Ice

There's a lot going on with that little 3-letter word! This will be fun.

Let's start with frosting a cake or cookies, also known as "icing" them. (Can you tell I'm hungry?) I haven't had breakfast but picked up a coffe at the bakery. There I stoically bypassed those fresh, beautifully ICED cookies and cupcakes! sigh (That's the truth.) Gotta move along fast so I don't talk myself into heading back to the bakery. It's a lovely spring morning and a short walk - now wouldn't that be nice? NO!!

Colloquially, people often refer to putting something "on ICE" when they want to postpone it. It's easy to see where that probably comes from. Many things spoil if they aren't kept cool so I guess it's a metaphor. (If you're a a serious grammarian please correct me.)

And TV hitmen now refer to "ICING" a victim. That seems to be replacing "offing" which I preferred. Icing sounds so cold-blooded vs offing which seemed gentler and more polite. Maybe it's a matter of political correctness.

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Now let's consider the case of "DRY ICE".  For starters, it's not ice at all. It's the solid form of the gas carbon dioxide. It shares the main feature of "wet ice", the solid form of water, but that's about their only similarity: both preserve frozen foods and other products that must be kept cool or frozen. 

Dry ice can do many things that wet ice cannot, and it has a huge advantage: it leaves no residue when returning to its original state as a gas, while wet ice leaves water behind when it thaws. That's because carbon dioxide has no liquid state. It goes directly from solid (frozen) to gas. (Think of the ruinous floods that sometimes follow a spring thaw.) 

But wet ice has only a couple of minor advantages over dry ice: There's no risk of quick frostbite when handling wet ice as there is with dry ice. And the average person can easily produce and store ice cubes at home whereas dry ice must usually be purchased elsewhere from a producer or distributor. 

A few of the many uses for dry ice: 

• Blast cleaning - major industrial use! 
• Arrest and/or prevent insect activity in containers of grains and their products. 
• Create fog via machines in theaters and other venues for dramatic effect. 
• Capture mosquitoes, bedbugs and other pests. 
• Loosen asphalt floor tiles for construction purposes. 
• Various scientific lab procedures. 

Notes: 

Good news:  Space exploration has revealed that the polar caps on Mars are made entirely of dry ice!  

Serious Risk:  Great care should be taken when using dry ice to avoid frostbite on any exposed body surface as well as the risk of hypercapnia, a lung condition that can lead to death. 

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Now for my favorite part of this post - sharing with you a breathtaking video of ice caves in Alaska's Mendenhall Glacier. Taken by drone just a few weeks ago, it portrays a journey that no human will ever take. Enjoy.

Gardening

There are flower gardens, vegetable gardens, kitchen gardens, and truck gardens. We all know about flower, vegetable and kitchen gardens even if we aren't gardeners. But what grows in a "truck garden"? Surely not trucks.

Truck garden is just another name for a "market garden" where vegetables are grown to be sold locally, often in local "farmers' markets". Because freshness is a requirement and the produce is often perishable it is "trucked" to market as soon as possible after picking. Hence the nineteenth century name which is seldom heard these days. But the practice is alive and well, even growing in some places. Many of us still scurry down as early as possible on market days to get the best berries or veggies, knowing they'll be picked over if not completely gone by 9 or 10 a.m.

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I know very little about gardening of any kind, but that's my current project, which is why I included it in the challenge. It gives me a chance to articulate my ideas and research as I develop my hopes for this summer.

I call these "hopes, not "plans" because I called them plans last year and never got beyond the hoping stage. There are two areas behind my house where I want to plant something attractive that requires little care. Choosing the right plants was the purpose of yesterday's post on Flowers.

Behind my garage there is a 20 x 20 foot area that is lumpy, with buried concrete chunks and a lot of clay and weeds. It needs to be evened out and a layer of good dirt laid down. Farther back is another plot the same size on which stood a cottage until recently.

                            

It was charming but unstable, and the cost to repair it was too high. Some buried trash remains to be removed and the whole area smoothed out. There's black dirt which will be fine for planting. 

Here's the back yard layout, not to scale but it gives a good sense of proportion. One plot for attention is between the Garage and "Ret wall" (retaining wall with a white picket fence on it). The other is below the label Retaining Wall on the layout where the cottage was.

Here is how the yard looked last summer with the cottage intact. The garage is on the left, white picket fence behind it on the retaining wall, labeled "Ret wall" in the layout above. The lower left area below the label "Retaining Wall" is where the cottage stood. (See it way in the back.) 

It's clear from the picture above that there is lots traditional gardening area which I do easily, but I can't add to it the preparation, planting and maintenance of the two new areas. They need to be "plowed" with something motorized, and the one between the garage and picket fence also needs a load of dirt laid. It's time to have that done and I think I have the man for the job. I hope to schedule him in the next few days and I'll report on that as a PS on this post.

Culinary Historians

By now everyone has heard of Julia Child, that tall lady with a passion for food who brought French cuisine to American kitchens. I think she would have great fun with today's foodies. And she surely would have loved her 100th birthday party despite the Michigan heat of an August day in 2012. That was just one of many events regularly hosted by the Culinary Historians of Ann Arbor (CHAA).

A cardboard Julia Child surveys the many dishes prepared in honor of her 100th birthday by the Culinary Historians of Ann Arbor. With a yellow 'Julia Child' rose.

Kim Bayer | AnnArbor.com Contributor

Until recently I had not heard of "culinary historians". Nor could I have imagined the passion such a calling could generate. That was before my introduction to CHAA. The program on my first visit was a lecture about The Egg! Did you know there are many similarities between human and chicken reproductive systems? That was just the first of many startling and fascinating facts presented that day. And our lecturer was so knowledgeable and entertaining that after the Q&A members followed him to his car with more questions!

There's even a blog written by an Atlanta nutritional anthropologist (another unusual field of study) - The Culinary Historian. Dig a little deeper and you will find whole sections in some libraries devoted to food preparation and consumption dating back as far as the Greeks and Romans. A fine example is our own University of Michigan Clements Library's archive. There a small and devoted volunteer staff works tirelessly to gather and catalog information relating to American culinary history, as well as presenting the occasional program.

And speaking of "the spice of life",  according to a recent lecture it was spices from the East that literally made life bearable for the Greeks and Romans. Theirs was a "fragrant" existence without plumbing or many other waste disposal conveniences that we take for granted. To counteract that situation they regularly dispatched fleets of ships and land-based caravans to the Orient to procure for them huge quantities of rich spices. This vast and steady traffic resulted in the creation of a whole system of enterprise and travel along routes still in use today.

FLASH  This just in, a new book compiled in part by going through Lincoln's grocery bills: