Cranberries and coffee
With shocking statistics about income
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Season of Mists
Fall’s final colors shimmer amid the Southwest Hills of Portland.
Income
Just in time for Thanksgiving, I found these sobering statistics in The Triumph of Injustice: How the Rich Dodge Taxes and How to Make Them Pay, by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman. The authors are economists at the University of California, Berkeley.
The average income of Americans, everyone rich and everyone poor, is $75,000, the authors note. But this figure is nearly meaningless, as the averages are so highly skewed by the huge incomes of the rich.
More telling is the average income of the 122 million adults who are in the lower half of incomes in the US. Saez and Zucman write:
For them, the average income is $18,500 before taxes and transfers in 2019. Yes, you are reading that correctly: half of the US population adult population lives on an annual income of $18,500.
Moreover, the authors note, that figure includes deductions like payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare, and possibly employee options like health insurance.
That income, $18,500, come out to about $1,542 a month, less after withholding.
So be thankful for what you have, while holding compassion for those who have less.
Poem I
Tower
Up, there, high up, Beyond the grasp of my reaching— A squirrel, two robins, a pigeon Dance on a twisting of wire Affixed to a mouldering post Eaten by insects within. Entire civilizations pass by, Secrets we never will hear— A squirrel, two robins, a pigeon, Scattered and flown away. Inside the post, bugs make sawdust. Outside, the wind sighs in the wires.
Thanksgiving
Next Thursday is Thanksgiving. Time to enumerate blessings.
Yet gratitude isn’t easy when you can’t avoid seeing all that’s wrong with the world. When you see men sleeping on the street. When no one wipes a child’s snotty nose. When all the leaves are gone and Christmas music in every store drives you batty.
A better way is to make thanksgiving a part of every day, not just the fourth Thursday in November. When I lay down to sleep, I think over my day and ask myself, “What am I grateful for?” When I wake up, lying in bed, I ask the same question.
Gratitude is entwined with noticing. Consider these last autumn leaves, yellow all around, how they twist in the wind, clinging to the branch, resisting. How can you keep from feeling gratitude for this life force that clings till the end? Its very inevitability lifts you. That’s how the love gets in.
Cranberries
I love cranberries. Sometimes I crunch on a few of them right out of the freezer, wild and insanely sour. I make cranberry sauce, of course, and I also add a handful of cranberries to every smoothie.
According to the World Population Review, cranberries are grown commercially in four states, and Oregon is fourth in production, after Wisconsin, Massachusetts and New Jersey.
Oregon has a cranberry crop thanks to a man from Massachusetts who came west to find gold and instead ended up in Coos County with some Massachusetts cranberry starts. Most of the farms are clustered around the city of Bandon in Coos County.
Cranberry sauce
Cranberry sauce is easy to make. You just add water and sugar to the berries and boil until the berries pop. They have enough natural pectin to make the sauce thick. Try using less sugar than the recipe on the package for maximum tart flavor.
It’s hard to find canned cranberry sauce that isn’t made with high fructose corn syrup. You do not want to eat a product like that. Buy organic.
Cranberry juice recipe
Cranberry juice cocktail made its appearance as a new product when I was a kid. Every year, I’d make the family a simple punch. This is the recipe, although I’m not sure you can buy frozen lemonade concentrate anymore.
Tingle Bells Punch
2 quarts cranberry juice cocktail 1/2 cup maraschino cherry juice* 1 6-ounce can frozen lemonade concentrate, thawed Two 1-liter bottles chilled lemon-lime soda
*Syrup from a jar of cherries. The process of making commercial maraschino cherries is sort of icky. They are bleached with chemicals and artificial coloring is added. Tillen Farms Merry Maraschino Cherries are colored with beet juice, but I can’t find out how the cherries are processed. They are less fluorescent than the traditional version.
Cranberry juice today
Nowadays I find commercial cranberry juice cocktail unbearably sweet. Plus, its sweetness comes from high fructose corn syrup.
Fortunately, unsweetened cranberry juice is widely available. Sip small amounts straight or sweeten lightly. Maple syrup is super for this. Add one part water to one part juice to make a cranberry juice cocktail drink.
Cranberry bread
Here is a good recipe with cranberries. It’s adapted from one I found on an Ocean Spray bag in 1972.
Cranberry-orange bread
2 cups sifted all-purpose flour 1 cup sugar (I use 2/3-3/4 cup) 1-1/2 teaspoons baking powder 1/2 teaspoon baking soda 1/2 teaspoon salt 1/4 cup butter 3/4 cup orange juice 1 tablespoon grated orange zest 1 well-beaten egg 1/2 cup chopped nuts 1 to 2 cups fresh cranberries, coarsely chopped --------- Preheat oven to 350 F. Butter a 9x5-inch loaf pan and dust with flour. Sift flour, sugar, baking powder, soda and salt (or mix them well in a bowl with a fork). Cut in butter until the mixture resembles coarse cornmeal. Combine orange juice and zest with beaten egg; add all at once to dry ingredients, stirring only to moisten. Carefully fold in nuts and cranberries. Spoon into prepared loaf pan, spreading sides slightly higher than center. Bake 1 hour. Remove from pan while still warm. Cool; store overnight for easy slicing. The flavors blend better, too, if the bread is allowed to sit before you eat it. The cranberries get more mellow and the orange flavor peeks out.
A better cranberry recipe
These scones are simply addictive. They’re made with butter AND whipping cream, and they have minimal sugar. The crunch of the cornmeal is unexpected and delicious.
Terry’s cornmeal cranberry scones
3/4 cup all-purpose flour 1/2 cup stone-ground yellow cornmeal 1/4 to 1/3 cup sugar 1/2 tablespoon baking powder (1-1/2 teaspoons) 1/2 teaspoon salt 4 tablespoons cold unsalted butter, in small pieces 1/2 cup whipping cream, chilled Zest of 1 small orange (or lemon) 1/2 cup dried cranberries -------- Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper. Combine flour, cornmeal, sugar, baking powder and salt. Cut in butter; use your fingers if you like. Add cream and orange zest, stirring with a fork until moistened. Add cranberries. Form into two 5-inch patties; cut each into 6 wedges. Place on the lined baking sheets and bake about 15 minutes, until lightly browned and firm. —Adapted from The Neighborhood Bakeshop, by Jill Van Cleave
Nutrition
Cranberries are high in antioxidants. Dark-colored fruits and vegetables always are. Even chocolate has some antioxidants.
But most of us don’t get a lot of antioxidants from cranberries—or even other fruits and vegetables—because we don’t eat enough of them. We get way more from coffee. In the words of Joe Vinson, a chemistry professor at the University of Scranton, Pennsylvania:
Americans get more of their antioxidants from coffee than any other dietary source. Nothing else comes close.
His 2005 study listed black tea as the second most prevalent source of antioxidants in the American diet, followed by bananas.
Some words about coffee in a coffee town
I usually drink my coffee black. I like the taste, the hints of mystery and darkness. The acidity. The fleeting flavors on the tongue.
Portland is chock full o’ coffee roasters. And now, portable units bring coffee-roasting technology to your home kitchen. Like mini-espresso machines, homeowners can have their own roaster. My daughter Lyza has a little one in her Vermont farmhouse.
Recently, a man came to my door with the bag of coffee he had roasted for me earlier that day in his home on Southeast Stark Street.
Michael “Moose” Schwartz is Black Rose Coffee, the boutiquest of the boutique. I discovered Black Rose from the stickers he’s affixed to posts and poles in the neighborhood, like the ubiquitous announcements of upcoming concerts.
Coffee centers
As you walk in certain parts of our city, you can smell the coffee from various roasters. One such nexus is Southeast Stark and Sandy, home to Portland Coffee Roasters and others. Another is Southeast Main Street between 11th and 12th avenues. Coava has a new facility there, and next door is the Buckman Coffee Factory, a shared-use operation that offers roasting technology, classes and event spaces to budding coffee entrepreneurs.
Coffee sources
Cunningham Coffee on Southeast Hawthorne will deliver roasted beans to selected neighborhoods in the city.
Many other startups will also bring you coffee. For example, Elevator Coffee delivers beans on Tuesdays throughout Portland for a $3.25 fee.
Coava Coffee, with a store on Hawthorne conveniently just two blocks from my front door, offers fair trade coffee from producers they know intimately. Read about them on Coava’s elegantly designed website.
Bold Coffee has opened a coffee shop/bookstore on Southwest Jefferson and 18th, near the Goose Hollow Max station. It features books about or written by under-represented communities—people with disabilities, adoptees, immigrants, or sexual or racial minorities.
For drinking coffee on-site—and, often, writing words for this Substack on my laptop, I like Coava, Wallflower on Southeast Division, and Push X Pull at Southeast Stark at Eighth Avenue, across from Organics to You. Also, Refuge Coffee on Foster Road in Lents and Albina Press at Hawthorne and 51st.
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Credo
The Universe is not stingy. Let things blossom. Remember to breathe.
I wrote these lines, and printed them out and posted them near my computer. I can recite the lines, but still I feel discombobulated. Time is out of sync these days.
I recall Leonard Cohen’s lines: “There is a crack, a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” These words have added meaning when I think of broken things: Broken pavement. Broken hearts. Broken dreams.
Let us have gratitude for broken things. When things are broken, you see, that’s how the love gets in.
Poem II
Fall crows
Pool of warm light. Rain scars the window In angry slashes. Still, the crows preen, Standing on wires. They never care Whether they’re wet. Rain comes upon them, Slicking their feathers As they flock and gather Where someone scattered Some soggy old french fries.
—30—