Miso almond sauce (from crabapple corners, new hampshire)

1 batch

Ingredients

Quantity Ingredient
2 tablespoons Oil
2 Onions; chopped
½ cup Chopped almonds
2 tablespoons Arrowroot starch
¼ cup Miso
2 cups ;Water
2 Garlic cloves; mashed
2 tablespoons Parsley; chopped

Directions

Heat oil in a saucepan; saute onions and almonds over medium heat until browned.

Dissolve arrowroot starch in a little of the water, and add along with the remaining ingredients. Heat, stirring, until the miso is dissolved and the sauce thickens.

Serve on rice as a main dish or over steamed strong-flavored vegetables.

The author wrote: " 'I pulled into Conklin, I was feelin' 'bout half past dead. . . .' Nobody I asked in this small New Hampshire city had heard of Crabapple Corners. It was a commune of yurts, I explained, small round wooden houses that looked like cupcake papers inverted over short dixie cups. I'd been sure that such an odd place would be famous locally, but no. At last my ride went on, and I started off on foot, asking for help as I went. A boy looked puzzled. 'Are they, uh, hippies? Like outside of society?' he asked.

'Yes, yes, hippies,' I eagerly agreed. Well, there were some hippies down at the Pest House. . . . Farther along, a young woman thought the hippies at the Pest House might be able to help me. It was growing late, so in desperation I headed for the place with the grim name, up a wooded lane just outside town.

"No one was home at the neat frame house. A gigantic Newfoundland wagged his tail as I opened the door and peered in anxiously. From a poster, John Lennon reassured me that I'd found the right place, so I sat on the lawn and watched the dog frolic with a goat while the sun set. In the last dim light a bearded freak finally arrived in a pickup truck loaded with wood. My frantic questions failed to perturb him. Crabapple Corners, he said, was eight miles away, but Karen, one of its members, worked at the same home for delinquent boys as his wife (who arrived home from work later looking nothing like a hippie in a stunning red suit and heels). He called Karen, and she in turn suggested that Jim, another member, pick me up on his way to a square dance where he would play bass that night, then take me home to the commune for the night.

"While we waited for Jim to come, I asked about the house's peculiar name. During a smallpox epidemic at the turn of the century, my host explained, the town had quarantined the sick here. I was glad to learn that the name predated the current occupants. Conklin was, after all, the only place in all my travels where a child had jeered 'Hippie!' at me on the street." "When Jim the bass player arrived, I found that the goat had gotten into my pack, which I'd left outside, and eaten up the bag of nuts and raisins I'd bought as a present for the commune. Then as we drove to the dance, Jim questioned me keenly. The main purpose of his maneuver, which took him miles out of his way, had apparently been to screen me. Crabapple Corners was small, he remarked, and cherished its obscurity. Ah well; my day had begun with being asked if I were a police agent. I must have passed, since the night eventually ended with a night's sleep under the round and fluted roof of a yurt."

From _Country Commune Cooking_ by Lucy Horton. New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan, Inc., 1972. Pp. 136-138, 158-159. SBN 698-10456-0. Typed for you by Cathy Harned.

Submitted By CATHY HARNED On 12-01-94

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