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Not to See the Eclipse

Road Trip II: Up to Portland

Summer jobs when you’re in college are a grind  — hot, low-paying, mostly boring. Chasing shopping carts around in a parking lot. Xeroxing rolodex cards. Interpreting cheeseburger orders in sophomore-level Spanish through the drive-thru window. Our youngest Lee has been pulling 5:30 am shifts most of the summer, unloading the trucks at Homegoods, schlepping rugs and mirrors around for hours. If they’re lucky and get a full shift, then they  spend the second half smiling at customers who give long elaborate stories about why they have no receipt but want to return this ceramic dog with a chip in it.

It seemed to me Lee deserved a road trip before heading back to school, so we were determined to take one. A close friend lives just up in Portland. That’s only two days drive. Synchronize your watches! Pack up the car! We’re heading north!

Continue reading “Not to See the Eclipse”

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Doomed to Repeat It

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. – George Santayana

The future is down a tunnel or off in the horizon, beyond where the eye can see; the past is a grainy photograph, blurring as years go by. We aren’t learning lessons from the past, and we stubbornly seem to be ignoring the future consequences of our current actions. Does it matter? I have been watching the appalling present, contemplating the past, and imagining the future while swinging back between bouts of hope and dread.

We can’t even get quotes right. I had always heard Santayana’s famous expression quoted as: “Those who do not learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them.” That could be just me paraphrasing, but I don’t think so. If you Google “doomed to repeat it” (as I did to chase down the quote’s proper origin), you get references to this saying. Some attributed to Edmund Burke. And probably Einstein. Continue reading “Doomed to Repeat It”

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Cinnamon: The Ordinary Exotic

20170809 spicedrawer

Spicy doesn’t mean what it used to mean when I was growing up. In the bland cooking from the midwest and the 1970s, spicy referred to garlic, pepper, and perhaps oregano. The famous “spicy meatball” Alka Seltzer commercial was both in praise of and a warning against partaking of strong flavors. Forty years later, Americans have come to embrace spice. We have spice trends – the hottest four spices in 2016 were apparently sumac, turmeric, mace, and za’atar – I don’t make this stuff up, folks. We are a literal melting pot of cuisines imported from so many cultures. But the most ordinary spice I grew up with also turns out to be one of the most medicinal, ancient, sought after, delicious, and versatile ones from around the world: cinnamon.

Cassia and cinnamon verum
Most savvy cooks know cinnamon is the inner bark from a species of tree. Some cooks (or expert Googlers) know the distinction between an herb and spice is that herbs come from the leaves and spices come from the seeds, barks, buds, or other parts of the plant. Cinnamon is grown by cutting the stems down to ground level every couple of years in a process called coppicing. Repeatedly cutting the stems leads to a thicker proliferation of new shoots, which is why groves of such small trees and shrubs are also called copses. When cinnamon shoots are harvested, the outer bark is scraped off and beaten off with a hammer, and the inner part pried off with a small crowbar; the inner bark comes off in long (meter) strips which dry in curled rolls called quills. Continue reading “Cinnamon: The Ordinary Exotic”