Food and Wood

I worked as a volunteer for the Obama campaign in 2007.  The weekend before the election between he and John McCain I went to Easton, Iowa in Madison County, where the famous covered bridges are, and went door to door for a weekend passing out campaign material and engaging targeted voters.  As I drove home, I had a feeling he would win.  And when he did, I was relieved.  I purposely turned away from politics for some months after that, taking a break as his administration got settled.  I wanted to see how he shaped the ongoing American debate and created change.   

I didn’t have that feeling this past election, and even after the results of the vote were clear the dread continued.  Only now am I able to breathe, sit back, and let Biden turn policy around to solve the obvious problems that were created over the past four years.  There was a huge pent-up demand for competency that is being filled.  I still watch Lester Holt and Rachel Maddow at night, but I’ve vowed not to constantly interrupt my thoughts with worries about our future. 

There are big thoughts we need to share and talk about, like politics and social change, and then there are small private thoughts that we rarely discuss.  I think that’s unfortunate.  We get a lot of comfort from simple things, and we need to share them too, to connect on another level.  Poets have always known that, and other thoughtful people in music and the arts.  But representing simple thoughts need not be confined to them.

Although American life as seen on the news has been violent and unpredictable, for many of us our everyday lives have become slow and certain during this pandemic.  At least mine has.  I’ve turned inward, and it’s not all bad.  I have time to think.  I look more closely at the mundane, the every day, the basic.  I find myself caught up in things I connect with daily.  Like food and fuel. 

I haven’t had breakfast in a restaurant for nearly a year, not that I often ate out in the morning.  I get up early, before it is light most days, and make my own breakfast.  I alternate between two meals, steel cut oats and eggs.  Simple foods I know.  I mix it up a little.   

Steel cut oats, however, don’t lend themselves to great variety.  Although I grew up eating Old Fashioned Quaker Oats cooked by my Mom, I now buy Bob’s Red Mill Steel Cut Oats.   Steel cut oats are also known as pinhead oats or Irish oats.  Bob’s steel cut oats contain a single ingredient, whole grain organic oats. 

Prominent on Bob Moore’s plastic bag packaging is “The Golden Spurtle” which is the trophy given the top prize winner at the World Porridge Making Championship held annually in Carrbridge, Scotland.  Bob won the award in 2016.  Heady stuff for steel cut oat aficionados, winning that golden spurtle, which is an ancient style oatmeal stirring stick, best used in the right hand in a clockwise motion. Pick any topic.  With Google, you can dive into it as deeply as you want. 

I got hooked on steel cut oats after my son Dean gave me a can of John McCann’s Irish oats from some fancy Chicago grocery.  McCann’s oats won the award for “Uniformity of Granulation” at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893.  Objective affirmation in the form of international awards seems to be a thing with steel cut oats.  I kept McCann’s can and store Bob’s oats in it.

Steel cut oats cook for a long time.  Get them to a boil, turn down the heat, and cook them slowly for 20 minutes.  It’s a one to four ratio, a quarter cup of oats to a cup of liquid.  I boil them in half water half milk.  Pinch of kosher salt.

Just the oats would be good, but the opportunity to stew something else with them for twenty minutes opens up a world of possibilities.  OK, not a world, but several. 

Dried fruit plumps up great with the oats: raisins, prunes, dried apricots, pineapple, or cranberries.  Or fresh fruit thrown in with ten minutes to go, blueberries, apples, blackberries, peaches, raspberries, whatever you like, or whatever you have.

While it cooks, I make coffee. After the oats fully cook down, I put them in a bowl, squeeze a small circle of South Ottawa Township honey on top, and cool them off with a splash of cold milk from my glass.  I eat them while I do the Chicago Trib crossword.  Mornings are good.

On the flip side (pun intended) eggs are much more versatile.  I get eggs these days from the Nettle Creek farm where I go weekly to buy raw milk.  I see the chickens up close walking around the barnyard.  I cook their eggs every way; over easy, sunny side up, over hard, or poached.  I hard boil them and make egg salad from time to time and spread it on toast for a quick bite.  I’m about to try a recipe in the sous vide for foolproof soft-boiled eggs you can keep in the fridge and use whenever you choose. But my favorite way to cook eggs is in an omelet.

I’ve gotten deep into spontaneous omelets.  This recipe involves standing in front of an open refrigerator door and choosing ingredients from what you see before you.  Leftovers play heavily into spontaneous omelets.  Uneaten vegetables from a previous stir fry are ready-made and terrific, or a handful of raw spinach braised in a hot skillet covered by the mix of beaten eggs and a dribble of milk.  Feta cheese, or any cheese, even cottage, goes especially good with spinach or any omelet.  I grate cheese and keep it handy in the fridge just for that purpose. 

My omelet vegetables of choice are yellow onions and peppers both sweet and hot.  I always chop at least one serrano pepper into every spontaneous omelet I make for myself, sometimes two.  Two will wake you up if you find yourself feeling groggy. Poblanos complement serranos nicely.  Bell peppers are fine.  No need to be picky. 

I usually skip or go light on meat in my omelets.  The other day I added four sardines to a spontaneous omelet.  They were leftover from a previous day’s sardine, onion, and mustard on whole wheat sandwich.  I don’t recommend sardines.  Turns out there is good reason sardine omelets are not on the menu of your favorite diner.  Liver sausage doesn’t work well either.  Spontaneity and the risk of failure sometimes go hand in hand.  Diced ham is good, as is Spam.  Chicken is just OK.  I skip beef altogether.

When I add meat, it is usually leftover bacon from BLT’s or Italian sausage from a previous night’s celebration of pasta and red wine chopped small and sprinkled in amongst the cheese and veggies.  I’ve learned to add meat to omelets sparingly or serve it on the side with beans, rice, toast, or tortillas. Omelets are an homage to eggs, and meat tends to hog all the attention.  I top off every spontaneous omelet with a strip of red Sriracha sauce. 

So that’s breakfast.  Cooked in a solitary way, before the sun comes up, with nothing but NPR and the Tribune as companions.  I love that time.  Just me, the stove, and the food.  Oats one day, eggs the next.  Done right, you think about little else for a good half hour.

In winter, another common sustainable commodity joins my daily pandemic routine.  Wood.  I eat breakfast and go to the shack.  When I get there it's cold.  Food fuels the body, but wood makes winter in the shack bearable. 

I have a small wood burning stove next to me in the shack.  The first order of business when stepping into the shack is to get the stove hot and the shack warm.

Although tiny, you would be amazed at how much wood you can burn in that small steel cube in one heating season.  Especially a season in which you never leave town.

Over the summer, with the help of generous friends, I assembled nearly all this winter’s firewood.  Last spring, I put out a single mention of exhausting my fuel supply and immediately got help.  A woman in Grundy County was cleaning out barns and sheds and gave me leftover wood posts from long removed fences.  A friend in the neighborhood gave me pine scraps from a wood deck he replaced with a patio.

Another friend in Serena Township lives on six acres of timber and heats his whole house with wood.  He fells dead trees, cuts their trunks into stove length logs, splits them into manageable pieces, then dries them to produce maximum heat.  He gave me limb wood he usually ignores or uses only for bonfires.  About the size of my wrist, some as big as my calf, they work perfectly for my little stove.  I store them in lengths that fit under the roof of my woodshed and cut the wood into 5” lengths as I need using a battery-powered chain saw in a jig.

To complement the wood, I have for several years been given Henry County pinecones and Rutland Township corn cobs.  The pinecones when placed on top of half a brown paper bag, and topped off with kindling, are perfect for starting fires.

The Rutland Township corn cobs are best for finishing fires at the end of the day.  They burn hot but quickly.  When I’m about to go back to the house, but the shack is cooling off, I get a burst of heat to finish off the day by filling the stove with cobs.  They start with a whoosh, burn like crazy, and are soon ash.

A word about the wood.  My friend in Serena Township with timber has burned wood from his property for 30 plus years and yet his property looks just as wooded as it was when he first showed it to me.  The limbs he gives me are mostly oak without bark, but mixed in there is cherry, hard maple, and hickory.  He measures the moisture content of his wood and burns it only when it is less than 20% and more than 10%.  Wood that is too wet does bad things to your stovepipe.  Too dry and it's not worth the effort.  Very few BTU’s.  I bought a moisture meter.  Everything anyone has given me is good to go.

Two kinds of wood stand out.  The posts from Grundy County were mostly round yellow pine but mixed in were some weathered gray posts with slots in them, the kind you slide rails into giving that nice old look of a split rail fence.  I had no idea what they were.  I ran low on kindling and figured to split those pine posts into small pieces.  On a whim, I cut into the non-descript posts with the slots.

I knew as soon as I smelled the sawdust come off the chain saw they were cedar. The shack is sided with tongue and groove cedar.  The woodshed is roofed with cedar shake shingles given to me by McConnaughhay & Sons Roofing.  Cedar resists rot and insects and lasts damn near forever.  It’s lightweight, fine-grained, splits like a dream, weathers beautifully, and requires little or no care.  It seems almost sacrilegious to burn it.  But when you do, when you cut it in small pieces and split it into thin slabs, it ignites at low temperature and is perfect for starting fires.  I feel blessed having it.

Mixed among all of it were some hedge posts.  I knew they were hedge because I grew up around those posts.  They were the oldest fence posts on our farm.  As I got older, we began making fence with steel posts, especially electric fence, but the old posts, which Dad always used for corners, were hedge.

 We used them to hold up woven wire around the sheep lot and barbed wire around the cow pastures.  When buried in the dirt the bottoms rarely rotted out.  Some of them came from trimmed hedgerows that formed that farm’s first fences.  The hedges not removed grew into trees long ago and produced light green hedge apples as big as softballs.

I’d never cut into one of those posts.  I knew them as whole things, heavy gnarly gray posts that resisted mightily the staples and nails we pounded into them.  As more hedge posts were removed and replaced by steel, we stacked the old posts around a tree in the sheep lot and burned them for fall wiener roasts.  They burned hot.

I was given four hedge posts.  They were hard for my small Stihl chain saw to cut through.  The snow around the sawbuck was covered in yellow sawdust.  The proper name for hedge is Osage Orange.  It’s a dense heavy wood that is 30% heavier than oak, and as difficult to split as it is to cut.  But when I reduced it to chunks that fit into my stove and added them to the coals of a hot fire, I realized how good they were as firewood.

They burn extremely hot and last longer than any wood I’ve ever burned.  I counted 28 rings on the cedar post I burned.  That’s 28 years as a living tree and God knows how many more as a fence post.  I’ve decided to save the hedge for the coldest days of winter.  I love having three posts left. 

I bought my stove from a small company called Navigator Stove Works.  Before I did, I talked to Andrew Moore, the guy who designed them on Orcas Island in the San Juan Islands off the coast of Washington.  I gave him the dimensions of the shack and asked if he thought his smallest model would heat it sufficiently in a Northern Illinois winter.  He did a little research, called me back, and told me he thought it would if I used 2x6 wall studs and insulated it well. 

Andrew intended his stoves to be used mostly for the small cabins of sailboats but found they are often used by owners of tiny shelters like the shack.

“Don’t be afraid to run that stove hard.  I designed it for everyday use.  Burn as much wood as you want, but back off if the steel glows red.  That’s too much.”

“Can I burn coal in it?”

“No.  Coal or pellets put out too much heat, and you could damage the steel.  You need a different stove for that.  But I think you can burn any type of wood there is.”

While I burned the hedge, I watched my stove closely to see if any part of it glowed.  It didn’t.  But I’m sure it was the hottest that stove had ever been.

Everything I’ve written about today; from oats to hedge, pinecones to corn cobs, milk to honey, and peppers to eggs, is sustainable.  The trees, plants, and animals all keep replacing themselves.  They are gifts from the earth.  I feel part of that on winter mornings, part of a cycle that will continue long after I’m gone. 

It’s good to get your head out of your…politics, stop scrolling and stay away from the news feed. Try it.  There’s a world of wonder in it.  It could bring the relief you need.  There will be a time to voice your opinion and do what you can to shape the debate, if our country finds ways to have civil discourse again, but it doesn’t have to be your full-time job. 

Make yourself a bowl of steel cut oats, throw together an omelet, burn some wood.  It works for me.