Old Hippie's Garage

One of my students, of Norwegian heritage, admitted in class the other day that she knew about lefse. “Every time my dad makes it,” she said, “I have to eat a little piece. It’s OK but it’s not my favourite.” Another student chimed in and said, “If you don’t like your dad’s lefse, he’s using the wrong recipe.”

True, that — even for just potato lefse there are probably as many different recipes as there are cooks. Lefse ain’t just potatoes. There are hard lefses and soft lefses, baked and fried, cooked with fillings and filled with things later. There’s even a dish called “Lefse Kling” that is taco fillings rolled up in a lefse.

Since I spent most of last Sunday making lefse (and since the recipe isn’t the secret to good lefse), here’s mine:

3 cups potatoes, steamed in their jackets and ground through a meat grinder when done (4-5 good sized spuds)

4 tablespoons olive oil

1/2 teaspoon salt

1 tablespoon sugar

1/4 cup dairy or non-dairy milk

1 1/4 cup flour

Combine potatoes, oil, salt, sugar and milk and mix with a handheld pastry blender. Add the flour and cut into the wet mixture with the pastry blender. Do not knead or stir! Cover the bowl and put in the refrigerator to chill. Using an amount of dough about the size of a tangerine, roll out paper thin. Grill on a lefse griddle preheated to 500F.

Now the secrets:

First, put a piece of clean canvas down on your work surface, and start rubbing flour into it until it won’t hold any more. That will let you roll out the sticky dough, without working too much into the lefse and making it tough.

Second, get or make a “lefse stick” to turn over the thin dough. A 1/4-inch thick piece of oak strip about an inch wide and 24 to 30 inches long is good. Sand down one end to a gradual flat point that tapers from about halfway along the stick. Round off the end. Use this to pick up the dough and turn it over as you roll it out. They are available by mail order, or just google it and see what it should look like.

Third, you don’t need it but it’s helpful to have a lefse rolling pin. Google that, too. Pleny of lefse has been made with the good old fashioned regular pin, so use that if that’s what’s in the drawer.

Fourth, a large round electric griddle WITHOUT a non-stick coating is good. A cast-iron skillet is OK if that’s what you have. Don’t use non-stick coatings like Teflon because high heat not only damages the coating but it puts all kinds of toxic crap in the air that you’re breathing. It’s toxic enough to kill pet birds, if you have one in the kitchen. The Bethany Heritage Grill is the gold standard. Some lefses grill at 350F, but potato lefse cooks at 500F.

Fifth, use a floury potato. Most recipes call for Russet or similar. I like to use organic Russian Blue potatoes from our own farm — not only are they locally grown (just down the hill!) but they make a wonderful purple-coloured lefse with a real potato-ey taste.

Take your little ball of dough and start rolling it out on the cloth. “Start round to end round.” You want a round lefse, not one that looks like Alberta. Practice makes perfect, and of course even the ugliest lefse will still taste good. A ball the size of a small tangerine should roll out at least 12 inches across. That’s seriously thin. Use the stick to turn the lefse over so you roll both sides a couple of times at least.

Place your lefse stick just on top of the left edge of the lefse, flip the edge up and over the stick and roll the stick three times to roll some of the round onto it. Pick up the round wrapped on the stick, flop it on the griddle and unroll it flat. Cook the first side about 20 seconds, then slide the stick under the middle of the lefse, pick it up, turn it over, and unroll it on the griddle. Let it cook about a minute or so, watching carefully for any spots that might burn. Flip it one more time to brown the first side a little. It should have little toast-coloured spots on it here and there, no burnt places.

Take the lefse off the griddle, and put it flat on a tea towel. Now roll up the tea towel with the lefse in it (like a jelly roll). Roll out and cook another lefse, unroll the tea towel, overlap the new lefse on the first one, and roll up the towel again.

This recipe makes between 10 and 15 lefse, depending on how much dough you use for each. I average around 12 lefse that can be as big as 16 inches across. If your pan is smaller, that’s your size limit. Store the lefse, still rolled in the towel, inside a plastic bag in the fridge, and eat it up within about four days. (That’s not hard!)

Lefse can be eaten spread with butter and sprinkled with sugar, or with any kind of filling you have. It’s definitely not a simple bread to make, but hundreds of years of Norwegian grandmothers will smile kindly on you from on high. That’s gotta be a good thing.

This recipe will make three loaves of bread. Toast for breakfast, a sandwich for lunch, bread with soup for supper — you’ll eat three loaves inside two weeks. I make this every two weeks, year-round. It’s adapted from a recipe in The Laurel’s Kitchen Bread Book. I grind my own whole wheat flour, but you don’t have to do that. Regular whole wheat from the store is coarse-ground, so mix it half and half with enriched white flour to keep the bread smooth.

Ingredients:

9 cups fine-ground hard whole wheat flour, or half-and-half white flour and regular whole wheat flour

1 tablespoon salt

1/2 cup warm water

2 1/2 teaspoons dried yeast

2 1/2 cups warm water

2 tablespoons + 1 teaspoon honey

2 tablespoons + 1 teaspoon oil

Directions:

Stir the salt into the flour. Stir the yeast into the 1/2 cup of warm water. Stir the honey and oil into the 2 1/2 cups of warm water. (Vegan? Use 2 tablespoons of sugar instead of the honey.) Pour the liquids into the dry ingredients and stir until too stiff to stir. Lightly flour a flat surface and turn the dough out on it. Knead 600 strokes.

Gee, that’s easy. You don’t have to know what dough “should” look like. Just knead it 600 strokes. I count by 20’s, sprinkle on a little more flour if it’s getting sticky (it will), and keep going. Add flour a little at a time. Putting down a whole bunch of flour at once will work too much flour into the dough. Just use enough to keep it from sticking to your table or counter.

When you’re done kneading, make the dough into a ball and put it in a large bowl, cover with plastic wrap or a pot lid and let it rise until doubled in bulk. (Test it: wet your finger and gently press in to the first knuckle. If the dough fills in the hole, it’s not raised enough. If it sighs, it’s too raised but just do the next thing anyway. The hole should just stay in the dough.) This takes about three hours in a room about 18C. You had some studying to do, right?

Turn the dough out and gently press the gas out of it. Form it into a ball and put it back in the bowl, cover up, and let it rise again until it doubles in bulk again. It’ll take about half as long as last time.

Turn the dough out and gently press the gas out of it. Divide into three equal pieces. Grease three loaf pans with cooking spray, and press a piece of dough into the bottom of each one. Press firmly in, and make sure it fills in the entire bottom of the pan. Cover the pans with plastic wrap and let the bread rise in the pans until it has filled the sides all the way up and is arching up over the pan in the centre.

Preheat your oven to 425F. Put an oven rack in the next-to-lowest slot. Take off the plastic wrap (gently) and slide the loaf pans into the oven. Bake at 425F for 10 minutes, then turn the oven down to 325F and bake for 40 more minutes. When they look done, gently shake the pans and see if the loaf “rattles around” a little inside the pan. If so, it’s done. Put them on a cooling rack, brush the tops with oil and let them cool completely before you cut into them.

I bag them up in old bread sacks and keep them in the refrigerator. They stay fresh and won’t mold for at least two weeks.

Lately I’ve been thinking about how many of our students are struggling — harder in some ways than I did when I was a starving student. I know what it’s like to be hungry and to have to make the choice for every dollar between paying for my education, paying for a place to sleep or paying for something to eat. There are two big differences I see: students are paying more now for their educations, and they apparently don’t know the skills of cooking for themselves.

One thing I want to do is encourage students to cook for themselves. It’s seriously easy. Buy a crock-pot. They cost about twenty bucks. Fill it about 2/3 full of diced potatoes, chopped onions, sliced carrot, some frozen peas and corn. Put in a little salt, pepper and garlic. Add water or broth up to about 3/4 full. Plug it in. Go to class. Come home to hot soup for supper. You’ll have enough leftovers for at least one and probably two more suppers. It doesn’t even require a kitchen, just a plug-in.

Learn to cook dried beans: Soak them overnight. Drain them and put them in the crock pot the next day in the following ratio: One cup of soaked beans to two cups of water or broth. Add some diced onion, salt, pepper, and a little garlic. They won’t get mushy in the crock pot, but they will be done. And let’s be honest about the issue of farting — if beans make you fart you’re not eating enough beans. They’re cheap protein and they fill you up. Your system will get used to them. Until then, see if you can play “O Canada” all the way through, including the high notes. Reward yourself with a cookie.

And learn to bake bread! Simple bread is…well…simple. Look in the Bake-up section for a simple recipe I call “600 Bread.” Soup and bread: cheap, wholesome food. Never boring — George Carlin said, “Soup is wet food.” That puts it into perspective!

Not everything that gets in here is sweet stuff, but this is. As you might suspect, there’s some back story:

My paternal grandmother, Emma Jane Hays, used to make these cookies for her family. As you will see from the original recipe, it used ingredients produced on a large farm operation in Illinois. I think these were very likely my Dad’s favourite cookie. Quite by accident one time, my mother told me the story. When she and Dad got married in 1943 they had a pretty traditional set of roles in the union. Although my dad was unusually strong for women’s rights and civil rights for blacks, and mom was highly educated and had a career as a laboratory scientist — inside their marriage they played things pretty straight for the times. I’m not sure why, maybe they thought it was a grand joke on the universe.

At any rate, Mom knew Dad liked sugar cookies, so she made some. Then she made the mistake of asking whether they were as good as his mother’s. (Note to new brides: bad idea!) Dad, being fundamentally honest, said that he believed his mother’s recipe made better cookies somehow. Being told she didn’t measure up to the ideal of Mother, or at least feeling that way, Mom did what any scientist would do: she collected every recipe for sugar cookies she could find and set about making batch after batch to see if she could find the secret. None of them were good enough.

Finally, in desperation, she wrote to Grandma and asked for her recipe. The secret was revealed. Secrets, actually — Grandma made these cookies with lard. That made sense on a hog farm where lard was common, and of course in the early part of the 20th century we hadn’t invented cholesterol yet, so it was perfectly safe. She also brushed melted butter on top of the baked cookies, and sprinkled on more sugar. Mom did all that and Dad was happy. Many years later when I came along these became one of my favourites as well. Mom’s basic Calvinist streak didn’t let her make them too often, however, because “you’re not supposed to live on them” as she would always say when I wanted more than one.

So here’s the original Grandma Emmie recipe, followed by the recipe I use now. The orginals, as I recall them made by my grandmother, combined the meatiness of lard with the saltiness and creaminess of the butter and sweetness of crunchy sugar between my teeth. Mom modifed the recipe to use butter instead of lard, which she found more palatable and Dad apparently didn’t mind. As a vegan with flexible ethics I have tinkered with the recipe myself, and I find this version tastes as good as my mother’s.

The new cookies may be vegan, but remember that they still have all the fat and sugar even though it’s ethical fat and sugar, and you’re not supposed to live on them. Eat them in moderation, and enjoy them to the full.

Grandma Emmie’s Sugar Cookie Recipe

2 cups white sugar

1 cup lard

3 large eggs

5 tablespoons milk

1 tablespoon baking powder

3 cups flour

1 teaspoon vanilla

pinch salt

Grandma’s original instructions say, “Chill, roll, 350, 15 min.” Obviously, anybody who’d make these cookies knew all the basic stuff that we all learned when we learned to cook. On the assumption that you don’t know all the basic stuff, let me translate that for you:

Cream lard and sugar until fluffy, then add eggs, beating well after each. Beat in vanilla and milk. Sift together flour, salt and baking powder. Mix in to make a soft dough. Chill dough in the refrigerator for two to three hours. Preheat oven to 350F. Working with half the dough, roll out on a floured board to about 1/4 inch thick. Cut with 3-inch round cookie cutter. Place cookies on cookie sheet lined with parchment paper or sprayed with non-stick spray. Bake 15 minutes or until just lightly touched with brown at the edges. Remove to cooling rack, brush with melted butter and sprinkle generously with more sugar.

The Old Hippie’s Sugar Cookie Recipe

2 cups organic fine raw sugar

1 cup/2 sticks vegan margarine

3/4 cup soft tofu, whizzed in the blender

1/4 cup soy milk

1 tablespoon no-aluminum baking powder

1 teaspoon organic vanilla

pinch salt

3 cups unbleached organic white flour

Chill. Roll. 350. 15 min. (grin) I’ll just copy and paste the instructions here, in case someone wants to print off only this much…

Cream margarine and sugar until fluffy. Blend tofu with soy milk and vanilla until smooth. Add blended tofu, beating well. Sift together flour, salt and baking powder. Mix in to make a soft dough. Chill dough in the refrigerator for two to three hours. Preheat oven to 350F. Working with half the dough, roll out on a floured board to about 1/4 inch thick. Cut with 3-inch round cookie cutter. Place cookies on cookie sheet lined with parchment paper or sprayed with non-stick spray. Bake 15 minutes or until just lightly touched with brown at the edges. Remove to cooling rack, brush with melted margarine and sprinkle generously with more sugar.

Enjoy in a kind, loving, ethical way!

OK, suck it up. Stop yer whining about fruitcake. It’s like kickin’ yer sister — too easy.

I was raised to respect fruitcake. Oddly enough, lots of Canadians appreciate Christmas cakes and puddings courtesy of our European and UK heritage. Americans, not so much. To me it’s good food. I have somewhere around a hundred recipes for different kinds of fruitcakes. I think what I like about them is that they’re dense, sweet, chewy — they satisfy when you bite them, instead of just deflating and leaving you with royal icing in your teeth.

This is one I call “The Best Damn Fruitcake in the World.” It was a recipe of my mother’s, and my all-time favourite. (Though, to be honest, I’ve rarely met a fruitcake I didn’t like. The main offender was another of my mother’s. I’ve conveniently destroyed the only copy of the recipe.)

Plan to make this one at least four weeks before you want it. It will benefit from some time to sit and meld the flavours. I tend to use rum to “age” my cakes. Mother used brandy. You don’t really need either, if you’re making a cake for someone who doesn’t want the alcohol — like a Muslim or non-drinker. I always warn people about it; I’ve had several recovering alcoholics tell me in all honesty that it’s not a problem for them, and I’ve had other people request a non-boozy cake if I offer.

You can make this recipe vegan by simply using 7/8 cup of vegetable oil to replace the butter (or replace with vegan margarine); replacing the honey with a scant 1/2 cup of raw sugar; and whipping 250 g of soft tofu in the blender until smooth to substitute for the eggs.

The Best Damn Fruitcake in the World

Cake:

1-cup butter

½ cup sugar

½ cup honey

5 well-beaten eggs

1-½ cups flour

1 tsp. salt

1 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. allspice

½ tsp. nutmeg

½ tsp. cloves

Fruit:

¼ cup flour

1 lb. Pkg. mixed candied fruit

1-cup raisins

½ lb. pitted dates

¼ lb. walnuts

¼ lb. pecans

Red and green candied cherries and pineapple: use whatever quantity desired.

Halve the cherries and cut the pineapple.

Dredge the fruits in the above 1/4 of a cup of flour.

Directions:

Cream the butter and sugar.  Add the honey.  Add eggs and beat well.  Add 1 1/2 cups of flour sifted with the dry ingredients. Pour the batter over the fruits and nuts and mix well. (If you don’t have a big Kitchenaid mixer, use a big honkin’ bowl and a sturdy spoon. Good upper body workout when you’re making a triple batch!)

I use the little foil loaf pans that will hold about 2 cups. Spray the pans with PAM or other cooking spray, then spoon the batter into the pans. If using a kitchen scale, I will tare the scale for the weight of an average pan, then add 450g of batter. Do not flatten…it’ll melt and sink on its own while it bakes.  Bake in a slow oven, 250 degrees for 3 to 4 hours.

Place a pan containing a quart of water on the bottom shelf of the oven while baking. Cakes baked with water have a greater volume, and are more moist and better texture, and a smooth shiny glaze.  If decorations of almonds and cherries are used, place on cakes at the end of 2 hours.

When the cakes come out of the oven, let them cool for about 10 minutes in the pans, then carefully turn them out of the pans and let them finish cooling completely on wire racks. Some people like to wrap them in rum or brandy soaked cheesecloth. I prefer a more direct approach. I use a 60cc veterinary syringe and gently dribble 15-20 cc of black rum into each cake. I wrap the cake in clear wrap and then put the wrapped cake back in the little foil pan. Ideally fruitcakes for Christmas should be made and aging by (American) Thanksgiving (Nov. 24).

Store in a covered container in a cool place. Properly stored and covered, they’ll last indefinitely. I’ve had 25-year-old fruitcake. It was amazing. If you’re worried about the temperature control or whether it will last until you’re ready to eat it, you can store the cakes in the freezer. Make sure they’re very well wrapped or they’ll freezer burn. Set them in the refrigerator the night before you serve them, to defrost.

A couple of years ago my wife and I were driving to Winnipeg from Kamloops. When we’re on the road, we usually stop in some town around lunch time and buy buns, sandwich supplies, fruit, and a package of cookies or something. Neither one of us likes to take too much time off the road when we’re traveling, and besides, eating restaurant food twice a day is bad enough.

So, there we were, out in the middle of Saskatchewan somewhere, and we rolled into some little burg that had a Safeway store in it. In the bakery section we found some flat buns for sandwiches that were really good. Firm enough to chew but soft to the bite, with cracked grains and cornmeal as well as sunflower seeds. They were about the size of an English muffin, but clearly they were “buns” not “muffins.”

I got to thinking about them while I was driving. They had holes in both sides, and though they were yeast breads they were not puffy. Then I got it — the holes were from a “dough stamp” or similar pricking device. As a baker who looks for weird bread I knew that many of the Middle Eastern and Asian breads are “stamped” just before baking. This allows the bread to rise, but when punctured just before going in the oven it leaves holes for steam to escape, keeping the bread relatively flat.

When we got home I hauled out one of my favourite baking books, “Flatbreads and Flavors” by Jeffery Alford and Naomi Duguid. I found a recipe for stamped bread called “Uighur Nan” — and modified it a bit to make this recipe you’re about to read. You will need a “bread stamp” or simply a fork to prick the bread. I cut a 3-inch circle of scrap oak board and hammered in some finishing nails. I screwed the whole thing to a piece of dowel for a handle. It’s ugly but it works.

You’ll also need a “pizza stone” or some unglazed quarry tiles for the lowest rack in your oven.

Flat Sandwich Buns

2 teaspoons dry yeast

2 1/2 cups warm water

5 cups Robin Hood “Best for Bread” blend, or a mixture of white flour with cracked rye, cracked wheat and whole flaxseed.

1 cup cornmeal

2 teaspoons salt

Put warm water in a large bowl, stir in yeast to dissolve. Beat in 2 cups of the flour mixture, then add the salt and beat well. Add the cup of cornmeal and mix in, then add more flour mixture to make a stiff dough. When too stiff to stir, turn out onto a board floured with more mixture and knead about 10 minutes.

Wash out and oil the bowl, put the dough back in, and let rise covered until doubled — about an hour-and-a-half.

Put the pizza stone on the lowest rack in the oven (remove the other racks) and preheat the oven to 500F. If your oven tends to run cool, just crank it up all the way as far as it’ll go without turning on the broiler.

If you have a kitchen scale, divide the dough into 12 equal-weight pieces. Roll them into balls with your hands, cover with a towel and let rest for 10 minutes while the oven continues to heat.

I can get four breads on a pizza stone. Working with only as many as you can cook at a time, flatten out the balls on a lightly floured surface until they’re circles about 6 inches across. Using a fork or bread stamp, deeply pierce the bread, flip it over, and do the other side. With a 3-inch bread stamp with about 12 nails in it, I hit each side six or seven times to get a fairly even distribution of holes.

Once you’ve done all the breads you flattened, put them on the hot pizza stone either with a metal spatula, a “peel” or baker’s spatula, or just lean into the oven and lay them on the stone. Close the door and keep an eye on them. They’ll be nicely brown in ten to fifteen minutes. When they’re as brown as you want, use a spatula to lift them out of the oven and onto cooling racks. Repeat the process until you’ve done all the breads.

Once they’re cool put them in a large bag and keep them in the refrigerator. They’re fantastic as breads or as sandwiches just out of the oven. When they’re cold I’ll usually split the bun with a sharp knife and toast it. I also split the bun, brush the outside well with olive oil, put some cheese in the centre, and put it in the panini press to make a grilled sandwich.

I end up making these about every two weeks. A dozen buns is enough for two people for some breakfasts and some lunches. One thing I like about this recipe is that unlike many breads, it only has one rising. My other mainstay bread recipe has three! This recipe is fairly fast to make (even faster if you have something productive to do while it rises), and can be started in an afternoon and finished in time for supper if you’re running behind.

Welcome to Old Hippie Cookin’: the food portion of Old Hippie’s Garage. Even old hippies have to eat. This area may be the part of the blog that I have the most interest in right now — I eat three meals a day and only work on the tractor once in a while.

People ask if I’m vegetarian or vegan. Yeah, mostly. Now, “mostly vegan” is like being a little bit pregnant or falling halfway down a stairwell. I usually say, “I’m a vegan with flexible ethics.” Life is just too short to tie yourself down to a limited diet unless you want to. If that spins your toque, fly right at ‘er. I try to make responsible food choices, based on my own evaluation of the facts.

Case in point, like many people I can get an elevated cholesterol level if I eat the traditional North American diet. As a vegetarian I don’t get high cholesterol, but my LDL-HDL-Triglyceride balances get all wonky. So if I eat just a little meat once in a great while, the levels come into balance and my doctor doesn’t threaten to put me on statins. Statins, in my relatively informed opinion, are evil. They seem to kill as many people as they “save” when some responsible life choices would be much better in the long run.

Another case in point: Some people can synthesize long-chain fatty acids from the short-chain fatty acids available from plant sources. Some people can’t. The latter group should eat a little fish once in a while to get the Omega 3-6-9 they need in a form they can use. Like most sneaky dietary deficiencies, people who can’t synthesize the Omegas they need end up eating more because their bodies are trying to get what they need. (New research shows a plant source for long-chain fatty acids. I’m looking at it and will write more in the future.)

Anyway, what this section’s all about is good food. If something I want to put here doesn’t seem to fit the categories I have, I’ll just make a new category. Expect this will grow in unpredictable ways. Feel free to send along your own ideas, try mine and make of them what you will, or suggest other resources. While a lot of this is recipe-based, I will put up book reviews and other resources as I think of or find them.

So wash yer mitts and dig in.

So. Harvest season. Jeez, Louise! Our cold spring and summer put us basically six weeks behind on the harvest. The Gods of Agriculture were smiling, though, and we’ve had pretty nice weather since the middle of August. Penny’s been busting hump harder than I have on it, because she’s had more time to spend on the farm. We’ve got most of the stuff up now, but about half of the potatoes are still in the ground along with some other root crops (parsnips, for instance) that can benefit from a good freeze.

Off the top of my head, here are some varieties that did well in our microclimate:

Katy Stokes’ Sugar Meat Squash

Oregon Homestead Squash

Sugar Loaf Hessel Squash

Costata Romanesco Zucchini

Martha and Parade cucumbers

Cascade Cream Cap/Maple Gold/Red “sister” corn varieties

German Butterball potatoes

Provento potatoes

Berlicummer carrots

Nutribud broccoli

Wallhachin, Mystery Keeper, San Marzano Gigante tomatoes

Soybeans

Scarlet Runner beans

Black Mitla tepary beans

That’s some of it, anyway. We’re still trialling varieties, so we’re not worrying too much about genetic crosses. We’re not saving seeds on most of them because we’re growing a bunch of varieties. Once we’ve got that sorted we’ll start saving seeds.

I acquired a lovely tool this year. Last year I bought a broadfork to help me turn over the small garden, and it works well in prepared, soft ground. I’ve been reading about the “Magna Grecia hoe” here and decided to pick one up. I bought just the head, and crafted a handle out of some birch lumber I bought locally. I treated the handle with linseed oil before mounting the head. I have to say this really is the best tool for working tough, weedy ground.

The bad part is that I now have a lot of tough, weedy ground to reclaim. Things kind of got away from us this summer. Resolve to do better next year, move on, learn from the mistakes.

Cheers, eh!

I was searching scribd the other day with a particular book in mind. I’ve been trying to run down a copy of Ken Cornell’s long out-of-print “The Low and Medium Frequency Radio Scrapbook” ever since I first heard about it. Resources for longwave experimenters are few and far between. Nobody’s ever heard of it; none of the online bookstores have it; it’s not in any library I know; and I think Ken’s gone so there’s nobody to ask for a scanned copy.
Well. I finally won one. Not just one, but actually two:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/39405306/The-Low-and-Medium-Frequency-Radio-Scrape-Book-by-Ken-Cornell-W2IMB-1977

and

http://www.scribd.com/doc/39405675/The-Low-and-Medium-Frequency-Radio-Scrape-Book-by-Ken-Cornell-W2IMB-Addendum-1977-1978

Note that the “scrape” in the URL is NOT  a typo, though it is “scrap” in the actual titles of the books. Perhaps they meant “e-book”? Doesn’t matter.

Now that I’ve read them, I am glad to finally have them in my library. If you’re interested in VLF or ELF radio, you’ll see just how limited the state of the art was back then. Now we use the processing power of computers instead of the old Mark I, Mod. 0 Ear, Human, two each. A lot of the equipment has gotten a lot more sophisticated — but as Cornell points out, in the U.S. or Canada you can get on the air for a relatively low investment, using equipment you built yourself, in a way that doesn’t require a licence.

And now the links are posted where someone might see them.

It’s winter. The calendar may still say “autumn” but -18 and snow is winter, darnit. Now that it’s winter, you can start thinking about what you’ll spend spring doing. I suggest that you plant a garden. As much as you feel you can manage — after a sober evaluation of your needs, space and abilities. The preparation part is easy. Weeding’s a pain, but necessary. The real challenge comes in the harvest.

If you’re growing a couple of containers of tomatoes to brighten up your salads, harvest is simply a matter of eating what’s ripe and waiting until the next one turns red. (Or yellow, or green, or purple. Tomatoes *are* the grooviest fruit.) If you’re trying to grow and harvest serious eat-it-all-winter food, you’d better have a plan and some knowledge.

Here’s how you get that plan and knowledge: Use this annotated bibliography as a study guide this winter. You can buy the books, or find them through your local library. I prefer to buy them, because I will refer back to them time and again, and it’s simple when they’re on my own bookshelves. Browse the suggested websites. Browse other sites and read other books as you come across them and find them interesting.

This is a project I did in collaboration with Penny Powers. Rather than post the whole thing here, I’m giving you this link to Chris Martenson’s blog because there’s a LOT of stuff there you probably should be reading. Let us know if you have other books and things you’d like to have added to the project. We’ll keep updating it as new stuff comes to our attention.