Jaggery

I'm kinda obsessed with apples right now, which is good. Every other week my mom's caregiver brings the mama to my house, and with her a hoard of apples. They're available for the taking at the dining room at my mom's community. She takes and never eats, and then they come to me.

I started making applesauce with them recently, and decided that I'd use jaggery instead of white sugar. It turned out delicious, and now I'm strung out on that particular recipe. What is jaggery? It's a sugar that is less purified. The jaggery we had in the house was from an Indian IPA recipe mrguy was brewing for a time, and I've been using it over the years for sweetness and funk when cooking. Using it is a labor of love, because it is packaged in hard lumps that have to be grated or even microplaned before you can  measure it. 

The other day I used the last of our 1lb bag. Mrguy ordered some from Whole Foods and it arrived...granulated. It will have a place in our pantry but it smelled more like a granular molasses than the musky, funky and almost savory flavor I've come to love. So today I will go in person to the South Asian grocery and see what they have. Crossing my fingers that they'll have OG jaggery and not this newfangled powdered stuff.

In the meantime, Atlas Obscura has served me this article about a Russian sweet called pastila, which is a labor-intensive apple meringue. I want to make it so badly but today's oath is "No cooking, only eating".

It Comes From Old Indian Mummies

Toward the end of his life, my pop spent as much time as he could away from the home, and specifically time away from my mom. He owned a firewood business, and the trips away were firewood gathering jaunts, out to the farmland where he could chat up farmers and get dibs on rows of their old apple and almond trees destined to be felled and replaced. Apple and almond are nice, hot-burning hardwoods.

Yeah. Maybe he did that. But the top level goal was more the *away* of it than the *firewood* of it. True: if he kept the firewood coming in, he could keep the business going, the business that consisted of a run-down RV next to a wood pile on a dead spur of the Southern Pacific. That's where he spent his days during the weeks when he wasn't in his car talking to farmers. All of this made him happy. 

Pop liked to tell stories, a trait that he passed down to most of us, unfortunately for him, since he's now the butt of a "story". I remember him telling me about Valley Fever which he told me, in a conspiratorial tone, came from "old Indian Mummies". Even then, in the 1980s, I would have been telling him "It's Native American", and rolling my eyes into the back of my head because it was so preposterous.

Fast forwarding into the twilight days, the old man would go on his firewood adventures, often staying at a particular motel in Mo-town. Healthwise, he was in no shape for these trips. He was on a lot of blood thinners and stumbled around in the night (probably due to a mix of peripheral neuropathy and adult beverages) and he often returned to us with a story about some accident that had happened in his room and how many hand towels it had taken to sop up the blood and how embarrassed he was and how he might have to find a different motel next time. Not that he'd be more careful or that he'd take my mom with him or do anything different -- he'd just hide out in a different motel.

Which brings me to near the very end. Pop went to the valley on one of his trips. He was not expected to be back for days but came home, instead, by late afternoon. This is a man with peripheral neuropathy, congestive heart failure, abdominal hernias, major deafness, major stubbornness, has had a couple of heart attacks. He goes to the valley and gets out of the car. It's over 100 degrees. The heat washes over him. He leans against the car to brace himself (he tells me later) and a guy comes over to him and says "Hey Mister. Are you o.k.?" Pop realizes he's in bad shape so he gets back in the car and drives home. He tells me this story and says:

"I think I have Valley Fever."

Thought of him today as I read that Valley Fever is on the rise due to global warming. Is it like where the permafrost is thawing and suddenly you have a lot more wooly mammoths and ice persons floating to the surface?

Didn't think so. Here's the article.

Release the Kraken

If by Kraken you mean ladybugs. 

I have a spider mite, scale and aphid infestation in the aku room. Trying to see what ladybugs can do to help. Mine were born in Brooklyn. So far they aren't even interested in the aphids. 

Mrguy says they need to "settle in".

Updates as they occur...

Banana Bread

Last Friday someone at work posted a meme about brown bananas.

Like many other people in the world who saw the meme over the last year, I felt impugned and made banana bread immediately. Did I mention that my chest freezer REEKS of frozen bananas? 

The resulting banana bread was one of the most beautiful of my life. I told mrguy to please let it cool and let me take a photo before diving in.

He did, but then forgot to cover the pan, which should not be a problem in a right and just world. However worst-cat-in-the-world-boy-kitten quickly located the bread and ate the best part of it (the top). It did not agree with him. He got violently ill and pooped everywhere at 4am. I thought I'd cleaned it up. Got back in bed, rolled over and put my hand in a puddle of cat glop on the duvet. So gross. I had to wash the rug, all of the linen, myself and the cat. 

But the banana bread was gorgeous, right?