STRATEGIES FOR SURVIVAL

with skillet cake

In the garden the shift is approaching. Suddenly the hips on the old-fashioned rose bush are starting to turn orange-red. I imagine this summer’s drought has made many plants panic into heavy survival mode.

glowing rosehips, next to phlox, so aromatic in the evening.

The human world is living in a period of great peril. What kinds of survival solutions are we being driven to? Nothing very effective so far… It’s crazy-making to think of Gaza and Ukraine and our impotence in the face of the insanity in the US, which is aggravating both the Ukraine and the Gaza catastrophes.

All of it makes focussing on anything else very difficult. Apart from basic daily chores, and human relationships, everything pales in comparison with the wilful infliction of death and suffering that’s happening in Ukraine and Gaza. Of course there are horrors, hunger, and conflicts in many other places: Sudan, Somalia, Burma, Chad, and more. But the shocking wars being waged ferociously in Gaza by Israel and in Ukraine by Russia are in a different category, and feel like the aggressions at the start of the Second War. The failure to stop them feels like the pattern of denial and appeasement that preceded September 1939.

Much of that failure lies with the US. The country to the south (as we in Canada refer to the US) is in the grip of a disintegration of the rule of law, a transformation into autocracy, presided over by the orange guy, along with a cohort of dishonest judges, spineless politicians, and greedy broligarchs.

History, if it still exists in the future as an area of serious honest study, will judge this era very harshly. “Why didn’t people stop the catastrophe?” I can imagine people wondering to themselves in fifty or a hundred years. What is our answer?

As I hit this wall of the incomprehensible, I resort to reading murder mysteries as a place to park my head. And I divert myself by trying to pay deeper attention to the beauty and quirkiness of everyday details, in the natural world and in the humans I have contact with.

The intense colours of fruits and vegetables at this time of year can lift the heart: local purple cauliflower cut into florets, and one large local tomato chopped and dressed with basil, olive oil, and salt.

I wrote these paragraphs late last week, but then failed to make time to finish my thoughts and post. What follows was written this week.

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Singing is another release and healing practice. Last weekend was a wonderful cleanse of the spirit: The Annual Ontario Sacred Harp Convention brought people together to sing Friday night and all day Saturday at Friends’ House in Toronto, and on Sunday at the Detweiler Meeting house in Roseville Ontario, a beautiful place to sing. We Ontario people welcomed singers from Quebec, British Columbia, Michigan, New York, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. As a result I’m feeling a little lighter, even though the news from the wider world remains grim.

garlic-chive flowers in the back garden

KITCHEN EXPLORATIONS - skillet cake ease

Late last week I made two skillet cakes, a larger (10 inch/25 cm) one to take to the Sacred Harp singings (we provide a wonderful potluck lunch each day) and a smaller one (8 inch/20 cm) for people at home. I riffed off the skillet cake recipe in my HomeBaking book. It’s a recipe I developed over twenty years ago while finding my way into ease with baking cakes, and is still my favourite, in all its forgivingness.

The original proportions are easy to remember: 2 cups all-purpose flour to 1 cup yogurt, 2 large eggs, ¼ pound butter, and 1 cup sugar to make one 10 inch/25 cm diameter skillet cake.

These days I make it with whole wheat pastry flour, rather than all-purpose and I increase the eggs to 3 or 4. The other essentials are small amounts of baking soda and baking powder, salt, and some spicing (usually some cassia (cinnamon) and a little clove, with perhaps some powdered ginger for heat; or instead cardamom and ginger).

I somehow failed to make a photo of the skillet cakes. How did that happen? So here’s a reminder of them, a breakfast of apricots, kefir, and buffalo yogurt, tart-acid fruit with the fermented tart-sour of the kefir and the yogurt.

I preheated the oven to 400F/200C and heated my two cast-iron skillets over low heat for a few minutes, with a little olive oil in each that I could swirl to coat the bottom and the lower sides of the skillets.

For this large batch I mixed together nearly 3 cups whole wheat pastry flour, 1 1/2 teaspoons baking powder, ½ teaspoon baking soda, and ¾ teaspoon salt in a large bowl. I added about a tablespoon of dried ginger, ¼ teaspoon powdered cloves, and about 1 teaspoon cassia/cinnamon. In another bowl I beat about 1/3 pound/150 grams of room temperature butter, with 1 cup of coarse unrefined cane sugar. I stirred in about 1 ½ cups kefir, beat 5 extra- large eggs until blended, and then added them to the bowl of wet ingredients.

I added the wet mixture to the dries and folded and stirred to make sure it was all moistened. (This is where, if I’m making the cake with rough guesses for quantities, there’s a chance to stir in a little extra flour if the batter seems excessively liquid.) Then I poured it into the skillets, and happily the amounts worked, so that each was filled to about halfway up the sides. Into the oven they went.

After ten minutes I lowered the heat to 385 F/190C. And once the top looked a bit firm, after about 30 minutes, I spooned on some lightly cooked apricot halves, plus some of their juice, and sprinkled a little coarse sugar onto each. They finished cooking in about 40 minutes for the smaller one and 50 minutes for the larger one.

And they were all gone by Sunday evening.

The intensification of flavour when I lightly stewed apricots earlier this month led me to repeat the process with some of the apricots I bought very early last Saturday morning at Wychwood Farmers’ Market before going to the singing. They went (cut in half) into a heated sugar and water mix (too light and thin to call a syrup, really) and simmered briefly. Here they are in a jar, a precious stash for later.