LivingSmall

I got the saddest news this weekend — Camp Osoha, the place that saved my life, is closing it’s doors after 89 years.

I went to Osoha for five years, during which, I moved twice and switched custodial parents. To say that Camp was the only stable point in my life for many years is an understatement. And Linda Porter, the camp director, has been a touchstone throughout all these decades — someone I could go back to years later for advice.

Maybe it’s a western thing, but as an adult I don’t meet very many people who went to these kinds of all-summer sleepaway camps. Osoha, and my brother’s camp, Red Arrow, had seven week sessions, and we all came back year after year. You tell people that and they look at you like you like it was child abuse. Seven weeks? Who would send their kid away all summer?

All I can say is thank goodness my parents managed to scrape it together each summer to send us back to camp. Camp was where I learned how to get along with other people, how to be a team, and how to work really hard to achieve a goal. And it was always the same. For me, who had one of those childhoods where nothing was ever the same, the fact that I could come back year after year and nothing changed, the kids in my cabin were the same, the counselors were the same, the songs and activities and rituals were the same. It’s where I learned that things really could be okay.

It’s very sad. The end of an era and I can understand why Linda is giving up the struggle to keep camp open and going. She took over Camp Osoha in 1975, and I suppose there just isn’t anyone to hand it off to. I think the perfect solution is to make it a B&B, where all of us geezers can come back, sleep in our old bunks, go canoeing, and maybe play a little tennis. We can have a council fire and sing all the goofy old songs … the bunch of old ladies that we are now …

Residents in parish of Martin join forces to feed themselves | Society | The Guardian.

Nick Snelgar, who earns a living from growing herbs and shrubs near his home in Martin, thought it was crazy that he could not eat local produce. “It would be fresher, tastier and more nutritious than anything from the supermarket and I thought it could be cheaper too if we organised to cut out the middlemen,” he says. “Farmers’ markets tend to be expensive niche providers for the few. I wanted a system to provide local food for the many.”

He organised a meeting in the village social club in 2003, and from it came the nucleus of enthusiasts who have organised the producer co-operative that is now feeding most of Martin’s residents.

Steve Sando and I had some good emails back and forth back in the day when we were both grumpy with Slow Food and Alice Waters. He grows the most DELICIOUS beans in the world. I can unabashedly plug them. Even if you think they’re too expensive and that buying beans by mail (as one must if you don’t live near by) — you’re wrong. His beans are wonderful. And you can plant them in your own back yard! I can personally vouch that the runner cannellini beans grow beautifully, make pretty red flowers, and produce lots and lots of delicious beans.

Here’s a great story of how Steve worked with a Mexican farmer to benefit them both: Rancho Gordo: Experiments from my mostly New World kitchen and gardens: More on the Rancho Gordo-Xoxoc Project.

Ill-conceived from the start, and as usual, a program with paperwork burdens that were prohibitive for small farmers, looks like the USDA has come to its senses and killed NAIS.

U.S.D.A. Will Drop Program to Trace Livestock – NYTimes.com.

A seven minute recording of Virginia Woolf (with thanks to Paul Lisicky for the re-tweet). Paul says she doesn’t sound like the Woolf in his head, but I’m afraid she sort of does sound like the Woolf in my head. Or some combo of this and Vanessa Redgrave’s Mrs. Dalloway.

It took me a long time to come to love Woolf’s work. If you’re not a fan, I recommend the letters — she’s scathingly funny and an unrepentant gossip.

MOBYLIVES » “Words, words, words” as Hamlet lamented…..

Looks like Robert Hass, a poet I adore, has a new book coming out:The Apple Trees at Olema: New and Selected Poems

The Paris Review has four of them online here.

While Poetry Magazine has put up September Notebook: Stories

Just about Halloween I had a stupid stupid accident and killed my laptop. I made the error of putting my unprotected laptop in a messenger bag with a re-corked bottle of wine before driving down to the cabin for the night. As I walked in the door I noticed wine dripping from the bag. The bottle had tipped over and opened and had absolutely SOAKED my laptop.

And then I made the fatal error. I tried to turn it on.

Nothing. And then I came to my senses and remembered that electricity and wetness inside a laptop is a bad bad combo.

I ripped out the battery and tipped it on edge to drain the red wine out of the CD-slot and left it in the warm laundry room all night hoping it would dry out and come back to life. Nope.

Then I took it apart. I’d already ordered a new one, and I figured since it was probably dead, I should open it up and see if it looked like it could be cleaned. That was an exciting experiment, but even though we got all the way in (there are a LOT of tiny screws on a Mac laptop), it was hopeless.

So, I put it on a shelf and forgot about it until last night when I was heading out. I put the dead laptop on my desk and stuck the power cord in, just because, and what do you know? It came back to life!

It was back. Three months later. It booted up just fine. The keys are still sort of sticky, so I have to do some cleanup, but it makes me feel much better to know I have a backup if I need it.

I guess the moral of the story is, don’t throw out “dead” laptops. Who knows? They could come back to life! Reduce, reuse, recycle indeed …

My new column at Bookslut, After Julie/Julia: The New Generation of Food Blog-to-Books, is up: I take on The Foodie Handbook: The (Almost) Definitive Guide to Gastronomy, Jam Today: A Diary of Cooking With What You’ve Got and The Art of Eating In: How I Learned to Stop Spending and Love the Stove.

In farming news, I was heartened by this editorial by Tom Vlisak, Secretary of Agriculture about his plans for revitalizing rural America. There’s still more in there for Big Ag than I really like, especially the biofuels stuff (we still haven’t figured out a way to make a biofuel that doesn’t require more fuel to grow, harvest, ship and process than it generates), but this point cheered me up:

Third, link local farm production to local consumption. Investments in local processing and storage facilities will allow for large scale consumers (e.g. schools, hospitals, small colleges) in rural communities to buy locally produced goods from smaller scale operations. These new and niche markets will leverage the wealth generated from the land, create jobs and repopulate rural communities.

Michael Pollan’s twitter feed (I’m still trying to get a handle on twitter — it’s a great time-waster, and I’ve found links to interesting things, but I think there’s something I’m still not getting). Anyhow, via Michael Pollan’s twitter feed, I found this link to an interview with Joel Salatin in the Guardian UK. Although he talks about a lot of really interesting topics in the profile, including the incursion of superbugs into our food supply, the problem of antibiotic overuse, land use models (which I wonder how well they’d translate to someplace like this where it doesn’t rain much), as well as speaking with real self-awareness about how he and his wife have handled his public career, I thought I’d pull this quote for those few people who have occasionally taken issue with my stance on eating meat:

The first thing I ask Salatin when we sit down in his living room is whether he’s ever considered becoming a vegetarian. It’s not what I had planned to say, but we’ve been in the hoop houses with the nicely treated hens, all happily pecking and glossy-feathered, and I’ve held one in my arms. Suddenly it makes little sense that this animal, whose welfare has been of such great concern, will be killed in a matter of days. Naive, I know, and Salatin seems surprised. “Never crossed my mind,” he says. The problem that’s leading the “animals-are-people movement”, as he refers to it, is two-fold, in his view. First: “The industrial food system is so cruel and so horrific in its treatment of animals. It never asks the question: ‘Should a pig be allowed to express its pig-ness?’ And the second thing of course is the urbanisation of the world, to the point where people are not now connected to their ecological umbilical, so that the only connection anyone has to an animal is a pet cat or a pet dog. And that really gives you a very jaundiced view of cycles of life – death, regeneration.”

I know I’ve blogged a million times about no-knead bread, but this one was so beautiful I just had to post a photo.

I started with about a cup and a half of leftover mashed potatoes. Then I added 3 cups of flour, a 1/2 teaspoon of yeast (I’m at the bottom of the jar and it’s not very lively anymore), a tablespoon of salt, and mixed it until the mashed potatoes were all incorporated.

Then I added 1.5 cups sourdough starter and 1 cup of warm water. It was a little wet, so I added half a cup of whole wheat flour. It was definitely a “wet shaggy dough” as the recipe describes. I covered it with plastic wrap, and left it overnight.

When I got home this morning it had risen to the top of the bowl. Sourdough starter seems to really like mashed potatoes — I’ve had that happen before. It was a really really wet dough — I had to add some more flour and use the pastry scraper to shape it into a boule.

But look what happened? It gained enormous spring once I put it in the oven — this loaf pretty much filled up my Le Crueset pot. It’s by far the nicest loaf of bread I’ve made in a while, which means it’s going to be interesting around here in the morning as someone likes mashed potato in his breakfast burrito, and I might start hoarding the leftovers for bread.