Goodbye summer!

Fall is on its way!  And I have pumpkins to prove it.

Corked

Today at the winery I was pouring wine alongside one of the owners when he opened a new bottle of 2009 Syrah, smelled the cork and grimaced.  "It's corked," he said sadly, pouring a glass and inhaling a large whiff to make sure.  "Not too badly corked, but still not what we want to serve," he said, setting the bottle aside and going into the wine library for another.

Good wine going bad via the cork is something new that I'm learning about in my days working at the winery, but I do have first hand experience with it from last year.  We sampled a delightful bottle of wine at another winery last fall and decided that was the wine we had to serve at Thanksgiving dinner.  It was an expensive bottle, but we figured it was worth it.

About a half-hour before Thanksgiving dinner was served, we opened the bottle to let it breathe, and then filled everyone's glass as we started carving up the turkey.  When we toasted and took our first drink, my husband and I exchanged glances at each other.  What we tasted was not vinegar by any stretch, but definitely nothing close to the delicious wine we'd sampled at the winery we'd bought it from. It was so disappointing. I didn't know it then, but we must have gotten a corked bottle of wine.  

Putting corks into filled wine bottles is historically successful way to preserve and store it, but it's not foolproof.  Approximately one percent of corks have minute amounts of bacteria on them, and this bacteria eventually multiplies, getting into the wine and causing the wine to go "off," sometimes in a big way, sometimes in a subtle one.

The best way to save yourself the disappointment of pouring a corked wine is to smell the cork carefully when it's first pulled.  It should be fruity and sharp.  If it smells musty, or like wet cardboard or an aluminum can, the cork is contaminated and the wine will probably not be good.  Usually if you've bought from a reputable winery or wine dealer, you can return the corked bottle for a good one.  And wines that are bottled using screw tops never have this problem, which is probably the main reason many wineries would love to use them instead of cork stoppers.  But there's a public image that expensive, good wines must have corks, not screw-tops, so there is some resistance to moving over entirely to screw tops.

So another lesson learned....I always figured the types of people who smelled a wine cork in a restaurant were poseurs, who knew nothing about wine but wanted to make it look like they did.  And while I'm certain it was probably true for some, there is actually a very good reason for smelling a cork if you know what a bad one smells like.  

Mold.  Wet cardboard.  Aluminum can.  If your cork smells like any of these things, send the wine back.  I don't know if life's too short to drink cheap wine, but it's definitely too short to drink a "corked" bottle.

Racial slurs and butter, y'all

So where do you weigh in on the Paula Deen controversy, y'all?

Do you love her down to earth charm, like me?  Did you find her original show to be home-y and comforting, the way your grandmother's house used to be, filled with frying goodies and sweet treats?  I did too, at least until last week.

Anyone with internet or an television knows the story that went national a few days ago, in which TV food chef and southern restauranteur Paula Deen answered several questions regarding her use of the "N-word," truthfully I would guess, in a taped deposition for an upcoming race-and sex discrimination trial.

She admitted she'd used the term in the past, and also that she'd considered staging her wedding with a "southern plantation" theme, including having waitstaff composed entirely of middle-aged black men and women, dressed in the traditional attire of house slaves from the Civil War era.  Really.

 Forget the butter.  The whole thing is enough to give any good public relations person a heart attack, just by itself.

I'm not from the South, so clearly there is a cultural chip I am missing in all this.  I grew up in Los Angeles, in a racially integrated neighborhood, in the 1960's.  No one -- I repeat -- no one, ever, said the N-word in my presence.  It was as taboo as the "F" word, maybe even more so.  I never heard it at home, at school, or on the street.  It simply was not said.  That is not to say people were without prejudice where I lived, but at that point, in my neighborhood, it was just no longer socially acceptable to say anything like that out in the open, and since my parents were open-minded folks with friends of all races, I didn't hear it in private, either.

For that, I am thankful.

For all the rhapsodizing that's done about the south and its culture, from a longing for the plantation days and those "Gone With The Wind" times to the flying of the Confederate flag, I sometimes shake my head and want to ask those people what in the world they are thinking, down in Land of Dixie.  It's not so much a lack of acknowledging those things happened, but the fact that some things, like that freakin' flag, seem to celebrate them.  

I admire Paula Deen for speaking honestly under deposition, and I also have no doubt that her own prejudices have waned as times have gone on.  To be character-asassinated for something you said 30 years ago seems patently unfair.  But for her to still not understand how deeply offensive the "N-word" and the idea of bought-and-sold human beings working in the plantation system are?  That puts her a little bit out of touch with the pulse of the nation, here and now.

Of course black people can call each other the N word, the same way I can tell Jewish jokes and my gay friends call each other "her," queens, or bitches.  That's the one and only advantage to being a minority of some kind, believe me.  The slur is about you, so you can take it and make it into a joke, if you wish.   Maybe we Jews are good with money.  Maybe some gays do sometimes act like women, haha.  When we turn the joke on ourselves, somehow it serves to take the sting off it a little. 

Maybe when one black person calls the other the N-word, it's in the spirit of taking the hate out of the word by using it regularly.  Which is fine, as long as you happen to be a black person.

But if you're not in that cultural or racial sub-group, you're expected to hold your tongue and be respectful, and that's what I think Paula Deen does not quite get. One of the most telling things was that she said she disapproves of the N-word being used in a negative way.  But the fact is, if it comes out of a white person's mouth, it won't be perceived as anything but negative.  There's too much blood, death and history for it to be otherwise.

I have no doubt Paula Deen's core supporters will help keep her restaurant open and her bank accounts solvent, but perhaps it's time to retire from the glare of the public spotlight when you haven't kept pace with where the rest of the country is regarding racial or cultural slurs.

The goodness of summer

The best days of summer are when we can enjoy a meal like this, grown from our garden.  Beans, potatoes, and a big salad.  And a glass of port wine, chilled with sparkling water added to it to make a kind of fruit soda with a kick.

Bon Appetite!

This was me, too.

Anytime you set out to write something, sometimes it takes on a life of its own, becoming what it needs to be rather than what you had necessarily intended.  It was true when I wrote a newspaper column for a living; I would sometimes sit down to write on one particular topic and end up with a column about something completely different.  And usually, my best columns were the ones that happened that way; something about the spontaneous upwelling of an independent, unforeseen idea meant that idea came from the heart and was somehow more original and true than whatever I'd originally planned to write about.

So it's no surprise that this blog about homesteading occasionally meanders off into other topics.  I am a homesteader, but have not been one my entire life.  The fact is, I've been many different people in the 52 years I've lived on this earth.

In 1978, for instance, I was this:

If you look to the right of the screen to a girl dancing in blue shorts and a white blouse, it's me.  Really. I spent two years dancing on the television show, "American Bandstand."  They were fun, glamorous years spent at nightclubs, in dance contests, and staying out until dawn with my friends.  I couldn't have put a plant in the ground if I tried, because my life was spent in the concrete of the city and had nothing to do with growing anything other than my dance repertoire.

I recently reconnected to this aspect of my past when I met up with my friend Mark from Bandstand and his husband John for dinner. Then the next day, my childhood neighbor friend Lori, who used to also go dancing with us, came and stay with us for a few days.  They tell me I am nothing like I used to be, and this is probably true.  Yet the girl in the photo above does still exist someplace inside me, and she is a valid character in my past.

And since my own dance partner, Paul, died of AIDS in 1985 and my neighbor friend is suffering from terminal ovarian cancer, I have been thinking a lot about the people we used to be, the people you see in the picture above.

And my conclusion is that I feel sorry for people who have been or are only one thing in life.   My life is richer for the various experiences I've had and the lives I've led, all of which have led me to this point. And if there's 12 different people inside you, all with different passions and interests, it's nice if they can all come out to play during one's lifetime, which none of us really know the length of.  I've been a dancer, a yuppie, a mother, a scientist, a teacher, a writer and a farmer and none of those people I was are any less valid than any other.  To claim they are is to negate a part of oneself.

Yes, I guess I am like a column that started out as one thing, then veered off towards a path no one could have predicted. My path is not what I intended it to be when I started out.  It began with glitter and glitz and is now filled with dirt and animals and sweet berries growing on the vine.  And that's a good thing.

Yet the glitter and glitz still exist somewhere down deep inside, because I do sometimes crank up the disco on my iPod and do a little New York Hustle in the pasture.  Because the girl you see above still has to dance sometimes, and it's only fair to let her get out and let go once in awhile.

Dried Apricots

Ratio of good (in jar) vs moldy (counter) apricots

The dried apricots were a mixed bag of success and failure.  Most of the pieces dried out quite nicely, but some of the larger ones looked like they had mold spores growing on them, so I chucked those and put the dessicated ones in the freezer to further preserve them until I need them.

All the pieces are a bit less sweet and a little darker than commercially-found ones, but they still taste great so I personally don't have a problem with it.

My take-home lesson from this is that next time, I will not follow the instructions, which say to cut each apricot in half before placing it on the drying rack.  The most nicely dried ones were cut into quarters or less, which made them dry faster since they were smaller. So smaller pieces equals better drying.

I am looking forward to making some Moroccan Chicken though, and being able to reach into the freezer for some naturally-dried apricots to add to the recipe.  Regular, sulphured dried apricots give me an asthma attack, so this is a great and much healthier alternative.

An anniversary

So exactly one year ago today our family was a makeshift convoy composed of four cars and a Budget rental truck, loaded up with everything we owned, heading to this new life on the Central Coast.  It's been a full, joyous year, filled with outings, concerts, new friends and neighbors, as well as fixing up our new place.  

As I write this, our home has been unpacked for quite awhile, is relatively neat, and currently filled with the smell of the sea, brought in by a strong on-shore wind blowing straight from the Pacific.  This is part of what we came for. The changes to the house are almost done, as far as renovations go, with just the kitchen to go, tentatively on calendar for early next month. The vegetables, vines and trees we've planted are flourishing.  The livestock is, too.

But more importantly than the changes in the house and property are the changes that have happened to us, internally, since we moved here.  Basically, we went from a kind of hermitude to being active and involved in what's happening in the county, everything from charity work to concerts to winery events, parties and dinners.

Sometimes you hit a point in life where you venture inward, in order to retreat from stressful or uninspiring surroundings or circumstances, and it is within the deep green reaches of our solitude that we first imagine a better future for ourselves and our loved ones.  Then, if we allow it, the images surface and begin gently moving us toward that future, like a gentle current, unimpeded as long as we don't begin working against the flow, paddling back in the direction we came from out of either fear or disbelief that we deserve a change for the better.

Today I pause and reflect on these things, and read again a truncated Bible verse I kept pinned to my mirror the two years it took us to plan our move and make it:

"For the Lord your God is bringing you into a good land; a land of vines and fig trees and pomegranates; a land of olive trees and honey."  (Deut. 8: 7 - 9)