Grain & Grasses


Let your sense of smell free to enjoy Nature. That is, if you live anywhere near Nature?


So, we come back in from our second morning walk and Smiley sets her squeaky toy down on the kitchen floor -- right before the box of liver snacks on the counter. Both of our dogs are smarter than their dad.

Maybe, I don’t let enough of my primitive senses free? Certainly, long, long ago, I learned enough about science and reality to bypass that Stone Age gene that tells our cerebral cortex to accept superstition and religion -- to explain away the stuff we haven’t answers for. Yet.

The past couple of days, I’ve been feeling like the first erect biped to think of milling grain. The spring grasses reached maturity a week or so ago. The heat of the last week has parched and bowed the full grain heads of those grasses. They wait for nature to play its part -- for wind and walking creatures to thresh those grains. The hollow below our back meadow, in between the meadow hill and the bosque, smells like a grain elevator -- without the dust and mildew. Little chance of argot poisoning driving any populace into a religious dancing death.

Americans often may have their brains filled with Dark Ages ideology; but, they’re still more likely to show up at the ER than setting themselves alight in front of an altar if they start seeing visions.

I imagine hunter-gatherers stripped away and stored handfuls of seeds to munch whole, at first. Sooner or later, some bright person got the idea of grinding them between a couple of stones and making what became flour. All the other predictable processes followed on -- from making a paste with water and drying it, baking it, preserving however the protein and starch and ash could be kept for other seasons. Then, yeasts did their naturally intrusive thing and we got to Wednesday, Which is today. The day I usually bake a couple of ciabattas to get us through to Sunday’s grocery shopping at Whole Foods.

Cultural divergence is a curious thing. I sometimes wonder how the poverty of the weevils who spread across this continent led to measuring ingredients by volume when the rest of the world pretty much already measured by weight. You can only make a respectable ciabatta [or a focaccia, for that matter] by calculating the weight of flour vs. the weight of water -- and keep the dough at 70% water or more.

In some future reflection, I will reveal the secret of my savory Italian loaves.

Posted: Wed - July 13, 2005 at 08:44 PM