesting a pure product that I've ever seen. The machinery and equipment used gets more sophisticated and expensive every year. They use miles of tubing to collect the sap that get chewed by bears and squirrels, at which time somebody has to spend all day walking miles around a forest to find the leak. You have to condense, by boiling, 50-60 gallons of maple sap to yield one gallon of syrup. It's completely organic.

However, if you buy maple syrup instead of buying foreign sugar, the North Eastern US, where billions of gallons of syrup are produced every year, will benefit by 5-7 times the value of your purchase: meaning if you spend one dollar in your local community on maple syrup, the benefit to the community will be five to seven dollars. So the $30 I spent on maple syrup at the weekend has a local value of $150-$210.

More fun facts about maple syrup:

- no artificial colouring, flavouring, preservatives or additives
- same calcium concentration as milk
- contains folic acid, biotin and niacin, which convert proteins and sugars to energy
- virtually sodium-free
- encourages growth and production of red blood cells
- has no fat and no proteins and is a good source of calcium, iron and thiamin

New York State is the third largest maple syrup producer in the world, but has a marketing problem. People in New York City see Canadian maple syrup on the shelves more than New York State maple syrup. If you live in New York City, there's no reason to buy Canadian maple syrup. Put some local sugar in her bowl.

Shaver Hill Farm
Roxbury Mountain Maple

Spring Clean Part 1

Spring Clean Part 1: The Ghosts of Apartments Past...from two continents and a trip down memory lane that's almost better than photographs because you have to pause to remember.  A wise man on a British soap opera said, many years ago: "What is life all about? Keys. The older you get, the more keys you accumulate." Some of these keys open filing cabinets and office doors of yesterday. One of the them opens an electric rolling-gate in Bed-Stuy and probably still works. There's a security key for a front door in London that was probably quite expensive to replace. I thought of throwing them in my forest and watching them deteriorate, but then some Wildean tragedy might occur, similar to The Portrait of Dorian Gray, and my memory might sink into the ground with them.

Sylvia Plath

Today cannot pass without the mention of the immeasurable loss of Sylvia Plath exactly fifty years ago. Carl Rollyson was today's guest on my radio show, author of American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath. This new biography sheds fresh light on Plath as a joyful, adventurous literary heroine, full of wry humour and determination. Rollyson says that Plath wanted to be loved by, and accessible to, all readers and didn't limit herself to academia. Her only novel, The Bell Jar, was a lively, jocular and sardonic account of her days as a guest editor for Mademoiselle Magazine in New York, a coveted position for a young writer just out of college. The later chapters of The Bell Jar are still full of hope and enthusiasm despite their content. The cover of the newly released edition has received much criticism, but the publishers knew more about Sylvia's wishes than any of us. The prose of The Bell Jar is not as hopelessly dour as the cover above suggests.

In the Bell Jar, she wrote of marriage:

"I tried to imagine what it would be like if Constantin were my husband.

It would mean getting up at seven and cooking his eggs and bacon and toast and coffee and dawdling about in my nightgown and curlers after he'd left for work to wash up the dirty plates and make the bed, and then when he came home after a lively, fascinating day he'd expect a big dinner, and I'd spend the evening washing up even more dirty plates till I fell into bed, utterly exhausted.

This seemed like a dreary and wasted life for a girl with fifteen years of straight A's,"

She published many stories and articles during her young adulthood for publications such as Mademoiselle, Varsity Magazine, Harpers, The Spectator and the Times Literary Supplement, but most impressively was first published at the age of eight in the Boston Herald.

Plath battled depression during her adult life, but this battle was accompanied by the struggle for women's equality in the fifties. Not only did she suffer depression, but she endured it in a time in which married women were expected to abandon their work, stay at home and focus on raising a family; portions of her later scholarships and grant funds were spent on childcare for her children, so she could take an hour or two out of the day to write. She was a true feminist, fighting for her art and her own identity as a married woman. If she couldn't write, she couldn't be.

She also had to contend with the English stoicism and awful British winter of 1963 alone with two young children. Rollyson suggests this may have tipped her over the edge. She was an outdoorswoman, an avid beachgoer and had worked on a farm - which she cycled to and from - as a student. I can attest to the fact that British winters are permanently overcast and enough, in themselves, to make anyone depressed.

Her poetry reflected her turbulent life and was later called confessional poetry or autobiographical. Her marriage was also tumultuous and, separated from her husband and having custody of her children, she ended her life by gassing herself in her kitchen in London in 1963 while her children slept in an adjacent room. Her last collection of poetry, Ariel, which was published by her husband posthumously, received critical acclaim and strongly influenced a generation of young women during the early sixties, a time of revolution.

Sylvia Plath was the first poet to have been awarded a posthumous Pullitzer Prize for her last work of poetry, Ariel.

Her death, at 30 years old, exactly 50 years ago today, was an enormous loss to the world of poetry and literature.

Fake Food

According to Andrew Beahrs, author of Twain's Feast, Mark Twain encountered a couple of businessmen on a steamer bound for New Orleans. One of the "scoundrels" boasted of how he sold cottonseed oil containing a drop of olive oil, (enough to get it to smell like olive oil), then applied a fake label to the bottle and sold it as genuine olive oil. That was one hundred and thirty years ago.

Cut to the present day and the BBC reports that a European TV dinner manufacturer has been recently found to be passing off eastern European horse meat as beef, leading to a public outcry over "fake food".

How little times have changed.

I interviewed Beahrs on my radio show last week and his book, subtitled Searching For America's Lost Foods in the footsteps of Samuel Clemens is a wistful look back at America's wild foods enjoyed by Twain, such as prairie chicken, lake trout, cranberries, the fascinating Sheep-Head fish, terrapin and croakers.

As I've said before, if you must eat TV dinners, make sure they are Amy's.

N.B. Also from Beahr's book: "when he measured a depth of two fathoms, a leadsman [on a Mississippi steamboat] would call out mark twain".