Sunday Morning friend

Met this little one while cleaning out the back forty deck. Don't know my herpetofauna well enough to ID it, and it seemed to be in a bit of torpor. As I was writing this post, squatting punching the screen of the iPhone, a large red tailed hawk (likely the same one I see in the park quite often) swept down and grabbed a mouse - not eight feet from me!

Pretty good day so far.

A cracker a day...

The little lady accuses me of being a cracker monster, but really, I just like
snacking.

I've been on a Mark Bittman kick lately. I really like his, well, minimalist cooking style. Indeed, you could say I was bitten by the Bittman bug.

I pulled this from his How to Cook Everything Vegetarian, which I recently nabbed from the library.

Ingredients:

• 1 cup flour
• 1/2 teaspoon salt
• 2 tablespoons oil (olive, for me)
• About 1/4 cup water, plus more as need

Method:

1. Preheat the oven to 400 degrees F.

2. Mix together the flour, salt, and oil, and slowly pour in that water. You want it smooth.

3. Roll out on a lightly floured surface until 1/4 inch thick, or even less. Mine was mostly more, becaues I was mainly in a hurry to get a hot oven ready to warm the house.

4. Cook about ten minutes, and let cool.

These extend easily with rosemary and other herbs/cheeses added to them, I hear. Maybe I'll give that a try tonight.

Cold morning for a pack test

It was in the 20s here Thursday morning. Having not slept well, I was running around the house trying to get ready for the pack test at 09h00. To get your red card, required to work any sizeable wildland fire, you need to pass a pack test. There are two levels: my brother and I were opting for the higher, harder one, wherein you must walk 3 miles in 45 minutes with a 45 lb pack.

The rear passenger tire on the jeep was a little low, so I borrowed K's Jetta. Unfortunately, I didn't count on having to need to pull over to scrape the ice off the windshield. Gainesville is supposed to be semi-tropical!

I scooted out to the Waccasassa Forestry Center out towards the airport, overshot it a bit due to bad pathfinding from the iPhone, came back, and parked. Brother Bear pulled in just after me, and we crunched over the still-frozen (not just frosted - frozen!) grass to the center, only to wait in line...and wait...and wait. The military influence on the early days of the Forest Service is still evident in the ever-present "hurry up and wait."

We finally made it through, with the bonus of now being on-call for Western fire duty. While waiting, we ran into some other folks from the UF Fire Science lab.

As we stretched, a 16-passenger van rolled up. We clambered in, and I ended up sitting in front of three FWC employees: one who I'd taught recently in a GIS course at work, and two others who now had jobs for which I had previously applied

We picked out our weight vests, which to our amusement looked like flak vests.

We lined up and started walking. You're not allowed to run or jog: only walk.

It was tough, but our whole cadre made it.

The downside of adding organic, vegan hemp protein powder to your
oatmeal: it turns green!

Cracked Cooking

The Master Recipe: Boule (Artisan Free-Form Loaf) Makes 4 1-pound loaves 3 cups lukewarm water 1 1⁄2 tbsp granulated yeast (1 1⁄2 packets) 1 1⁄2 tbsp coarse kosher or sea salt 6 1⁄2 cups unsifted, unbleached, all-purpose white flour Cornmeal for pizza peel

After the success of the fry bread, and with the apartment still reeking of oil, I felt encouraged enough to give non-fried bread a try again. My most previous attempt had failed fairly completely, but that wasn't enough to get me down.

The big thing on the blogowub now - or, at least, 15 megabytes minutes ago - is Artisan Bread in Five Minutes a Day.

However, I'm cheap, and don't want to order a used copy 'til the popularity dies down and the resale crashes.

From the gallons of information that Google Reader dumps on me daily, I had caught an article from Mother Earth News.

The recipe itself is fairly straightforward. It's similar to the No-Knead Bread, which I'd already made a while back. I won't put down all the directions here, as it's fairly involved. Click through to Mother Earth News for that.

I mixed up the bread using Southern Lilly white flour and kosher salt. Lacking corn meal, I opted for grits.

I mixed it, and following the instructions, let it rise over night in the 'fridge.



It turned out great, except for one thing...

My pizza stone cracked!


I suspect it occurred when I poured the water into the hot pan (as described in the article) to put steam in the oven. Although the steam made a great crust, it was not so great for my stone.

Fry Bread Power!

...or, how I learned to stop worrying and love the fried, oily goodness.

I'm a sinodont, which is to say that I exhibit sinodentition. My teeth, along with those of my brother and father, look like this:

A recent ancestor of my father was a Native American. Native Americans and east Asians tend to express sinodentition. It is particularly pronounced in my father (I'll refrain from posting the pictures of his teeth) and less so in my brother and I.

With that as preface, this past Wednesday I was cooking up some hushpuppies for a potluck. I've carved out a particular (or peculiar) niche as a consumate fryer of hushpuppies: these puppies are so quiet, you'll never need to hush them.

Once the hushpuppies were cooked, however, I was left with extra time, a well-stocked kitchen, and a cast-iron pan full of cracklin' hot oil. This is never a good idea.

On an early date with the lil' lady, I had cooked for her fry bread. Fry bread is regarded as a traditional food of native americans, but some suspect it was more of an adaptation to the meager rations provided on early reservations. I tend towards the latter interpretation, but I do suspect that it has roots in earlier acorn-flour-in-tallow cakes.

This time around, I pulled up a recipe online and set to work. By this time, the kitchen was a minor disaster, but as is said in our family, "it's a very small kitchen."

FRYBREAD (Zahsakokwahn)

Staple of Powwows, Symbol of Intertribal Indian Unity

(Source)

  2 cups flour
  3 tsp baking powder
  1 tsp salt
  1 cup milk
  Deep hot fat in frypan or fryer

Sift dry ingredients. Lightly stir in milk. Add more flour as necessary to make a dough you can handle. Kneed and work the dough on a floured board with floured hands until smooth. Pinch off fist-sized limps and shap into a disk -- everyone has their own characteristic shapes.(Shape affects the taste, by the way because of how it fries). For Indian tacos, the disk must be rather flat, with a depression -- almost a hole -- in the center of both sides. Make it that way if the fry bread is going to have some sauce over it. Smaller, round ones are made to put on a plate. Fry in fat (about 375°) until golden and done on both sides, about 5 minutes. Drain on absorbent paper. (Phyllis Jarvis, Paiute)

I did as described. I had to wait to heat up the oil again - the first ones turned out pretty oil-laden, but the latter ones were nice and crispy.

The results must have been well liked, because by the time I made it through the line in the potluck, everything was gone! It's always a good sign, I figure, when your food is gone so fast that you don't even see it taken.

Whosit whatsit

I've been digging soil pits lately, trying to compare old field and a possible shortleaf pine native landscape. The other intern and I were up at Pebble Hill plantation. Driving along a dirt road, following a contour between a hill and a bottomland hardwood wetland, I came across what I thought must have been the foundations of some earlier building.
A semicircular brick wall surrounds an space where steps descend.


The steps lead down into an area that may or may not continue further back; I was unable to see that far inside. Water has filled up to the steps.

The brickwork appears old (composite of different clays, but not stamped,) but has been reinforced with what appears to my uneducated eye to be modern concrete.

Any ideas? My initial thought was a millwheel, but it doesn't appear to have any location for the wheel to attach. My next thought was a cattle dip, but it's awfully fancy for that, and Pebble Hill has never had cattle. It remains only a forestry and hunting reserve, with a focus on quail.