every day is a good day
Making bread ranks up there along with making tofu and petting your cat as one of the most relaxing, heart warming things you can do. Sometimes I add nutmeg, or allspice, or coriander to the dough. Today it’s dillweed.
It’s not something to rush. Adding just a bit of yeast to the dough and letting it slowly rise overnight makes dough that is as soft and pliable as a baby’s butt. Tomorrow the house will fill with the wonderful aroma of baking bread.
Spring creeps ever closer. The daffodils are sending their flower buds up toward the sky. More green than yellow today, each day their buds turn ever more yellow.
Fuller baskets of eggs are a sure sign of spring’s approach. Each week, more hens stir from their winter break to lay eggs. I read about an egg farm, Trillium Farms, in Ohio which produces 8,000,000 eggs every day, which means they must have some 10,000,000 or so hens. Details about the farm were in an article about migrant children forced to work for $2 a day in horrible conditions at the farm. The next time you buy eggs, think about where they came from. No one needs to suffer for you to eat.
When I go out to gather eggs, thirty or more chickens sometimes come chasing after me. It’s my fault. I often give them several scoops of sunflower seeds, something they love to eat. Ever hear the pitter-patter of tens of chickens chasing after you? It’s a delightful sound that’ll put the smile on your face. I wonder what the sound of ten million hens running after me would sound like?
This gray time of year, with day after day of clouds, drizzle, and rain, I can feel like this leaf looks. A walk in the woods, among the green ferns helps.
It’s King Richard who knows how to perk me up. Such razzle, dazzle. Maybe there is something to be said about dressing up in brilliant clothes, at least wearing a flaming red hat. Hens are into dressing up too. Plain won’t do for them. Even the hens, who from a distance look like they are wearing a simple outfit, when you get up close, have feathers of exquisite patterns. “Drab be gone, drab be gone,” is their siren call.
Irizake, a dipping sauce made from sake, dried plums, fish flakes, and salt, is having a comeback in Japan. Historical references to this sauce go back to the end of the Muromachi period (1336~1573). During the Edo period (1603~1868), irizake was an indispensible seasoning. If you were to have sashimi back then, you would dipped your fish in irizake instead of 醤油 – soy sauce. In Japan, soy sauce did not become a seasoning for the masses until the middle of the Edo period, and its current form did not appear until the late 1800s when scientific understanding of fermentation combined with industrial manufacturing to enable mass production of soy sauce.
Irizake is easy to make. You first mix the sake, umeboshi, and salt together, and bring it to a boil. Once the alcohol has boiled out, you add the fish flakes and simmer until the amount of liquid has been reduced to half. Strain it, and you have irizake, a seasoning with a history of six to seven hundred years.
The very oldest versions of irizake are even simpler. The sake and umeboshi are boiled until the mixture is reduced to half. The result is strained, dried seaweed is added, and let to soak for a day or two.
Poor Sven. After a morning deluge, he is so soaked, his feathers are dragging in the mud. Nothing looks as sorry as a wet rooster. What he needs is a hole in the sky, just what I found on my bicycle ride home from the post office. There, off to the south, a hole in the sky, a hole so bright it could have been an alien spaceship blasting its way down for a landing. I could have been seconds away from being whisked away to another galaxy. It’s one possibility if you never hear from me again. If I go silent, look up on a clear, moonless night. Somewhere way out there, far, far away, among the galaxies millions of light years away, that’s where they will have taken me.
