JanerBlog

Dang, garden.

Man, I go away for four hot days and the snap peas go from deflated little pods to brimming-full of fat peas, the strawberries are ripe except for their little green noses, and the cherries are blushing. Here's hoping I get some of them before the birds do, this year.

White Privilege in the sustainable food movement

This is Good reading, especially for somebody who's as dedicated to the Farmer's Market/Food Co-Op/Community Garden plan as I am. I'm realizing more and more how much I need to challenge my assumptions about race and class in regards to food accessibility, and this is a good starting place.

EDIT: I forwarded this to the head of our Food Co-op and he said he's passing it on to the board.

h/t to Delux-Vivens for posting about this earlier.

Community gardening!

So this last Saturday, I spent all day volunteering at two separate community gardens. The first is down at the end of my street in the Vine Neighborhood, and I was really thrilled to see all the folks who stopped by to help. I got to meet neighbors I've lived near for literal years and never met. I'm really looking forward to getting the majority of the plants in the ground over the next few weeks -- it seems like a really dedicated enthusiastic bunch, and I'm sure I'll have plenty of new friends afterwards. The Vine Neighborhood really needs more stuff like this to get us all out of our houses and interacting -- it's way too easy for us to just go to work and come home and never talk to one another. (On a side note, Paul and I have really been enjoying how many folks we've been meeting lately as we all use the park across the street to exercise our dogs. It's good times!)

The second place I worked was at Peace House -- and just like this awesome workday last year about a hundred local volunteers showed up from various churches, colleges and high schools. All the neighborhood kids volunteered too -- and just like last year, most of them worked harder than the high schoolers, who seemed to prefer leaning on their shovels rather than using them. We built four enormous new raised beds and shoveled a dumptruck's worth of compost into them, and added a huge sandbox to the playground. Peace House also just got some really good news -- they received a grant to put in a fruit orchard of 18 dwarf trees! Soon they'll have apples, pears, peaches and cherries to compliment their strawberries, blueberries and raspberries. I'm trying to convince them to put a grape arbor in, too.

Yay for community!

You know how I can't shut up about how awesome our Farmer's Market is?

Well, it's for good reason. The People's Food Co-op really deserves a massive shout-out for all their hard work on this issue, especially Chris Dilley and Elizabeth Forest. Unlike most other crunchy-granola organizations, they're not about the food suppliments and high-end specialty items that only the well-to-do can purchase regularly -- they're about bringing healthy, affordable, local food to the community -- and in Kalamazoo, making that food available with WIC/EBT/Bridge programs is essential. When the Coop had their first big outlay of seedlings this spring, I was delighted to see signs up next to them saying you could buy them with your Bridge card -- so if you wanted to start a little window-box of lettuces and have fresh, cheap salad all summer long, you could lay out the $3 and be all set. How awesome is that? If you local folks have neighbors who might not know about this, spread the word, so that everybody can take advantage of this great resource

Rock on, Food Coop, and Farmer's Market. You make this city such a good place to live.

A warning to Ann Arbor Sushi Connosieurs

I just puked after eating takeout sushi from Totoro on State.

Note:This is only the third time I've thrown up since I was twelve.

And yes, I was just in a Very Germy Place right before, but i washed my hands thoroughly before leaving, and then again at the restaurant right before I got my takeout.

Sat! Ur! Day!

It was the firstmFarmer's market of the season, and it was so wonderful to see all my favorite folks again. While I was scoring hand-rolled tamales, fresh chicken wings, cheese samples and wee baby deer-tongue lettuces, I dropped off an entire winter's worth of egg cartons and plastic grocery bags with two of my favorite vendors, who will happily recycle them.

Then I was off to transplant my seedlings at my sponsor-greenhouse -- almost all of them survived! Man, I hope I can find homes for all of them.

Then it was back home, where I cleaned the living crap out of the house, then cleaned the living crap out of the backyard (including figuring out why the damn fishpond pump quit [Answer: a pound of muck caught in the filter]) got the tiny lettuces in before the rain hit, went shopping for the week, and got my wonderful birthday present from Paul: a kayak rack installed on the top of my car. No more kayaks flying off the car in traffic! And Paul, bless his heart, vacuumed about fifteen pounds of swamp dirt and dog hair and spilled coffee out of my car while I did all the aforementioned. He is a good, good man.

And now, we are ordering Martini's pizza, which I am going to eat until my head falls off. A true story by Jane, The End.

Gathering mushrooms-o

I went mushroom hunting last night and found a bag full of False Morels (Verpa Conica). I identified them with help from Director Dan and his five mushroom books. I'm still a little wibbly on eating them, so I gave them to the coworker who told me about the hunting spot. He says he eats them all the time, and maybe he'll swap me some true morels later in the season.

Worth the Weight

I've largely stopped talking about weight, and my issues with my weight, because a) nobody likes hearing people go on about their diets, and b) because I really don't like all the self-loathing that typically accompanies a round of fat talk.

This last month, though, I've got a couple of wake-up calls, the first from a health assessment, and the second from a friend. The health assessment, without getting into details was ... suboptimal. The friend's suggestion, on the other hand, was much more helpful.

But let me back up.

I've always, always had an aversion to writing down what I eat, because I hate all the accompanying self-loathing (see above). I hate what that kind of journaling does to me; I'm such a Type-B personality, and forcing myself to keep tabs on every calorie pushes my obsessive buttons in very uncomfortable ways. I tried to come up with a good metaphor, and finally said today that it's like stalking yourself. "Girl in apartment 2a ate breakfast alone. She had a single cup of Wheaties, a half-cup of skim milk, and an eight-ounce glass of organic orange juice. Dog carcass in alley this morning, tire tread on burst stomach."

So back to my friend's suggestion: that I use the free website, The Daily Burn. It allows you to log your intake and exercise, then spits out nice little charts and graphs to show your progress, and lets you know how far over or under you are on your daily goals. It feels like blogging, like filling out a spreadsheet, and the extra degree of separation from a notebook full of cribbed shorthand about portions and points makes the process more about the data and less about the self-judgement. This is literally the first positive experience I've ever had in keeping track of what I eat. Pretty much every food (and most prepackaged stuff, including all the foofy hippie brands I eat) and exercise (precor machine, kayaking, road biking) is already in the catalog, so logging your progress is a snap. I'm even finding myself overestimating portions just to be on the safe side, which is something I never did before.

Seeing a week's worth of food intake laid out as data allows me to see what I should and shouldn't be doing, where I need to improve, and what I can keep getting away with. I'm not starving, I'm not obsessing over portions or calories, and best of all I'm not having to restrict myself to a bunch of stupid rules. And my pants are already fitting better, so it must be working.

So -- thanks, Kind Friend, for the suggestion. It really helped.

Waffed Falafel.

I made falafel this weekend, and it was yummy, as falafel usually is. But after seeing this, now I have to go dig up the waffle iron we inherited, and make the rest of the box.

Guilty pleasures

I have a guilty-pleasure confession: I love chicken wings. Love them. I love the tactile pleasure of getting every last bit of meat off the bones, and as such, I rarely eat them in public (I have the exact same problem with rib tips, my preferred form of barbecue) because I am such an embarrassing, gnawing carnivore. It's a bit like that scene in Splash, where Madison eats the lobster (sorry, no clip -- The Youtubes have failed me).

So I tend to eat my wings at home. Which brings me to the problem.

There is something in chicken wings that drives our pets completely insane. They will not leave us alone when we eat them. The cats swarm, leaping into laps. The dog shoves her snout directly into the bowl. We cook meat all the time, and nothing has ever produced a reaction like this -- all other meals are ignored as though they don't exist (okay, except for our older cat, who loves yogurt).

So I literally have to throw all the animals out of the room and shut all the doors to eat my wings, unless I want sauce-sticky fingers covered in pet hair from shooing them away. And as soon as I carry the bones to the garbage, they're on top of me again.

The wings are sizzling now -- off to start the kitty-viction.

Recipe for venison chili

Soak three cups of kidney beans overnight.
Go to basement and find two quarts of jealously guarded, organic, home-grown, home-canned tomato sauce.
Wash crock pot. Add beans and soak-water.
Dump in both quarts of tomato sauce.
Fill jars half full with water to remove every last molecule of sauce. Slosh around, prepare to add rinse-water to crockpot.
Notice with horror that there is a crack running the entire length of one jar.
Pause to consider. Both jars still had seal.
Haul out colander. Think about trying to save beans. Rinse beans.
Realize there's no way to get the beans all the way clean. Consider boiling beans. Think about tiny shards of broken glass.
Chuck beans. Wash crockpot thoroughly.
Return to basement, find two more quarts of jealously guarded, organic, home-grown, home-canned tomato sauce. Carefully inspect jars. Thump seal on both. Return to kitchen.
Dump in both quarts of tomato sauce.
Fill jars half full with water to remove every last molecule of sauce. Slosh around, prepare to add rinse-water to crockpot.
Notice with horror that there are multiple small cracks, previously invisible, around the bottom of one jar.
Invent new swear words. Dump sauce down drain. Wash crockpot again, this time with bleach and boiling water, just to be sure.

Send up a prayer of thanks that this little kitchen nightmare constitutes only an inconvenience, and not a financial disaster. Remember times when losing so much food would have meant cadging dinner from friends. Remember thousands of other families who would go hungry, or make different choices based on fewer options.

Return to basement. Stare mournfully at four empty slots on shelf. Count remaining jars, heave sigh of dejection. Select two more quarts of jealously guarded, organic, home-grown, home-canned tomato sauce. Carefully inspect jars. Thump seal on both. Return to kitchen.
Find black turtle beans that do not require pre-soaking. Rinse, add to crockpot.
Obsessively check quart jars. Thump seals again.
Dump in both quarts of sauce. Add rinse-water. Sigh with relief when both jars are sound.
Fry pound of ground venison until dark brown and add to pot.
Scavenge fridge. Chop and add celery, onion, garlic, sweet corn, green bell peppers.
Add cumin and chili powder to taste, along with fresh-ground black pepper and healthy dollop of Rooster sauce.
Cook in crockpot for five hours.

Makes five quarts; serve with side of gratitude.

I should clean out the fridge more often.

I just made one of the best leftover recipes I've ever eaten. As I mentioned in the last post, we've got about a hundred pounds of doe meat headed for the freezer, so I made up one of our chuck roasts from last year to make room for it. I was out of pretty much everything that goes with chuck roasts, like celery and carrots and mushrooms, but I *did* have a frozen bag of leftover cranberry sauce from Thanksgiving.

So I cooked the potroast with it. Potroast with cranberry-red-wine-balsamic sauce, served with roasted sweet potatoes. No recipe, just eyeballed it. And holy crap, was it good.

Meat harvest!

Looks like we're not going to have to buy a beef share this year -- my dad lets a bunch of guys hunt on his land, and they just brought him a nice young doe. I've paid for processing, an we'll have venison all year long. Yay!

Makin' Bakin'

Finished the holiday baking today. I skipped out on the annual German Pretzels for the first time in four years; I was feeling too exhausted to go through the whole process, so I opted for more smaller recipes instead -- which, ironically, turned out to be pretty much the same amount of work.

I'd been feeling like trying some new recipes, and so I decided to have a look at a cookbook my mom gave me for Christmas last year (*cough*Martha Stewart*cough*). This year's roundup included:

• Peanut butter cookies with peanuts and chocolate chips


• Butter rum cookies


• Gingersnaps


• Dark chocolate-orange-espresso cookies (I think these were the best of the bunch, by far)


• Tart cherry liqueur truffles

Naughty tomatoes

A few years ago, Neil Gaiman found a Satanic Tomato in his garden.

This year, I got him beat. I had two Satanic Tomatoes.

Well, they're satanic until you turn them upside down. Then, they're naughty tomatoes.

I wish I'd been able to capture the 180-degree twist in the longer one's... er... protuberance. Unfortunately, it wasn't a very cosmetic tomato. Almost all of my plants got hit by fusarium wilt, and a lot of the fruits got spotted as well.

Once I shaved off its spotty hide, though, it sure was tasty. Dunno about the evil, though.

Rotten little jerks

While I was away this weekend, the birds ate every single one of my ripe cherries. Every. Single. One.

Cures scurvy, the common cold, and lazy shoggoths

So I finally figured out what was wrong with my sourdough starter, also known as Olmer the Shoggoth. For the last year, it's been turning out these sad, flat loaves. They taste just fine, but they're really uninspired, with a dense, clammy crumb. Lately I've been forced to spike the dough with a pinch of storebought yeast to achieve the leavening I wanted -- which ticks me off, because frankly, that's cheating and defeats the whole purpose of having a sourdough starter.

After a bit of googling, I discovered that starter bacteria require a pretty acidic enavironment to grow and multiply properly. Our water is very, very hard -- to the point where I have to actually scrape off calcium deposits from the sinks and fixtures. Turns out that I'd been slowly alkalizing my bacteria! One website suggested that I crush up a Vitamin C tablet and add that to the starter at feeding time. I was skeptical, but I tried it anyway. Three days later when I opened the jar to check on it, Olmer was happy and bubbling and percolating again, so I immediately split him in half and started baking.

Here's the results:

Pretty, huh? All I use is flour, water, salt and shoggoth.