chicken feathers

how we eat - day 6

Before I publish our day's menu I'd like to share an annotated list of my favorite food related publications.  Some I've had for quite some time and are well-worn, others I haven't had for very long but I can tell that they will be classics.

Gardening
Square Foot Gardening by Mel Bartholomew.  This book is awesome because it makes gardening very accessible - you just have to think about your garden one square foot at a time.  We've never had space for a huge garden but the amount of food we've been able to grow using this method has been remarkable - even with my greenish-black thumb.  The "Guide to Growing Crops" in the back is worth it's weight in gold.

Four-Season Harvest by Eliot Coleman.  This book was a revelation for me!  Growing food year round completely changed how I think about food storage.  His techniques are creative, low-tech, and intuitive.  If he can be harvesting fresh salad greens all winter from his Maine garden, surely I can be doing the same in our comparatively mild climate!

How to Grow More Vegetables* (and fruits, nuts, berries, grains, and other crops) *Than You Ever Thought Possible on Less Land Than You Can Imagine by John Jeavons.  First, I love this title!  He writes just like I do (I love parenthesis and impossibly long sentences)!  This book is similar in concept to Square Foot Gardening but more scientific.  It is really intriguing and strongly argues for the need of closed-loop living. 

Lasagna Gardening by Patricia Lanza.  I will be trying this technique for building soil this year.  We'll see how it works.  You essentially build the soil from the existing ground up.  You just layer different organic ingredients until you've got about a foot of goodness and then plant right into the layers.  Fascinating!  I love that there is no digging involved.

The New Seed Starters Handbook by Nancy Bubel.  This is the Holy Grail of seed starting.  Every thing you need to know and more.

Locavore Living
Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan.  A super interesting book in which he researches and explores several meals - conventional, sustainable, and hunting/gathering.  I love his style of writing and he poses some very interesting points and dilemmas (surprise!) that we face as eaters.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver.  She has long been one of my favorite authors.  Now she is elevated to sainthood in my eyes.  How I would love to have dinner with her!  Read here for a long Kingsolver love-fest.

Cooking
What's For Dinner by Maryana Vollstedt.  This is my go-to book for meal planning.  I've tried almost every recipe in there and save one or two flops, each recipe is a gem.  The meals are simple and delicious. 

The Art of Simple Food by Alice Waters.  I just checked this book out from the library but it has now been added to my wish list.  She breaks recipes down into 17 areas such as sauces, pasta, soups, beans, and roasting.  She outlines a few simple methods in each of those areas that can be infinitely adapted to whatever the fresh food of the season may be.  Alice Waters just may be my Kingsolver of the cookbook world.

Real Simple the magazine.  They have stellar recipes.  I rip out the ones that look good and store them in page protectors in a three ring binder.  I have them organized by season.

cooksillustrated.com.  You have to subscribe to their site but IT IS SO WORTH IT!  Every recipe ever published in the magazine is in a searchable database so when you have a pound of...say...belgian endive (I don't and never have but the name is so delicious!), you just type in "belgian endive" and up pops...well, let me check...holy smokes!  10 recipes!  How about Braised B.E. with Bacon and Cream or Grilled B.E?  You can sign up for a FREE 14 day trial - do it!  You'll love it!

www.everydayfoodstorage.net.  This is a fun site dedicated to helping you incorporate food storage into everyday meals.  I really like it for her recipes using whole wheat.  She's obsessive about food storage.  I like that in a girl.

There you have it.  A peek at my foodie bookshelf.

Here's a peek at our menu.

Breakfast:  Russell, Grant and Anna:  Cheese and Toast and Apples ala Grant.  Toast and butter for me.  I meant to have some applesauce but ran out of time.  I barely managed the toast.

Lunch:  Tuna Pasta.  This is a family staple.  Read here for the recipe.

Dinner:  Split Pea Soup, Cornbread, and Salad.

Auntie Katie's Split Pea Soup

2 carrots, sliced
2 ribs celery, sliced
1 onion, diced
1 parsnip or potato or both, large diced
1 ham hock
1 3/4 c. green split peas (1 lb) washed, stones removed
1 bay leaf
1 tsp. dried thyme
4 c. chicken broth (I use 4 c. water and 4 bullion cubes for this)
4 c. water

Add all ingredients to a large soup pot, bring to a boil and then simmer for at least an hour OR dump all the ingredients into a crock pot and cook on high for 7 hours.

Season with s&p.  And fresh parsley if you have it.

Mom's Cornbread, Jennified

1 1/2 c. white whole wheat flour
1/3 c. evap. cane juice sugar
1/2 c. cornmeal
1 Tbsp. baking powder
1/2 tsp. salt
1 1/4 c.  milk
2 large eggs
3 Tbsp. butter, melted

Combine dry ingredients in medium bowl.  Mix wet ingredients together and then add to dry, stirring just until combined.  Bake in a greased 8 x 8 pan at 350 for 35 minutes or until golden brown.

I feel that I need to add, lest you think we are obnoxious purists over here, we will be scarfing down some brownies from a box in just a couple minutes.  You've gotta do what you've just gotta do.
 

#8

Read Plenty - CHECK!

This book was in the same vein as Animal, Vegetable, Miracle but not nearly as engaging or well-written.  The couple who wrote the book decided to eat food found within a 100 mile radius of their home for a year.  This decision was more of a "heat of the moment" decision and the book had that feel to it - coping with a self-imposed lifestyle that they mostly believed in.  By the end they were pretty hooked but there wasn't much depth for most of the book.  I love the topic of local eating and the politics of food, but the book itself was a little...I don't know...irritating.

#9

Read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle - CHECK!

How I loved this book!  Barbara Kingsolver is one of my most favorite authors and by the end of the book I was ready to move in with her. 

Here's some of my own background info that puts this book into my own context: When I was in high school I worked for a summer as a tour guide for the Alaska Railroad.  Prior to that, I really didn't appreciate the beauty of Alaska but seeing it through the eyes of visitors, it really woke me up to the stunning scenery.  Since then I've loved being outside and feel so deeply satisfied and rooted when I am enjoying lovely natural spaces.  After college which had afforded me some incredible traveling experiences, I moved to Vermont, where I lived for a time with a lovely family who had a large garden...I remember coming home one evening and they were out digging carrots.  It was really cold (frost was predicted that night).  I got on my knees and helped dig.  I remember my achy fingers, racing against the ebbing light, trying to get the harvest in.  I felt so alive and so, I don't know, RIGHT.  That experience stayed in my heart as Russell and I started putting down roots of our own.  With the addition of a child and then another, I felt all kinds of nourishing urges.  I wanted to know where our food was coming from.  I wanted to feel a sense of community.  I stopped shopping at Wal-mart (over 4 years, baby!).  I started focusing on keeping my life more local.  More rooted.

So, anyway, I have felt like my passion was becoming more focused - I was finding I had the same appreciation for the astounding red rock formations in southern Utah and the taste of a sweet pea straight from the garden.  I had all these thoughts about food and earth and community and sense of place but no real framework on which to hang them.  NOW I DO!  Kingsolver's (I feel like I should call her Barbara) book offered the most beautiful thoughts and voice to an eating style (lifestyle, really) called a locavore - one who eats that which is local.  What a beautiful concept - one that offers sustainability, community, variety, incredible nutrition, appreciation...all the things I've been mulling over for the last 10 years or so.  Don't you love that?  When you find something that acts like a lens and focuses all the pieces so you can really see what's going on?  I'm panting.  Seriously.  I love this stuff.

So, as a teaser, here is one of the quotes that made me leap out of bed and start pacing as I thought about how profound the statement was.

"The main barrier standing between ourselves and a local-food culture is not price, but attitude.  The most difficult requirements are patience and a pinch of restraint - virtues that are hardly the property of the wealthy.  These virtues seem to find precious little shelter, in fact, in any modern quarter of this nation founded by Puritans.  Further more, we apply them selectively: browbeating our teenagers with the message that they should wait for sex, for example.  Only if they wait to experience intercourse under the ideal circumstances (the story goes), will they know its true value.  " Blah blah blah," hears the teenager: words issuing from a mouth that can't even wait for the right time to eat tomatoes, but instead consumes tasteless ones all winter to satisfy a craving for everything now.  We're raising our children on the definition of promiscuity if we feed them a casual, indiscriminate mingling of foods from every season plucked from the supermarket, ignoring how our sustenance is cheapened by wholesale desires." p.31

Couple that with a verse from the Doctrine and Covenants (a part of the scriptures that I LOVE!): Every herb in the season thereof, and every fruit in the season thereof; all these to be used with prudence and thanksgiving.  (89:11)  It was like the light was turned on.  Eeeeeeeee!   I love it!

So.  I have a clearer vision now.  I am changing the way I think about food and its connections.  Its growth.  It feels great.  Thanks, Barb!

two more books

I finished Comanche Moon by Larry McMurtry a couple weeks ago.  Fabulous!  I read Lonesome Dove last year and couldn't put it down so I was looking forward to its prequel.  It was equally expansive and raw.  I am not a big fan of the western genre - the whole cowboys and Indians theme tends to tick me off as opposed to enlighten or entertain.  McMurtry's Lonesome Dove saga, while definitely westerns, are so honest about human nature and it's complications that they are a delight to read.  A little depressing too - he'll knock off a main character without much warning.  My only reservation in recommending it is that the language is a little rough here and there and some of topics are taboo but if anything, it makes the book that much more believable.

The Daybreakers was my first Louis L'amour book and probably my last.  It wasn't very fair to read it after McMurtry's book.  Even in the shadow of Comanche Moon it wasn't much to look at.  The characters were horribly bland and very cut and dry - the good guys were good and the bad guys were bad.  The ending was all kinds of happy, neat and tidy.  Unless I'm on a beach or sick this type of book doesn't do much for me.  I did, however, stay up until midnight to finish it, partly because I was curious to see just how Tyrel was going to win back the town (seriously) and partly because I just wanted to get it over with.  I've moved onto a much more interesting book about....seeds.  Try to contain your excitement.