Farm Share for One

I went to visit my family yesterday, and I think my sister was
a little disappointed that all I brought them were two melons
and a bunch of collard greens.

I got the share on the assumption that I wouldn’t cook that
much, but there wouldn’t be any trouble giving some away to
people who would, and it isn’t so expensive that if a few things
end up in the compost bin it isn’t a tragedy.

In general, it has been working out that way. The melons are a
problem because I don’t like them at all, and apparently neither
do some of the people I give things to. This week I had an
unusually large number of events to cook for, which accounts for
not having brought lettuce or beans to the family.

I did dither about what to do with the excess zucchini long
enough that they developed unsightly spots, so I think I’ll put
them in the compost bin, although probably the starving children
in India would be glad to have them.

If they eat zucchini in
India. If they don’t, the children would probably insist on
starving even if someone gave them lots of zucchini. My Polish
relatives tell the story of some well-intentioned food-relief
efforts from the US after World War II, where anyone in Poland
could get all the peanut butter they could eat, and it sat there
in the warehouse while starving people who’d never touched peanut
butter in their lives and weren’t going to start now died in
the streets.

In any case, my zucchini would have worse than unsightly spots
by the time it got to India, even if it weren’t more efficient
to send money to OXFAM or
somewhere than to mail zucchini to India. And I haven’t put
very much stuff in the compost bin.

I’ll be playing on September 20

Here’s part of the draft press release my sister sent me
yesterday. I’d show you the whole thing, except that she sent
it for editing to the participants, and they may want something
edited in or out. But there will be lots of music and some poetry reading and probably opportunities to join in.

Arts Around the Block
Church of the Holy Spirit, 190 Rock Street, Fall River
Sunday September 20, 2000 12:30 -4
THE CLASSICAL VENUE

Chapel:

1:30: Laura Conrad, Two ornamented renaissance standards by Diego
Ortiz, G-alto Recorder accompanied on Italian
Virginals: Douce Memoire, O Felici Occhi Miei

Sanctuary – Classical music:
3: Peter and the Wolf by Sergei Prokofiev. Led at the keyboard by
Judith Conrad, Jagan Nath Singh Khalsa, Violin as Peter, Ruth Shand,
Bassoon as Grandfather, Mike Shand, Baroque Flute as the bird, Dan
Moniz, clarinet as the cat, Carroll Grillo, soprano and alto saxophone
as the duck, Alan Powers as narrator.

Outside by the wall behind the cemetery (weather and noise level
permitting):

12:30 Laura Conrad, solo recorder music by Jacob Van Eyck, music to
stroll through the park to, in 17th century Holland

3:30 The Fall River Fipple Fluters:
The Night Watch by Anthony Holborne
Mozart Trio
Folk Songs from the British Isles (The Banks of Allen Waters,
Flow Gently Sweet Afton, Dashing Away with the Smoothing Iron, All
Through the Night, Londonderry Air)
Dowland Now O Now I Needs Must Part

further information Judith Conrad 508-674-6128, Judithconrad@mindspring.com

Laura Conrad, also a Durfee high graduate, now lives in Cambridge MA
where she directs the Cantabile Renaissance band and studies recorder
with John Tyson. She is playing recorder today; she also plays
serpent, an ancestor of the tuba which was widely used as the loudest
bass
instrument available between 1600 and 1850.

The Fall River Fipple Fluters are an amateur recorder-playing group
founded in 1991 by Judith Conrad. They play together for fun every
Friday at Four-thirty in Fall River. New members are always welcome,
willingness to try to learn recorder is the only requirement. They
play all sizes of recorder and many different styles of music, the
core repertoire being Western classical music from the 16th to the
18th centuries, the heyday of the recorder.. For further information
call Judith Conrad, 508-674-6128

I’m not listed in the Peter and the Wolf program, but
apparently everyone who comes will be invited to participate in
the finale, so I may bring a tuba or serpent or something, or just twitter on a recorder. I will definitely be playing with the Fipple Fluters.

Notice the new look

Yesterday, I went to post my blog entry, and discovered that a
lot of links on my blog didn’t work. I eventually discovered
that it wasn’t an isolated problem, but was an instance of this
attack.

Before I found that article, I had already done most of what
Lorelle suggests, except that instead of doing it in
situ, I had moved from the web host (hostrocket) where I’ve had all of laymusic.org for several
years to the one where I’ve been putting SerpentPublications.org
(dreamhost). And done some
fiddling with the theme.

So I now have a brand new installation, with a different look,
and the same blog content.

I’m planning to move the whole laymusic.org content to the new
site, using the wordpress blog as a content management system.
I hope to finish this by mid-October, as that’s when I would
have to pay hostrocket some more money. That isn’t a hard
deadline, as of course I can move content as is from one host to
the other.

In any case, let me know what you think of the new look. If
there’s something you really like better about the old site, let
me know.

It felt like a lot more work than this, but what I did was set
up a child theme based on the Thematic theme, and modify
it to have:

  • A header that looks a bit more like the old
    one.
  • A sidebar that looks something like the old one,
    only better, I hope.
  • Slightly larger type, in the Arial font instead of Georgia.

A Graphic Example


[ebook on Sony reader]

A lot of non-technical people’s eyes glaze over when you start talking
about standard, non-proprietary formats. Mike
Cane has come up with a graphic example of why you don’t
want one company owning the format of the books you read.

Apparently Sony requires any book sold for their reader in
their store to be formatted by them (at a cost of $200). And then
when they do it, it looks like that.

This hideous example is from Sony, for the Sony readers, but
the principle is the same for any proprietary format — if they
won’t tell you how to do it, you’re stuck with them doing it for
you, and you may well not like what they do.

This is why I don’t put music in proprietary formats on SerpentPublications.org.

Turning space into money

An advantage of the dog park being open again is that I get to
talk to people who do things I wouldn’t normally be involved in. A couple of nights ago,
the owner of a sprightly two-year-old terrier named Demon was
talking about all the good deals in used motorcycles you can get
this time of year.

Apparently, if you don’t have the space to store your
motorcycle for the winter, you sell it in the fall for very little money to
someone who does.

So my friend, who doesn’t personally have any more space than
anyone else who lives in a Cambridge apartment, was salivating
over the deals he’s been seeing in the used motorcycle market, and
wondering how many bikes he can convince his parents to store for him.

Report on the September 1 meeting

We played:

Schedule

We will be having our usual dropin meetings on Tuesdays at
7:45 PM at my
place.

Other events

The last Wakefiled Summer Band (Laura Conrad, tuba) of the
summer will be tomorrow, September 4, starting at 6:30 PM. The
concert is in front of the bandstand on the Wakefield Common, on the
south shore of Lake Quannapowitt. There
will be refreshments afterwards in the First Parish Church
Vestry.

This concert will include many of the big hits from previous
concerts, as well as all the music that wasn’t quite ready to play
earlier in the summer.

Pretending to go a Maying

The new piece the Cantabile
Renaissance Band played last night was by Thomas
Morley from the Triumphs
of Oriana. This is a collection of madrigals by most of the
famous composers of the day (1603). They must have been the sort
of music that was played for Queen Elizabeth when she went to
visit her nobles to keep them spending their money on
conspicuous consumption rather than on raising armies to rebel
against her.

You can read what I said about the music on the
Serpent Publications Blog, but we found the words
interesting as well, particularly the lines:

A Prince,
of beauty rich and rare,
for her delighting,
Pretends to goe a Maying,

We weren’t quite sure what that meant. One idea that occured
to us during the beer-drinking part of the meeting, where we
were discussing our gardens, was that it wasn’t May, but the
prince had too much zucchini in his garden, so he was leaving
them on his neighbors’ doorsteps and ringing the doorbell and
then running away.

Another idea I had was that it was the kind of Maying that led
to teenage pregnancy that he was pretending to do, which the
Queen wouldn’t have really wanted to do, but might have enjoyed
having a beautiful man pretend to want to do it with her.

In any case, your guess is at least as good as mine, so feel
free to leave your ideas in the comments.

More about Julia

With the movie where Meryl Streep plays Julia Child in the
theaters, a lot of people are writing about her. I’ve already
commented on the Michael Pollan
article. Here are two other posts worth thinking about:

  • Don’t Buy Julia
    Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking — You will never cook
    from it     in slate.com takes the point of view that:

    The inconvenient truth is that although the
    country’s best-loved “French chef” produced an unparalleled
    recipe collection in Mastering the Art, it has always been
    daunting. It was never meant for the frivolous or trendy. And it
    now seems even more overwhelming in a Rachael Ray world: Those
    thousands and thousands of cookbooks sold are very likely going
    to wind up where so many of the previous printings
    have — in pristine condition decorating a kitchen
    bookshelf or on a nightstand, handy for vicarious cooking and
    eating.

    I acquired a one-volume copy last summer when I was cleaning out Bonnie’s
    house. I admit I haven’t yet cooked anything from it, and it is
    fairly pristine, although Bonnie cooked a lot from quite a
    number of her cookbooks. But I expect to change that this month
    — I won a box of organic cake flour from King Arthur Flour,
    and unlike most of my other cookbooks, Julia has recipes that
    specify (and presumably were tested with) cake flour.

  • Rachel
    Laudan    , in her blog about food politics and food history,
    writes a post comparing Julia Child with Elizabeth David, who
    wrote the books about French cooking that caused her generation
    in England to discover it. She says:

    So although their dishes overlapped, David and Julia offered their audiences quite different ideas about cuisine. David’s was this breath of scented air, recipes as poetic guides to possibilities, a touch of sophistication and class for the aspiring. Julia’s allure was the challenge, the hard work, the mastery the guaranteed results that offered entry into a tempting international world.

    Neither vision had much to do with what French housewives, still
    reeling from World War II, actually cooked (here and here),
    an observation not a criticism.

Spruce tips in August

Someone on the homebrew club mailing list wanted to know where
you get spruce tips. I replied:

You find a spruce tree, but it only works in the spring; after that
they mature into spruce twigs.

So you might have to wait until next May, unless you can get a cooperative denizen of the Southern Hemisphere to send you
some in our fall.

I thought it was amusing that anyone would think that something
with as small a market as home brewers of spruce beer would be sold somewhere out
of season.

Coffee making ritual

A couple of months ago, I mentioned that I’d
started roasting my own coffee, and said that when my coffee
making ritual settled down, I’d do a better description of it.

The roasting doesn’t really add as much time as abandoning the
automatic coffee maker did, but in any case, except for the
grinding, it’s mostly time when
you’re free to putter around the kitchen, and if you cook at all,
you need to spend at least that much time every day puttering
around the kitchen. If you don’t, you can use the time to make no
knead bread. (More about that later. I just bought the book,
and my first batch is doing its second rising as I write
this.)

Normally I would give you links to Amazon, since I have an associate
account, and if you bought stuff by following my links, I would
get some money. In this case, they don’t seem to have any of my
exciting new coffee equipment, so I’ll just link you to SweetMaria’s, with whom I
have no relationship except that of a satisfied customer.

My coffee roaster is the Fresh Roast
Plus 8 coffee roaster, which I bought with the sampler of 8
different kinds of decaf coffee. They were all good coffee, but 3
stood out as the kind of coffee I especially like, so when I
finished the sampler, I ordered more of the ones from Costa Rica,
Ethiopia, and Sumatra. They also have a blend specially
formulated for making French Roast. This hadn’t been in the
sampler, but I wanted to try it, so I ordered some of that, too.
I generally like commercially roasted coffee best in the French
roast, but I think this isn’t true for home-roasted coffee, so
I’ll probably not repeat the French roasting experiment.

The coffee roaster makes three batches of the size I make these
days (about two mugs worth). So on a day when I need to roast
more, I put the tea kettle on to boil the water and put two large
scoops of coffee in the roaster and turn it on.

Then I grind the coffee for this batch in the Zassenhaus knee
mill.

The brewer I’m using these days is the Clever
Coffee dripper, which looks like a normal #4 coffee filter,
but has a valve on the hole in the bottom which is closed when the
filter is on the counter, but open when you put it on top of a mug
or thermos. This means you can grind the coffee as coarsely as
you like it, which makes the grinding easier than for a regular
filter, and then brew it in the filter, which makes the cleaning
easier than a French Press brewer would be.

Before putting the filter in the brewer, I rinse out the brewer
and make sure that opening the valve produces an enthusiastic
stream of water. Then I put the filter in the brewer, and put my ground
coffee into the filter.

When the water boils, I pour a little bit into the brewer,
and then wait while it wets the grounds, and then fill the cone up
and set the timer. I set it for 5 minutes these days since I’m
doing French roast, but when I’m doing a lighter roast I do it for
3 or 4 minutes.

When the timer rings, I put the brewer on top of my thermos and
wait for the coffee to drain into the thermos, pour myself one
mug, close the thermos to keep the second mug warm, and come upstairs
here to write my blog post.

One thing I especially like about this system is that I don’t
have any actual measuring steps at all. When the roasted
coffee beans are cool and ready to go into a jar, I take three
identical jars and eyeball putting equal amounts into each jar.
When I have boiling water, I just fill up the brewer.

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