Cooking to infinity

This blog post was inspired by Crista Gray.  It would never have occured to me that anybody would be interested if she hadn't suggested it.  

I like to get the most out of things.  I don't buy new clothes when the old ones will do.  I wear my shoes until they fall apart.  I eat leftovers that are on the edge of inedible.  And I like to use up all of the usable parts of the things I cook.  Before I elaborate on that, I should explain how that relates to the title of this post.

There are few enough of you who read this (and bless you every one for caring).  Some of you, like me, grew up in Mendocino County.  I am sure you know the Pacific Lumber company.  It is hard to miss them up there in the land of pot and trees.  Perhaps you remember this lovely quote by Harry Merlo, LP's President and CEO during the eighties.  He said, ""We need everything that's out there. We don't log to a 10-inch top, or an 8-inch top, or a 6-inch top. We log to infinity. Because we need it all. It's ours. It's out there, and we need it all. Now."  He meant they don't stop with the little trees to let them grow into big trees.  They cut down everything, including brush, chip it up, and make pressboard.  Because that is how to make a profit.  In timber management, I find this idea abhorrent.  In my own domestic economy, however, I try to follow it.

There is nothing new about this type of frugality.  Many of our culinary delicacies today are the result of the frugality of our ancestors.  When you kill a calf, everybody can figure out what to do with the tenderloin.  A little salt, pepper, and maybe some other spices, sear it and serve it rare.  The meat is tender and tasty, and the prep is easy.  What am I supposed to do with the little guys legs though?  Even in a calf that meat is tough, made mostly of connective tissue and bone.  Well, braise that bad boy in wine for hours, and we have Osso Buco.  Have you ever ordered Osso Buco in a restaurant?  If you paid less than $20 for your dinner, you did well.  For a piece of meat some would be tempted to toss to the dogs.  Flank steak is another example of this.  It is tough but flavorful.  Somebody figured out you can marinate it, cook it rare, cut it against the grain, and make fajitas out of it.  Suddenly it is trendy and $14/lb at Whole Foods.  

However, I came here to tell you about my own innovation, not to complain about what trendiness does to meat prices.  My children love roasted chicken.  They call it Chicken With Bones-o.  This song, which you should listen to if you are not already familiar, is the reason.  They, being the little ones, love to chew on the bones-o.  This presents a problem though.  They like the legs, thighs, and wings.  I like the breast, but there is quite a bit of meat left on a chicken carcass even if we eat all of those parts.  And we don't always.  Sometimes they want to eat the leftovers, sometimes they don't.  So I freeze the carcases.  When I get about three in my freezer, I used to make stock.  Sometimes I still do, but even I can only use so much stock.  These days I make chicken enchiladas with the meat.  This means I get 1-2 meals for me and the kids out of every chicken, then an entire pan of enchiladas (about 12, or 6 meals for me) out of every three chickens.  Not to mention the scraps I feed my dog.  She gets real happy when I do that.


Here is my recipe for Leftover Chicken Enchiladas.  It borrows liberally from a recipe published in Cook's Illustrated, but is different enough to call it my own.

Leftover Chicken Enchiladas

3 chicken carcases.  

1 large (28 oz) can crushed tomatoes

1 small (14 oz) can enchilada sauce

1 Tb whole cumin seeds

3 Ancho chillies, dried

3 chipotle peppers from a can of chipotles in adobo, diced

2 medium onions, chopped

4 cloves garlic, minced or put through a garlic press

1 Tb Hungarian smoked paprika

Fresh ground black pepper to taste

1 lb Monterey Jack Cheese (or pepper jack)

1 bunch cilantro

12 corn tortillas

In a large dutch oven, stock pot over medium heat, or slow cooker, combine the chicken carcases (they can still be frozen), tomatoes, enchilada sauce, chipotles, onions, garlic, and smoked paprika.  Cover and bring to a simmer.  You may need to move things around to be sure the chicken is at least half covered with liquid.  Remove the stems from the Ancho chiles.  Place in a coffee grinder with the cumin seeds and pulse the grinder until they are finely ground.  Add 2 Tb of the resulting powder to your pot.  Reserve the rest and add to taste (I generally add it all up front).  Note that if you refer to skip this step (basically you are making your own fresh chili powder), you can use equivalent amounts of commercial chili powder.

On the stove top, simmer for 3-4 hours on low, stirring occasionally to prevent sticking.  In slow cooker, cook on low for 8 hours or so.  Remove from heat and allow to cool.  Pick the edible meat from the carcases.  If you have a dog, reserve the non-bone portions you don't want to eat for him or her.  Otherwise, toss the bones and other discarded parts.  

Place the edible meat in a colander over a large bowl.  Pour the contents of the pot into the colander.  This is a second chance to look for small bones or other unpalatable bits of meat.  Discard any you find.  Shred the meat finely, and press against the colander to allow as much liquid to pass through as possible.  Place the shredded meat in another bowl.

Grate the cheese and coarsely chop the cilantro.  Add half the cheese, all of the cilantro, and pepper to taste to the shredded meat and stir to combine.  Now you have your enchilada filling (the meat) and your enchilada sauce (the strained liquid).  Taste both.  Add seasonings to taste (salt, pepper, more spice, more chili flavor).  Some possible additions:  Diced pickled jalapenos, Sriracha or other hot sauce, more chili powder, diced roasted peppers (canned or fresh).  

At this point, the sauce and filling can be refrigerated to allow you to assemble the enchiladas later, at your convenience.  Saving them in the refrigerator has the added benefit of solidifying the fat in the sauce, allowing it to be easily skimmed.  

When ready to assemble, preheat the oven to 350.  Warm the tortillas, one at a time, in a skillet on the stove top.  A quick spray of oil, or a little added to the pan, makes them easier to work with.  For each enchilada, take a warmed tortilla, fill with 1/12 of the filling, and roll.  Place, seam down, in a 9x13 baking pan.  You will have to do a little Tetris to fit them all in.  I do a row of 8 or9 (as many as will fit) parallel to the short edge of the pan.  Then I put the remaining 3-4 into the space parallel to the long edge of the pan.  Whatever works for you.  It is important not to leave big empty spaces though, as the sauce will pool there and you will end up with hard tortillas.  

When the pan is full, pour the sauce over the enchiladas.  Make an effort to moisten the top of all of the tortillas.  Cover the pan with foil, and bake for about 30 minutes.  Remove pan from oven, top with remaining cheese, and return to oven for 15 minutes or until cheese is well melted.  Remove from oven and serve.

I like to top with diced avocado, sour cream, and salsa, and serve with lettuce on the side.  

I love this recipe.  It is versatile (change the flavorings for a completely different result, skip the enchiladas and use the meat as burrito filling or to top nachos).  It uses something that would otherwise be wasted.  To be honest, after one or two meals of roast chicken, I am pretty tired of it.  This allows me a chance to use the whole thing without having to slog through another chicken sandwich, or a third meal of reheated chicken.  Toss it in the freezer when you are tired of eating the leftovers, and it will wait patiently for you to make something tasty with it.  I have to admit, I have been amazed by the reactions I've gotten to these enchiladas.  I think of them as something to get me through the week.  Every person I have served them to has been impressed way out of proportion (in my opinion) to their quality.  So make them if you have some chicken lying around (whether you roasted it yourself, or bought the $5 rotisserie chicken at the store, I've used both) and let me know what you think.

What about the boys?

This post has been a long time coming.  It has been percolating in the back of my mind for months at least.  Years really.  Over the past few months, though, it seems that the plight of the modern man has been in the news a lot.  Here are my thoughts.

I sat down to write today because of a lucky juxtaposition.  A persistent cough, jetlag, and an understanding boss combined to allow me to be home at 3:00 in the afternoon.  On the way home I heard an interview with Cheryl Kilodavis, who wrote a book (My Princess Boy) about her five year old son who likes to wear pink dresses and sequins.  She was interviewed with two other women, one the mother of a male to female transgendered adult and the other a psychologist, expert in gender identity.  This comes on the heels of a wave of stories in the national media about families where men are unemployed or earning less than their wives or female partners and the effects this is having on us all.  In a country where men, especially husbands and fathers, define themselves by their ability to earn (bring home the bacon if you will), we are told that this is causing real problems.  I heard one call-in show where a man called in to explain that, while both he (a humanities professor) and his wife (a lawyer) were employed and successful, she was leaving him because she no longer wanted to be married to a man who made less than she did.  You could hear the agony in his voice.  I believe this illustrates a very particular moment in the history of gender relations in this country.

Gentlemen, we are behind the curve in terms of redefining traditional gender roles.  Feminism has become entrenched in our national consciousness.  This is not to say that all is well.  There is still a significant income gap, for instance as this graph from Wikipedia shows

(wiki linky)

However, I would argue that it has become generally accepted that women and girls should be encouraged, if they wish, to enter into traditionally male roles.  They may face adversity (ask a female service member sometime if you really think everything is okay), but, in general they will be encouraged by women if not by men.  The reverse is not true.  

Getting back to Ms. Kilodavis and her Princess Boy, there is a very strong backlash against men who choose to exhibit traditionally feminine traits.  In this case, her son wanted to dress in pink lacy dresses.  Her reaction was to try to guide him back to traditional male outfits.  At first she justified it by saying that it was to protect him from discrimination.  Later she came to realize it was her own hang up that caused her discomfort and she eventually came around.  Then she wrote a book and made a splash on TV talk shows, NPR, and in the national media.  Think for just a minute how a book publisher might react to a woman who allowed her daughter to wear jeans, and tried to pitch a book about it.  In 1911 there might have been backlash, but in 2011 we don't even notice.  

This, and the stories of male to female transgendered people are splashy and get attention.  But there is a more subtle distinction here as well.  Jeremy Adam Smith blogs about, and wrote a book about, a trend toward men breaking out of their Don Draper absent father roles, and toward acting as caregivers, sometimes primary caregivers, for their children (so-called, stay-at-home dads being the extreme example).  This is an extension of the call of women, as they enter the workforce, to have partners who share the burdens of homemaking, as they expand to share the burdens of breadwinning.  Again, I am not arguing that all is well in terms of gender equality or that things have shifted the other way somehow.  What I believe is that we have spent so much effort on valuing women's move into the public sphere, so long the sole purview of men, that we have forgotten to value the contributions of women and men in the private sphere, traditionally belonging to women.  It is empowering for a woman to break out of her traditional gender role and become a high-powered attorney, wearing a suit and working 70 hours a week.  When anybody, male of female, prioritizes the private sphere, they feel compelled to justify themselves to the world.

I believe it is past time for a men's movement to answer the advances of feminism.  I emphatically do not mean something along the lines of Robert Bly and Iron John (so eloquently described by Utah Phillips as men getting together and "dragging their scrotums through the underbrush").  This semi-tribal, yuppies-drumming-and-hugging-in-loincloths movement of the nineties just doesn't do it for me.  The exact shape of what I do want isn't completely clear.  I believe we need to re-value "women's work."  Raising children, cooking healthy meals at home, keeping the house clean and orderly, washing laundry...all of these things are vitally important.  It isn't doing anybody any good to work themselves to exhaustion in the public sphere in order to be able to afford to pay somebody else to maintain their homes.  

This is a question that weighs particularly heavy on my mind as the father of a son.  I am also the father of a daughter, which comes with its own worries.  I can say unequivocally though that I see far more role models and support structures for my daughter in the world than I do for my son.  Whatever my daughter does, I expect her to get a "you go girl" from somebody in authority.  I worry about my son though.  He doesn't want to be a princess, hasn't put on a dress in a while, and shows no inclination to wear one to school.  In fact, if anything, he shows more of the stereotypical boy traits than I am comfortable with.  He plays with toy guns, tends toward an aggressive personality, and torments his sister.  Where are the role models in the media or in stories for him to emulate? John Rambo?  Ben Stone of Knocked Up?  Men in popular culture tend to be muscle-bound, testosterone-poisoned brutes or (more recently) overgrown boys who never grew up.  I worry about what is cool these days, and how my boy will react.

My revolution is a quiet one for now.  I am not a good housekeeper, but I cook healthy, homemade meals from scratch.  I try to offset the type-A, career-obsessed modeling of their mother by leaving work early to pick them up when I can, by deliberately choosing a career where I rarely have to work nights and weekends.  I know I am not the only one moving in this direction, but I wonder what is the iconic image of this new change I hope I am only seeing the beginning of.  Perhaps you will see me in the newspaper, burning a jock strap in front of the courthouse.  Until then I will be baking bread, teaching my son to put the toilet seat down, and wondering what comes next.

Talkin' 'bout my generation

I have this very distinct memory from high school.  I was alone in the car with my English teacher and a neighbor on the way home from school.  Both of these gentlemen are of an age with my parents, and are members of the part of that generation who defined themselves by breaking with their parents' social standards and forging a brave new world.  That world is now primarily remembered for experimentation with drugs and new social standards, as well as a revolution in music.  This neighbor, feeling cantankerous perhaps, asked me a question as something of a challenge.  His question was, "What music defines the legacy of [my] generation?"  I was a shy kid.  I mumbled something about The Pixies, as that was the first thing that came to mind. He shot me down dismissively, saying that Art Rock had been around a long time.  He was, of course, perfectly right.  For his generation, Rock and Roll was a revolution that has changed completely the shape of music ever since. 

I suppose it says something about me that this conversation has stuck with me for so long.  I think about it periodically, and have come to the conclusion that the correct answer is very simple.  I was too prejudiced at the time to see it.  He would have hated it and I didn't have the strength of character to argue the point at the time, so I suppose it is for the best that I didn't try to defend it.  The answer, of course, is hip hop and the parallels are striking. 

Both hip hop and rock music have roots in African American music traditions.  Led Zeppelin (the band for which the term "heavy metal" was coined) started life as a blues band.  Rock, of course, has had at least thirty more years to evolve and permeate the mainstream than hip hop has, but when it started, the older generation dismissed it as noise, not music.  Ironically, those same rebellious youths who dismissed their parents as square are now all grown up and dismiss hip hop as noise, not music. 

Unlike rock, hip hop has remained primarily segregated racially.  With a few exceptions (Vanilla Ice, and Eminem standing out among them, each in his own way) artists that most would consider true hip hop remain black or brown (Pit Bull and other Latino artists are examples here).  All it takes is a few minutes on a modern pop music station to hear the influence of hip hop and R&B on modern pop.  I spend as few minutes as possible listening to modern pop music stations, so I am not going to embarrass myself here by trying to list names and songs.  Like rock in the eighties, hip hop aesthetics pervade modern music.  It is my generation's musical legacy.

Perhaps writing this piece will purge my memory of this conversation and allow me to stop making this argument in my head during idle moments.  Of course, it brings up another question to keep me up at night.  I like to think of myself as a pretty cool dad.  My iPod contains plenty of music my parents would find headache-inducing.  I do some judicial editing with the on-off button on my car stereo so that my daughter can indulge her passion for Eminem's Haley's Song (you see, she shares initials with him, and came up with the nickname M&M for herself independently so she feels a certain connection to that bleached-blond, foul-mouthed bad boy of hip hop).  Now that I have freed up some mental real estate, I can spend my time worrying about what the musical legacy of my children's generation will be.  What, in twenty years, will they be listening to that I will consider noise, not music?

A bread post, complete with recipe

I love to bake. For most of the people reading this blog, that will not be any sort of surprise at all, since you all know me pretty well. I started baking as a kid. We didn't buy cookies at the store like some families do. If we wanted cookies, somebody had to bake them. Since I was usually the one that wanted them, I was usually the one who baked them. I developed my own recipe, based off the Toll House recipe, quite young. I’ll share it with you if you ask nicely. I used to make cookies after dinner. I distinctly remember making people pause the movie so I could run into the kitchen to take another batch out of the oven without missing anything. I suppose that was kind of annoying to the other movie watchers, but I always came back with warm chocolate chip cookies, so I can’t imagine they minded that much. By the time the cookies were done, I had usually eaten enough dough that I had no interest in cookies at all. But they keep, and there is always tomorrow.

In college, I lived in a co-op called Columbae. The house was owned by the university, I believe it had started life as a fraternity house. The co-ops were kind of the anti-fraternities. I will just say, forty people (male and female) between the ages of 19 and about 24 (we had a few grad students), living in the same house, making every decision by consensus, and moving rooms every quarter. I will leave you with that image and save Columbae for a future post. It was there that I learned to bake bread. Every weeknight, it was somebody’s job to make a huge batch of bread for the whole house. For a while I held that job, and loved it. I would start prep after the dinner cleanup crew finished (about 8:00 or so). Bread would come out of the oven around midnight. The smell would always attract the many brain-dead students still awake, pulling them away from studying for a much-needed carbohydrate boost. The bread cognoscenti say that you shouldn’t cut it until it has cooled to room temperature (it lets some steam escape, resulting in drier bread). My mothers (yeah, I’ve got two, and a father, again, a subject for another post) believe hot bread will clog your ileocecal valve. I, on the other hand, am a firm believer in cutting one loaf right away, while it is too hot to touch, spreading some butter and honey on a piece, and enjoying it immediately with a cold glass of milk. This moment is about 50% of why I make my own bread.

My bread is, I believe better than what you can buy in the store. At least, I like it better. That is one of the biggest benefits of doing one’s own cooking (aside from saving money, and generally healthier eating). When I make my own food, I can make it to my taste. I like plain whole wheat bread, no nuts or seeds, moist and fluffy. So that is the bread my recipe makes. Just like I tinkered with the Toll House cookie recipe years ago to fit my tastes I have come up with my own favorite bread recipe. It is primarily drawn from Mollie Katzen’s basic bread recipe (I still send people to her hand-drawn illustrations of bread baking when they ask me how to bake) and Nancy Silverton’s everyday whole wheat, combined with everything I have learned in my fifteen year obsession with bread. For those who would like to try it, my recipe is attached below. I intend, someday, to publish it, along with other recipes I have developed. Feel free to use it, alter it, bake from it whatever you want. Please, just don’t publish it as your own. And cut a piece of that first loaf out of the oven, eating it hot however you like it best. Damn the bread cognoscenti and the ileocecal valve (whatever it may be).



Tim’s WW bread:
makes 4 ample loaves

Sponge:
5.5 cups (44 oz.) water
6 cups (26 oz) WW flour
2 tsp salt
1 tsp instant yeast*

Mix:
4 tsp. instant yeast
4.5 cups (19 oz.) white WW flour**
4.5 cups (19 oz.) bread flour***
2 eggs
½ cup sugar or honey
2/3 cup oil
4 tsp. salt
2 cups cooked grain (optional)****


The Sponge: I learned to bake bread from Mollie Katzen’s Enchanted Broccoli Forest. If you are familiar with her recipe, you may recognize some of it in this recipe. She suggests using a sponge, mixing part of the flour with a little yeast and water and letting it rise before mixing it with the rest of the ingredients. This is a technique called a pre-ferment, used by professional bakers to improve the flavor and rise of bread. Traditional hearth breads use a pre-ferment (called, variously, a poolish, mother, chef, or biga), often allowed to rise overnight. I included the sponge in this recipe because I have tried cutting this step out (I love cutting out unnecessary steps, as we will see in a minute when we get to the kneading bit) and found that my loaves rose significantly less. So, mix up the sponge ingredients (should make a wet dough), and allow to rise in a warm place, covered with plastic wrap or a clean towel. Be sure to leave plenty of room between the covering and the sponge, as it will rise and can make a mess of your towel if there is contact. A minimum of an hour is a good idea. Longer periods (up to 10 hours or so) are fine, depending on your baking schedule. If you are going to go longer than about 3-4 hours, I suggest letting it rise in the refrigerator where the cool temperature will slow things down.

The Mix: Take all of your sponge and put it in a bigger bowl (unless you used a nice big bowl in the first place). Add all of the ingredients of the mix except the flour first, mixing well. Some people caution about not letting the salt touch the yeast before it has been mixed with the other ingredients (they believe the concentrated salt can kill the yeast cells). I have not found this to be a problem, but it is pretty easy to add them to opposite sides of the bowl. Add the flours and stir until thoroughly mixed. If you have made bread before, you may find that this dough is wetter than you expect. Don’t worry it is designed that way. A wetter dough (within limits) makes a lighter loaf.

Kneading: This is one of the places where I firmly disagree with most home bread recipes. The famous “No Knead Bread” recipe from the New York Times a few years ago popularized a method called folding used by professional bakers, especially for wetter doughs, for years. I believe this method can be used for any bread recipe and will save a lot of time and effort (or electricity if you choose to knead in an electric mixer). If you don’t believe me, or really like the stress release and forearm workout of kneading, just knead this dough for about 10 minutes, adding a little flour to keep it from sticking. Use as little flour as possible, as too much will get you back to that denser consistency, and a denser loaf.

For those who are willing to step off the cliff with me, here is what you do: Plan to let this bread rise for about two hours (this will vary a bit depending on the freshness of your yeast and the temperature in your house) For the first hour, every twenty minutes, sprinkle the counter lightly with flour, pour the dough out, and fold it into thirds (as you would fold a letter). Rotate it 180 degrees and fold it again. Return it to the bowl to continue rising. After the third fold, just let it rise unmolested for the next hour. It should about double in bulk by the end of the rise. If it is done sooner, skip to the next step. If it is rising slowly, put it in a warmer place (on top of the dryer, while a load is drying, is a good place, or on top of the refrigerator).

Divide the dough into 4 approximately equal pieces (you can, of course, cut this recipe in half for 2 loaves). Oil 4 loaf pans lightly with spray oil or butter. Shape the pieces into loaves and place them in the pans. Oil the top of the loaves, cover with a clean towel or saran wrap, and leave in a warm place to rise. When the loaves have risen such that the part of the loaf contacting the pan is about even with the top, slash the tops with a sharp knife (serrated works well), and place in a preheated 350F oven. If you are pressed for time, about when the top of the dough is level with the edge of the pan, slash the loaves and place them in an unheated oven. Allow it to preheat to 350 with the loaves in there. They will continue to rise as the oven heats, cutting part of the time off of your baking day. Bake until the loaves are golden brown and sound hollow when thumped (the best way to test this is to use an instant read thermometer and bake them to between 180 and 190 degrees). Remove them from the pans, and place on a wire rack to cool. The bread cognoscenti say that you shouldn’t cut it until it has cooled to room temperature (it lets some steam escape, resulting in drier bread). I, on the other hand, am a firm believer in cutting one loaf right away, while it is too hot to touch, spreading some butter and honey on a piece, and enjoying it immediately with a cold glass of milk. This moment is about 50% of why I make my own bread.

* I call for instant yeast (also called bread machine yeast sometimes). The only difference between this and you traditional Active Dry yeast is that the instant is pelletized in smaller pellets at the factory, allowing it to be mixed directly with the dry ingredients. If you can’t find it (big box stores or places that cater to caterers often sell yeast in 1 pound bags for far less than your regular supermarket) Active Dry yeast is fine. Use about 1/3 more yeast (there are fewer living cells in Active Dry than instant) and mix it with a small part of the water (about ½ cup) to dissolve before adding the other ingredients.

** White whole wheat flour is whole wheat flour milled from white wheat berries, rather than red wheat, which is what most whole wheat flour is made from. Because it has a thinner seed coat, it does not have the strong flavor most people associate with whole wheat flour, and produces a lighter loaf without losing the nutritional value.

*** I use bread flour in this recipe because it has more gluten than all purpose flour, which helps make up for the high proportion of whole grain flour. If you can’t find bread flour, all purpose will work (though your loaves may be a bit denser) or you can add a little bit (up to ¼ cup) vital wheat gluten to compensate. Alternatively, you can substitute more white whole wheat for the bread flour (up to the whole amount for a 100% whole grain loaf). A little added gluten, again, will help with the fluffiness of your bread.

**** I used to try to use uncooked grain here, and some might work (cornmeal for instance, adds crunch without absorbing a lot of water). I ran into trouble with uncooked oats and bulgar, in particular, absorbing water out of the dough and changing the consistency of the bread. Feel free to experiment here if you have more patience than I did. You can also add things like a cinnamon sugar swirl, dried fruit, nuts, etc. I like my bread pretty plain so I have written the recipe this way.

Insulation (or the Secret Origin II)

This is another piece that I found on my hard drive. It covers some of the same territory as the last post, but I think I actually like it better. Rather than revise history by replacing the last one with this, I thought I'd post both.

There are a number of things that could be used to sum up my childhood. Each of course would highlight a different part of it. One of these things is insulation. For many years I lived part time with my father, in his unfinished house. By unfinished I mean that the structure was all there, but either money or gumption had run out before the finish work had been completed on interior. So the walls were framed and the insulation was in them, but the drywall that would have completed the inside of the walls in most houses had never been put up, let alone spackled, painted, and trimmed. For many years, in place of wallpaper or the textured walls painted one of the many hues of off-white beloved of interior decorators, when I glanced at a wall or stared at the ceiling I saw the shiny backing of fiberglass insulation decorated with the name of either Johns-Manville or Owens-Corning. It is a testament to the amount of time I spent in this particular occupation (staring at the wall or the ceiling, that is) that I still recall both of those brand names with a familiarity usually reserved for contractors and their employees some twenty-odd years later.

But that is only one way in which insulation can be used to sum up my childhood. As I said, I only enjoyed the warm and silvery embrace of Johns and Owens roughly half of the time. The other half of my life was spent with my mother and stepfather living in a teepee. Now the teepee was the dwelling place of the plains Indians in this country before we white folks killed and enslaved them and turned it into a country. Never mind that the plains Indians, who lived in that great arid middle part of what is now our country (after all, they are mostly dead, how are they going to contest ownership-and when they do, whose courts do the deciding?). My parents decided to pitch their teepees in the temperate rainforest of the Northwest. I don’t think they spent too much time thinking about the wickiups the Pomo built in our part of California, which were more like thatched huts with willow, oak, and reeds. Our teepees were not made of skins as the originals were. Remember these were hippies who tended to frown upon the killing of animals. So our teepees were made of canvas. Which brings me back to the subject of insulation. Canvas, especially wet canvas is one of nature’s crappiest insulators. In fact, there is something called a swamp cooler where one wets a cloth and wraps it around the thing to be cooled. The evaporation of the water makes quite an effective cooler.

We were in the Pacific Northwest, however. I like to include Northern California in the Pacific Northwest which I realize stirs anger in the hearts of Oregon and Washington. You can tell I lived there because I don’t consider San Francisco to be Northern California. It is clearly in the rough center of the state. But most non-Californians and a disturbing number of southern and central Californians seem to believe that San Francisco is a few miles from the Oregon border. As evidence for this I present the stickers plastered all over pickup trucks in Monterey which proudly proclaim “NorCal” in gothic script. I will refrain from further comment on this atrocity and simply refer the owners of those trucks to a state map.

Whatever we call it, northern Mendocino county shares a Mediterranean climate with the Pacific Northwest. This means that the summers are lovely, warm, and clear. The winters , however, are damp and miserable. Luckily, there isn’t much evaporation to cause that evaporative cooling I mentioned. There is a lot of rain however and teepees are not well designed to deal with rain. So we added a second roof of plastic sheeting hung inside the top of the teepee’s cone in the winter, when it rained for 9 months of the year. I remember looking up at the water pooled inside. I am pretty sure that after a while it started to turn green. We also heated our teepees with wood stoves. We did use that lovely invention the chimney, so the smoke was almost all vented out the side of the teepee. The single layer of canvas was far less effective that Messrs. Manville and Corning. So most of the smoke went out the chimney and most of the heat went out through the walls.

We heated bricks on those stoves, wrapped them in towels, and placed them in the bottoms of our sleeping bags before bed. Yes, for that half of my childhood spent in the teepee, I spent every night in a sleeping bag. It seemed perfectly normal at the time. As did the brick-and-board shelves that occupied the edges of the teepee upon which we kept our things. The lovely part about this was that there was a little triangle of extra space between the vertical back of the shelves and the diagonal wall of the teepee. This was a great place for a boy to hide. Unfortunately it was also a perfect place for a cat to leave the entrails of eviscerated rodents. In the summer they kind of dried up and mummified. I can’t actually remember what happened to them in the winter. I think that may be for the best.

So now, years later, I live in a house like everybody else. I have drywall, plaster, and a lovely layer of off-white paint on my walls. Owen and Johns are a thing of memory and the heat from the gas furnace stays neatly inside the house. The toilet is in the bathroom, not 200 yards up the hill in a little shed built over a hole in the ground. I don’t miss the rodent entrails, the long walk through the snow to the toilet in the dark, or the potential for lung cancer represented by the fiberglass insulation. I do miss walking in the forest by starlight. It can be done if you let your eyes adjust and feel carefully with your feet. Where I live now there is too much light pollution to see the milky way, let alone let your eyes truly adjust to the dark. I wonder how much of who I am is the result of little experiences my kids will never have. And I wonder who they will be as a result. And so I raise a nostalgic glass to Johns, Owen, and all the little red ants attracted by the mouse guts behind the shelves. Then I take a hot shower and crawl into a bed between sheets, with no need of a heated brick and realize I don’t miss them that much.

The Secret Origin

I had a very small circle of friends growing up so it wasn't until high school, or maybe college, that I realized that the way my family lived wasn't exactly normal.  For instance, I knew that most Americans don’t live in teepees but I'd never lived any other way so I didn't have anything to compare it to.  Never mind that the teepee was designed by the plains Indians, who lived in that great arid middle part of  what is now our country (after all, they are mostly dead, how are they going to contest ownership-and when they do, whose courts do the deciding?).  My parents (more precisely, my mom and my then-stepdad) decided to pitch their teepees in the temperate rainforest of the Northwest.  I don’t think they spent too much time thinking about the wickiups the Pomo built in our part of California, which were more like thatched huts with willow, oak, and reeds.  And so we had to make a second roof of plastic sheeting hung inside the top of the teepee’s cone in the winter, when it rained for 9 months of the year.  I remember looking up at the water pooled inside.  I am pretty sure that after a while it started to turn green

We didn’t really have a kitchen the way other people understand the term.  We had “Darkest Africa.”  In “Darkest Africa,” there was a table, made from one of those industrial spools telephone crews roll telephone cable off of.  A refrigerator, or more properly, an icebox.  It was an old Frigidaire, not plugged into anything of course, into which we would put big 5 pound blocks of ice in the summer, which kept our food cold.  There was a real gas stove, hooked up to a propane tank.  There were some counters around the outside.  I can’t remember how they were made, but I think the top was bare plywood.  We had plastic tubs into which we poured water to wash dishes.  We had to collect the water from a hose spigot some 50 feet away, and heat it on the stove if we wanted to wash out dishes in hot water.  The floor wasn’t qute dirt, it was a mixture of soil and concrete.  You see my parents (I am just going to use this somewhat imprecise term, unless it is critical to the story) didn't want to leave a mark on the land when they left.  I went back years later to look and they were right.  There is only a flat spot where I used to live.

My memory is a little fuzzy about the exact size of the teepees, blurred by the years and the fact that the things around us get smaller as we get bigger.  I think they were about 20 feet across at the bottom.  My step brother (who we will cal Ari) and I had one.  Our parents had another about 100 feet away through the woods.  I described the kitchen already.  Our living room was a fire pit with a brick grill built next to it for cooking my step-dad's specialty, "Chicken Goo-La-Lee."  In the summer, part of our dinner was usually cooked on this grill, and we would often eat around the fire.  In the winter we sat on the floor and ate on a low table in the teepee I shared with Ari.  During the day we would play outside.  Somehow in my memory it was always summer, so I honestly don't know what we did in the winter.  I remember a lot of Uno.  Maybe we played Uno all day.

There is, of course, another room in most modern homes.  That room we euphemistically call the restroom, W.C., powder room, or bathroom.  That room really has two separate purposes, and in teepee land, we separated those purposes in two different places.  Baths were taken in the bathhouse (think cowboys, not the Bowery or the Castro).  It was one of two permanent buildings on the property that had not only running water, but that pinnacle of modernism, hot running water.  Of course, it didn't have a regular bathtub and certainly nothing like a shower.  I used to take baths in one of those big galvanized metal tubs they use to water horses and cattle.  I remember the fitting they used to plug the hole in the side had a hard, square, plastic piece on it that stuck into the tub.  You had to be careful to watch out for that.  

There was also a toilet in the bathhouse for any citified visitors.  We hardier folk used the outhouse, which was literally a wooden structure over a hole in the ground.  I have developed extensive experience of outhouses in my life, and this was the most primitive.  Not even a seat to sit on, you had to squat over the hole and hope your legs didn't cramp up before you were done. 

Looking back, I wonder what my life would have been like in a regular house, with 4 walls, plumbing, and central heating.  I think about raising my own kids and how different their lives are than mine was.  I like to say that I have experienced the industrial revolution in my life time.  I've gone from kerosene lamps and wood-fired cookstoves to iphones, wireless internet (I refuse to call it wi fi), and blogging.  Sometimes I think I would fit better in an earlier, simpler time.  But that isn't the time I live in.  I live in a world of exponential technological change.  Of fast international travel, instant communication, information saturation, and catastrophic oil spills.  If it ever comes crashing down around our ears, I'm ready to go back to the wood-burning stove.  Until then, I'm off to update my Facebook status.

A blog? Really?

I never thought I would be the sort of person who had a blog.  When I think blog I think either of the semi-professional types who have particular insight (think Daily Kos) or the sort of personal journal that has inane details of someone's personal life (think the worst Twitter stereotype with no character limit).  I recently read a couple of personal blogs that made me change my thinking.  They were structured more like the kind of topical essays I used to love but haven't written since college.  The sort of essays that might be published in Harper's or The New Yorker but without the competition and editorial review.  The sort of essays that get turned into This American Life episodes.  The sort of essays I have been meaning to write, and even have drafts of hiding in a file on my hard drive.  I hope creating this will give me incentive to write more often.  I hope that it will help those family members and friends I just moved away from stay in touch a little better. 

A note about the title:  When I was growing up, my father wrote a column for the local paper, which he called "Down Our Road."  I have gone down a pretty different road, but I would like to think I am continuing that tradition.  Depending on your age and connection to popular culture, you can call it an homage or a shout out to my dad.