Op Op Celebrates!

As of early March, the Op Op blog started on its fourth year! To date, I’ve done 484 posts—egads!

Springtime is a great time to have started something, isn’t it?

We had a wonderful sign of celebration (AND a kickoff to the start of a wonderful birthday for my sweetie, Sue) this morning! With this warm weather, we’ve had the windows open all night long, so we awakened this morning to singing birds, as well as this sight:




Yeah, it’s “Tuffy the Opossum”—it was crawling around in our redbud tree at dawn. (I was wondering what Genji, our cat, was watching so intently!) (Sorry about the picture quality, but it was dawn, and you know how autofocus works!)

This past week, an opossum had been run over on Broadway; we buried her out beneath the elderberries. There was one teeny-tiny (dead) baby in her pouch. It was rather sad, but it’s reassuring to see that some of the opossums of our “urban wildlife” are still around.




For those of you who weren’t on board at the beginning, I encourage you to take a gander at my early posts. Ho-ho-ho!

There was the Op Op “signature” martini, for instance!

And four posts in a row discussing “what is an Opulent Opossum”! Surely by now, it’s clear this is not really a blog about marsupials. Those posts explain what I’m getting at with the phrase.

Grandpa’s dandelion wine recipe, Grandma’s recipe for wilted lettuce salad, and a post about the deep “roots” of our peonies helped set the tone for the blog (I think).

Did you know that when I started this blog, I really hadn’t taken many pictures at all? It’s been fun learning, and sharing with you. I’ve created albums on my Op Op Facebook page of some of my favorite photographs.

Well, here’s to Op Op year four. Thank you, so much, for joining me.

—Julie

St. Louis Orchid Show—There’s Still Time to Go!

But don’t delay—it ends on Sunday, March 25!




Last year (remember?), I was gypped out it due to inclement weather and a busted ankle, and I all I could do was point you to our friend’s Flickr site full of her beautiful floral photographs. (Indeed, this year, she took more gorgeous photos—and yup, I’m still telling you to see her Flickr page—click here!)

But this year is different—we got to go last week! And I took a few little pictures, myself.






But you really ought to go yourself, because pictures never equal the immediate experience—of flowers, or anything else. The annual orchid show takes place at the Missouri Botanical Garden. Here’s the official website of the show.

And here’s a YouTube advertising it.



The theme this year is “Flora of China,” which is an ongoing project of the research branch of the Missouri Botanical Garden, a multi-multi-multi-volume description of every plant in China. (But the orchids in the show hailed from all over the world.)


Visitors enter the orchid show through a Chinese-style moon gate similar to the gateway to the Missouri Botanical Garden’s Chinese Garden, built to celebrate St. Louis’s sister city Nanjing. (That garden, by the way, is my favorite place at the MBG.)


The use of Chinese lanterns in the orchid show provides a tiny taste of the Missouri Botanical Garden’s big Lantern Festival that it will have this summer. Click here for more on that.


The orchid family is one of the largest families of plants in the world (you couldn’t tell it from Missouri, since most are tropical, and our temperate flora is dominated by composites, grasses, and grasslike plants). Orchids, however, are many and varied. There are about 600 genera, with about 15,000 species, worldwide (plus loads of cultivars).

Honestly, I don’t know what else to say, but GO!


I didn’t write down the names of the orchids I photographed, but many of the people taking pictures there were also photographing the name tags, for later identification. I just know this as “those freakishly bright orange orchids!”


See this little orchid bud? Well, it’s probably blooming right now! Just for you to see! Don’t miss it!

Sneaky Snake Mating Melee!

It’s in the seventies today, and although it’s plenty windy, it’s feeling a lot like spring. Our daffodils are blooming profusely, and the forsythia’s starting to flower, too.

And, of course, another sign of spring in our yard is the emergence of hibernating garter snakes! (For the record, Thamnophis sirtalis.) Thursday (March 1) was a banner day for us in this respect, since we saw, for the first time, with our own eyes, a garter snake “mating ball.”




We’d read about it but, well, words don’t do it justice!

But here’s a picture Sue took. They were right outside our front steps, in a sunny spot on our front walk, in early afternoon.

The phrase “mating ball” doesn’t describe what we saw very well. I’d call it a “writhing snarl of snakes” or a “serpent tangle” or something. I’m pretty sure there were about a dozen in this group. We watched as two snakes arrived and joined the fray.

They looked like they were having fun!

There’s not much reason for me to tell you what you can find online, but for what it’s worth, here are some selections from the “garter snake” entry in Wikipedia.

Behavior

Garter snakes have complex systems of pheromonal communication. They can find other snakes by following their pheromone-scented trails. Male and female skin pheromones are so different as to be immediately distinguishable. However, sometimes male garter snakes produce both male and female pheromones. During mating season, this fact fools other males into attempting to mate with these "she-males". This causes the transfer of heat to them in kleptothermy which is an advantage immediately after hibernation so allowing them to be more active. She-males have been shown to garner more copulations than normal males in the mating balls that form at the den when females emerge into the mating melee.

Reproduction

Garter snakes go into brumation before they mate. They stop eating for about two weeks beforehand to clear their stomach of any food that would rot there otherwise. Garter snakes begin mating as soon as they emerge from brumation. During mating season, the males mate with several females. In chillier parts of their range, male common garter snakes awaken from brumation first, giving themselves enough time to prepare to mate with females when they finally appear. Males come out of their dens and, as soon as the females begin coming out, surround them. Female garter snakes produce a sex-specific pheromone that attracts male snakes in droves, sometimes leading to intense male-male competition and the formation of mating balls of up to 25 males per female. After copulation, a female leaves the den/mating area to find food and a place to give birth. Female garter snakes are able to store the male's sperm for years before fertilization. The young are incubated in the lower abdomen, at about the midpoint of the length of the mother's body. Garter snakes are ovoviviparous, meaning they give birth to live young. However, this is different than being truly viviparous, which is seen in mammals. Gestation is two to three months in most species. As few as 3 or as many as 80 snakes are born in a single litter. The young are independent upon birth. On record, the greatest number of garter snakes to be born in a single litter is 98.

Sesame Crunch Bars

When I first started getting interested in cooking, I was mostly interested in health foods, not “retro” recipes, and one of my favorite books of that time is called Uprisings: The Whole Grain Bakers’ Book. I’ve got the “revised edition” of 1990, which was published by the Cooperative Whole Grain Educational Association. This fun book features recipes from eighteen cooperative bakeries across the nation—many, alas, which are now closed.




Some apparently are still in operation, such as Blue Heron Bakery in Olympia, Washington, and Open Harvest Bakery in Lincoln, Nebraska. Hooray for them! And one of my favorites, though not represented in the book, is Small Planet Bakery in Tucson, Arizona (their “vegie bread” is the best!) Most of these kinds of bakeries were started in the 1970s.

Although the book is out of print, a former member of the Uprisings collective in Berkeley has been digitizing portions of it and posting them online, at uprisingsbakersbook.org. For more information, click here.




I encourage you to get a print version of the book, because it’s very fun—all the recipes were written out by hand by members of the collectives and cooperatives supplying the recipes, with lots of cute drawings, too. There is also a lot of good introductory stuff about baking in general, and baking with a variety of whole grains, in particular. Plus, there’s a helpful index to recipes by major ingredients, and recipes separated by dietary characteristics (such as “no eggs or dairy,” “no wheat,” and “low- or no-fat”). This book is a treasure.

The recipes make delicious food you can feel good about eating, and if you have warm memories of eating or working at health food coops, you’ll particularly adore recipes such as Carob Chip Cookies (with tahini and tamari, yes, tamari); Carrot Celery Bread, “Peanut Minus” cookies (“eggless, dairyless, wheatless, but NOT peanut-less!”), 7-Grain Currant Muffins, Ozark Barley Bread, Banana Rice Cupcakes (wheat-free), and the best damn whole-wheat pizza crust you ever had (it’s spiffed up with oregano, cayenne, and basil—yum, yum!).

The recipe I’m sharing with you today is from the section contributed by Uprisings Baking Collective, formerly in Berkeley, California. You can read about that collective online here.

These sesame crunch bars are sweet, but not overly so. They keep well. They’re a terrific snack or light breakfast. They’re a perfect hiking snack! You can alter the flavorings a bit with other nuts, dried fruit, and so on.

Note that in the recipe below, transcribed from the book (page 224), I’m offering some comments and ideas for substitutions (which are in brackets).




Sesame Crunch Bars

Makes about 30 2-inch squares. Use an 8 x 14 inch pan, or similar.
[I use two 9 x 13 inch pans and spread dough to about 1/2 inch high, which yields 48 bars, each about 2 1/2 x 2 inches.]

• 5/8 cup peanut butter
• 1 1/4 cups honey
• 2 tsp. vanilla
• 1 1/4 cups oats [rolled is what I use, as in Quaker]
• 1 1/4 cups cashews [I don’t care much for cashews, so I use raisins or chopped dried apricots]
• 1 cup wheat germ [I was getting low, so I substituted some crushed breakfast cereal flakes]
• 6 1/4 cups sesame seeds [rather hard to find; I finally scored these at an international/ethnic grocery; by the way, sesames can get rancid quickly, so when buying, check for freshness, and refrigerate or freeze them when you get home]
• 5/8 cup sunflower seeds [raw]

Cream together peanut butter, honey, and vanilla [it helps if you heat the honey and peanut butter; heating softens it up and makes it easier to stir]. Add the rest of the ingredients [in a big bowl!] and mix well with your hands—it works best and saves on dishes [if you heated the goo part, you can stir it with a spoon]. With wet hands or rolling pin, flatten mixture to uniform thickness on oiled pan. Dough will be stiff—be patient. Bake at 350 degrees for about 25 minutes [my oven runs hot and my bars are thinner, so I go for about half this time; watch it; if it gets too toasty and tan, it will be hard; and if you use raisins, don’t let them scorch]. Let cool [then cut into bars and store in a closed container, separated with waxed paper].

Missing the Early Spring

A few weeks ago, in a fit of desire to have something fresh and green on my plate, I planted a bunch of lettuce and radishes in our front planters, which receive plenty of full sun. Not so great for the plants in midsummer, but this time of year, it seems like a personal greenhouse.

And our daffodils are already starting to bloom!

Indoors, I also planted different types of chili peppers from some seeds from last year. I don’t have great expectations about them, but what the hey—nothing ventured, nothing gained. But sure enough, they’re starting to come up.

And my parsley seeds are germinating, too. It’s all so . . . optimistic, and springlike.

But I honestly don’t feel like spring. Since Thursday, my mood has ranged from deeply worried, to preoccupied, to grief-stricken, to numb. Mostly I’m just numb, with shock: Earl, one of our cats, died Friday night (or possibly Saturday morning). He died alone in an oxygen chamber at the vet’s. Damn.

It came on suddenly—Thursday morning I found him on the landing, midway between the front doors and the second floor, breathing hard—I could see the sides of his body struggling to bring in air. And he wouldn’t stand up and walk anywhere.

I took him to the vet’s right away, where throughout the day they treated him and tried to run tests on him. (Earl has always hated to be constrained in any way, so naturally he would start to struggle, and they were afraid to get him too worked up. They never got a blood sample from him, though they did get some X-rays.)

Ohhhhh, I don’t want to tell this story; I don’t want to relive all this painful stuff. By Friday afternoon, when we visited him at the vet’s, he was in the oxygen chamber, mouth-breathing, struggling, with a 50 percent chance of making it through the night, if this undiagnosable fluid-in-the-lungs thing could just . . . run its course, the various drugs they’d given him clear his lungs out, and he could get better . . . But he didn’t, and he was gone by the morning.

In retrospect, we realized that he had developed an occasional dry cough (we just figured we needed to dust more often), and in the past few days had seemed quieter than usual (but it had been exceptionally gray and rainy, so we all were feeling pretty quiet). Those were the signs, and we didn’t see them. It was probably heart disease.

Earl had some pretty annoying habits, but he was lively, good-natured, and extraordinarily friendly (even with kids; even with other cats). He was astonishingly intelligent and headstrong. He was nimble and lithe, muscular and quick. We used to joke that one of his grandparents must have been a squirrel, or a weasel, or some other kind of “chittery animal.” It seemed he did most everything abruptly—so I guess his death was pretty much in character.

We have two other cats, and that the four of us are here together is a comfort, I think, to all of us. But the house is so very still without him: When he slept, he slept hard, but when he was awake, he was busy. He always ran downstairs to greet us when we opened the door. He woke us up in the mornings. He visited our guests (and walked on them). He pestered us for all kinds of things and trotted ahead to show us the way, always alert and inquisitive—a very active soul, our precious gray Early.

The other two cats are more, well, catlike: They eat and nap; they walk quietly. This weekend, Sue and I spent our shocked, numbed hours hiking, driving out in the country, walking around downtown, reading, and watching movies together on the Internet. Trying to let this new reality sink in. The flowers may be blooming, but it’s definitely still winter in our house, in our hearts.

This is gonna take some getting used to.

_______________________________________


Look, I usually don’t like to share my truly personal matters on the Internet (you’ll notice I’m not posting a picture of Earl, even though he was a strikingly handsome Russian blue), but then my blogging had been sparse, anyway, due to lots of work. And now it’s seeming difficult to write posts for this new reason, that I’m just not feeling very “enthusiastic.” I’m sure you understand.

Prune Bread (Retro Recipe)

Here’s one of the two great recipes for prune bread that appear in my esteemed 1949 Good Housekeeping Cook Book. I share it with you because prunes are opulently opossumable, and this bread is delicious!

It uses the proven combination of orange and prunes. As an example of how well the two flavors go together, I see that at least one company sells prunes (“dried plums”) that come pre-infused with orange essence.

A few notes on the recipe below:

1. This time, I didn’t chop up the prunes very much. But I think the idea is to chop them much more finely, so the fruit is incorporated more evenly throughout the bread (sort of like zucchini bread, or banana bread). But I wanted the chunks to be more visible, so I only cut them coarsely with a knife. (The down side to big chunks? It makes your knife sticky when you slice it!)

2. I suggest using less baking powder/soda/salt. It really doesn’t need that much. I think you can halve all three ingredients and come out fine. But here, I’m presenting the recipe just as it appears in the book.

3. In the same book (same page, even) is another gem: Oatmeal Prune Bread! And if you Google “prune bread” you can find lots more fun chocolaty, banana-y, citrusy, appley, nutty variations!

Hooray for prunes!




Prune Bread

1 cup dried, uncooked prunes
3 cups sifted all-purpose flour
4 teasp. baking powder
1/2 teasp. baking soda
1 1/2 teasp. salt
2 tablesp. granulated sugar
1/4 cup shortening
2 tablesp. grated orange rind
2 eggs, beaten
1 cup bottled milk or 1/2 cup evaporated milk and 1/2 cup water

Heat oven to 350˚ F. Rinse prunes, drain, dry. If very dry, boil 5 min. in water to cover; drain. Put pitted prunes through food chopper, using medium blade. Sift flour with next 4 ingredients. Cut in shortening with pastry blender until like coarse corn meal. Stir in prunes and rind. Combine eggs and milk; add to dry ingredients; mix well. Pour into greased 10˝ × 3˝ loaf pan. Bake in moderate oven of 350 F. 1 hr., or until done. Makes 1 loaf.

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From The Good Housekeeping Cook Book, with a preface by Katharine Fisher (New York: Rinehart, 1949), p. 446.

Prunes

. . . And other dried fruits. Why, oh why, do people in our country disdain them? For centuries, humans have prized them for their deliciousness, versatility, practicality, economy, simplicity, elegance. Not to mention their nutrients, which scientists are still learning about!

They store incredibly well and don’t need refrigeration. They’re right there on the shelf in your pantry, ready for you to need a quick dessert, or something to put in your muffins.




You can cook them or eat them like candy, just as they are. You can put them into sweet dishes, or you can use them in savory recipes such as curries, salads, meat dishes, stuffing, stews.

Go to the California Dried Plums official website, and read about all this stuff. They’ve got recipes and lots more. Good lord, the nutrients! Antioxidants, phytochemicals, potassium, the good kinds of sugars, vitamins, and lots more. And dietary fiber.

Actually, it’s a combination of the fiber and certain phytochemicals that make prunes so “gentle and effective.” Americans have become embarrassingly puerile about prunes, laughing about constipation and the elderly. This idiocy has prompted the California plum growers to change their marketing so that now, they’re selling “dried plums.” But Americans are aging, and constipation isn’t funny when you have it. And what a tasty, natural alternative to synthetic, pharmaceutical laxatives from the drugstore!

Eating any dried fruits, of course you have to be grown-up about it. Edward Brown put it this way in his wonderful introduction to vegetarian food, Tassajara Cooking: “One thing to remember when eating dried fruit is that it’s easy to overdo it. Often people who wouldn’t consider eating ten plums sit down and eat ten prunes, or they eat two, three, or four stewed dried pears when they wouldn’t eat more than one fresh pear. Dried fruit can have a pretty strong effect.”




In other words, don’t blame the food for your overindulgence in it. (Would you drink a whole jar of habanero salsa and then blame the salsa for the aftermath?) Also remember that fiber is the friend of anyone trying to lose weight. Fiber makes you feel full. Slim-Fast is basically a fiber drink!

After the indulgence of the holidays, I’m wanting culinary simplicity. And the prune is a perfect Opulent Opossum subject: humble, pure, overlooked, fabulous. A breakfast with stewed prunes plus low-fat yogurt or cottage cheese is just the ticket these days. And one place to go for prune-recipe inspiration is old cookbooks that predate America’s childish equation of prunes with poo-poo. It’s time to start associating them with health and feeling great!