Late fall ... grazing and haying (7USC1471d)

One of the things I have missed the most when living overseas is the season of fall. So when we scheduled a trip to the Midwest for the beginning of October, I was relieved that I would get a dose of autumnal glory this year. As it turned out, while we were back in Ohio, it was a sunny and summer-like, in the 80s the entire weekend. Nonetheless, we did get to see the colorful leaves in the countryside as we bore witness to not one, but two, beautiful bonfires.

Right before we left on our trip, though, I had to drop the dog off at the kennel. In an attempt to assuage my guilt over his impending captivity, I took him on a hike through a nearby county preserve. As we walked along, crunching through leaves, I realized that I might actually get the full breadth of my favorite season right here in California. Indeed, with one breath of crisp air, I knew that my sinuses, now fully clogged, were detecting the change in the air.

Actually, I should've seen the signs a few weeks earlier, when we went camping at Lake Morena County Park. During a lakeside sojourn with Sage there, I counted only a few wildflower holdouts among the tell-tale brown, dry grass.
And the hazy light from the fading sun already was casting long streaks and shadows earlier in the evening. Sage and I had to abandon our dip in the water quickly, so we could get back to camp in time to light the fire before darkness fell.

Some of our campground compatriots also gave hints of a full fall. One man by the lake was taking advantage of the rising autumn winds to fly a kite. And a local family taking a stroll through the park was accompanied by a turkey, named Lady Gaga, who perhaps was on the "edge of something final," like landing on the Thanksgiving table.

Just to be sure we were adequately reveling in the harvest celebrations of fall, a few weeks later we decided to seek out a corn maze. We wound up driving to Temecula for the Big Horse Corn Maze, which greeted us with pumpkins, primed to be carved and propped on someone's doorstep or put into a pie.

This being my first corn maze, I opted to let our more experienced companions, a gang of adolescent boys, lead the way. Despite their fast-paced enthusiasm on an unusually warm Saturday, we managed to all make it out of the 11-acre maze alive, in less than an hour.

And thank goodness, because otherwise, how would I have learned the wonder of shooting corn cobs out of an air-compressed cannon or the pleasure of riding around a random cornfield in the desert atop a rickety, hayless cart?

Lest I sound cynical, other activities managed to make me forget the unfall-like heat for a while. The band, complete with washtub bass and poetry-reading groupie, offered to let TJ sing with them when he gave them a good tip. And watching farm workers try to wrangle Bacon, a fiesty contestant that got loose right before the pig race, was quite entertaining.

All right, so our experiences in California weren't quite as authentic as a Midwestern autumn, but sometimes you take what you can get. And for fall on the West Coast, apparently you get a tame turkey named after an outrageous pop star. 

Construction in compacted layers (30USC1265)

When people start talking about their heritage, I try to hide. My family is big on genealogy, so I know lots about my family tree, but the only lineage I can truly lay claim to is, well, Appalachian. That's probably one of the reasons I am obsessed with foreign foods; while I am cooking, I can feel like I am channeling tradition -- even though the culinary customs of my ancestors probably center more on moonshine than main dishes.

I've always felt an affinity for Greek culture, both in terms of its food and philosophy. I love its mix of the practical -- Seneca founded Stoicism, that pre-eminent Midwestern virtue of controlling one's emotions to find universal truth, in Athens in 3rd century B.C. -- with the excessive -- Spartan king Menelaus started the Trojan War over some chick, Helen of Troy, who was stolen by studly suitor Paris.

Greek cuisine illustrates a similar paradox. For example, in moussaka, Greeks practically substitute eggplant for carbohydrate-filled pasta; apparently they were early practitioners of the Atkins diet. But to ensure excess, you fry the eggplant in oil, then top it with craploads of fat-filled meat and cheese. I mixed the practical with excessive when I took on the eggplant. When peeling an eggplant, which device seems most practical: this miniscule peeler or this lengthy knife? The knife, of course, and I grabbed the biggest one I could find to skin those suckers.

In a practical move, I didn't go out of my way to find the right ingredients. I used dried oregano and parsley, since I don't have fresh in my herb garden. And I figured diced tomatoes would be just as good as hand-crushed -- and less messy to my kitchen and clothing, I might add. Plus, I couldn't find ground lamb, so I settled for ground pork, which was an astonishing 95% fat-free!

The most excessively annoying part of making moussaka is preparing the eggplant. You have to season and sizzle 1/2-inch slices cut from three specimens. With about 20 slices, only two or three of which would fit into my skillet at once, this step was time-consuming. The recipe did not state or imply the length of this task; perhaps Greeks have excessively large skillets that can hold more slices than mine.

With the eggplant prepped, you can move onto the other part of the filling, which includes the impractical ingredient of lemons, cut into thin slices. Over the process of cooking, the lemon flesh dissolved into the mixture, but the rind remained. The pieces were tender, but I still couldn't imagine biting into such bitterness, so I fished out the rind before I constructed the moussaka, even though the recipe didn't say to do so.
Apparently, Greeks do have unusually excessive and practical cookware, because to add all the filling ingredients, especially the pork and tomatoes, I had to transfer the mixture to a bigger skillet. The step of simmering down the filling also took longer than I expected (and than mentioned in the recipe); while waiting, I was tempted to mix my true heritage with my food-inspired culture, but I didn't have any ouzo on hand.

The layering of the dish truly reveals its excess. You start with a bed of oil-soaked eggplant, then cover it with the meat mixture and two cheeses: feta and parmesan. Then you repeat the same two layers before topping it off with yet one more layer of eggplant slices and a heavy dose of bread crumbs.

But the practical methods return as you finish cooking the dish: Just throw it in the oven and let it bake until it's brown on top. But of course, be sure to check that all that grease doesn't bubble over (especially if you have a gas stove with an open flame at the bottom!). Who knows what kind of disaster would've ensued if I had used pork with the full fat content.

The final result is practical in its scope: The dish can feed a large family -- or a small family for a week (Guess what will be in TJ's lunch for a while) -- and the rest can be frozen for future last-minute meals. But it is also excessive in the way a piece just oozes with grease as it slides into place on the plate. And of course, what do you use to sop up that delicious sauce? Some carb-concentrated bread, of course!

Community development and affordable housing projects (42USC9816)

As I was about to write my third post in a row about cooking, I realized that maybe I should address some of the other activities we do here in Tijuana. But until recently, there wasn't much among our plans that was worth sharing, unless you really want to hear about how I never found a good pumpkin ale in Ohio or how I am probably going blind with all the time I spend grading essays. Now, however, I have proof of us doing something of substance.

As part of the 50th anniversary of the Peace Corps, the consulate organized a community-service project through Fundación Esperanza de México, which helps Tijuana-area families build concrete houses. Incidentally, the Peace Corps has programs in Mexico, but they are focused on preserving ecology and advancing technology. The U.S. assistance is limited because the program was admitted starting only in 2004. Before that, there was some resistance based on justifiable reservations reverberating from colonization.

The Esperanza (meaning Hope) program is unique in that it is not a takeover nor a handout. The families actually pay for their houses (over time, of course), but the foundation coordinates the needed resources, including, us, the manual labor. The families do plenty of the heavy lifting, too. The foundation provides the machine for the families and their community to create the concrete blocks for the walls of their houses. And trust me, the family and community had done a lot of their share already. The first part of the morning was spent stacking the blocks so we could make space to really dig in.

What we were digging into was the shallow foundation of the previous home, a wooden structure that provided little insulation or protection and that had already been easily demolished. The foundation was surrounded by tires to shore up the dirt of the surrounding hills and the roots of the encroaching vegetation. We formed a bucket line with students from Universidad Autónoma de Baja California in Tijuana and volunteers from a health-care organization near Los Angeles to clear the chunks of destroyed foundation, the remains of removed tires, and the tons of cleared dirt. TJ fell in toward the beginning of the line, after spending some time in the pit with a pick.

I was more toward the quality-control area, where we decided whether the contents of bucket would be dumped on the trash pile or passed on to the end of the line, where the dirt was being spread like a blanket to hold the evermore blocks that were popping out of the machine down the hill. At the end of the day, it didn't seem like we had accomplished much more than creating an enormous hole, but my arms knew better, and they elected to give myself a beer for a job well done. Apparently, they were right, because two days later, when I went to get my flu shot, the nurse commented on my muscular upper arms. See the karma that charity can bring?

Substitute different foods providing the nutritional equivalent (42USC1786)

I headed to the grocery with the intention of making moussaka, a Greek-style lasagna made with eggplant and lamb. I knew I was pushing my luck on the ground lamb, but I thought I could substitute ground pork or beef, if necessary. I didn't even consider a lack of eggplant, because I had seen it in the supermarket in abundance a week ago. As if spewing a curse, a friend warned me that eggplant might be hard to find in Mexico, right before I went to the grocery.

With no eggplant or lamb in sight at the supermarket, I had to abandon my plans, but I didn't want to give up on the one afternoon I have lots of time to cook. So I came back to my list of dream dishes, seeking one for which I had all the ingredients. Just a few days before, after watching TJ's 90-year-old grandmother exhibit mastery in the kitchen, I decided to add a few Finnish foods to my agenda. TJ asked Grammy to share some traditional recipes with me, but they were all in her head, so I turned to the web. One I found was lihapyorykoita, or Finnish meatballs, and it happened to be the only meal in my catalogue that could be created from my pantry, mainly because it's mostly made of fat and meat, which I always have in stock.

The beef was frozen, but luckily, it was hot (in the triple digits in parts of San Diego County), so about half of it thawed before I needed to start prepping the meatballs. For the rest, I needed to make sure I didn't cook it as I defrosted it, so I nuked it for 30 seconds at a time on half-power, peeling off the thawed meat in between microwave sessions, of which there were four.

The recipe called for whipping cream, of which I had none, but a little bit of Googling revealed that I could substitute heavy cream, of which I also had none. But serendipitously, I also came across this recipe for heavy cream, which is a nice little trick to know for the future.

The recipe also called for allspice, and surprisingly, it was one of the only spices the previous resident didn't leave behind. On the same internet adventure, I found a substitution for allspice. I had just bought cinnamon sticks for the moussaka, and I had ground cloves. But then I thought, why not use a bit of pumpkin-pie spice? Since it contains cinnamon and allspice (along with nutmeg and ginger) -- and since the previous resident left behind five containers of it. I split the recipe's measurement between cloves and pumpkin-pie spice, with a few scrapes of cinnamon for good measure. Finally, I had all the ingredients.

Mixing the meat was a messy endeavor, especially because I didn't really mince the onion, so much as chop it as quickly as possible so I could get back to Dr. Drew's Lifechangers. But eventually, the seasonings, meat, cream, bread crumbs, and egg all became incorporated, so I could form them into golf balls fit for frying.

The meatballs went into the icebox as I waited for TJ to come home after crossing the border to run in the States. He was delayed well into the evening because he found a puppy locked in a public bathroom. (What is it with us and abandoned dogs?) But at least he was hungry after going through the trouble to make sure the pup was safe and sound in a shelter. It took me about 45 minutes to whip through the steps of cooking the meatballs: 1) melting the butter, 2) browning the meatballs, 3) making the gravy, and 4) simmering the meatballs in the gravy.

It took me a little longer than the allotted time because I had to transfer the final concoction into a larger pan. Apparently, Finnish cooks have skillets the size of Scandinavia. They probably also have egg noodles always at the ready. Me, I had to settle for a bag of those cheap, almost-instant noodles that I subsisted on throughout college (because they were more sophisticated than mac and cheese, of course).

While TJ ate, I asked him if his grandma ever made similar meatballs. He said she usually made Swedish meatballs at the holidays. What a traitor! Out of curiosity, I looked up some recipes, and it seems that the major difference between the two countries' versions is that, in Sweden, the beef is mixed with pork, the meat is seasoned with nutmeg (which I ended up adding as part of my improvised allspice), and the gravy is made with stock, not heavy cream. Leave it to me to lean toward the tradition with more lard.