Rolling On One

I’ve often bought a loaf of Irish soda bread when I see it in the supermarket in early March, partly just for a change and partly because I do like substantial breads more than soft fluffy ones. When Stephanie linked to the soda bread site in her Saint Patrick’s Day post I clicked through to it. I have to say I like it a lot, mostly for its insistence on basic logic.

Of course, I wanted to try a recipe. I did the brown bread recipe verbatim, except for cutting a tic-tac-toe board instead of an X in the top, and except that I neglected to cover it with a tea towel while it was cooling. So here’s the story —

Ready to put in the oven:

In the middle of baking, at the point that I took off the cover (this stuff was originally baked in a dutch oven. Putting it in a cake pan and covering with an inverted cake pan for the first 2/3 of the baking time is a reasonable substitute.)

Cooling, the first guest of honor on the antique baker’s rack we got on Craig’s List two weekends ago. Doesn’t it look like a good oomphy loaf of bread?

I’m not going to make it all the time, but I like the result. This is bread that’s really food, not fluff that can keep sandwich ingredients off your hands. This is sustenance that gave people the strength to work the fields, cut the peat, and build the railroads.

At some point (probably while washing breakfast dishes) Arlene called from the kitchen, “The hawk is here! It just buzzed the bird feeder!”

We had seen a small hawk last weekend, under the trees across the driveway, eating something it had just caught. This time, it was on the snow beyond the apple trees. Arlene realized that there had been a redpoll on the feeder the last time she had looked, and it wasn’t there any more. When she got her binoculars, she saw that the hawk was eating a redpoll. Oops.

We looked in the bird book to check out identification. We’re pretty sure the bird was a sharp-shinned hawk, but the size was just about the crossover range between largest sharp-shinned and smallest Cooper’s. The tail looked pretty well squared off, so we’re sticking with sharp-shinned.

Later in the day we walked over to the spot where the hawk had been eating. Sure enough, there was a big splotch of tiny feathers on the snow.

There were at least three other splotches of feathers in the general area. That hawk has been hanging around, picking off birds from our feeder!

The hawk came back later, but didn’t catch anything while we were watching. I did open a window this time, and the bird was closer to the house than where it had been eating, so I got a few better pictures:

Usually Maine Maple Sunday is the third Sunday in March. This year that’s Easter, so a lot of sugaring operations had their open house yesterday.

We went to a pancake breakfast at the Crescent Lake Community Center in Webbs Mills. My pancake was cooked really nicely — just done, not overdone — but there were only three griddles going at the whole place, not enough to keep up with the crowd. We gave up hope for getting seconds and went over to Sweet William’s.

It was much as we remembered from two years ago.

A crowd around the sugar house. The evaporator is going full blast. That cloud of steam is why you don’t make maple syrup in your kitchen, and why we decided not to try tapping our trees this spring. That, and the fact that we’re not around all the time to empty sap buckets. There were delicious free samples of ice cream with maple syrup and maple baked beans.

The Sweet William operation was selling maple goodies at this table. We got syrup, maple butter for us and for gifts, and one big maple sugar leaf candy for a gift. We passed up the maple popcorn.

Here’s the display of tapping supplies, from an old metal tap and bucket to modern plastic tubing fittings.

… and some trees with tubing leading from their taps to the main line of the collection network.

We passed up the tour of the sugaring operation this year because we thought we remembered enough from two years ago.

Two weekends ago, when we were in the Boston area because of my klez gig, we did some shopping from Craig’s list.

My mom has a nice sewing box that opens up to reveal six shallow drawers or boxes, just the right size for spools and notions. Arlene has been seeing many things a lot like it on Craig’s list. There was one in Needham that we went to see, and bought. It came with contents, which included two pairs of scissors, lots of thread on wooden spools, a beautiful bamboo point turner (for turning the points of collars, etc., right-side out, that is), a metal, not plastic, hem marking gauge, and a couple of giveaway sewing kits with “look for the union label” ads on them. We think that some of that thread has been in that box since the 1950s.

The other item was a bakery rack. It was on the third floor of a house off LaGrange Street in West Roxbury, on the edge of our normal stomping grounds. The seller said the rack originally came from Gorman’s Bakery in Central Falls RI. It barely fit in the back of our Forester — I had to take one caster off the bottom with the screwdriver of my Swiss army knift to get the hatch to close safely — but we did get it home. We took it up to the kitchen in Casco last weekend. Notice a kind of wood theme to the kitchen? I moved some stuff for the picture.

Really, you might want to skip this post. I’m just recording it for my own information.

Most of last week I had a major PITA. I don’t mean an annoyance, I mean a visit to the HMO and being sent downstairs to the surgeon. That was Thursday. Two percocets and lots of hot baths later, I’m feeling normal.

Just for review, here’s what’s happened to our back deck in Casco over the past month.

In late February, we thought there was a lot of snow on it:

By the beginning of March, there was more snow. Note that you can’t see so much of the railing in the front.

Last weekend the railing was broken. All the snow (really, ice that formed as the snow melted or was rained on and then refroze) slid off the roof and fell on the deck. When Matt looked he didn’t think we still had a deck. Arlene’s reaction was that it looked like the Titanic’s iceberg on the deck. The only damage I’m certain of is that the top rail on one end is broken and the picnic table is smithereens. Where by smithereens I mean:

Somewhere under the iceberg is the remains of a weber grill. I wouldn’t be surprised if the kettle part of the grill is OK, but it’s hard to believe the legs will be intact.

I’ve done cross-country skiing in recent years, but it must have been forty years since I had done any downhill. Matt (and Anne too) has asked me several times in the past few years if I wanted to go skiing. I had resisted until last Saturday (that would be March 15, I guess).

It’s not really far from Casco to Bethel, where Sunday River is, but there’s a very respectable ski area called Shawnee Peak that’s much closer. Shawnee is on Moose Pond in Denmark — well, I guess actually in Bridgton. As the crow flies, it’s about four miles from the house Arlene and I rented from one of her Newton teacher friends, but you can’t get there from there — the house we rented is at the end of a dead-end road, so you would have to loop back to the main road, go back towards downtown Bridgton, up Hio Ridge Road (you can wave to Linda what’s-her-name, Whiting?, of Pinestar Studio, who lives on that road) and then up Mountain road, over a little bridge at the narrows on Moose Pond, and eventually to the ski area. Or what we did from Casco, go through downtown Bridgton and towards Freyburg until you get to Mountain Road. That puts it about 25 miles from our house. Shawnee Peak is known as a family-friendly area with plenty of beginners trails. I figured that I was ready to try it.

I don’t have downhill ski equipment of my own, and after only having downhill skied twice after I did it in gym class in college (oh, hmm, maybe another time or two with the Browns at Nashoba Valley out in Groton) I signed up for a lesson at the “first time on skis” level. The whole package, skis, boots, poles (which they didn’t let us use in the class at all), lesson, and lift ticket (restricted to the beginners chairlift), cost $65.

It really all came right back, not just like riding a bicycle, but back. I never really learned much beyond the first lesson’s worth in gym class, so I felt that I was doing about as well as I ever had — which isn’t saying much, just snowplow turns. There were seven people in the class, three adults and four kids. After the instructors went over the basic ideas of stopping and turning and had us all do three or four 50-foot runs just to see if we had caught on, one instructor asked the adults to come with him. We went over to the chairlift,  rode up it  (the other two adults took the first double chair and I rode with the instructor. He turns out to run an ice cream business, but since there’s not so much to do in the winter, he does ski instruction then) and started down, in two short runs to get the feel of it and then one long run that went all the way to the bottom. I did fall on the second of the short runs — well, it was the steepest part of the run — but basically by the time I got to the bottom I was saying, “I could get to like this.”

I didn’t watch or hear Obama’s speech yesterday, but I did read it at that link. All I have to say is, it will be a tragedy for the country, comparable to the failure to have elected Adlai Stevenson president or to having elected Reagan, if Obama isn’t elected, after that.

On second thought, that’s not all I have to say. The point is towards the end of the speech — do we want the campaign to be about serious problems, or about distractions? That’s at the heart of the problem with American democracy.

Of course it’s impossible to know what someone else’s motivations are (hard enough to know what mine are) but my impression is that most politicians have positions on issues because they need to figure out what to say to get elected, because their basic motivation is to get elected. That was possibly the most the case with Romney while he was in the running, but I think that applies to Hillary also. That is, “what can I say about X that will appeal to people and isn’t too far from what I believe?” I really think that Obama comes at it from the opposite direction, “What does the country need to do, and then how can I say it to convince people of it?” I think the latter approach is much more likely to lead to solutions.

Will the public care about the real questions, or prefer to continue to be distracted? Political commentators who ask, or respond to, questions like “What does the candidate have to do now to defuse this situation?” are part of the problem, and candidates who run their campaigns according to questions like that are another big part. The answer I’d like to hear, in general, is “what the candidate has to do is remind the public of what the real issues are.” In the end, it’s the public’s decision, and I don’t have much confidence in the outcome.

I played in the band at a bar mitzvah last Saturday. Jim, the clarinetiest in the JCC klezmer band, had been asked by one of his neighbors to get a band together for the occasion. He spoke to Barry, the leader of the JCC band, who asked me to participate. So the three of us were up there on the stage at Temple Emeth in South Brookline doing chassidic, klezmer, and Israeli songs. For the past four weeks we had been rehearsing for a half hour before the regular JCC klezmer band meetings. Even that wasn’t enough time to practice all the songs that Barry gave us. Most of Barry’s music is just the C lead sheet. I have to transpose those as I go, unless I enter the tune into Finale, have the program transpose it to the trumpet key, and print out a part. Of course, when I do that I have a nice clearly printed part in the right key, rather than a splotchy xerox of a handwritten part in the wrong key — but there were too many to enter them all.

Well, we did some songs that I had to sight read and transpose from those splotchy xeroxes, and I suspect there were guests thinking, “where did they get that trumpet player? He’s terrible!” We did some songs that I knew pretty well and I suspect there were guests thinking, “that band rocks!” We did “Bei Mir Bist du Schoen” with me on vocals, and I bet there were some people thinking, “Oh my, do people still know that song? It takes me back 50 years!”

Mostly, I’m not used to playing for that long at a stretch. It was tiring but fun.

I walked around the pond at lunchtime. Before I got to the real start of the trail I bumped into two people looking up into the trees. They were trying to find what was making a strange call. It was probably just grackles, but the people were from Sweden, not familiar with North American birds. I walked with them a little way, talking about Stockholm, and they turned around near the big log bench next to the water.

There were five ring-necked ducks, one each male hoodie and common merg, a pair of swans, and several Canada geese in the pond. I didn’t see much in land birds other than the grackles at the start.