New Blog at New Domain
A Slow Motion Move
Happy Thanksgiving
David Horowitz: Verminous Anti-Intellectual Hack
Incompatible Cleansers
Falcon & the Sailor Boy
Stalinists Come Out of the Woodwork
Oregano, Thyme, Savory, Peppers & Potatoes & Plato
Feeling a Draft
Militant Christianists
Inculcating Christianist Ignorance
Agent Orange Reparations
Nancy Bauer (A Slow Motion Move)
jd (A Slow Motion Move)
Nancy Bauer (A Slow Motion Move)
Pascale Soleil (A Slow Motion Move)
MJ (David Horowitz: Verminous Anti-Intellectual Hack)
alan (Happy Thanksgiving)
Dan Biston (Stalinists Come Out of the Woodwork)
jd (Stalinists Come Out of the Woodwork)
Dan Biston (Stalinists Come Out of the Woodwork)
jd (Stalinists Come Out of the Woodwork)
Oregano, Thyme, Savory, Peppers & Potatoes & Plato · Nov 16, 10:33 PM
We have oregano & thyme growing in our yard as perennials & I always harvest a bunch in the fall & dry it for winter use. I dry the herbs by cutting the stalks into three or four inch lengths & shoving them into brown paper bags: within a week you can start giving the bags a shake to get the leaves to fall to the bottom where you can easily harvest them. We don’t have enough room or, actually, the right sort of site, for a real vegetable garden, but this year I planted a bed of various peppers, mild to hot, which we used fresh in the late summer. As the first frost approached, I cut all the peppers & brought them in the house to dry. The easiest way to dry peppers, for us, is to tie them on a string & hang them near the wood stove, but I bet the warm air register from your central heating system would work nearly as well.
I do most of the cooking around here & on nights when I don’t feel like doing much we often have “breakfast for dinner,” which means home fries & eggs. (Language note: Growing up in California, I would have called the potatoes hashbrowns despite the fact that they retain a cubed shape & are not grated or smashed.) I cube the potatoes in into a pyrex bowl, add salt & olive oil, then microwave them on high for six minutes, pausing at three minutes to give them a stir, which prevents clumping. In the old days before we had a microwave (we were late adopters), I would have parboiled the taters. I dump the potatoes into a preheated nonstick pan — there should be enough oil in the bowl that you don’t need to add more — & let them brown slowly. About halfway through this process I add whatever herbs & spices I’m going to use & let everything get nice & melded together.
I didn’t learn this method from a book or even from another cook, but from eating at what we all called “the Greek place” on University Avenue in Seattle when I was an undergraduate in the early 1970s. There, you could get a plate of sliced potatoes that had been baked, then fried & dusted with oregano. Add a bowl of soup & a beer & you had lunch for under two dollars. Those were the days. I loved those potatoes & when I began cooking for myself I found a way to recreate them without a deep fryer. I also make a version of this dish using left over baked potatoes, but I don’t like it as well.
Anyway, tonight’s herb mixture was particularly wonderful: oregano, thyme, a stove-dried bird pepper, & a few shoots from a little pot of winter savory growing on the kitchen window sill. I chopped everything up fine & sprinkled on the potatoes as they browned. The result was very satisfying. The pepper hit is more subtle than you get with commercial red pepper flakes. Not that there’s anything wrong with (reasonably fresh) red pepper flakes.
So next year I have decided to grow peppers in pots in every sunny corner of the yard. My current small supply is not going to last till Christmas, alas. One of the great pleasures of living here on the river is that I can tend these plants. I’m not a gardener, really, but a kind of caretaker. Well, I couldn’t stop the thyme & oregano if I wanted to, now that they’re established. And given the circumstances here, on this little acre, I don’t want to be a gardener. I’m happy that I can have these perennials to cook with.
I suppose all this rusticity is a little fake, considering that both Carole & I earn our livings by professional academic jobs. But Horace wasn’t exactly a simple farmer, now, was he? But then, the farmer, grubbing in the muck, less often has the opportunity to experience the pleasures of the table; the wage slave experiences such pleasures even less often than the farmer. (Note: I live in a place where there are actually small farmers managing to make a slim living.) Tonight’s dinner of potatoes has got me thinking about what counts as luxury & the difference between luxury & pleasure.
My freshmen have been reading More’s Utopia this week. With this text, I tend to focus on themes rather than details: the consequences of draconian punishments, rhe reasons for having laws, the implications of deciding to organize a society one way rather than another way. For out discussion a couple of days ago, I made copies of that section from The Republic in which Socrates says to Glaucon, in effect, “Oh, I get it. You’re not interested in the ideal state, you’re interested in the luxurious state. Well, that will require an army.” The ideal state would be ruled by a kind of unmilitaristic caste of Spartans & presumably everyone else would emulate the philosopher-king’s plain way of life. My less thoughtful students, when asked about their own notions of an ideal society, simply produced gated communities protecting luxury for the few; my more thoughtful students struggled to figure out how to have reasonable pleasures while managing some kind of justice.
It’s a dilemma for their teacher as well. I could accept being a philosopher king, or perhaps I’d settle for being an unacknowledged legislator.
* * *
Joseph — I’ve always tried to have lots of herbs in my garden (sage, chives, thymes, parleys, lavenders). I like being able to pinch and smell them as I do other things in the garden. I have a simple garden sage that I bought for a $1 at a grocery store here that I have divided into numerous additional plants by sticking a limb in the ground in the fall and letting the branch root over winter.
Since I moved to Indiana, I’ve missed having large clumps of rosemary. They rarely survive our winters.
— don 11/17/2006 11:11 AM #
Don, I grow rosemary as little bonsai & use the trimmings. They certainly would not survive our northern New York winters. I bring pots of sage indoors, too, though I should experiment with putting clumps in some sheltered spots in the yard. I love that the thyme & oregano grow like weeds. This was the first year I planted a lot of peppers & I am delighted with the result.
— jd 11/17/2006 11:55 AM #