Well, everyone, this is the last post. Thanks for reading. Jono
goodbye from Jono Tosch on Vimeo.
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SAYONARA!
Yesterday afternoon I ate some pan con tomate on my front porch. A bee landed on the tomato and began to eat. I observed the bee for several minutes and then took the sandwich for a trip around the house and garden.
bread and tomato from Jono Tosch on Vimeo.
To make pan con tomate, toast some nice bread and then rub raw garlic onto the toasted bread. Drizzle the bread with olive oil and then put some slices of fresh tomato onto the bread. Sprinkle with salt and enjoy.
So it's been three weeks since I left Massachusetts and three days shy of two weeks that I've been here in New Mexico. Homesickness has kept me quiet this week. Homesickness and loneliness. But I'm getting over it. Today I finished "Mississippi," the big road movie that's been sitting on my computer and hogging up a ton of space. I squeezed five days of travel along and around the Mississippi river and at least seven hours of footage into this nine minute film. All the unused footage has been shoved into a number of zipped folders. By journey's end, the bolt hole in my camera had become completely worn out from excessive use of the dashboard mounted camera swivel add-on. But it served its purpose. This is some of that purpose. Enjoy.
The second of several road videos...
About a week ago I had no idea what The 6 Motels Western Adventure would look like or be. A couple weeks before that, all I had was a drawing of the number 6. A couple weeks before that, I knew that I would return to the Crawford farm in New Mexico, but I didn't know when and I didn't know how. At one point I thought I might fly out there. At one point I wasn't even born. The long and the short of it is that today I realized exactly how much hotel money I need to earn. I need to earn $500. I made a grave error when I forgot that I must also return from New Mexico, so this trip technically should be called The 12 Motels Western Adventure, but it's not. I'm sticking with The 6 Motels Western Adventure. And in fact, thanks to two very cool and early donors, I've already got one room covered! That just leaves 11 more rooms to go. Fortunately, I will be keeping The 6 Motels Western Adventure as I go. It'll be a rolling document, and if you really like the rolling document, you can always CLICK THE 6 while I'm on the road and creating it. Speaking of on the road, I spent that last 48 hours tweaking out the Dashboard Mounted Camera Swivel Add-On Prototype, and this is the short film that I made. It should give you a sneak peak of what to possibly expect from The 6 Motels Western Adventure. Of course, I have a few more tricks up my sleeve. Thank you, and please think about clicking the 6.
People ask me often enough what I've been up to. Like tonight, Elaine said she hadn't seen me in a while, and she asked me what I'd been up to. I said, Nothing that I'm not normally up to in the summer, which was true enough. Kimchi workshop was good, I said, which was also true enough. These are the sorts of sheepish answers I give when people ask me that question, which is to say that they are untrue—but it's simply not socially adept to launch into a long-winded talk about riding your bicycle around with a video camera with someone who is an acquaintance at best when one of you is merely throwing away a napkin and the other is breaking up a chocolate bar and preparing snacks before a poetry reading in the tight little back room of a poetry business. So I just lied and said the same old same old. Summer is going good, I said. How's yours, I said. If I had been less of an idiot, or less shy, or simply more interested in talking, or if I'd been drawn out of my shell by some forceful magnetic shoes, I probably would have started gabbing away about the film I made while riding my bike up and down a couple farm roads in Hadley; I would have talked about those roads and about the road I will take back to New Mexico this fall to work, once again, on Stan and Rose Mary Crawford's garlic farm. You can see what a mess it would have been to spill all of that on an unsuspecting friend who was washing strawberries. It's better just put it here so that you can see what I've been up to—whoever you are—and hopefully, if you hang around long enough, you can join me as I drive out to New Mexico this mid-September. I'm going to make a movie about it. But no more gabbing. You can get back to scrubbing your foot. Here's the short film.
There is a bonus area of Northampton that is tucked between the interstate and the river. It's a large area that locals call the meadows. The roads are pure silt. There are new school and old school fields, organic and so-called conventional farms. There is an airport and a fair grounds; there's even a nation wildlife sanctuary with a beaver pond. If you follow any of the silt roads, eventually you will come to the Connecticut river. Sometimes there are boaters on the river. Sometimes there are people with small, portable grills, snacking on weenies. Going by the number of empty beer cans and flavored, alcoholic drinks—hard lemonade, Twisted teas, other gross beverages—it appears that the meadows is a favorite place for the youth of Northampton to drink illegally. In any case, I drove down there the other night to film some fireflies. I checked myself vigorously for ticks upon returning home. This is the film that I made. It stars my feet.
I'm watching the flames build in the grill for the first time this year, and I'm about to crack a beer. Hopefully the tension I've been carrying around all day will dissipate. Let's see....ah, very nice. Please hold on one more second...keep holding....ah yes, that seems to be doing the trick. I don't know why it is, but at least once a week I want to KILL. Tuesday and Wednesday roll around, and I have NO PATIENCE. None. It didn't help that this morning I got stuck behind the slowest driver on the planet in the Staples parking lot. Some rich old dude in a BMW station wagon—what a dick. I was like, "Yo geezer, you gotta fucking move!" The guy was doing two. If that song that says "Move bitch, git out the way, git out the way" had come on the radio, I would have probably rammed him. As it was, I just did two behind him. Anyhow, I'm pleased to release my second bike film. I liked doing the first one so much, I decided to do another one. This one is faster—FASTER—and hopefully it demonstrates a few new tricks. Whatever the case, I think Northampton comes out looking really fine. Enjoy.
Last August when the X-Country Road and Farm Adventure Fun(d) Drive was in full swing, I was pumping out tons of videos and pummeling Facebook with links. A lot of those videos made it onto the blog, but a lot of them didn't. Some don't even exist anymore. This one, however, does. It was intended to be another promotional video the for the X-Country trip, but I thought it was too insane and demonic to serve that purpose, so I put it on the shelf and forgot about it—until yesterday. Here's the short film. Watch me cook the hell out of some chicken pieces (and some corn) in the rain.
Well, this isn't food, not exactly—and if you'd been present in the "editing room" while I made this, you'd know how unimportant food can be sometimes—but even if this isn't exactly food, I do still think that it bears some relationship to human appetite. The motivation behind art and cooking are sometimes the same thing: we want something more than the world currently offers us. We look in our pantry and it seems scant. We mill around the house, hungry. There is something we want, but we don't know what, so we take another look in the pantry out of sheer boredom. Would you look at that, we say. There are some provisions in our pantry after all. It was only that we could not see them. If this seems too poetic for you, let me return to the ground. Sometimes you merely feed yourself because you are hungry; but other times you spend some time making yourself a meal that does more than fill your belly. This, I think, is the bridge between art and food. Food and cooking lend themselves so easily to all our human metaphors. How often have you heard someone say, "This pie is made with love"? "This cube steak is made with love." "These mashed potatoes, hon, are made with love." Of course, they're made with fire, spatulas, and rolling pins, but we cannot help ourselves. If eating were only calories, we could all go happily onto liquid diets. But there is something more to eating. I spent the whole afternoon eating marker caps, eating my vinyl record as it turned around and around. Bon appetite.
Question: What do you do when you have sorghum? Answer: You go to the dentist. Scratch that. You don't go to the dentist for sorghum, though I badly need some serious dental attention right now. What you do when you have ripe sorghum is harvest it. The rhythm of agricultural work is not complete without the harvest. There is so much satisfaction from the wholesale destruction of a crop that you spent so much time planting and nurturing. There is pleasure in removing it, in clearing it from your field, a retrospective pleasure that can be twinged with sadness for the soft hearted, or that can be downright ecstasy for the hard hearted. It depends on what type of person you are. Many of us are in the middle. If you are like me, there's satisfaction in cutting down rows of gorgeous plants. The harvest marks the end of something, but a cleared field can also be refreshing. Especially if you rotate your crops. True misery is when you hack down acre upon acre of corn, knowing that you will only plant more of the same corn in the spring. Good organic farmers, however, know that where this year sorghum grew, next year squash will grow. Squash may not be better than sorghum, it may only be different. You could read this text as a reflection upon love and love lost. It's better, however, to read it as life and more life. Life goes up and life plummets: the sorghum rises and the sorghum gets whacked down. If you don't believe me, you can watch this X-Country Road and Farm mini Feature Film: "Sorghum."
Hey Everybody
I'm on the ground in New Mexico, getting acclimated, taking in the scenery and chatting like mad with my excellent hosts, Stan and Rose Mary Crawford. Rose Mary is an absolute joy and she loves tennis; Stan can do dishes faster than any many alive. The valley where they live and farm the land is abundantly beautiful, and you are abundantly beautiful for sending me here. Yesterday I had a run in with a fat tarantula. Pokey little thing had the nerve to waddle up to my camera when I bent down to take its picture. Tomorrow begins the farm portion of the X-Country Road and Farm Adventure. Until then, sit back and enjoy the old time religion of some hard-core, Oklahoma bible thumpers. I hated that state. Jono
My phone dropped a lot of calls when I was on the road, sometimes conveniently when I received a call but didn't want to talk, other times inconveniently when I wanted to talk. About an hour after I crossed the mighty Mississippi, I really wanted to talk on the phone but there was no service, so trained the dashboard-mounted camera on my mug and decided to hold a one-sided conversation with President Obama.
I'm at another McDonald's, this time in a small farming town outside of Little Rock. There's one piece of advice I can give you about long road trips and eating fast food: get one burger and nothing more. The guy in front of me in line just now had four sandwiches, a medium fry, and a full size drink. If you eat that much fast food while on the road, you might as well drive straight into a sidewall. Anyway, I can't babble too much right now because I need to make Oklahoma City by night. A little preview of of "Day Three," though: a phony phone call between Oilchanges and Barak. OK: here's "Day Two." Ciao!
I'm at a McRonalds in Wytheville, Virginia, having lunch This morning I woke up in a parking lot, a nice and dark one deep in the recesses of Blue Ridge Community College, somewhere between Harrisonburg and Roanoke. My bed's pretty hard and a little too short, but man was it sweet to wake up behind that college. It rained all day yesterday. Today, though, today is beautiful. I'm rolling through hard-core Christian land, where preachers on the radio talk about Egypt and the Pharoh, and where the secular right-wing pundits vent spleen against environmentalists. Wow. Editing video on the road is a little tough. Here's "Day One." "Day Two" is coming soon. Peace.
The other night the old lightbulb in my brain flipped on and I had a vision of velcro. I thought I could easily mount my camera on my dashboard with sticky velcro tape. I thought it'd be as simple as a trip to WalMart. I was wrong. Nothing sticks to vinyl dashboards. Adhesive repellent vinyl dashboards are probably the greatest invention in history for parents with kids who cannot help but plaster the dashboard with stickers from the dentist, but they are not useful to X-Country Road and Farm bloggers who want kick ass road footage. I bought the envisioned velcro tape, but tape alone would not be enough. I had to "engineer" a solution with a plank of wood and some shims I made from downed tree branches. This X-Country Road and Farm Adventure Fun(d) Drive will be over tomorrow. The time to click the gas can is now. Until then, here's some practice footage I took with my dashboard mounted camera in Whatley, Massachusetts, where hurricane Irene did very little damage.
Thanks for hanging in there during the August-long Oilchanges X-Country Road and Farm Adventure Fun(d) Drive month. I will be on the road shortly. Jono
Welcome to Oilchanges.
Pop on your headphones and enjoy.
Keep your eyes on Oilchanges. I'm headed out to New Mexico this September to work on Stanley Crawford's famed garlic farm, and my readers are behind me! Throughout the month of August my readers donated $1600 to make this Oilchanges X-Country Road and Farm Adventure possible. Thanks to them, me and Oilchanges will be packing up the station wagon and heading out west to do some top notch road and farm bloggin', so keep your eyes posted. I'll be bloggin' all the way. Until then, check out the easy-browse archives at the top.
Cheers,
Jono
Yo yo yo, Friends and Fans, this X-Country Road and Farm Adventure Fun(d) Drive is rounding third and heading for home. Nine days left to scoop up the remaining $520, and then it's Goodbye Pledge Central, Hello Road! Until then, there's work to be done.
Fear is a huge part of our food culture. First time I canned spicy beans, I nibbled the end off one bean and immediately called my parents to warn them that I might be dead by morning. "Don't cry, Ma," I said, "Botulism's as good a way to go as any." I was in the dark and afraid. Fear is rampant in our food culture, and the giant industrial food producers love it this way. I'm not sure that The Man created this fear, but you can be pretty damn sure that he has zero interest in making you feel empowered. He wants you to think that P**si and Chicken nuggs are safe and that home canning is demonic. But it's the other way around. Home canning is glorious and safe. It's a helluva lot safer than driving. Check out this video, and then keep reading.
The Low-Down on canning high-acid foods:
You don't need any special equipment to can a few pints or quarts. You only need a big pot, some mason jars, some canning salt (which you can find at any grocery store), and some tongs to lift the jars out of the pot. You should also read up on home canning and use a recipe to make yourself feel more comfortable and confident with the process. It's really about the confidence: the confidence that you can make your own pickled peppers, that you don't need a monolithic corporation to do it for you. This is about wrestling power from greedy hands. Here are some basic things to do:
1) Do sterilize your jars and two-piece lids in boiling water for the required time
2) Do follow the recipe, especially when it comes to vinegar-to-water ratio of your brine
3) Do "process" your stuffed jars for the required time
4) Do watch those lids:
If the lids suck down and stay down, you're in business. Processing the jars in boiling water causes gasses in the jars to spew out. As the jars cool, a vacuum will be created inside the jar. Yes, the botulism bacteria, Clostridium botulinum, does require an anaerobic environment, which is exactly what you create when you process the jars, which is why you should sterilize your jars and process them for the required amount of time, i.e. to kill any bacteria that might be present. REMEMBER: the botulism bacteria must be present in the first place. If there are live cultures in your jars, you will soon find out. The bacteria will produce gas as a by-product of their existence in your jars, and thus the lids of your jars might bulge. There is some risk. THE REAL TRUTH, THOUGH, IS THAT THE PERCEIVED RISK OF HOME-CANNING IS MUCH HIGHER THAN THE ACTUAL RISK, ESPECIALLY WHEN YOU ARE CANNING HIGH-ACID FOODS. It's this artificially high, perceived risk that the industrial food mofos want. They want you to think that you can't can, because if you can't can, then you gotta buy their crap, and crap is what it is. Between me an you, we all know that the megalithic food giants don't give a flying f**k about us or our health.
Peace
Hi Friends and Fans
The switch-boards are bleeping and blopping. The gas can is 7/10ths full! Dennis, the floor-cleaning robot, spent the morning at the groomer's, getting his wires tightened and the ball bearings in his wheels lubricated. I spent the morning on the interweb, learning how to read and write html, to prepare this blog for the onslaught of new readers who will arrive shortly. When Oilchanges becomes a blog of note, thousands of new viewers will pour onto to it, and like you, they'll be expecting top notch content.
Hopefully they will like what they see. They'll be a little wet behind the ears; they won't know Dick from Harry or Tommy from Tortelloni. Not like you. Some of you have been coming to Oilchanges for three years now! I posted the video below on August 13th, 2008. Thanks for all the support and feedback. Remember to click the gas can.
Jono
