November 12

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The 12th was a chilly, damp, and windy day.  It was the first time this season that I felt the breath of winter down the back of my neck.........

I went to the dentist for a filling.  Sigh.

Sitting in the dentist's chair, looking out at the trees being blown by the wind.

The evening of the 10th we went to a special dinner at Zingerman's Roadhouse.

Glenn Roberts of Anson Mills was the star of the evening, along with many of the special things he grows.  He brought all sorts of wonderful things for us to taste, including several that are so new to his repertoire that no one in the USA is eating them.  Special varieties of various edibles, including grains and legumes, all cooked for us by the Roadhouse chef, Alex.

Glenn is particularly interested in historical grains -- the varieties that were grown two or three hundred years ago, when flavor was more important.  I hadn't thought about the way food plants move around the world.  Some of the varieties Glenn grows went from the southeastern USA to Europe, Africa, and Asia, and then were lost in this country.  Glenn has retrieved them, and is growing them here again.

I liked hearing the stories of the different foods -- where they originated, where they traveled, how they are being used today.....

All of the food we ate that night was delicious, and, as you'd guess, most of it was grain/legume based.  Right down my alley -- I'm one of those people who have only extremely rarely met a carbohydrate I don't like.

One plate served to us that evening had three scoops of grits.  One made from white corn, one from yellow, and one from red corn.  It was so interesting to taste the differences.  The textures differed, as well as the flavors.  I would eat any of them, any time, and the red one was really special.

The one thing I liked the very best were the polycrop biscuits.  "Polycropping" is growing multiple crops in the same soil at the same time, and harvesting them all at the same time.  Glenn plants the seeds in the order of how long the plants need to grow from planting to harvest.  (I wonder how that works -- planting when other plants are already growing there......  I also wonder about the harvest -- wondering what sort of machinery can harvest a wide variety of plants at once, saving the big seeds like corn, and smaller seeds from other plants, too......)

It was a very interesting and tasty evening.  I'm so glad we went.


We loved the biscuits so much that our server gave us a few to take home.

Eating something nice and soft for lunch after the dentist (the anesthetic was mostly gone, but I really did not want to bite myself and add insult to injury)......

This is very nice indeed.  Biscuit made from Anson Mills Polycrop flour.  It had emmer, flax, sorghum, buckwheat, and oats, if I remember correctly, plus four more plants whose seeds are eaten by people (which I have forgotten, alas).  All grown together in the same fields at the same time, and all harvested at the same time.

We were told that plants which grow together taste even better together than if you grew the same plants, separately, and combined them only after harvest. 

After seeing the PBS Nature program "What Plants Talk About," which showed mother trees feeding their baby trees with help from underground fungus, I can totally believe that plants who grow with each other are sharing information, nutrients, and who knows what all, under the soil where we have no idea what is going on..........

We can see flecks of all sorts of different colors, from all sorts of different seeds, in the biscuit.

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I would eat these any day and every day.  If I only could.  This 9-plant polycrop is unique to this year (they are building up and adding more plants to the mix each year), and the flour is not for sale...........

I can buy Glenn's grits, though, and I mean to do that!

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