Unquiet Desperation

Making grape jam is a simple process. Take two quarts of Concord grapes, wash them, mash them briefly, cook them on the stove for ten-fifteen minutes, strain off the juice, add six cups of sugar, boil to about ten more minutes. Ladle into jars, seal, and submerge them into a boiling water bath for fifteen minutes. Remove and let cool.

Buying grape jam is even easier. Run out to the store, deal with the crowds, find the brand of grape jam you want, wait in line, pay, walk out, drive home, and enjoy.

Cost-wise, it’s all about the same.  There’s no huge savings in doing it yourself.

So why bother to do it yourself? With making jam, or with anything else?

Satisfaction
When done well, the homemade jam tastes so much better than the stuff from the store. Part of this is physical and real: using fresher ingredients in a small setting, you can achieve  better results. The other part is psychological: you took the time and did it yourself with your own two hands.  There are few better feelings than knowing you have learned a new useful skill.

Do you remember being surprised or even amazed at all the things your grandparents or your parents knew how to do? How one or more of them know some trick or some way to handle a situation, be it home repair or cooking?  Where do you think those skills came from?  They came from learning how to do it themselves.

Passionate Experimentation
It is very convenient to be able to pick up whatever you want from the grocery whenever you want/need it. But the product is bland, it’s uniform, it’s designed to appeal to the most people it possibly can.  When you do it yourself, you can make adjustments for your own palate. Not satisfied with how Smucker’s jam tastes? You can work to improve upon it.  Maybe you want to try a flavor that you’ve never been able to find before, like a clove-spiced apple jelly. Once you know the basics, you can start to experiment and improvise. You can try new things, and the thrill of discovery is a wonderful feeling. Learn the simplest form, then write your own recipe.  Record it, pass it down.

When The Revolution Comes…
This is a joke between my wife and me. In the back of our minds, we’ve always wanted to know that if our lives were to change radically we would have the skills to pick up and carry on. It’s something that also plays off of seeking simplicity and eating real food, as well: when we make things ourselves, we know what’s going into them, and we know we can repeat the process however many times we like.  Knowing how things actually work is useful, whether you’re speaking of machinery, or ingredients in a recipe.  There are skills we use in business, then there are, in my opinion, Real World skills. Skills that you need to survive. I recommend learning a few of the latter.

At the end of the day, do you have actual, useful skills?  If you were lost, who would you want with you?  The guy who spends his weekends hiking, or the one who understands how to use social media to build trust networks?

The Concern and the Challenge
No generation in the history of the world has lived more in it’s mind the current one. We live our lives being spoon-fed stories via movies, television, the Internet. We play long and involved games sitting on our couches staring at illuminated screens. We flit, digesting information from RSS feeds to Twitter to NPR to Podcasts.  My great concern is that, in time,  we will live our lives in our minds — we will cease doing things in favor of watching and/or reading about things.

Creativity and passion are not something you can experience by observing, not something can get from an illuminated screen. Watching someone chop wood does not make it possible for you to swing an axe. The goal of doing it yourself is just that most simple of verbs: TO DO. Act. Create. Participate and engage in the world around you instead watching in fly by on someone else’s Twitterstream.

I challenge you to do something new this week. Cook a new meal, walk a new route, seek out a new experience. Find something beyond the words to occupy yourself. Embrace an experience. Do it yourself.

(Update: People have asked for more detail about the jam-making process itself. That’s coming in a mid-week article, complete with pictures with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one.)

I’ve been roasting coffee on my stovetop at home. I enjoy it. There’s something about the smell of the green coffee beans slowly turning a deep, dark brown, something about the cracking in the pan as the water expands to burst the outer husk of the bean that makes me smile. The true payoff comes about twenty-four hours after the roasting, opening up the sealed container and taking a whiff of the freshest coffee I’ve had in a while. It’s a ritual I’ve come to enjoy, and one that I encourage others to try.

I’ve had people tell me about using air poppers and other more expensive devices to make “the perfect roast.”  I’m grateful for the advice, but I’m not doing this for perfection. I’m doing it because I wanted to cultivate a non-digital skill, and because the act of the work itself makes me happy.

A few weeks ago, my family and I visited Roscoe Village in Coshocton, Ohio. Roscoe Village is a combination town center and historical reenactment village, where you can learn how people originally lived when settling, attend an old-style school lesson in the original school house, learn about period medical practices, etc. It might be the fact that I enjoy studying history, or it might be that I went on one too many medievalist camp-outs in my youth, but I’m always drawn to the craftsmen doing their work by hand. The term “honest work” comes to mind, as does the realization that I might be able to do similar work, if only I spent the time to learn.  When I was younger, I enjoyed woodworking, though I never pursued it. I enjoyed music, but did not pursue it. I enjoyed brewing, and did not…you see the pattern here. Everyday life will overwhelm you if you let it, and for the past fifteen years, I’ve been building a career in software development, which makes all manner of odd demands on one’s time. There are all kinds of excuses for not pursuing our interests, and all seem equally valid at the time.

As we walked around the village, I began to think about this I.O.U. I’d written to myself.  I’ve spent the better part of fifteen years staring at a computer screen.  The aversion to it started about three years ago, but I worked hard to bury that feeling when I started at Mahalo, where my screen time on a weekly basis would shoot through the roof. For years I’ve been craving time away from the screen, and this reminder was just what I needed to get the ball rolling.

It must seem strange to many of you that I would need a reason to shut the computer off. Understand that I’ve been enamored with computers since I was 15, and this was my hobby long before it was my career.  Converting that hobby into a career was at once a blessing and a curse. A blessing, because I was doing something that interested me, but a curse because I did not cultivate other interests outside of the glow of a computer monitor.  When I started to resent the time I spent online outside of the office, it caused a real problem.

While walking down the streets of Roscoe Village, I had time to reflect on this.  I had other interests, but I tossed them aside for writing code, both on work time and off.  I got involved with communities of people online, spent time in virtual space with them, but back in realspace my relationships and interests were lacking.

We were standing in the basement kitchen of one of the houses, listening to a woman speak about how they would cook in the old days. She was in front of a stone fireplace, showing the tools of the trade, offering some freshly-baked bread and churned butter to taste. Then she pointed at an odd looking tool: it looks like a coffee can on a long rod with a little door cut into the side. She said that this was a coffee roaster, and people used to roast their own coffee over the fire each morning, then store it for a few days, grinding it as they needed it.

It was like a warm sun ignited in my chest. There was a sense of realization that here was something that interested me, something that I could do, hands on, for the sheer joy of doing it.  The next morning, I drove down to the local grocery, picked up a pound of green Colombian beans, and started to roast my own coffee.

I discovered that the joy I feel while working out a problem in code is the same joy I feel when working on a new roast. The realization that I was, as a good friend puts it, hacking my world was like a TNT for my brain. The experimentation and process of roasting coffee, or cooking, or brewing ignites the same fire in my mind that working through a code problem does: it’s all hacking, and it feels great.

The best part is that I can more readily share to fruits of my labor with my friends and family. The biggest drawback to my career is that if I do my job well, no one can see the craft, the reasons for things working the way they do, the very things that makes the work itself beautiful. It’s hard for people to gain an appreciation for well-crafted code, but a good cup of coffee goes a long way. They can savor and appreciate it, they can revel in the aesthetic that I felt when I was roasting it.

This has been a revelation to me. It pleases me to no end. It makes me happy.

I’m planning to go beyond roasting coffee, getting back into brewing beers and making liquors. It’s not for a business, it’s not for money, it’s for the sheer joy of doing something with my hands that both makes me feel happy and fulfilled, and that I can share with others.

To conclude: roasting coffee became a symbol to me, a process toward finding enjoyment outside of the laptop screen. It’s why I’ve been talking about it so much both in realspace and on Twitter, with my friends out there. Like all worthwhile things, it is bigger than the words I use to describe it, because the meaning is greater than the meager descriptions I can hobble together. It is joy, and joy is a rare thing in life. We need to embrace it, however we find it, whenever we are lucky enough to do so.

Workouts in the past week: 4
Pounds lost in the last week: 1
Pounds lost since starting: 1
Goal for this week: Mindful eating. Ignore the old, bad habits, get on new ones. Specifically, cut cheese and sugar consumption in half and drink more water.

About two months ago, I decided to go vegetarian. I’d like to be able to tell you it was because of some form of moral outrage about how animals are treated, and while there is an element of that, the main reason was simple: I needed to change my relationship with food¹.

If you’ve met me, you’ll know that I’m fat. No, not just fat…obese. I have a definite problem with seeing food as a reward, something to be an emotional comfort, instead as a source of nutrition.  When I was commuting to work a few years ago, I would stop for two bagels with cream cheese on the way to work, and pick up two McDonald’s double cheeseburgers on the way home every day, but then I would have my normal meal with the family on top of it. Why?  It’s the same reason some folks have a drink after work, it made me feel better, allowed me to de-stress.

I went vegetarian because it sets up a strong and clear line for me and forces me to think about everything I shove into my face. It has eliminated any stopping at all at fast food places, because if I cannot get the fat and salt of the meat, there’s no real reward. At parties and gatherings, it helps me moderate my food intake because I need to think about what I want to eat, not just fall into the flow and grab whatever is in front of me. I’ll admit, I’ve fallen off the wagon, but when I have done so, I’ve come to regret it².

I’ve been reading about the science of food a lot over the last few months as well, about how different things foods cause our brains to feel comfort, happiness, even something similar to mini-orgasms with the right combination of chemicals.  This report from CNN was interesting:

This is not a pity party, and this is not an attempt to blame the food industry for my problem. It’s my personal responsibility to stand for myself again the tide, and I strongly believe that. However, I do find it interesting and disturbing just how the food industry, like the cigarette companies before them, use marketing and chemistry to create a social norm and provide an emotional experience regardless of consequence. Food can become the ultimate addiction, especially when specifically engineered to provide an emotional response. You can give up cigarettes, but how do you give up food? I think there is a discussion to be had there, and I think that’s fodder for a future essay.

I’m not telling you this so you can hear the strains of violins and weep for my unfortunate condition.. Far from it. I bring this up because I know there are lots of other people out there like me. I’m hoping that by talking about this, I can bring some of the issues out into the open. It’s one thing to sit in a theatre and watch Super Size Me, but it’s another to be sitting in the car, driving home, resisting the strong urge to stop and get something to eat  because it’s been a hard day, and by god, you deserve it.

Expect more from me on this topic. They say to write what you know, and food issues…well…yeah. I know those all too well.

1. God, I hate how fluffy that sounds. But I cannot find another way to put it. Bear with me.[back]
2. Going to Schmidt’s while at Origins was not the brightest move.[back]

My wife brought this into the marriage. Her mother is from New Orleans and knows how to make a mean pot of Red Beans and Rice. I’ve learned this from her, and then I’ve started to play with it.

The recipe is pretty freeform, and is very forgiving. Here’s how we make it in our house.

1 lb of dry kidney beans, preferably Camilla kidney beans
1 medium-large sized smoked ham hock
1 medium onion
2 stalks of celery
2 cloves of garlic
3 cups of rice (white is traditional, but I use brown or jasmine)
3 bay leaves
1 tsp  ground black pepper

Take the kidney beans, rinse, and put into the crockpot with 6-8 cups of water (enough to cover by about 1 inch), one good sized smoked ham hock and the bay leaves. While that starts to cook, slice and dice the onion, garlic, and celery, sauté in olive oil until onions are translucent. Add to the crockpot. Cook on high for 6-8 hours. Every hour or so, stir and mash the beans to thicken the sauce.  Salt to taste.

By then end, the sauce should be like a gravy, with enough solid beans for texture. Don’t mash ALL the beans, or you’ll get mush, which no one will eat.

Cook the rice according to the instructions on the bag or package.  To serve,  place a scoop of rice on the plate, then cover with a ladleful of the beans from the crockpot. Serve with warm french (or other crusty) bread.

In the past, I’ve added andouille sausage or smoked kielbasa for some added meat. When serving, this is amazing if you add Tabasco or yellow pepper rings on top. It’s also fabulous as leftovers.

Important note: When using beans other than the Camilla beans, you may need to let them soak overnight before cooking. I made this with black beans once, and it became a two day prep. Today, I’m trying azuki beans, and I prepped for it last night by soaking them. I’ll update with post with the results.

I’m going to work on a vegetarian and vegan version of this. I’ll let you know how that goes, when I finish it.