I just emailed my chair a full draft of my thesis. There’s going to be plenty to fix, but this is still a huge deal, and I’m this much closer to having my brain back (and being able to can and cook and blog and etc. again).

Woot!

2 dozen eggs, a package of bulk ground beef and bulk sausage and a beautiful hunk of sirloin steak that’s big enough for 2 dinners from Rocking F, potatoes and tomatoes from Faucette Produce, cheese from the Mulners, lettuce from Weatherhand (I think that’s his name) farm, strawberries (!) from High Rock Berries, sprouts from Snow Creek Organics, our chicken from the Petersons.

A lot of things were just a little bit more expensive this morning; the vendors apologized when they handed me back my change, talking about feed and fuel and looking worried. I told them not to apologize, that we eat a heck of a lot better eating from them than we do from conventional sources, and we’re glad to pay it, and we know things are getting a more expensive. Their worry makes me worry, though. There’s been some kerfuckle on the internet lately about impending food crises, and that, I haven’t taken all that seriously, but when the people that grow my food start looking worried and talking worried, that I do take seriously.

Jennifer over at Last Night’s Dinner is after my own heart today. These days, it simply doesn’t occur to me that we could, you know, go out and buy strawberries fresh in January. It’ll sound silly, but I forget that you can even do that. Eating local when possible has, after a couple of years, become an ingrained habit.

(Thesis watch: 55 pages and counting. I’m hoping to have a full draft to my chair by Friday. Meep.)

Yea, it’s that time of year again… 2.5 weeks until the end of the semester, and I’m huffing and puffing up to the finish line.

This spring has just been too busy, anyhow. It turns out that finishing my coursework, trying to write a thesis, tutoring ESL classes, teaching a community college class, being a worker owner at Deep Roots, finishing out my assistantship, and job hunting for the summer and next year, all along with normal life - is a lot of work. Hence, the lack of posting.

Things get a lot better May 6th (I turn in grades for my class, after grading 21 take-home essay finals in 20 hours, I need to time that better next semester) and then even better sometime over the summer, when I defend my thesis. At which point, I will have a masters degree (in two calendar years, considerably less than the 11 my BA took.)

(The plan for after, since people ask, is to teach community college next year. Local CC has a small program that trains faculty. After that, the plan is to continue to adjunct and apply to permanent instructor positions [me and the 1234235234 other people in this state with masters degrees that want to teach] until either I get hired for one [oh hallowed day], or lose my patience and start applying for part-time staff jobs that allow me to teach one or two classes, or lose my patience and go to phd school, though whether it’s going to be sociology, anthropology, or education is anyone’s guess.)

Meanwhile, we got our first strawberries of the season yesterday, and they smell amazing. We picked up our first chicken from our chicken CSA, which I’m looking forward to eating with great glee. Both are reminders that spring is here and summer is coming, and life will slow down a bit. I have Great Plans for this summer, including learning how to can, so hopefully there will be a little more activity around here soon.

I’ve been in the Seattle area for the last week visiting my mom and tromping around my adopted hometown. Actually, there hasn’t been quite enough of the latter since my mom lives in Marysville, a fair distance north of Seattle. I think next time I’ll get a hotel or, something Joyce pointed out to me, rent a private apartment for a week. I love seeing my mom, but part of the reason to come to Seattle is to see Seattle, not Marysville. Plus, the cigarette smoke in the house is driving me nuts. Blech. I figure we can get my mom a room of her own for three nights or so to give her a mini vacation. I ran this idea past her and she likes it, so this sounds like a win-win.

I used to live in Everett, just south of Marysville. I often said that the best thing to come out of Everett is Interstate 5. I must say, I think the same thing of Marysville. With apologies to Gertrude Stein, there’s no there there.

I reserved a compact rental car but was given a free ‘upgrade’ in the form of a brand new Chevrolet Impala. In a word, YUCK. The HVAC controls are nearly perfect, but that’s about the nicest thing I can say about the car. It’s huge, handles like the 3600lb car it is, and it gets absolutely horrible city fuel economy. Highway fuel economy is decent at about 28, thanks to a V6 engine that can run on three cylinders under light loads, but it doesn’t take much city driving to drag the average down into the teens. The next time I get offered an upgrade I’ll ask them if they’ll pay for the difference in gas usage, since a major reason for me to rent a small car is the fuel economy.

Thursday night I went with a friend to see Cabaret for her birthday. The woman that played Sally Bowles had a serious set of pipes on her, and the Emcee was a heck of a lot of fun. I’m going to have Two Ladies running through my head for weeks to come. I had a great time.

Yesterday I met up with an old friend for lunch and a few hours in Seattle, specifically Pike’s Market and the waterfront. The clouds cooperated by holding back the rain and even parting for some sun to shine through, though they came back together and let loose shortly after I dropped my friend off. It was great to spend the afternoon with her.

I’m returning my rental car at noon and then my friend from Thursday are going to go play. A ferry ride from Edmonds to Kingston, a jaunt down to Bremerton, then a ferry back to Seattle. Dunno about after that.

I’m glad I decided to be here for two full weekends, though I’ll be glad to get back home to Joyce, our kitties, our space, and our routines.

A short video I spotted over at Boing Boing TV.

I’ve long held that technology, properly applied, can improve the lives of everyone. In this video, Doug Fine says a couple of things near the end that sums up my point of view nicely, namely that we don’t have to give up everything to be green.

Thoughts?

An appalling article from the New York Times in which a small farmer talks about expanding his operation to meet the demand for local food, only to be penalized for doing so.

Snippet from the article:

Last year, knowing that my own 100 acres wouldn’t be enough to meet demand, I rented 25 acres on two nearby corn farms. I plowed under the alfalfa hay that was established there, and planted watermelons, tomatoes and vegetables for natural-food stores and a community-supported agriculture program.

I’ve discovered that typically, a farmer who grows the forbidden fruits and vegetables on corn acreage not only has to give up his subsidy for the year on that acreage, he is also penalized the market value of the illicit crop, and runs the risk that those acres will be permanently ineligible for any subsidies in the future. (The penalties apply only to fruits and vegetables — if the farmer decides to grow another commodity crop, or even nothing at all, there’s no problem.)

Emphasis mine. I can understand why the subsidy would be lost, but why the penalty? Once on the government teat, always on the government teat? Does anyone else think this is outrageous?

1. I got to meet La Stewie today! She was off of work during the daytime, so she schlepped up here and we did lunch and coffee and it was delightful. We chatted like we’d known each other for years, other than the fact that we were doing the whole “So, how’d you end up here for grad school?” and “How’d you and Jeff meet?” thing. It was a lovely break from life, and it was good to finally get to meet her. She is just as lovely as she comes across online.

2. We have a chest freezer now. A friend is slowly divesting herself of large possessions in preparation for a move, and cut us a great deal on her chest freezer. My inner squirrel is gleeful, letmetellyou. One day, when I have time to think again, I’m going to stock it with lovely stews and chili and such, and then, when we don’t feel like cooking, we’ll just pull something out of the freezer. And we can freeze produce this summer. And chicken. Lots and lots of glorious chicken.

3. We’re joining a chicken CSA. We’re going for the 8 chicken option, starting at the beginning of April and running through July. The farmers are folks we’ve gotten chicken from before, and they’re always awesome.

If a girl were interested in getting started with canning and freezing who was a complete newbie, where would she start reading about it? What resources would y’all recommend?

Also, what do you guys freeze in? I’m hesitant to use those freezer bags that seal shut with heat, unless you can reuse them - I’m becoming more and more concerned with waste generation, and using something like that as a one-off just seems environmentally irresponsible (our city only recycles 1 and 2 plastics that are in the shape of bottles. Other 1 and 2 plastic can’t be recycled.) I’m hesitant to use zip top bags because I always say I’m going to wash them and reuse them, but they’re a pain to wash, and even if I do wash and reuse them, they do wear out pretty quickly. Would regular old Gladware “tupperware” do the trick for large scale vegetable freezing? They do wear out eventually, but it takes much longer than plastic bags and they’re much easier to wash, which means they’ll actually get reused. How does glass work for freezing? It seems like it would stress the glass.

Has it really been since November that either of us has posted? It doesn’t seem like it.

We got through the holiday season relatively in one piece. Normally, Thanksgiving is up in Baltimore with my mom’s family; however, my grandmother, the matriarch of the family, passed away this fall, and collectively, it was decided that we didn’t want to do the big Thanksgiving this year. Things are still up in the air as to whether we’ll resume Thanksgiving next year or pick another holiday to celebrate together. Meanwhile, we did a big Thanksgiving dinner down here at my parents’ house with my parents, my sisters, and our cousin, who might as well be a brother. Jeff and I contributed a local turkey, as well as a few other goodies to the festivities. That turkey received many, many compliments.

The rest of November and December disappeared in a flurry of finishing the semester, passing my thesis proposal defense, and starting my thesis research (me) and work and pager duty (Jeff), along with Christmas and New Year’s and my sister’s birthday. New Year’s was quiet for us; we stay in on New Year’s Eve, preferring to stay off the roads where all the crazies are. We cooked up a steak from Rocking F Farm with my sister, stayed in, and played board games.

The semester has started for me in one place (I’m teaching my first real class this semester) and starts on Monday in the other. In theory, this should be my last semester of graduate school, so I’m going to be frantically trying to finish my thesis (or not, if I decide I can’t hit the deadlines for May graduation and that I’m going to aim for August. I should know by the end of January). Life is going to be busy for the next few months.

Right now, we’re both fighting off the tail end of colds. I blame my students.

Blogwise, I need to post and tie up Nitty Gritty, and we’re going to try to post here a little more this year.

Right now, we’re on an every other week farmer’s market schedule, as it’s not exactly high produce season, and what we can get freezes or keeps pretty well. Today, we got eggs and extra sage sausage from Ward’s Happy chickens; potatoes and hothouse tomatoes and cucumbers from Faucette Produce; green, yellow, and red peppers, and salad greens from the greenhouse stand across from Faucette Produce (one of these days, I’ll get his name) [normally, we get our lettuce from Weatherhand Farm, the local hydroponics guy, but he was sold out by the time we got there today]; ground beef from Rocking F; and cheese from the Molners. Tucked up in the corner of the market was someone we hadn’t noticed before: Cane Creek Farm, selling pork and beef products, and advertising humane treatment, and antibiotic-free and animal by-product free meat. We’re not about to abandon Rocking F for our beef needs (Margueritte’s prices and quality just can’t be beat), but we did get a pound of Italian sausage, which we’re eager to try. If it turns out to be good, they have bratwurst, chorizo, and other good looking things. I’ve been chomping at the bit for a greater variety of local meat products, so hopefully the sausage is tasty. We’ll make a full report.

What is it going to take to make it stop?

E.coli is everywhere. It’s part of nature. You have some in your gut right now. It only becomes a problem when we handle our food in a negligent manner.

‘We’ mostly means ‘bulk food producers.’

There are questions I could ask here, but I’d just be preaching at the choir.

Joyce and I need to replace some aging skillets and we want to get away from Teflon. We’re seeking opinions and experiences with enameled cast iron cookware. Do you like it? How long can the enamel be expected to last? Any brand recommendations?

Thanks!

One of my daily blog reads is Zen Habits. Yesterday there was a great post that I thought I’d share with you here. The title of the post is 10 Tasty, Easy and Healthy Breakfast Ideas. I want to try almost all of them.

hey, it’s not a taco!

This week, we didn’t have tacos. We had a real, planned, local meal. The corn came from Rocking F and the squash from my great uncle. For the homemade macaroni and cheese, the noodles featured flour from Southern Biscuit and eggs from the Wards, milk from Homeland Creamery, and cheese from the Molners. Non-local was a bit of olive oil (purchased at Deep Roots and some spices. Dinner was tasty, and my cousin, who was over for dinner, thoroughly approved.

Like a lot of folks the previous, we never quite got around to planning a meal that was completely local this past week. Jeff’s mom was in town, and I was starting school (I’m in the second year of my master’s degree). However, we ended up having a couple of meals that ended up being all local by happy accident. Monday we made crustless quiche (from a recipe we first tried back in June and liked so much that it’s worked its way into a semi-regular rotation), with eggs from the Wards, cheese from the Molners, Southern biscuit flour, and milk from Homeland Creamery. I think we had corn with it, from Rocking F Farm, our beef folks; they had the only corn in the market by the time we got there two Saturdays again (we’ve been having record heat, and it’s been frying things like corn.) Friday night, we had talked about going out then decided we didn’t feel like it, and didn’t have anything in particular scheduled for dinner. However, we did have some leftover taco meat from later on in the week, so … you guessed it, we had tacos again. Southern biscuit flour in the tortillas, cheese from the Molners, ground beef from Rocking F, and sides that were more of that corn from Rocking F and some delicious farmer’s market squash. Non-local ingredients in both meals were some oil (in the roux for the quiche and to fry the squash in) and a bit of taco seasoning.

I couldn’t figure out what to make this past week, and didn’t want to repeat the all-tacos-all-the-time show (taco count last week: two nights.) I went rummaging in the freezer and came up with a forgotten package of stew beef. With temperatures pushing 100… I ended up making beef pie, of all things. Boiled potatoes, corn cut off the cob, and cooked stew beef (simmered with some spices and chicken broth) were mixed together with gravy (a little butter and flour mixed to make a roux, combined with “chicken” broth and milk, placed into an 8×8 baking pan, then covered with a biscuit topping, and the whole thing baked. The corn, potatoes, and beef were all purchased from our farmer’s market, as was the milk for the gravy and biscuits and the cream to make the butter. The flour was produced by Southern Biscuit, and is locally grown and milled.

It was tasty, and made great leftovers the next day.

over easy egg tacos, corn

Around here in the kitchen, we get into… let’s not call them ruts, let’s call them patterns instead, shall we?¹ Which is why this week’s OLS meal also involves stuff on tortillas and corn, just like last week. Also, we’ve been eating a lot of tacos lately; they’re easy, they’re quick, they don’t heat up the kitchen very much, and we both like them. We’ve been mainlining corn, too, trying to enjoy it as much as we can before the season is up. So we had over-easy-egg tacos and corn this past week.

The corn was the best corn we’d had all summer, purchased again from the greenhouse vegetable guy (Wesley?) across from Faucette Produce at the curb farmer’s market (corn so sweet that it doesn’t need butter or salt or anything; we’ve been eating it plain, straight off the cob.) The eggs were from Ward’s Happy Chickens, the local-enough cheese from the Molners, the tomatoes were from my daddy, and the flour from Midstate Mills down in Newton.¹ The tortillas had a bit of non-local but locally-purchased oil in them (I need to make up butter).

1. We had beef tacos Monday night. We had these tacos Wednesday night. We had over-easy-egg tacos again last night. We’re currently eating tacos for breakfast, scrambled egg style.

2. And thanks to a little investigation by Stew, we now know that most of that flour is not just locally milled, but locally grown. That is so very cool; I had no idea that wheat was even grown in NC.

The farmer’s market has moods, just like any other living thing. Some weeks, everyone’s harried and busy and can’t chat and doesn’t really want to chat and they count the pennies and we’re in and out. Some weeks, everyone’s in a good mood and they want to chat and visit, and they round down or throw extra things into the bag. Some vendors are always in unfailingly good moods, but some weeks, everyone is in a good mood, and it’s very very nice.

Today was one of those days. We wandered around and got to stop and talk to folks we don’t always get to talk to for extended periods of time. The guy who sells greenhouse vegetables across from Faucette Produce sold me six ears of corn for a dollar. We bought the most gorgeous chunk of beef roast on special from Rocking F, and spent awhile chatting about her ailing truck. We exchanged ideas for keeping cool with Polly Faucette. When our lettuce guy was sold out (everyone wants lettuce with it being so hot, and it being so hot means that his lettuce is growing very very slowly) and Homeland was out of skim milk, we shrugged and smiled. Everyone was out of cantaloupe by the time we got there, but we got peaches, which we didn’t last week. I also got a bag of the teensiest tomatoes imaginable, smaller than cherries, which I’m eating like candy, one at a time every time I walk through the kitchen.

It was a good morning. The heat’s broken for the day - we’ve been pushing and pushing past a 100 degrees for a week now, but right now it’s cloudy and 81, which is a huge improvement. That probably contributed to the collective good mood. Whatever it was, it was nice.

enchiladas, corn

This week brought us enchiladas and more corn (I feel a categorical imperative to eat as much corn as possible while it is in season.) The enchiladas featured locally milled flour, our local-enough cheese, and local ground beef. The sauce was constructed with tomatoes and green peppers from the my dad’s garden, and a bit of non-local broth and spices (along with a bit of organic tomato puree) purchased at our local co-op. Beef, cheese, and corn were purchased at our farmer’s market.

pork tenderloin, corn, roasted potatoes

Our One Local Summer meal this week was pork tenderloin roasted with a bunch of spices, roasted potatoes, and corn. The pork came from the Wards, the potatoes from Faucette Produce, and the corn from the peach orchard (I haven’t gotten their names yet). Non-local items were olive oil and spices. I feel like I should have more to say about it, but it was easy and tasty, which, when you’re using summer foods and local ingredients, is what we usually aim for. Most of the meals we cook are pretty simple, and I don’t mind that.

(We had a bonus OLS meal last night: corn and potato chowder, with bread I’d made from locally milled flour. Delicious. )

We got our first cantaloupe of the season last week. The only melon I eat is watermelon, but Jeff reported that it was delicious. We cut it up at the beginning of the week, and it went into his lunches last week.

This week was milk, eggs, sausage, potatoes, onions, blueberries, ground beef, peaches, corn, cheese, squash, cucumbers, cantaloupe, and green beans. We didn’t need tomatoes; my dad is still supplying us with those, and it turns out he has some green peppers this week too.

The abundance available at our market this week was staggering. Everywhere you turned, there were piles and piles of produce, all of it beautiful, fresh, and ready to eat. I love summer.

breakfast casserole and corn

Our OLS meal this week was breakfast casserole and corn (I swear, we eat more than meat and cheese. Really.) The breakfast casserole had eggs (from the Wards), sausage (also from the Wards), cheese (the Molners) and cream (Homeland Creamery), layered with homemade tortillas (flour from Southern Biscuit, [thank you, Stew,] salt from Deep Roots [though, of course, not local salt] and butter made from the same cream (I normally use oil, but in the name of making all-local tortillas, tried butter. The result? Tasty, and a little more crispy than the ones with oil.) The corn was from the only vendor that had corn last week that we saw (it was all over the market this week) and was our first corn of the season. It was sweet, lovely, and tasted like summer.

This week was cheddar studded meatloaf patties and mashed potatoes. Cheese from the Molners, ground beef from Rocking F, potatoes from Faucette Produce, an egg from Ward’s Happy Chickens, milk and the cream to make butter from Homeland Creamery, all purchased at the curb farmer’s market. Also included were various non-local spices and garlic, all purchased at our local co-op. They were extremely tasty, and alas, I have no picture, since dinner was so tasty that we forgot to take a picture. Then again, we’ve all seen meat patties and mashed potatoes covered in gravy before, right?

This upcoming week’s OLS meal is going to feature corn. Corn! I can’t wait.

• We saw the first of the season’s corn last week, but we figured it was going to be crazy expensive and not very good, so we passed. I bit this week, though. The same folks were back, and with a lot more corn, so I asked them how much. “Dozen ears for $4,” and they were preshucked. “How much for a couple ears, and you don’t need to shuck them?” “Oh, a dollar.” So I hunted for a dollar, and she hunted through and picked pretty ears, and threw three of them into a bag for me. We love corn, but I wasn’t sure I was ready to try to go through a dozen ears this week. They’re small yet, too. Now, in a couple of weeks…
• The season’s first peaches were out this week, too. $4 for a small basket, and worth every penny - we inhaled that orchard’s peaches last year.
• We got out first blueberries of the season last week, and got another container this week.
• I got bacon this week. I tried last week - it’s tomato season, and I want BLTs - but they were out. (”Well, I brought 20 pounds, and we just sold right out…”) This week, there were 2 packages left when we got there (”We brought extra this week”) and I snatched one up.

Other than that, it was a pretty standard week for us. Cheese, beef, eggs, sausage. The market has exploded, though. Squash, zucchini, green beans, tomatoes, cucumbers, green peppers… summer’s bounty is spilling out all over the place. I was bouncing when we left (”Corn! Peaches! I feel like a little kid getting everything I want!”) The only other thing I really wanted was watermelon, but my great aunt told us that she suspected that the ones out in the parking lot hadn’t been grown around here, and anyway, we’d rather wait for her baby melons to come in. She says it’s probably going to be another month.

pork and potatoes

This week was garlic-butter roasted pork and scalloped potatoes, plus a side salad for me. The pork was purchased from Ward’s Happy Chickens (our egg vendor), the potatoes from Faucette Produce, the cheese from the Molners (it comes from Ohio, but that’s not so far away, and we know that it’s good cheese and sustainably produced, and except for goat cheese, it’s probably as local as we’re going to get. Plus, the Molners are as nice as can be. If locals around here know of somewhere where one can buy block cheddar and Muenster that is more local than Ohio, I’m all ears), lettuce (mostly local, from Weatherhand Farm, our local hydroponics guy, with some organic greens from Deep Roots mixed in), tomatoes (from my dad’s garden), mayonnaise (Dukes, which I’m pretty sure is local and made up in Virgina), milk, cream, and butter made from that cream, from Homleland Dairy. Items mostly purchased from our curb farmer’s market. Some non-local but organic garlic and spices were purchased from Deep Roots, our local co-op.