Dana O’Driscoll writes about “The Way of Wood”—about humanity’s interaction with wood, the loss of that interaction, and ways to find our way back to it.
Posts in: Workshop
I finished a wooden mallet today with some scrap leather on the ends. It’s very amateurish but I am an amateur.
The now-time of the hands
Caroline Ross: When we cannot touch, cannot be held, do not regularly make things with our hands, work so hard that we do not have time to press seeds into the ground in a garden, nor to sew the button back on our shirt, which is so cheaply made we throw it away rather than invest our precious finger-tip-time, which anyway we must keep sacred for our devices… We no longer settle into the never ending now-time of the hands.
Happy winter solstice! I went into the woods yesterday intending to cut a larger Yule log from a downed tree but working with a hand saw lowers your expectations. 😂
I’m making fire cider in an attempt to beat back all the sickness going around right now. Unfortunately it won’t be ready for a couple of weeks. Anyone ever tried this stuff?
Floofy Pie
Rachel and I made Julia Child’s “Fluffy Pumpkin Pie”—which will forevermore be called Floofy Pie in our house. Rachel used Julia Child’s pie crust recipe and it was outstanding. We used fresh pumpkin instead of canned and this, I believe, was the source of the only problem we had: too much liquid. The pie did firm up but the bottom crust wasn’t as dry as we’d like. Cooked, not raw, but also not dry.
The best hot chocolate
Makes two servings of rich, not overly sweet, hot chocolate. You’ll never use those packages of hot chocolate mix again. 1/4 cup sugar 1/4 cup dark cocoa Pinch salt 1/3 cup hot water 2 cups milk (I use oatmilk) 1 tsp vanilla (Optional) Large glug of Disaronno, Cointreau, or other liqueur Mix sugar, cocoa, salt, and hot water in a sauce pan. Stir frequently (and into the “corners” of the sauce pan because the cocoa will want to clump there) until mixture comes just to a boil.
I made some pawpaw muffins this morning using this recipe. I would have liked them to have a stronger pawpaw flavor, so maybe the pulp should be increased. (I cut everything in half because I didn’t have enough unfrozen pulp to make the whole recipe.) The recipe is actually for bread but I had a notion to make muffins instead so I used this article as a reference for how to convert a quick bread recipe into muffins — basically increase the heat and decrease the time.
Pawpaws are the largest edible fruit native to North America. They’re often described as a mix of banana and mango flavors. This National Park Service article describes the tree and fruit and says the trees are becoming increasingly dominant in the understory because deer do not like them. An interesting case of the interrelatedness of the ecosystem: as deer population increases due to a decrease in predators, pawpaw trees increase because deer don’t eat them and instead eat other species. As pawpaw trees increase, the NPS says, the forest canopy may become more patchy or shorten (see the article for the reasons why).
HOMEBREW 2, the second mailing of what I’m grandiosely calling an analog media project, was dropped off at the post office today. If you’re interested, you can see pdf scans and/or find out how to sign up for mailing list on this page.
