Monday, April 27, 2009

#92 Spirit of the Harvest, North American Indian Cooking







#92 Spirit of the Harvest, North American Indian Cooking

Today would have been my Dad's 90th birthday. Dad was a real Renaissance man, he was interested in everything. He would build us beautiful box kites to fly and take us bird watching in the country. When something captured his imagination, he would pursue the topic or subject until he felt he knew all about it. For years he searched for the perfect yellow orchid, this was when it still took 7 years from planting the seeds to seeing your first flowers. At the time a bright yellow was a very difficult color produce, when he had one in his collection, he was done and the green house came down.

He loved the geodesic dome and sphere designs of American architect Buckminster Fuller. Dad spent months creating the triangular elements it took to make one of these spheres from wood. There was math behind each cut and angle and when his models were done, they were so strong you could stand on the sphere and there wasn't a nail in them. They're works of art.

At the end of his life he was still perfecting the art of "napping", making arrowheads. He was very interested in the American Plains Indians and he spent hours using a deer antler to flake chips off flint to form their traditional shapes. He would study the stone and find it's stress points and then carefully apply pressure to the edge. He worked for hours at his work bench in the garage and there would be a pile of broken and discarded flint at his feet. He produced hundreds and hundreds of these points but was still looking for the perfect point when he died.

There were many, many things I admired about my Dad but if I wanted to use just one word to describe him, it would be kind. He was a very kind man. So in honor of Dad and his love of the American Indian culture, today's cookbook is #92 Spirit of the Harvest, North American Indian Cooking. It's by Beverly Cox and Martin Jacobs. Those are his arrowheads in the pictures.


1 comment:

  1. Glad to see the new post and on Dad's birthday. I was hoping my orchid would be in bloom today...but no such luck, the buds fell off over the weekend. The leaves and roots look so good too. Oh well. Our yard is so green right now it looks fake. Neal had to mow Wednesday and again on Saturday. It's raining now so he will have to mow again when it dries out a bit.

    ReplyDelete