What We Need Is Here

Grace's Favorite "Vegetable"

Grace was finally rewarded for her work in the corn bed - preparing the soil, planting the corn shoots, and posing for weekly photos with the growing corn.  I thought it might be too early to harvest, but it was perfect. Grace's favorite vegetable is technically a grain, but that's okay. This week it was everybody's favorite!

Corn's not an efficient crop to grow in a small garden like ours since it takes up so much space for the amount of food it produces.  But we're really growing primarily for taste and beauty (and happiness), and Grace loves corn, so corn's gotta be in there someplace.  As do cherry tomatoes for John, broccoli and  basil for me (and Steven across the street who loves pesto)... you see how it goes.  I long for a real working garden, planted for sustaining my family, but I feel lucky to have this one.  Lucky because it provides beautiful, tasty food to supplement our meals, lucky that a crop failure (like the bean sprouts that were pecked out by the chickens (yes, we experimented with letting them run freely again...) isn't a big deal to us nutrition-wise, and lucky because the fact that we are moving is settling in and I am going to miss it. 

We'll have another garden - a small one in our tiny front yard and possibly a few random things growing in the back in the spots of sun available (buildings all around).  Once we get there, we'll also find other places to grow things - a home for elders has contacted me about helping them grow a fall garden, the after-school center at the police station would like us to garden with the children, and there are some other areas in which we could develop a community garden.  So we'll have a garden; it just won't be this one.

Ugh, moving.  This is a good move for all kinds of reasons, but it's still hard. The next few weeks are going to be so full of packing and cleaning here and painting and organizing there!  I need a good attitude!  I need some coffee.  And a few more tasty, beautiful meals made from the fruits and grains of our labor here.

Hot and Sour Green Bean Salad with Tofu

Green beans are just coming into season, and this recipe will put them to good use. In about a month, we should have our own red peppers in the garden as well - and we always have mint popping up in the flower beds.  This is delicious!  And with farmers market and garden veggies supplemented with food from Ward's it meets the Hogtown Homegrown Eat Local Challenge!

HOT AND SOUR GREEN BEAN SALAD WITH TOFU

Serves 4

7 ounces very firm tofu

Oil for frying

Dressing

1-2 tsp. chili pepper flakes

2 cloves garlic, crushed

4 tablespoons soy sauce

4 tablespoons lime or lemon juice

4 tablespoons honey

Salad

2 cups green beans, sliced lengthwise

1 red bell pepper, cored and thinly sliced

4 green onions, sliced

2 handfuls of fresh mint leaves

½ cup toasted (or roasted) peanuts – optional

1.       Drain the tofu and wrap in paper towels until ready to use.

2.       Shake or blend dressing ingredients together.

3.       Heat a shallow layer of oil in a skillet over high heat.  Cut the tofu into 3-inch slices and fry, turning once until golden all over.  Drain on paper towels.

4.       Put green beans, red pepper, onions, mint, and tofu into large bowl and cover with dressing.  Add tofu, and mix gently. 

Sprinkle peanuts on top if desired.  May be served on rice or another grain - or alone.

Thanks, Girls!

Hmmm... We've been out of town at Joe's graduation, and I had written a post about our chickens and scheduled to show up on Friday night.  And now it is gone.  I guess even these new-fangled, user-friendly blogging sites foul up once in a while.  Or I did.  Anyway, here's what I was going to say about chickens!

I wanted them for years before we got them and had collected a file of instructions about feeding and housing them.  Not being at all handy, I think I was waiting for that day when I had acquired enough skills to follow coop-building directions.   That was not happening, but John - who is less fearful of failure than I am - just  up and did it anyway last summer.  He thought up a coop, bought the supplies and it was finished in a few days. 

It's by no means perfect.  We had to add a door once we realized how heavy it was to lift to get at the food and water.  And the heaviness is an issue he hadn't thought of in building a "chicken tractor" - a small, moveable, bottomless coop for scooting around the garden so chickens can scratch and "fertilize" fallow areas.  John thought he was opting for a more sturdy coop when he used heavy boards.  Suffice it to say it doesn't actually move without borrowing the labor of friends and neighbors.  So it's more of a small coop instead of a "tractor."

 

But it's working fine. We get about five eggs per week from each off our three girls - more than enough for our family.  While we don't have good records on what we've spent on feed, the chickens range freely on a regular basis and so don't eat as much as they might. 

We wonder what will happen as they age and don't produce many eggs.  I remember my grandparents' chickens, many of which I grew up with; several had to be at least a decade old.  I have a feeling that, like them, I would find it hard to cook up Henny, LouAnn and Junebug - lserving "Pet Pot Pie" as my brother called it when he and his kids slaughtered and ate their rooster.

For right now, we 'll just enjoy the eggs and not worry too much about the future. 

Sweet Potato Quesadillas

Another sweet potato recipe!  I can't help myself; they're nutritious, grow like a weed here, are constantly available at the farmers' market, volunteer in the garden, and everyone likes them.  Tonight was our last "Wednesday Night Dinner" - at least for a while, and we celebrated Ben's upcoming 20th birthday. He wanted Sweet Potato Quesadillas. And, in general, Ben gets what he wants.  John loves them, too, as did Ben's peeps. Served with sour cream, salsa, and a 100% farmers' market and garden salad, they were delicious!

The recipe is from Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home, the best collection of recipes I own - and I have a lot of cookbooks!  Here it is: 

SWEET POTATO QUESADILLAS

1 ½ cups finely chopped onions

2 garlic cloves, minced or pressed

3 tablespoons [olive] oil

4 cups grated, peeled sweet potato (about 3)

½ tsp. dried oregano

1 teaspoon chili powder

2 teaspoons ground cumin

Generous pinch of cayenne

Salt and ground pepper to taste

1 cup grated sharp cheddar

8 flour tortillas (8-10 inch)

Salsa

Sour cream

Sauté the onions and garlic in the oil until the onions are translucent. Add the grated sweet potatoes, oregano, chili powder, cumin and cayenne and cook, covered, for about 10 minutes, stirring frequently to prevent sticking [I sometimes add a few tablespoons of water]. When the sweet potato is tender, add salt and pepper to taste and remove the filling from the heat. Spread one-eighth of the filling and 2 tablespoons of the cheese on each tortilla. Fold in half and then cut in half for a wedged shape quesadilla.  Cook on a lightly oiled griddle or frying pan turning until both sides are lightly browned. 

Serve immediately topped with salsa and sour cream.  Serves 4.

Blueberry Season!

It's just the beginning of a season that will last at least a month. We are lucky to have blueberry farms all around our area - a number of them u-pick and organic.  "Pick Your Own" is a nice website with locations and phone numbers of farms open to u-pickers. 

Blueberry picking is a great activity for the whole family. The weather's still pretty nice early in the morning, and the bushes are thornless and not easily damaged by little ones.  Picking wild blueberries as a child and later at farms with my children - as well as with school children on field trips - are some of my happiest May memories.  And what a great way to turn children on to the goodness of local food. 

This week I bought organic blueberries at the 441 market for $4/pint - which is still a better deal than an equivalent amount of Ben and Jerry's.  And quite a bit healthier.  They're considered a "super food" - anti-inflammatory, anti-oxidant, etc., etc.  Although after reading Michael Pollan's book, I don't know how much credence to give the latest food fad.  I do know this: they're good, they're local, they're even beatuiful. We're going to be eating a lot of them over the next month.

This is part of the joy of eating locally. We can look forward to blueberry season like we do to a holiday that comes around each year. We appreciate them all the more because we don't have them all the time.  Go celebrate! 

Garden - Early May

We've had very little rain over the last month which is pretty typical for this time of year - at least over the last few years.  We're watering fairly regularly, though, so things are growing well.  I prefer to water the garden by hand, directing it right at the roots of the plant. It saves water, but it also keeps down weeds since the area around the plants is getting so little. This week, though, I put on the sprinkler for the first time and watered the browning front lawn and the garden together.  If I were going to live here longer, I would just plow up the rest of the yard. Who needs grass when you could have more strawberries?

Everything's thriving at this point. The corn is beginning to form cobs, the branching sunflowers have buds, and we've harvested our first two cherry tomatoes this week (Gracie ate them before they made it inside).  We've also been harvesting some delicious broccoli.  My little experiment over winter yielded this result: It is better to replace frost-damaged broccoli with new transplants than to cut back the damaged ones.  The frost-bitten ones never produced much and went to seed quickly.  The new ones have started yielding normal-sized and delicious broccoli stalks.

Earlier in the week we pulled up the remaining collards which were beginning to bolt and planted green beans in their place since they stand up to the hot weather farily well.  We also harvested the rest of the sorrel and composted the bolted lettuce plants, leaving just one cilantro in that plot to continue going to (coriander) seed.  Grace and her friend, Halle, planted sunflower seeds there which were given to us by my neigbor.

It's been a beautiful spring so far, perfect weather for being in the garden. Click on the photo below for a larger view (with labels).

 

I think I LOVE this

Aaak. I have become the grown-up of my teenage nightmares; I am excited about an appliance. 

Our old top-loading washing machine gave up the ghost last week and we decided to invest in a front-loader - based on our resolve to replace old appliances with energy star rated ones as the old ones die.  This one had been terminal for a while and required one of us to reach in and give the tub an initial whirl before it would start the spin cycle. When it leaked oil all over our clothes, we got the word form the repairman that we had no choice but to let her go.

So we now have a handsome front loader wedged next to my grandmother's 40-year old Lady Kenmore dryer (which the repairman says may never die - a testament to both old-fashioned quality and to two generations of hanging clothes on the line instead). This is by no means the most radical solution to clothes-washing energy-saving; a lot of folks are exploring much more frugal methods - No Impact Man Colin Beaven, for example, who washes clothes in the bath tub, and Cindy from Waste Wear Daily who diverts used washer water to her garden - but it's surprisingly good. While we got the new one based on energy and water savings (it uses 20 gallons per full load as opposed to 50 gallons), I was thrilled (see how far gone I am?) at how thoroughly it spun out the water from the laundry.  Clothes dry at least twice as fast on the clothesline, and I imagine it wouldn't take nearly as long in the dryer either.  With our humid summer weather fast approaching, and our hoped-for move to the Catholic Worker House, I am interested to see how many loads we can get on the clothesline each day.

Be still my heart.

Oxalis:Another Wild Edible Right Outside the Door

I've always liked these little plants. Big ones, with purple flowers are growing by the front door; tiny ones with yellow flowers all over the garden. They pop up in early spring around St. Patrick's Day - like little shamrocks.

Now I know you can eat them!  They are also called Wood Sorrel and taste very lemony - like the French Sorrel growing in the garden. Funny how often I have thrown the pesky things in the compost (their little roots are hard to get at sometimes) while praising and watering the domesticated sorrel.  No more. They are delicious and beautiful - and plentiful in early spring. And they help make a very pretty salad.

 

Body Clutter

I kind of hate to write this; there is so much thinking and talking about weight and weight loss and diet, etc., - especially among women of a certain age (mine). But when I was writing about the cost of clutter and its relationship to the low price of cheap mass-produced “stuff,” I couldn’t help thinking about a book I recently read about food.  In The Defense of Food, Michael Pollan suggests that eating with health in mind (not necessarily weight loss and buff bodies) is quite simple: Eat food, not too much, mostly plants. His book talks about how nutrition science and big food corporations have led us astray by encouraging people to eat too much cheap, processed food.  He says we should be spending more, consuming less.  The connection is obvious.  We’ve got too much stuff – everywhere.

I thought I had avoided weight loss obsession in my adult life.  Busy with four kids, and concerned about feeding them well, I stayed around my high school weight range, give or take ten pounds.   But over the last few years, the weight crept on.  Ben’s cancer treatment, which at one point caused him to lose 30 pounds, magically transferred that bulk to me.  Treatments done, Ben looks pretty much back to normal.  I am not. Or at least I don't think so. 

I suffered from anorexia as a teen – a food obsession that seems to be passed down through the women of my family. And my fear of passing that on to my daughters or other young women in my life has made me a poor dieter as an adult.  I wanted it to stop with me.  But my revulsion toward dieting hasn’t protected me from feeling guilty about my health as my weight has crept up.  I am out of the healthy weight range, and I would like to get back in. Michael Pollen’s advice really resonates with me as a way back to health by acting healthy – both physically, mentally, and in the world at large.  So.  Starting today I am going to follow his advice and see what happens:

·         Eat fewer processed foods: esp. white flour, white sugar, and corn syrup.

·         Eat three meals a day, no snacks.

·         Eat mostly plants (local of course). 

·         And to keep myself from sliding down the slippery slope of obsession, I will eat a bagel on Sunday and dessert once/week if I want it.

And I will strive not to obsess about the number on the scale, only checking it in a, ahem, detached and curious way.  Maybe the weight that I am now is exactly what I am supposed to be as I approach fifty.  Maybe the extra fluff makes me more cuddly to grandchildren.  Or, being a seventh-generation Floridian, perhaps I have developed a beneficial genetic mutation – a built-in flotation device around my middle parts. Maybe I will stay exactly the same, regardless of what I eat.

Maybe not.  Either way, I believe I’ll feel better about the weight I am if I feel like it’s the result of eating well with health in mind, mine and the food system's.

Clutter: The Local Connection

My house was built in 1964; it was a “Parade Home” back then (homes shown by the builder to entice new buyers), so had some extras. It has a two-car garage and seven closets (four bedrooms). The upstairs closets are roomy, one is a walk-in. Then there's a linen closet, a coat closet and an under-the-stairs closet (we use it for toys). 

Growing up, my grandmother’s house, which was built in the 30s and had two bedrooms, had two closets. Those closets were about 1/3 the size of our bedroom closets and would hold about 10 items of clothing each.

The Gainesville Catholic Worker House was built at the turn of the 20^th century. It was once quite “upscale;” It has zero closets. 

I know of new homes now that boast three-car garages and two walk-in closets in the master bedroom.  I confess; I could probably fill those extra storage spaces in a heartbeat.

But with what? If I live “locally,” and buy necessities from locally-owned stores, how much “stuff” will I accumulate? After my first child was born, we moved to the small North Florida town where my parents had grown-up. They had moved away after high-school, never to return except for visits to grandparents.  I was delighted to be able to shop at “Bruce’s”, the store owned by the parents of my mother’s best friend in high school, and at “The Lovely Shop” where she bought her homecoming gown. I bought my daughter’s first shoes at “The Children’s Shop” where my grandmother bought my first shoes. There was always a salesperson handy to find what you needed and they would alter it if needed too, for free. When a friend pointed out that I could have bought three shirts for the same price at the new K-Mart that had just been built on some old farmland, I remember thinking that I actually only needed the one shirt.

What is the difference in frugality and being cheap? I think it’s the difference between cost and price.  The price of the sweatshop-produced shirt bought cheap and sold by people barely making minimum wage at a big-box store (that was just beginning to take business from the family-owned stores downtown) was low. The actual cost – in human suffering, quality, community cohesiveness, and care - was very high. Within a year of my moving to Lake City, a huge mall was built near the interstate, K-Mart was joined by Wal-Mart, and the downtown shops began to close for good (to be replaced twenty years later with country-style shops and antique stores – a kitschy ode to what was lost).

Frugality is a virtue. Buying what is needed and rewarding good workmanship with your hard-earned dollar is good. Not taking more than you need, “living simply so others may simply live”, is right. But like so many other virtues, “frugality” has been used and warped by advertising that tells us if we’re smart we’ll buy three for the price of one, the conventionally–produced tomato from Holland over the locally raised one that costs pennies more, the plastic toys at a fraction of the price of the handmade ones. We’ll get more for our dollar, if we buy where they tell us to. We’d be stupid to throw away our hard-earned money on less. Meaning fewer. Because what we really, really want is More. Because we don’t have enough as things are, we aren’t enough without more. So buy it, buy it now. And buy more tomorrow. 

And be sure and build more closets. Because how many toys can a child play with anyway? And how many shirts are going to be worn or in the wash at the same time? And how many bright things that catch our eye on a down day shopping will we really put to good use? And how many things have we bought to make us happy or beautiful that didn’t quite do the job? They’re cramming closets everywhere. 

I know they’re cramming mine. And if all goes well, we will be moving into the no-closet house before long. Oh my.