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I found some celeriac!

Wednesday, May 15, 2024


Mashed celeriac

A few weeks ago, I wrote here about my curiosity about the root vegetable celeriac, which I had never had. I was thrilled to find some yesterday at the Whole Foods store in Winston-Salem. I bought two of them.

I understand that celeriac can be prepared in many ways, raw or cooked, including roasting or making it into a slaw with apples. For my first experiment with celeriac, I decided to treat it like mashed potatoes. I boiled the celeriac for about 25 minutues, then mashed it with butter, cream, and salt. It was delicious.

Though the taste obviously can be compared with celery, I don’t think I can compare the texture with any other vegetable. Some online recipes suggest puréeing the celeriac in a food processor, because it doesn’t mash as smoothly as potatoes. To me that would be a mistake, because I like its texture.

The history of celeriac is fascinating. It was familiar to the ancient Greeks, and it was mentioned by Homer. It became very popular throughout the Mediterranean and made its way deeper into Europe. It’s new to most Americans, including me. We might think of it as occupying the potato niche in Europe before Spaniards brought potatoes to Europe in the 16th Century. When I took my first bite of my mashed celeriac, it seemed strangely familiar and ancient, as though, if there is such a thing as reincarnation, I had eaten it in past lives.

I hope that celeriac will become better known in the U.S. after the recent film “The Taste of Things,” in which celeriac appears twice — first in the garden, and later in the kitchen. There is a celeriac recipe in my 1948 edition of a Scottish cookbook that was first published in 1925. It’s called “celery root” or just “celery” in that cookbook, as though celery root was better known in Scotland than the above-ground celery stalks and leaves. They are different plants, though of course they are relatives.

I was able to find some celeriac seeds (on eBay), and Brittany and Richard, from whom I buy vegetables each week, are going to try to grow some for me. The seeds are tiny. According to the last report I had, after three weeks in their greenhouse, the seeds still had not sprouted. I still have some hope. Brittany and Richard say that they don’t think they can grow celeriac profitably, because it takes a long time to mature. But they’re growing some partly as an experiment, and partly for me. If celeriac was easy to find hereabouts, it would always be on my grocery list.


In the bin at Whole Foods. It was between the parsnips and rutabagas at $2.99 a pound. The label identified it as organic and grown in Canada.

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C.J. Sansom’s Dissolution

Monday, May 13, 2024

I was not aware of C.J. Sansom until I read his obituary in the New York Times. I immediately ordered his first novel, Dissolution, and read it pretty fast, because it was quite good. There are seven novels in the Shardlake series. Matthew Shardlake is a kind of Tudor-era detective and lawyer who (at least in the first book of the series) works for Thomas Cromwell. Cromwell is in the process of dissolving England’s monasteries for King Henry VIII. The Shardlake character is one of Cromwell’s “commissioners” who go out to the monasteries and do Cromwell’s legal work (and dirty work).

Sansom died just a few days before a television series named “Shardlake” started streaming. According to every source I’ve seen, the series was made by Disney+, but I can’t for the life of me find it on Disney+. I did find it, though, on Hulu.

After the first few chapters of Dissolution I was a bit disappointed, because Sansom doesn’t write the snappiest dialogue in the history of fiction. But by the end of the novel I was impressed. The novel is beautifully constructed. Sansom, who was also a lawyer, had a Ph.D. in history. I am highly inclined to trust Sansom’s take on the history of the dissolution of the English monasteries under Henry VIII. In a historical note at the end of the book, Sansom comments on the scarcity of studies on the dissolution of the monasteries. He pretty much dismisses two fairly recent books — 1992 (Yale) and 1993 (Oxford) — and says that the last major study of the dissolution was published in 1959 — The Religious Orders in England: The Tudor Age, David Knowles, Cambridge University Press, 1959. I have ordered a copy of the 1959 Knowles book on eBay and will probably write about it here later on. I am not the least interested in Catholicism in England, but as an unrepentant heathen I am very interested in the erasure of Catholicism in England.

So far I have watched only the first episode of the “Shardlake” television series. The television series is not, not, not faithful to Sansom’s novel. The television series removes one of Sansom’s key characters (Mark Poer) and replaces him with a character named Jack Barak. I do not, not, not approve. The writer of the TV series, Stephen Butchard, says that Sansom’s Mark Poer was too submissive for television and that a character was needed who would do more head-butting with Shardlake. That really irks me, because the television character is a snarky contemporary smart-ass like any number of cookie-cutter male characters that you’ll find on HBO or Netflix. Sansom’s Mark Poer character never snarks at Shardlake, but he certainly was man enough to think his own thoughts and go his own way. I also am skeptical of the television version of the Shardlake character, who sometimes seems mean and heartless in a way that Sansom’s Shardlake never was. It makes me wonder whether the actors have even read the books, the same way I have wondered whether the cast of the 2015 television version of Winston Graham’s Poldark had ever read the books, because they got their characters all wrong.

In any case, if you think you might be interested in C.J. Sansom’s Shardlake novels, I’d highly recommend reading the books first.

As for the dissolution of the monasteries, I hope to have a more informed view after I’ve read The Religious Orders in England: The Tudor Age. But based on what (admittedly little) I know at present, I have to wonder if the history of Western civilization wouldn’t be very different if Henry VIII had never shut down the monasteries (and reallocated the monasteries’ money and land). If Rome had continued to keep England barefoot and domesticated for five hundred more years, could Elizabeth I or the British Empire ever have happened? If not for the religious turmoil that so changed the church and transferred so much power downward from the pope and the bishops to literate commoners, could Edinburgh ever have led the Enlightenment? Could the American colonists have thrown off both a king and a pope?


Anthony Boyle as Jack Barak

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Cabbage rolls

Friday, May 10, 2024

Some of the most beautiful leaves in the garden are the outer leaves of cabbage. They’re usually wasted, though. Some are removed at the farm, some at the grocery store, and some at home. But if you can get them fresh enough, there are things you can do with them.

Last week when I picked up my weekly vegetable box from Brittany and Richard, I pre-arranged to get, this week, a cone cabbage that they would cut while I was there, outer leaves and all. Then I’d rush home and make cabbage rolls. This dish was in progress in the kitchen less than an hour after the cabbage was cut.

The stuffing is brown Basmati rice and crushed Brazil nuts, well seasoned. The sauce is a basic red sauce. I didn’t bother to even steam or boil the cabbage leaves before rolling them. They seemed tender enough, and I cut out the thickest part of the stem.

It’s a wonderful thing being able to get one’s vegetables fresh and organic from a farm only a couple of miles away. One of the things I realized today, as I took things out of the box and got them ready for the fridge, is that the growing of the vegetables is only part of the luxury. The other part is that the vegetables have already had their first wash, and they’re ready for the kitchen or the fridge. I also get to do a garden walk-through during my weekly pickups and even poke my head into the greenhouses.

As I mentioned last week, I’ve not completely quit gardening. This year I’ll grow tomatoes, cucumbers, and basil in my own garden.


The cabbage, fresh from the garden


I also got some beets today, with the beet greens in perfect condition. Click here for high resolution version.

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Hazelnut chocolate bombs

Thursday, May 9, 2024

Recently a friend gave me a pound of California hazelnuts. What to do with them? I hit upon making no-bake hazelnut chocolate bombs.

Whiz equal parts (by volume) hazelnuts and dates in a food processor. I used about a cup of each. Add cocoa, and, if you have them, some chocolate chips. I added enough Grandma’s molasses to make them hold together into bombs. As the mixture becomes sticky, it will form up into a big ball in the food processor. Some brandy would have been a nice addition, but I didn’t have any. I rolled the bombs in date sugar to make them less sticky. I’m storing the dough in the refrigerator and will roll them into balls as needed.

You could use any kind of nuts. They take no time at all to make. They’re very high calorie — about the same as ice cream, I’d guess — but they’re more nutritious than ice cream and even have a lot of fiber. And, in spite of all the calories, they’re a better form of carbs than cookie-cookies.

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A John Rawls recipe book

Monday, May 6, 2024

Free and Equal: What Would a Fair Society Look Like? Daniel Chandler. Penguin Random House, 2023. 404 pages.

As the jacket blurb says, this book about the philosophy of John Rawls aims at “dragging his theory of justice down from Harvard’s ivory towers and into the streets with the people.”

For those already familiar with Rawls (unfortunately not many people), this book will be redundant. But Chandler does lay out Rawls’ theory of “justice as fairness” in lay language rather than in the dense language of moral and political philosophy. Chandler includes real-world examples of where some of Rawls’ ideas actually have been put to the test, and he proposes ways of bringing justice as fairness into the theory and practice of good politics.

Chandler is an economist and philosopher at the London School of Economics.

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A scene from Mississippi

Saturday, May 4, 2024

I apologize for being just another person out to make a political point from what’s happening on university campuses. But I do think that everyone needs to see this video. It was shot May 3 at the University of Mississippi. According to news reports, counter-protesters — mostly white males — greatly outnumbered the protesters. I can’t determine the original source of the video, but it appears to be nonprofessional video shot with a phone. Many news organizations have used the video.

My political comment would be: Let’s keep this in mind when Republicans tell us that universities are liberal indoctrination centers where conservative students dare not express an opinion.

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The first box of 2024 produce

Friday, May 3, 2024


Bok choi, snap peas, green onions, cone cabbage, lettuce, and broccolini

It’s only the 3rd of May, and I just picked up my first box of 2024 vegetables. Again this year, I’m outsourcing the gardening. A young couple who live about two miles away, who moved here from Chicago, are making a living from their little farm. This year they’ll have three seasons of community sourced agriculture boxes each week — spring, summer, and fall.

They are superb gardeners. Over the winter they added a second greenhouse (for starting their vegetables from seeds). They do organic, no-till gardening on remarkably little land. None of the space they have is wasted, with some room left over for blooming things that feed the birds and bees. They sell most of their produce at a high-end farmer’s market in Greensboro, which is open on Saturday mornings. I believe I’m their only local customer who picks up at the farm, which is a bit sad. Most rural people just don’t care about fresh vegetables anymore. Very few people garden, and based on what I see local people buying in the grocery store, their diets are terrible. As much as rural people complain about grocery prices, you’d think they’d get a clue.

I have a standing appointment for pickups on Fridays at 11. They pick my things early in the morning, wash it, and put it in their chiller. When I pick it up it’s fresh from their garden.

Again this year I’ll grow tomatoes and herbs (especially basil) in my own garden plot. But I’ll get everything else from Brittany and Richard.

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The magical threads from nowhere to somewhere

Tuesday, April 30, 2024


From a live stream from Heathrow Airport, Monday, April 29, 2024

When Charles Dickens was a young man, he would sit on London Bridge and watch the traffic — the people on the bridge, the ships on the river. Though London was a somewhere rather than a nowhere, it’s easy to imagine that Dickens thought of the faraway places to which the ships were bound, or from which they were coming. In David Copperfield, Dickens’ young hero does the same thing:

“[B]ut I know that I was often up at six o’clock, and that my favourite lounging-place in the interval was old London Bridge, where I was wont to sit in one of the stone recesses, watching the people going by, or to look over the balustrades at the sun shining in the water, and lighting up the golden flame on the top of the Monument. The Orfling met me here sometimes, to be told some astonishing fictions respecting the wharves and the Tower; of which I can say no more than that I hope I believed them myself.”

A common theme in literature is stories that start nowhere but take the reader somewhere as the plot unfolds. Often the stories return to nowhere at the end (because there’s no place like home). One of the reasons we read is to escape the nowhere in which most of us live for a vicarious look at somewhere.

Through the miracle of the global network that we call the Internet, there are new ways of sitting in the stone recesses of London Bridge and watching the world go by. When I discovered the YouTube live stream from London’s Heathrow Airport, I spent an embarrassing amount of time, as though mesmerized, just watching the planes land, one after another, about a minute apart. The chat window identifies the plane and says where it came from — Buenos Aires, maybe, after a long flight, or Edinburgh after a short one — sometimes places I have never been, sometimes places I remember, and sometimes places that I still would like to go.

Then I realized that planes fly over my little piece of nowhere all the time. I also realized that there are apps that can identify those planes as they fly over and reveal where they came from and where they are going. It happens that a great many planes in and out of Atlanta fly right over me on the way to Europe and beyond. In no time at all, I saw (in the app) a plane on its way to Paris that was headed my way. I went out to see if I could see it. My eyes never found it, but I heard it pass over. Paris! Until Notre Dame caught fire, I had not planned to ever go to Paris again. Now I want to see Notre Dame after it has been repaired. Then there was a flight to Rome, a big Airbus that made so much noise that I could hear it through my bedroom window.

The YouTube streaming service from Heathrow is Flight Focus 365. The URL changes a couple of times a day, so you’ll need to select the live stream from the list of videos.

The app, for iPhone and Android, is Plane Finder.


⬆︎ Source: Wikimedia Commons. A square-rigged ship is to previous centuries as an Airbus 380 is today. They’re equally romantic and beautiful, if you think about it in a certain way.

⬇︎ The red airplane icon is Delta flight 66 from Atlanta to Rome. The blue dot is my location.

Update:

As long as we’re talking about Heathrow Airport, I should mention Windsor Castle. Planes approaching Heathrow from the east pass right over Windsor when they’re about six miles from Heathrow. The altitude is low, a little more than 2,000 feet, so if you’ve got a window seat you’ll get a very good look at Windsor Castle. There are stories that Queen Elizabeth II was so accustomed to the sound of airplanes overhead that she could identify airplanes from their sound.

I should also mention Slough, which is visible in the map below. I had wondered how “Slough” is pronounced. The train toward Paddington Station stops at Slough about 25 minutes before Paddington Station. According to the automated voice that calls out the stops, “Slough” rhymes with “how.”

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My rabbit hole

Saturday, April 27, 2024


AI image by Adobe Firefly. Click here for higher resolution.

Do we all have old friends who have gone down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories? I certainly do. Arguing never works, does it? The only way I could think of to tell someone that they’ve disappeared down a rabbit hole is to acknowledge that we all have our rabbit hole, furnished in whatever way suits us best. This is what my rabbit hole might look like.

By the way, it is just remarkable how quickly AI imaging has become available. I subscribe to the Adobe Creative Suite, which now includes AI imaging tools.

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I’m counting on Apple to do AI right

Friday, April 19, 2024

An article yesterday at MacRumors.com asks “Should Apple Kill Siri and Start Over?” My answer to that would be yes. Siri was (and is) terrible. Siri fell far short of the vision that Apple described in 1987 in the video above, which gets the vision right. Siri was a huge embarrassment for Apple.

I remember watching this video in 1987 at an Apple promotional event, and I’ve never forgotten it. Almost 40 years later, Apple at last is in a position to make the “Knowledge Navigator” a reality.

There’s an important hardware angle here. AI’s need a lot of computing power. AI’s run better on graphics processors than on CPUs. Apple’s M1, M2, and M3 chips are generously supplied with graphics processors. I’m writing this on a 2023 M2 Mac Mini Pro. It has ten CPU cores and sixteen (!) GPU cores. AI’s run very well on Apple’s high-end M2 chips, but it seems that Apple is not going to release M3 models of some of its computers and will skip straight to M4 chips, which are engineered specifically to optimize AI’s.

As for software, we still don’t know much about what Apple is planning. We should hear a lot more at Apple’s annual developers conference, which starts June 10.

It’s interesting that, in its 1987 visionary video, Apple showed its “Knowledge Navigator” being used by a Berkeley professor. Sure, there are plenty of people who would use an AI for sports statistics or investment research. But to really advance human knowledge, we need an AI that has read everything. The best material is behind paywalls — all the daily newspapers, academic papers new and old, new books plus all the older books that have been digitized, and even much of the daily chatter on the web. That’s going to cost a lot of money, but if anyone can figure out how to ethically acquire all that material and pay for it, Apple can.

A major failing of current AI’s is that they don’t attribute anything. My guess is that that’s because the people who are building the currently available AI’s don’t want us to know where they are stealing their training material. But if an AI is to be trusted, and if an AI’s answers are to be suitably weighed for reliability, then the AI must tell us where it got its information with citations and footnotes.

AI development is moving very fast. Acquiring, licensing, and figuring out the economics of the training material is a huge undertaking. Google, my guess is, will try to gouge and steal. Apple, I think, will do a more trustworthy job. In a few years, I expect to have a truly useful Apple AI running on Apple hardware.

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