Cornstalks at Sunset

A tassled and tousled cornfield

This dried-up cornfield sits across the road from our house. I don't think high-moisture corn is going to be a problem in western Kentucky this year. The corn, what there is of it, is getting a good baking right in the field.

I read that, across the nation, a good corn crop is expected. Much of the corn belt has had a good year with enough rain.

That's good, because the demand for corn-based ethanol has put a lot of pressure on the corn market. When consumers have food and energy competing for the same product, we have a dicey situation, in my humble opinion.

I also read that the high price of corn is driving up the cost of farm land in some corn-producing states. In other words, the land is perceived as a good investment by more people, and with more demand, land prices have gone up. This is good for landowners who might sell, but it makes it harder than ever for young farmers to get a start. Property taxes will also rise if the land is re-assessed at current values. Then, there are the environmental costs of marginal farmland being put to corn production. Overall, better corn prices are a mixed blessing, even for farmers.

I think we should make every effort to use kudzu for ethanol. It grows like crazy, and we have a lot of it in the South. We can't get rid of it, so we may as well use it. I'm not suggesting that we plant any kudzu, because it's too hard to eradicate. We should just make use of the rampant, unwanted vines that are already growing. It's free, except for harvesting costs.

Technorati tags: corn prices, ethanol, farmland prices, kudzu

Wild Roses

Prairie rose and pasture rose

Rosa carolina, wild pasture rose of western Kentucky

This pretty little wild rose is named Rosa carolina or pasture rose. Several clumps of Rosa Carolina grow along our lane, which climbs the hill to our house from the highway. Every summer, I enjoy seeing their blossoms.

Pasture rose is a native of the eastern United States. I'm also familiar with wild prairie roses from my Nebraska childhood. The flowers of both roses are very similar, but the berry of the pasture rose is yellowish-orange while the prairie rose has a red or red-orange berry.

The pasture roses here are a larger plant than the prairie roses I remember. Western Kentucky usually gets about three times more rain per year than western Nebraska, and I am sure that affects the size of the wild rosebushes.

I've noticed that ladies sometimes choose "Prairie Rose" as a nickname for internet bulletin boards or a CB handle. There are many other things named for prairie roses, even a town in North Dakota. Pasture rose isn't often honored in that way -- its humble, homely name is rarely adopted.

I took this photo earlier this summer before the drought became severe here. The roses look lush and fresh, compared to the dried-up landscape we have right now.

If you look closely, you'll notice two plants are represented in the photo. The other one is honeysuckle vine, which grows rampantly around here. It's an invasive species, not even a native of this continent. It was brought here as an ornamental from Asia. I love the scent of honeysuckle blossoms, but I hate its habit of growing over anything in its path.

"Back to School" in 1980

The first two weeks of teaching in Santa Cruz, Bolivia

In mid-July of 1980, Dennis and I arrived in Santa Cruz, Bolivia. We had accepted a two-year teaching contract at the Santa Cruz Cooperative School (SCCS).

Just a couple of days after we arrived, Bolivia had a military coup. We sat it out at the school director's house, with several other newly-arrived teachers who didn't have apartments yet.

In a couple more days, the markets and shops reopened, and everyone came out of their houses and went back to work. The new government established checkpoints on the main roads, military patrols of the streets, new papers for foreigners to carry, and a midnight curfew for one and all.

For us newcomers to the country, these restrictions were just part of the overall strangeness. We settled into our little apartment and got ready to teach school.

The seasons are reversed south of the equator, so it was winter when we arrived in July. The school year at SCCS ran from August through May. This put the seniors on the right schedule to go to college in the U.S., and also worked well for hiring teachers from the U.S. It also put us in school through the hottest months of tropical summer!

Instruction at SCCS was in English, but its students came from everywhere. Some were the children of rich Bolivians. Others were the children of foreigners working in Santa Cruz -- Americans, British, French, Israelis, Taiwanese, Koreans, Germans, Swedes, etc.

Many of the foreign families in SCCS were connected with sugar plantations and refineries or gas drilling and pipelines. Some families were in Santa Cruz with U.N. programs, as representatives of their home countries, missionaries, entrepreneurs, or expert advisors in some field.

When I look at the SCCS website, I am astonished at the growth and apparent prosperity of the school. When we taught there, the school didn't have as many buildings as it does today.

Here's an excerpt from a letter I wrote to my family on September 1, 1980:

School has started and it has kept us busy and mentally, if not physically, exhausted. We have two weeks under our belts now. We had a week of orientation and then students on Monday the 18th.

I think this has been the most difficult two weeks of school teaching I have ever done. The kids came in absolutely wild, and it has taken stern measures to keep them quiet and in their desks long enough to attempt to teach anything. Also, of my 18 kids, only one speaks English at home, so I explain and show, and re-explain and show again, endlessly. In Reading class, I teach not just the recognition of the word, but also the meaning. The language barrier makes everything about twice as hard as it would ordinarily be.

They are starting to shape up a bit as far as keeping quiet. We have very high ceilings and a brick tile floor, so any chair scraping or whispering echoes badly! If one other person is making noise, it is hard to hear whoever should be talking. So I'm sure my second graders think Mrs. Netz is really a grouch about being quiet.

However, I am learning the vocabulary that they can understand and adjusting to them somewhat--as they are to me. It is frustrating much of the time, but still it's rewarding when someone does understand.

I have 7 girls and 11 boys in my room. Dennis has 22 in his room. He has been having the same language problems as me, though to a lesser degree because his are 4th graders and have had more years of speaking English. With all this and the stress of being a first-year teacher, I'm sure he will always vividly remember these next months.

Related information:
Welcome to Santa Cruz
Free Wisdom about Santa Cruz, Bolivia
Michael Simon's photo blog about travel in South America

Technorati tags: Santa Cruz Bolivia, Santa Cruz Cooperative School, SCCS, 1980

A Clutter Battle Fought and Won(?)

Cleaning out and re-accumulating

Casper The Incorrigible had a good time, early this morning before anyone was out of bed. He found the bottom door of the china cabinet open, so he explored that forbidden compartment while he had a chance.

To get in there, he had to push aside a stack of assorted foam and paper plates and plastic cups and tip over several tall flower vases. Most of this ended up on the floor in front of the china cabinet.

Somehow, picking up Casper's spill of paper plates and vases morphed into cleaning the china cabinet top to bottom. I "Windexed" the glass shelves and "Pledged" the wood. Then I rinsed the "china" and dried it.

This sounds so simple when I write it, but it took quite a while. I decided to pack away a few things I don't use much, donate a few things to our upcoming church garage sale, and reorganize the rest of it.

In the process, I decided that I don't need much more Anchor Hocking Early American Prescut (EAPC). I inherited my mother's 1960s glassware of this pattern, and I've collected it since then, thinking that I'll give each of my children a set when they set up a stable home. Thus I have two of many pieces -- or you might say, too many pieces!

I packed up the dishes and some other stuff for the church garage sale, and Isaac and I went to town to run some errands. We dropped off the garage sale items at church, and I must say, I was feeling quite virtuous about cleaning my china cabinet and getting rid of a whole box of clutter.

Then we went by the library and used the computers. When our time was up, Isaac went to look for some books. While waiting for him, I accidentally strayed into the magnetic field of the donated-books closet. I do have a terrible weakness for books, especially old books.

I only bought three, and they are in exceptionally nice condition -- well worth the $1.00 each I paid for them. They are:

• The Poems of Eugene Fields (with an ancient strip of paper marking the page with the poem, "A Valentine"
• Leaves of Grass (Carl Sandburg)
• The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson

And I suppose I should confess that I bought an old book at the library on Thursday of this week, also:

• American Notes by Rudyard Kipling

That's one box out, and four books in. Am I making progress in the ongoing battle against too much stuff? Not really, but at least the china cabinet is nice and clean.

Fannie Merritt Farmer and Her Cookbook

Upon finding three early versions of my favorite cookbook...

Today I discovered several online volumes of Fannie Farmer's cookbook: the original 1896 edition, the 1911 edition, and the 1918 edition of The Boston Cooking-school Cookbook. Finding them was like running into a dear friend unexpectedly -- a really nice surprise.

Fannie Farmer and Me

My cookbook collection takes up a couple of bookcase shelves, but my Fannie Farmer cookbook is my all-time favorite.

My mother had a copy of The Fannie Merritt Farmer Boston Cooking School Cookbook (10th edition) which I used sometimes, when I was growing up. Later, when I had a little place of my own, I bought my own copy, the 11th edition, which was named The Fannie Farmer Cookbook.

I turn to Fannie Farmer every time I make cornbread, baking powder biscuits, pancakes, waffles, ginger snaps, brownies, and more. In the previous sentence, I linked to the recipes in the 1918 cookbook; their ingredients are similar, but not identical, to the recipes in my 1965 cookbook.

Some of my favorite Fannie Farmer recipes -- applesauce spice cake and peanut butter cookies, for example -- aren't in the 1918 edition. Those recipes were apparently added by her heirs. Her immediate family did early revisions, and later, her niece by marriage, Wilma Lord Perkins, revised several editions. Perkins writes in the preface of the 11th edition about upholding "Aunt Fannie's" standards of clear, dependable, basic recipes.

Marion Cunningham took over in the late 1960's as the reviser/author of Fannie Farmer cookbooks. It's now in its 13th edition, completely rewritten with many new recipes, but personally, I don't intend to buy it. I'm going to stick with the edition I know and love.

I have the Fannie Farmer Baking Book by Marion Cunningham, and it has not become a favorite of mine, though I've tried to give it a fair chance. I admit I may have a bit of attitude. Some cooks think she's done great things with the Fannie Farmer cookbooks.

Who was Fannie Farmer?

Fannie Farmer (1857-1915) was a pioneer of scientific cookbook writing and the study of nutrition. In her recipes, she used standardized level measurements -- cups, teaspoons, tablespoons, etc. -- rather than the lumps, pinches, dabs, and dashes common to recipes of her era.

In the two decades after her cookbook was published, she saw it reprinted nine times. She surely would not have guessed that 110 years later, it would still be in print and considered a masterpiece and a classic.

Fannie Farmer's life

Fannie suffered a stroke when she was only 16 years old. She was unable to walk for several years and she was unable to complete the college education she had planned. Though she learned to walk again, she always had a limp.

During her years of recovery from the stroke, she became interested in food preparation. When she was about 30 years old, she enrolled in the Boston Cooking School, a school for professional cooks, where she became a star pupil, an assistant, and finally, the school's director. Thus the title of her cookbook was the Boston Cooking School Cookbook.

Later she started a cooking school for housewives, Miss Farmer's School of Cookery. She wrote a book about proper nutrition for sick and handicapped people and became a lecturer on that subject at the Harvard Medical School, as well as running her own school, writing a newspaper column on cookery, and authoring several other books.

As a young person, Fannie Farmer had red hair. She never married, and she died when she was only 57. She suffered another stroke that paralyzed her legs again, but she continued working from a wheelchair, giving her last lecture just ten days before her death.

A note from Fannie Farmer

My Fannie Farmer cookbook was revised and updated by her niece, Wilma Lord Perkins, but it still has a foreword from its original author. I quote a paragraph from it:

At the earnest solicitation of educators, pupils, and friends, I have been urged to prepare this book, and I trust it may be a help to many who need its aid. It is my wish that it may not only be looked upon as a compilation of tried and tested recipes, but that it may awaken an interest through its condensed scientific knowledge which will lead to deeper thought and broader study of what to eat.

-- FMF

Yes, Fannie, the book has been a good help to me every time I needed its aid.

Fannie Farmer and my daughter

My Fannie Farmer cookbook isn't in very good condition. It's well-worn, inside and out. Some of the most damaged pages are the ones with Keely's favorite recipes. She learned to bake from this book.

A few years ago, I found a nice clean copy of the 11th edition on eBay, bought it, and gave it to Keely. It has all her favorite recipes, so she was delighted to get it. She's been using it, she tells me, and impressing people with how she can cook and bake.

I also bought a fresh copy of the 11th edition for myself, but I haven't used it. I'm fond of my old Fannie Farmer that opens to all the right pages automatically. I think of little Keely every time I open it!

Sources:
Fannie Merritt Farmer Biography
About Fannie Merritt Farmer
Fannie Merritt Farmer at Wikipedia
Fannie Merritt Farmer
Fannie Merritt Farmer, Mother of the American Cookbook
Fannie Farmer Biography
Seven centuries of cookbooks - treasures and pleasures

Technorati tags: Fannie Merritt Farmer, Fannie Farmer Cookbook, Boston Cooking School Cookbook, classic cookbooks, great cookbooks