[Above photo: One of Portland’s grand early 1900s mansions facing the Western Promenade and the Fore River. A recent ad offered a 1400sq ft, 3 bedroom apartment in one of them, with its own turret, for $2500/ month. Why buy?!!!]
2 January 2022
I can recall thinking that if I could only last to 2020, that would be enough life for me. Ha! I’ve moved the goal posts and am looking at 2030. It seems incredible, when I recall that my father and his father each died suddenly of a heart attack at 55yo. It is a gift, this life. A misery for some much or most of the time. But Hope, that ephemeral candle, distant in the darkness, is inextinguishable for most and we stumble, trudge, glide, or sprint onwards.
Given the breadth and number of my good friends and my regular attention to written media, I am stunned—hurt, even— that no one in the past 5 years has kept me abreast of the single most important discovery of the 21st century. Or is it an invention? No, I don’t mean Tinder or Tik Tok or tiny cameras that make Ansel Adams proud of every photo.
I mean, AVOCADO TOAST. Combining familiar ingredients—-bread must be 10,000 years old, and avocados, who knows? Then a topping of salted toasted seeds, or a touch of hummus, perhaps some tapenade—-marshmallow fluff, the imagination soars. So delicious, so nutritious. So handy. Sophisticated. Clever. Intuitive. You get the point. It is currently competing with smoked kippers for my favorite. And, wonder of wonders, the avocado boom in the US and Mexico, that is probably an ecological disaster, provides plenty of those egg-shaped fruit at reasonable prices, even in these northern climes.
My virginal experience was at local coffee shop 10 days ago. A friend and I had tried to lunch at Szechuan Kitchen, a local eatery that my daughter recommended. The night she and Sadie stayed here, an employee tested positive and the place was closed. 10 days ago it was only open for take-out and the curbs on Congress Street right now are hard and cold. We moseyed along the street toward Noods, an all-purpose noodle shop. Closed. Then my friend spied a coffee shop. I had passed it many times, but thought it was a shared work-space thing. On the menu—You guess!—was avocado toast. So that is what manna tastes like! I wanted a second but they had run out. I’ve been back once and have made it at home twice. The perfect handy lunch. I didn’t even feel like a cigarette afterwards.
I see the direction in which this is trending. I made a loaf of olive-walnut bread to bring to my brother’s home for Christmas dinner. I employed a “starter” and was guided by the Tartine bread book my daughter generously gave me for Christmas. I am a voracious, but very slow reader. A tutor of mine at Harvard suggested, putting a kind spin on it, that I really savored the words of a novel, say, as if I were reading poetry. Ha! Plodding, I think. Anyway, this book, written by Chad Robertson, has a lot of interesting autobiography. By the time I finished that part, I needed to get on with the baking. I plunged in, reading the directions for each step as I went. After assembling the ingredients, there is a 25-40 minute “rest”. Then, with an addition of a bit of warm water and the salt, the 3-4 hour “bulk fermentation” follows. An initial shaping and a 20-30 minute “bench rest” is followed by the “final rise” of 2-3 hours.
I’m used to making bread with instant yeast. If I followed his directions, I’d be 3-4 hours late for supper, not a thoughtful move. I cut things short and turned, folded, and baked, which yielded a magnificent-appearing loaf, dense as a brick. (It was delicious toasted with some butter, its appeal definitely due to the olives and walnuts.)
After feeding the starter—It is kind of like having a house-broken pet that isn’t very social—daily for a week or two, I wanted a little return on my effort. So I began, again, yesterday, letting the dough rest and rise for over 4 hours. Although the starter seemed lively enough, the dough didn’t rise at all. I’m sure I have done something very wrong. Anyway, I had purchased a large box of yeast; I proofed a tablespoon-full with warm (80 degree) water and a teaspoon of sugar. It was foaming like crazy in 10 minutes, so I mixed it with the dough, added a bit more flour, and let it rise. Did it rise?!!!! A dusting of rice flour on the top, eversion into the skillet half of my Dutch oven, sesame seeds liberally sprinkled on top, and baked to perfection. Very tasty, however, not sour.
The bread at Tartine is the best I’ve ever had. Simply perfection! Clearly Chad is maniacal, exceeding “obsessed”, about his bread. I don’t have the patience to nurse it like he does. My mind begins to wonder about shortcuts. If the sour flavor is from yeast and bacterial fermentation, which yield citric and acetic acid, could I just add some of each to my mix and use Active Dry Yeast for a similar result? No doubt, someone has tried this. I shouldn’t be publicizing it, lest you visit and sample my loaf and this knowledge with spoil it for you.
This is part of what I do, socially quite isolated, in the Maine winter.
I have gradually learned to appreciate the maturity that goes into crafting and negotiating legislation. It is so easy for me to join the stridents of the “Radical Left”—this couplet always kills me, since it sounds like cruel, desperate people trying to do things to harm others, which is an apt description of the Far Right these days. As they say, Congress at its best is like a sausage factory, requiring compromise and patience. Reading Heather Cox Richardson’s essay this morning about Lincoln’s thoughts and actions leading to the Emancipation Proclamation was an enlightening experience for me on the complexity, ambivalence, and growth of his mind. It was like looking into a microscope on the first day of Histology lab in medical school, trying to get the damned slide into focus. Lincoln gradually achieved the focus, that “all men are created equal” actually means that slavery, its economic benefits to the slave-owning class notwithstanding, was a deep moral wrong. And I was taught that history was mainly the dates of battles and the names of the winners! https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/FMfcgzGmtFHHhfsXWSlXWGWDGngJdSGW
Good talks with family and friends over the past few days have buoyed my spirits. Ari is kayak camping for 4 days in the Everglades. She says it is incredibly lovely: 150 pelicans in a flock, many manatees swimming under their kayaks, lemon sharks, and lots of fish in the mangroves. She sounds very happy and likes her guy’s parents.
If you don’t know about it, the Criterion Channel is a find! At $99/year it rivals Netflix yet has an amazing permanent and rotating archive of films. They are doing French New Wave starting this month. In their permanent collection are the Bergman, Satyajit Ray, Kurosawa, Fellini, De Sica works that were the yeast of my adolescence and early adulthood. Jeanne Moreau. Sophia Loren. Swoon! And, of course, Marcel Pagnol’s amazing Marseille Trilogy.
Happy New Years to all. Health and prosperity, love and laughter. That about covers it.
A Psychiatrist in Myanmar 