Spiders

On the floor, on the wall, in the kitchen

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As fall deepens, ants and arachnids start to migrate indoors. All it takes is a tiny hole in the wainscoting or a window screen, and they are inside.

Early risers find dew-spangled spiderwebs just outside the front door. Soon you may find them in the corners of your living room.

People in Portland are gentle with spiders. Rather than crush an invading spider, they will try to capture it, gently, and return it outside.

The spiders return the courtesy. None of the species in Portland is poisonous, although they can bite, and that wound can become infected.

Spider luck

In a spiritual sense, spiders evoke creativity, rebirth, connection, growth. In the practical world, they are determined, consistent, indefatigable and resolute.

In many cultures, their presence is a sign of good luck.

It’s a fact, too, that a spider’s silk is five times as strong as steel. An article in Science explains how. 

Both male and female spiders can spin webs, though the females’ are larger and more elaborate. 

Spider time

They spin in silence
Sticky strands
Strong like steel,
Strangling silk.

Caught on my fingers,
Cobwebs in my hair.
Flies are a sacrifice
Helpless and doomed.

I found a huge spider web in Provence, and some smaller ones in Portland.

I took this photo in 2007.

Busy spiders encase ivy in a Southwest Portland garden.

Others get to work on a cedar in Southeast Portland.

And of course, there’s Halloween spider imagery.

Boo!

Spiders in the kitchen

First, spider cookies. I found this technique on the Web. Place chocolate chips on still-warm cookies. Melt more chocolate, spoon it into a self-sealing snack bag, and make just the tiniest cut on the corner. Squeeze the chocolate carefully onto the cookies, radiating out from the chocolate chips.

I tried the technique using a small paintbrush to spread the chocolate. Not very artistic, but you get the idea. I couldn’t use the photo from the website because it’s copyrighted. It was out of focus, anyway, and the spiders had only six legs.

What is a spider, anyway?

The Secret of Cooking: Recipes for an Easier Life in the Kitchen, by Bee Wilson, is a big book of advice about cooking tools and techniques. She writes that a “spider” is a handheld Asian implement for lifting foods out of fat or liquids. 

Hey, I had one of those, once. I never used it, though, so I gave it away. Other cooks swear by spiders for flicking food, like doughnuts or pasta, out of fat or liquids. I just use a slotted spoon.

Besides, in my vocabulary, “spider” is another name for a cast-iron skillet.

At one point, cast-iron pans looked like spiders. They had feet to elevate them above the embers in a fireplace. But even footless cast-iron skillets are still called spiders by people like me.

Spiders, not scary

Lore, fantasy and fable surround cast-iron cookware. Many people are afraid of cooking in cast iron because of this.

I have a lot of cast-iron wear, and I use it all the time. 

I don’t use the saucepan, because I have lighter-weight alternatives, and the Dutch oven is hard for me to hoist as I get older. But I use the other three every day. The smaller two fit in the toaster oven. Fran Gardner photo

Here are some of the shibboleths about cast iron.

1. Never wash a cast-iron pan. It will get rusty and lose its seasoning.

I wash my pans all the time with soap and water. I often use a piece of chain mail to scrub them. I could use salt or sand, but why bother? Soap and water work. If the pan loses some of its finish, I just spread a little oil with a paper towel. I often don’t bother to heat the pan until I use it to cook in.

2. Because iron is reactive, acid foods, like lemon or tomatoes, might pick up the taste of metal.

The nonstick seasoning keeps metal from leaching into the food. I cook spaghetti sauce in cast iron. It never tastes funny.

3. Cast iron is too much trouble. You have to worry about rust. It’s a pain to season.

New cast-iron pans come pre-seasoned, although it’s a good idea to re-season them. Old ones that you can buy for a song at thrift stores can be seasoned, if needed, with little effort. There may be a patina of old food and grease, but you can usually work around this without having to strip the pan. 

Small businesses like Department of Work, based in Portland’s St. Johns neighborhood, will restore your battered iron pans for a reasonable price. Send inquiries to Julie Wilson at departmentofwork@gmail.com. 

To season a pan

1. Clean the pan, scrubbing away old deposits of grease or food. Use a Scotch-Brite, chain mail or even steel wool, regular or soapy (SOS or Brillo).

Chain mail used for cleaning pans, with an avocado and a pear for scale. In 2011, I reviewed a documentary DVD called “Chain Mail Techniques: 5 Basic Weaves & More.¨ It made making chain mail look easy. Fran Gardner photo

2. Season the pan 

Apply a thin coat of oil with a paper towel. Best to use an oil with a high smoke point, like sunflower.

Put the pan in a 450 degree F oven for about 30 minutes. Small skillets can be seasoned in a toaster oven. Whatever works. Keep your kitchen ventilated, as the pan might smoke.

Repeat the process—oiling, then heating—two or three times. By then, you’ll have a good buildup of oil on the pan and it will be essentially non-stick. You should still use butter to fry eggs, but most foods won’t stick badly.

If they do, you can scrub the sticky pieces off and re-season the pan if necessary.

Cast-iron abuse

Some time back, a Kentucky teachers union organizer named Nema Brewer tweeted: “JD Vance washes his cast iron skillet.” There’s no evidence Vance actually does this, but the tweet may be the impetus behind a sign posted by my neighbor.

You can order this sign from the BrattyPolitics store on Etsy, where the only comment about the source of the quote is “you know he does.”

Well, it’s kinder than the bogus rumor about Haitian immigrants eating pet cats. And it’s funny.

Moving on

Someone posted recently on Next Door that she won’t ride the MAX train anymore because of all the crazy people. I don’t have a problem with people acting out on public transit. They are just being human.

I see all sorts of things on the bus. Mostly, they’re good.

Bus poem

Tired old men,
Chipper young students.
Wheelchairs and walkers,
Two cats in carriers,
Skateboards and backpacks.
Strollers hold babies
Or, often, dogs.

Bulging black bags
Full of bottles and cans.
Ten cents a container,
Walking around money—
Or bussing around money
In this strange economy.

No food on the bus,
Signs prominently proclaim. 
That never stops
The riders from eating.
There’s another latte
Splattered on the floor.
At least it’s not ice cream.
I’ve seen that, too.

Sometimes it’s noisy:
Shouters and chatters,
Though most folks are quiet.
Reading their smart phones
And checking their mail*

*Thanks to the chain mail discussion above, I have a vision of a knight in armor, checking his mail. Is that a tear in the underarm?

Old-time cop shows

When I was a kid in the 1950s, the ’30s and ’40s were terra incognita when it came to  movies and TV. Nobody ever thought of rerunning old television shows, and I remember movies as being mostly black-and-white gangster stories featuring the interiors of big black cars and fat-lipped characters who all looked like Edward G. Robinson.

I couldn’t get a handle on what life had been like for my parents in those days before I was born. I often wonder if my children’s generation has the same blindness about the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s.

But now—anyone can revisit ancient TV shows like “Perry Mason” or “Murder She Wrote” or “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.” All it takes is a streaming subscription.

I recently started watching “Columbo,” a cop series that ran from 1968-74 and that featured Peter Falk as the rumpled detective in the tan raincoat. You can watch it now on Peacock or Amazon Prime.

The schtick with “Columbo” episodes is that the viewer witnesses the murder in the first minutes of the show. You know who did it. The twist lies in discovering how LAPD Lieutenant Columbo (I don’t think he has a first name, any more than the much-mentioned “Mrs. Columbo” does) figures this out for himself.

The romance of the typewriter

When I was a young thing I was in love with the idea of writing but had no idea what to write. I did know how I would write, though: on my beloved Smith-Corona portable typewriter.

I reveled in images of the foreign correspondent, cigarette dangling from his lips, batting out copy in some ratty tropical bar. Tap tap tappety tap.

The first episode of “Columbo’s” first season,* “Murder by the Book,” opens to that romantic tappety tap as a mystery novelist, played by Martin Milner (remember him from “Route 66,” circa 1960?), types away on an electric machine in his high-rise office with its sweeping view of L.A.

The clatter continues over the credits. It only stops when the novelist is confronted by his one-time partner and future murderer, played by Jack Cassidy, a crooner who ended up playing the murderer in three episodes of "Columbo."

Bear with me, young folks. These TV shows all mattered to me once in my life.

Historical notes

The episode is classic Columbo, with the detective pausing on his way out to door to pose “just one more question: I was wondering . . .”.

I remember thinking that the directing in this episode seemed leaden, as opposed to the shifting perspectives often seen when even two characters are interacting is more modern shows. Then I noticed there were some interesting closeups involving Columbo’s ear and the murderer’s chin.

The director credit didn’t appear until the the end of the show: Steven Spielberg. Well, it was 56 years ago. 

The screenwriter

The episode was written by the late Steve Bochco, who went on to change the genre of cop shows with series like “Hill Street Blues,” “L.A. Law” and “NYPD Blue.” 

We all gotta start somewhere.

*Footnote: IMDB and Peacock say “Murder by the Book” is the first episode of “Columbo.” Amazon Prime lists it as the third.

*Another footnote: I watched a lot of “Columbo” before I knew that Falk had a glass eye. He lost his right eye to cancer when he was 3 years old. It added verisimilitude to his trademark squint.

Check out

The election is approaching and we are all biting our nails. Everyone knows this election will change everything.

Proof positive

I am alive, just holding on
Holding my breath, afraid in my bones.
Yet everything passes, and scars cover over
All of the hurts we amassed in the past.

Nature heals clear-cuts, it just takes awhile.
The wrongs of the past are buried in time.
When we feel strong, we coddle those wounds.
Inside we struggle while outside we're calm.

We drive on the right, raise our right hand to swear.
Yet when the road forks we must choose right or left. 
Forget about clear-cuts, it will still matter
Decades in the future how we vote this year.

30 and done

In Portland, city government is changing in major ways. One change is ranked-choice voting, where you choose up to six candidates and an algorithm determines which candidate will prevail. Another is that the City Council will expand to 12 members, three each from four districts. And the mayor will serve largely as an administrator, choosing and working with a city manager.

So here I am, checking out the 30 candidates who are running in my district for the new Portland City Council. Three of them will serve.

If you don’t live in Portland, count your blessings.

—30—