Wild comet chase!

Have you heard about the comet neowise?  I guess it's been haunting the early morning hours for a while now, but decided to check out the night scene on the 12th of July, 2020, and I was determined to capture it on film.  Get out and look, it is a good show but it will be gone as of the 22nd!  I saw hale-bopp and Kawasaki back in 1997, or at least I thought I did, but this is way cooler though I thought I had read it wasn't as good?  Weird!  Definitely have a pair of binoculars or a telephoto lens for the best show.  I had read that it was 'right after sunset' but full dark would be a better description. I actually despaired of ever seeing it, I went out looking the last three nights, but between low clouds and obstructions on the NW horizon, I didn't see much.  Last night I took all my junk out (spotting scope, tripod, binoculars, folding chair, camera and two lenses, flashlight, bug proof clothing) and sat watching, waiting, hoping, but again, no comet and low clouds, ugh!  But Jupiter was bright on the opposite horizon so I got the spotting scope out and had fun with that, trying to take pictures through a spotting scope with a telephoto lens in the dark, yes it was as awkward as it sounds!  Saturn was just to the left as well, and that was amazing, with the 60x spotting scope I could actually see 4 of Jupiter's moons and Saturn's rings, and yes, I did get an awful picture of Jupiter and 3 of its moons (or 1 big bright blob and 3 specks) but it was fun and cool.  Then I looked in the opposite direction and there it was!

Yes, my pictures are pixelated (I'm photographing with a telephoto lens in the dark!) and there are overhead wires, but it is still way cool.  I remember those 1997 comets as just a slightly oblong star, this baby looks like what a comet should in one's imagination!  Just seeing it was amazing, it was also fun to try photographing it (please don't use your phone?!), I've captured lightning and fireworks and a planet, now a comet!  Definitely get out the binoculars, but find the Big Dipper after full dark and follow it straight down to the NW horizon, look for a blurry bit of light, and there you go!  We won't see this particular phenomenon again, and who knows when we'll get another to equal it, so be wild, skip an hour or two of sleep and go star gazing!

The Long-sought 'Basic Bread' Recipe, Gluten-free Version: Loaf Bread, Buns, Pizza Crust, Fry Bread!

In the good old days, when wheat was still a thing at my house, I used to have what I called the basic bread recipe, and used it for everything from French bread to buns to fry bread to bagels and pizza crust, it was the same dough but a different technique.  Enter the gluten free days, when I need a very specific recipe for everything, and then it has to be modified and tweaked until it uses what I can eat and have on hand, a tedious process indeed!  But I think I've finally found my new basic bread recipe, one I have used for loaf bread, buns, pizza crust, and even fry bread!  It is a batter, not a dough, so the technique is strange at first but it gives very edible results when I had all but despaired of 'real bread' again!

Basic Bread Recipe: Gluten Free:

1/2 cup each millet and oat flour (brown rice flour works too instead of millet)
1 cup each tapioca and corn starch (white rice flour isn't a great substitute, potato starch might work?)
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp instant yeast
3/4 tsp salt
2 tsp xanthin gum
1/4 cup sugar (I like brown for bread, white for pizza crust, add brown to liquid ingredients)

Combine in a bowl and whisk together, set aside.

Beat three egg whites into stiff peaks and set aside.

In the bowl of a stand mixer (regular beater) or a bread machine, add:

3/4 cup warm water
1 tbsp vinegar
1/4 cup oil (and brown sugar, if using)

Add the dry ingredients and the egg whites and beat until smooth, it will be a thick batter.  Scrape sides as needed.

For loaf bread:
Spray with cooking spray and flour a loaf pan, spread batter evenly into pan, cover with plastic wrap and place in a warm oven to rise for 1 hour, bake at 350F for 48 minutes (may vary for your oven).  Turn out of pan and cool, wrapped in a towel on a wire wrack.  Cool completely before slicing.  Freeze anything you won't use immediately.

For buns:
Spray a cookie sheet with cooking spray and divide batter into 12 globs, using wet fingers, shape each glob into a hamburger or hot dog bun shape, for hamburger buns, it should look like a peanut butter cookie.  Cover loosely with plastic wrap and let rise 20-40 minutes in a warm, moist place.  Bake for 15-20 minutes at 350, until cooked through.  Cool completely, slice and freeze or serve.

For pizza crust:
For thin crust, spread on two big cookie sheets (sprayed with cooking spray), spreading as thin as you can, sort of like frosting a cake.  Cover with a towel, let it rest 15 minutes, bake in a 425 oven for a few minutes until bubbly and solid, top and broil until cheese is golden otherwise cool completely and freeze, to use, just top it frozen and bake at 385 until hot and gooey.

For thick crust, just use smaller pans (it puffs up a lot!) and let it rise a little longer.  I use my cast iron skillets.  Bake before topping though!

For fry bread or elephant ears:
Spread dough out on two large cookie sheets (sprayed!) as for pizza crust, cut each into 9 squares, smoothing edges and making a little space between squares with a rubber scraper.  Allow to rise 20 minutes, covered.  Meanwhile, heat an inch or two of oil in a skillet until hot.  Using a wet pancake turner (mine was silicone) push in the sides of a square until it is about half the size, and awkwardly scoop it up using the turner and your wet hand, drop it into the oil, 'stretching' it out as you do so (the first one will be messy!).  Immediately poke several holes in the mess using a sharp pointy oil and heat resistant object (I used a meat thermometer, but try a kabob skewer or a chopstick or a meat fork?), to allow the hot oil to seep through and cook the entire the blob through without burning the edges (like the hole in a donut but tiny).  Turn frequently and removed when golden brown, drain on a wire rack and eat hot, either with sugar or with your favorite taco toppings.  I used an 8 inch skillet and did one at a time, they didn't take long to fry but are putzy!

Homemade everything?

I've been making my own bread for years, though as I mentioned in a previous post that this seems something of a pandemic fad as well, but even I am discovering necessity is truly the mother of invention.  It is strange what I can get and what I can't.  Mayonnaise is apparently on the list of things that are currently hard to find on local shelves, at least at a reasonable price.  So I tried my hand at making my own, I'm personally a fan of Miracle Whip and looked for a recipe for just that, it was pretty easy and used stuff I always have on hand, we'll see how it turns out.  I've also been trying to make fake cheese, which hasn't had near the success.  My first attempt was basically bacon flavored jello.  Yesterday's trial had a promising texture (fresh mozzarella) but it didn't really melt or taste like anything, though one attempt did yield a promising parmesan substitute; we'll see what happens!  I also discovered the margarine I've been using instead of butter has whey in it (which is why I can't do real cheese!) and locally I can't find any of the 'plant butters' so I've been trying reliable recipes with peanut butter and or canola oil instead, everything but the frosting has turned out, but that was because I added cocoa powder which made it really stiff, I had to hand shape a toupee for each cupcake but it tasted great!  With google to supply recipes, what can't you make at home?  And hopefully you can still eat the failures!  Well, everything except the fake cheese...

Birthday Custard Pie?!

Gluten free baking is quite an exciting animal in its own right, but then throw in a recipe transcription error and it really gets interesting!  I made this cake the other day, I halved the recipe and substituted my own flour blend (1/2 cup each tapioca and corn starch, 1/4 cup millet) and it made wonderful cupcakes!  Then my little son decided he wanted a yellow cake for his birthday, and I thought I had my recipe.  I ended up with a gluten free impossible custard pie!  It actually was quite tasty but it wasn't a birthday cake.  I had transcribed the recipe wrong, leaving the sugar at 2 cups but halving everything else, oops!  I tried again and it was delicious and now we have a memory to laugh at for every birthday here on out!

All we like cows?

I've had a few classes in epidemiology, I have spent a significant portion of my career diagnosing and managing contagious disease in a population setting, albeit my patients moo, but herd health is herd health, whether you are dealing with chickens or people.  While I appreciate everyone's concern and efforts to protect the health and lives of the most vulnerable in this epidemic, from the start I think we've had it all backwards.  Hiding out at home won't do squat to fix this problem, it only kicks the can down the road; it won't go away while we cover our eyes and pretend it can't see us if we don't look at it.  The theory of 'flattening the curve' might work if we had some 'herd' exposure, but we aren't flattening anything, we're avoiding exposure altogether and are just elongating the line leading up to the exponential peak.  The minute we leave home, the virus will start spreading again, as viruses do, this plan does nothing but put off the inevitable, unless we plan on staying home forever, which might work with chickens, but people aren't content to live like that.

Anecdotally I heard in school that Iceland has a native breed of cattle that will die if exposed to foreign cows because the creatures are so isolated that they have never been exposed to the common gamut of bugs every other cow in the world takes for granted, their immune systems will be overwhelmed by the usual microbial flora endemic to your average bovine.  That seems to be the current theory at work in many parts of the world: stay safely in Iceland with no exposure to foreign cattle.  But this can't last forever, that theory only works because there are Icelandic farmers willing to make hay and support the beasties in their isolation, how do we maintain a society in complete isolation?

My first year of school, the teaching hospital was full of West Nile patients, every stall was filled, neurologic horses everywhere.  Since then I have seen one case.  One case in fifteen years.  We could have kept our horses in mosquito proof stalls their entire lives, though it would not have been much of a life for the horse and kind of makes owning horses pointless, but they would be safe!  They developed a vaccine and natural exposure instilled immunity in the population; the very next year it was as if it had never happened, when the previous year it was the very end of the horse world, at least if you listened to the talking heads, and it was easy enough to believe, seeing all those flailing horses and full stalls, but the next summer those same stalls were empty and nobody seemed to remember a year ago it had been the end of the world.

I am not saying that we should just go back willynilly to life as usual with no precautions whatsoever, far from it, but thinking this will just magically go away if we hide at home long enough is ridiculous, that isn't how viruses work.  Protect those most at risk, use common sense and practical measures to slow spread (but not stop it entirely), but putting the entire country on house arrest only delays the inevitable.  Should we hide at home until a good vaccine is developed?  No.  It can take years to get a good, safe vaccine to market, and even if we wait that long in anticipation, who says we can develop a good or effective vaccine?  Corona virus vaccines in other species are lousy, the flu vaccine isn't great, there's a good chance we won't ever have a decent vaccine for this particular bug either.  There's my two cents, I'm just a cow doctor, so what do I know!

Gluten free sandwich and toasting bread!

BLTs, Grilled Cheese sandwiches, toast, fresh bread...do you remember those days?  Well, they don't have to be over, after a lot of searching and trial and error, finally here is a bread you can quite literally sink your teeth into.  It isn't starchy or stiff or gritty or cake-like or otherwise characteristic of the worst of gluten free, it doesn't even taste like cardboard!  Here's the original recipe  where I found the genius idea of using whipped egg whites to help make it an airy, fluffy dream when you can't have wheat!  You can slice it thin, you can freeze it, you can toast it, you can eat it plain (warm!) or make a sandwich, everything you expect from normal bread!  It is a batter bread, I've tried the whipped egg whites in a gluten free dough and it doesn't do much (too heavy?).  I use my bread machine but a heavy duty stand mixer is good too, by hand or a light mixer might not do the trick but you can try.  I used the flours I like/can eat, feel free to try your own mix if you wish.  The original recipe calls for a lot of tapioca starch and the first time I tried it, it was almost rubbery (still delicious) and shrank quite a bit as it cooled.  Substituting some corn starch and oat flour adds a bit more texture and structure to the loaf, and reduces shrinkage, enjoy!

In a bowl, mix with a wire whisk to combine:

1 cup tapioca starch
1 cup corn starch
1/2 cup millet flour
1/2 cup oat flour
2 tsp xanatham gum
3/4 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 tsp instant yeast

In another bowl whip 3 egg whites until they form stiff peaks.

In the bowl of a heavy stand mixer or the pan of a bread machine place:

3/4 cup warm water
1 tbsp vinegar
1/4 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup oil

Add the dry ingredients and the beaten egg whites and mix until smooth (3-5 minutes kneading in the bread machine, scraping down the sides occasionally).  It will be a very thick, sticky batter.  Scrape into a greased and floured (I used corn starch) bread pan and cover loosely with plastic wrap.  Let rise 45-60 minutes in a warm place (I turn the oven on for a few minutes and then turn it off).  I bake mine for 48 minutes in a 350 degree oven.  Remove from pan and let cool completely (I wrap it in a towel and place it on a wire rack) before slicing and enjoying.  If there is any left, slice and place in the freezer for later use.

Return of the Ancient and Worshipful Art of Homemaking?

For many people, the current shut down of entire economies and nations has them stuck at home, without work or school or unnecessary shopping trips or restaurant visits to interrupt things.  While many are fleeing into the virtual world for solace and comfort, I wonder how many will rediscover the art of homemaking.  Not much has changed at our house, both parents are in 'essential' lines of work.  My son is home from school but otherwise it is pretty much business as usual, more like summer break than anything else.  Who knew I lived in self-quarantine on a regular basis?  We cook our own meals, we watch our own kids, I even cut our hair!  For our household, this crisis hasn't been much of a change out of our regular routine, but then we live at the backend of forever, the nearest big box store is 90 miles away and with our food sensitivity issues we rarely eat out at our town's two restaurants!  But what of families with full-time working parents whose kids are in daycare or school most of their waking hours?

If they don't each venture into their own virtual reality or are institutionalized through boredom or cohabitant induced madness, what is to come of them?  Will we rediscover game night?  Will we rediscover baking cookies or bread?  Will we discover a hundred projects around the house we can accomplish with a screwdriver and YouTube?  With food supplies in a weird state of flux and out-to-eat not an option, will we discover how to cook with what we have on hand?  With so many unemployed or underemployed, will we rediscover frugality, budgeting, and living within our means?  With no social outlet but distant contact with our acquaintance, will we rediscover neighborliness and the wonder of a good conversation?  Will this weeks long 'snow day' force us all to reconsider the important things in life, namely the non-things?

At out local grocery store, there was no bread or milk initially (last week there were no eggs but plenty of milk) but so too was the yeast and flour wiped out.  I could understand the pasta and sauce, the boxed dinners, but yeast?  Could people be actually making their own bread because they couldn't just buy it?  How cool is that!  Don't get me wrong, this whole mess is no fun from one end to the other, and the suffering, economic strife, and chaos it has caused hurts, a lot, but on the bright side, it may just be the wake-up call our weary modern life needs.  Just stop, put life on pause, remember that life doesn't have to be hectic, busy, or exhausting.  Your house can be a home, a haven, a place of comfort and fun and fellowship, not just a place you collapse after another hectic day, tossing aside your backpacks and briefcase to fall into bed and race out the door next morning, day after exhausting day.  So what are you doing during this enforced 'sabbath?'  Are you rediscovering the joys of a simple life?  I hope so!