little touches

i like having time for the small touches of domesticity. well watered, happy plants, ball jars and budvases filled with freshly clipped herbs sitting at the ready on the counter. i like snipped flowers from the garden on the dining room table. the hidden accomplishment of a well organized cutlery drawer. fresh votive candles with the wicks up, ready to be lit. one of the reasons i'm in love with baking my own bread is because i know it means i basically have to be home for the 3-4 hours it takes to mix, rise, and bake the loaves. it is an endeavor you can only accomplish if you slow down and allow yourself the time to do it. i've found there are so many little tasks and embellishments to be done around the house that make me feel good, useful, and in better control of my life when i complete them.

i'm not afraid to admit that i love martha stewart and her entire empire, but i usually am bothered by the absolute set decorated perfection of her homes and all that she seems to so efficiently accomplish. that being said, all the things i mentioned above are things you might find on martha's monthly calendar which they show each month in her magazine. her calendar always says amazingly specific things like from this month's issue "raise lawn mower blade as the grass growth slows as season gets drier" or " give bolted lettuce and scraps to chickens", "dust ceiling fans". i love to ridicule that calendar and adore the artist ida applebrog's droll interpretation of it in a series of her paintings which contain to do's: design aprons for nuthouse, plan cure for ugliness, change god's phone number, etc. but i must confess to loving the way martha gives pride of place to those little tasks and home management chores. sure, if you have 4 homes you would need to be quite organized to keep them all functioning and lovely, but even with 1, i think i could use a little reminder to turn the compost bin or clip the mint patch for july mojitos. why not elevate those little household moments to something you can check off and accomplish in your daily life? something that makes your individual and family's surroundings more beautiful and inspired?

i think we set a nice tone to our day today by making time for one of those little touches i'm talking about....we took the time to pick cherries. yep. my neighbors have a tree that is drooping with the weight of the little ruby beauties and i have been feeling a bit jealous watching the birds devour them. my neighbors were kind enough to offer as many as we wanted to pick , so we walked next door in our pjs this morning and picked a colander full. cleo loved the act of picking and choosing and finding the sweetest, darkest ones she could reach. i loved watching the morning sun dapple in the leaves and light flynn's blonde head as he strained to reach a limb. it was a really nice, fulfilling experience and the colander full of beautiful, ripe cherries is the perfect, nearly "set decorated", touch of summer on my kitchen counter.

viva the little things!

IKEA through the eyes of an 87 year old

i had a really interesting afternoon. i took my 87 year old grandmother to IKEA for the very first time. i got her there by bribing her with the promise of decent swedish meatballs (her mother came to America from Sweden in the early 1900s) and lots of eye candy. let me back up first by saying that my grandmother is in a monogomous relationship with Sears and has been for 60+ years. i think the only thing she doesn't buy there are groceries and she would do that if they sold them. shopping at Sears in fashion place mall has been part of her life my entire life. she goes there to use her 20% discount card, but i think it is more about her knowing the store, knowing the products that they sell and feeling comfortable with that as a customer. she genuinely has a relationship with the brands and even the employees at her sears store. i went there with her a couple weeks ago to buy an iron and both the manager and the woman at the counter knew her name. isn't that crazy?

so today's exposure to the universe that is ikea was especially foreign to her. i don't think she was at all prepared for the scope and breadth of what they sell. i don't know if i'm really prepared for it! the amount of physical stuff to look at is boggling and definitely over-stimulating. modern day consumerism is its own unique thing. it is like shopping on steroids. and i think we've all gotten a bit used to it. row after row of plenty.

today's visit to ikea highlighted to me just how far we've gone beyond the kind of shopping my grandmother does. for one, i don't think anyone is brand loyal enough to make a store their one and only, despite the fact that more than ever individual stores like Target and Walmart carry everything one could possibly need under one roof. and being unaware of what exactly the inventory inside the 4 walls of a store is, is part of the madness and/or charm of the modern day shopping experience. we don't want to already know everything they have, we like to round that corner and see the new, new thing, don't we? i haven't known the person selling me something (other than insurance or a house) on a first name basis maybe ever. it just isn't part of the way it works anymore.

we certainly have become very savvy at shopping as a people. we can hang with a zillion end cap displays and we can discern the subtle difference between being identified as a walmart or a target shopper. the whole consumer experience is much more varied and takes up a lot more time, but since shopping has become an actual past time in our country, that is something we have all accepted, which is ironic since the demise of the mom and pop stores, and the rise of things like ikea, really happened because of the allure of convenience. getting everything all in one place, or increasingly all in one store has become more of the norm than going to separate little storefronts for everything on your list. but it is sad to think what is lost without the small shops...the relationships with the people who own and run the store, and the expertise it takes to run a store with a limited inventory of a certain thing. if you sell knives and nothing else, i imagine you really get to know your knives. and what's more, your store has an actual point of view. the owner has chosen to sell these certain things most likely because they think they are good, quality products. i don't know if i can be so sure that my chain grocery store or the franchise at the mall is so conscious of why and what they sell.

getting back to ikea, despite these musings, i would say my grandmother's feeling abut ikea was really positive. she enjoyed the "modern" "substantial" stylings (her words) and seemed genuinely to enjoy herself. but buy something? no way. she wasn't the least bit interested in taking anything home with her. she even tried to talk me out of the $1 ice cream cone for cleo at the end of our trip, saying it was just too expensive for plain old vanilla. when is the last time you went into a store and walked out with nothing?

p.s. i can't resist giving a plug for something ikea related but with a definite twist towards the subversive. check out http://ikeahacker.blogspot.com/ the entire blog is dedicated to the ways people have reconfigured products ikea sells for their own uses. some are ingenious, some are downright hilarious, but mostly i love the way people have found ways to personalize something as mass produced as a piece of ikea furniture. i find that very inspiring. enjoy.

seasonality

i don't want to fixate on the book animal vegetable miracle, well maybe i do, but i can't resist bringing up one more topic. one of the aspects of the book i found most provocative is how natural the notion of eating seasonally is when you produce your own food, and how unnatural it is when you stroll the aisles of any modern supermarket. with the rise of global trade, food of all types is now available to us year round. we can get apples in june, blueberries in january, citrus in september, lettuce in december, watermelons in april....there is no order to the offerings in the produce section. the selection available feels random, or more appropriately, it feels full all the time.

most of us lost the ability to know when and where things grow a generation or more ago. i think the only vegetable the average person is even conscious of when the true growing season is, is the tomato. and this is because it seems to be universally acknowledged that home grown, height of summer, garden tomatoes are a completely other species (and a far superior one) to the lowly, pale, mushy creation we have available for purchase in the stores all winter and spring. the funny part is that i think the same comparison could be made for most produce and food we eat. it will taste better if it is picked when ripe and ready. and this means that to eat something ripe and ready you need to live where it was grown. connect these dots and you realize if you live in most parts of north america, you probably don't live where a lot of what you eat even grows. seen any banana trees on your street recently?

now i'm not a proponent of swearing off everything in your diet that isn't native to your area, but i think one of the most salient points kingsolver makes in animal vegetable miracle is that if we want to start eating more responsibly in the modern food chain, we all need to better embrace seasonality. eat things when they are at their prime, whether at a restaruant or at home, not when they have been trucked or flown in from half way across the world. this way we not only support our local growers and farmers, we are helping to limit the amount of fossil fuels it takes to produce and deliver food out of season.

so how are we supposed to know when something is in season? kingsolver came up with a cliff notes way to do this for all the non gardeners of the world--picture a season of foods coming from one single, imaginary plant. she calls it the vegetannual. i can't possibly explain it as eloquently as she, so here is the description lifted straight from page 64 of animal vegetable miracle:

"Take a minute to study this creation--an imaginary plant that bears over the course of one growing season a cornucopia of all the different vegetable products we can harvest. Picture its life passing before your eyes like a time-lapse film: first, in the cool early spring, shoots poke up out of the ground. small leaves appear, then bigger leaves. As the plant grows up into the sunshine and the days grow longer, flower buds appear, followed by small green fruits. Under midsummer's warm sun, the fruits grow riper, and more colorful. As days shorten into the autumn, these mature into hard-shelled fruits with appreciable seeds inside. Finally as the days grow cool, the vegetannual may hoard the sugars its leaves have made, pulling them down into a storage unit of some kind: a tuber, bulb, or root.

So goes the year: First the leaves: spinach, kale, lettuce, chard. (Here that is April and May.) Then mature heads of leaves and flower heads: cabbage, romaine, broccoli, and cauliflower (May-June). Then tender young fruit set: snow peas, baby squash, cucumbers (June) followed by green beans, green peppers, and small tomatoes July). Then more mature, colorfully ripened fruits: beefsteak tomatoes, eggplants, red and yellow peppers (late July-August). Then the large, hard shelled fruits with developed seeds inside: cantaloupes, honeydews, watermelons, pumpkins, winter squash (August-September). Last come the root crops, and so ends the produce parade."

i'm seeing the early spring vegetannual erupt in my own garden. i am knee deep in it with the shoots and leaves stage--lettuce, chard, spinach, arugula are all looking lovely (though my spinach has already gone to bolt) and have been delicious. i'm still waiting for the small green fruits to come on--the peas and the cauliflower specifically, but until then, i am going to try and focus in on these lovely leafy things and try to just exhale and wait for the next batch of things to come on. i think that in respect to food, the adage "all good things come to those who wait" really rings true.

Above images are of my water logged leafy green garden patch and image of the Vegetannual courtesy of animalvegetablemiracle.com

remind me again where my food comes from?

this week i began harvesting big bunches of spinach and lettuce from the garden. other than our herbs, it is the first time we've eaten something we set in the ground this year. it felt exciting to go clip and snip and then lovingly wash the leaves for dinner tonight. in the process of collecting, i also noticed that some of the tomato plants now have the little yellow flowers that will lead to those delicious tomatoes in a couple of months. the nasturtium and morning glory seeds have popped up this week so it is starting to feel like full blown garden time. everything is still small and a wee bit sad but i noticed a huge growth jump in the last 10 days as temperatures have started creeping up and up. this past week we hit 80 for the first time and the tomatoes really responded. i think some of them doubled. cleo and i are going to measure all the plants every sunday and record them in her nature journal. i think it is a good project for her (she loves any excuse to write important notes) but i have to admit to being really curious about the rate at which things grow. i simply have no idea to expect. an inch a week? 6? a foot?

there is a lot about growing stuff that i simply have no idea about. i've just finished reading animal vegetable miracle by barbara kingsolver and i must say it was very inspiring and provocative. i can't recommend it highly enough. the subtitle of the book is "a year of food life" and it basically chronicles kingsolver and her family's experiment to live for 12 months as "locovores", eating only what they themselves grow and produce on their farm in appalachian virginia, or what they can purchase directly from a supplier in their own community. they go the whole year with the only exceptions to this being whole wheat flour for their bread and coffee. their goal was to forgo our society's damaging industrial food system that uses gazillon gallons of petroleum to produce and deliver our food, gazillons more gallons of pesticides, chemicals, and drugs to manufacture our produce and meat, and has long ago forgotten the farmer side of the food equation, instead creating huge corporate farms and meat plants or CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations) to give us what we eat.

the entire book is insightful about what it takes to produce the food we all eat, but instead of being a wagging finger handbook about all the things they had to swear off and why, the book is very much a celebration of all that they discovered about food through the process of seeing it through all its steps: from seeds to plants to fruits and veggies, from egg to chick to chicken dinner. they make cheese, can and dehydrate food, raise and slaughter heirloom chickens and turkeys, forage for wild morel mushrooms, and grow literally tons of vegetables.

the book made me aware that what and how i choose to eat really does have a larger impact. what we eat shapes who we are, not just physically, but culturally as well. if we continue to support a food system that is wasteful and harmful not only to the planet but to our own farmers, what does this say about our humanity? if we encourage meals that can be ordered and paid for and put down the hatch in less than 10 minutes and all within the confines of our own car, do we like to eat? do we respect what it took to produce that food?

i think the larger question is do we really care about our food anymore? i'm not talking about the food network and the george foreman grill and the hot new korean bbq taco truck people will wait on line for 2 hours for, and all the other food gadgetry and pagentry. i'm talking about food broken down to the basics. the actual ingredients of what we eat. this seems like such a basic thing to swear off...after all food IS survival. it is life. and it seems that in the course of history, most cultures have elevated food (and the producing of it) to a very important and even sacred realm. the knowledge of how to grow things and then transform them into something deliciously edible has been handed down from generation to generation for eons...at least until the recent past. kingsolver makes a lot of great points about why america has a particularly dulled appreciation for its food. one of the best is that we have no intrinsic food culture here. we don't have, she claims, " a collective wisdom about the plants and animals that grow in a place and the complex ways of rendering them tasty." In short, we do not have a cultural relationship with our food like say, italy or france.

when viewed in this light, it makes sense that we're so screwed up about food and the ways we go about producing it. having this kind of handed down food culture is like the checks and balances of eating. it appears to impart some intrinsic awareness of how to eat well and how to eat smart. if you have a relationship with the land that produces your food, chances are you won't want to spoil it by covering it with pesticides that kill everything but the wheat. if you have always grown your food, you know that eating a peach in january doesn't make any sense and why would you want to fly a peach half way across the world again when everyone knows mr. x down the road has peaches worth waiting for? if you have made bread every day for your entire life, there is no possible way that someone can suddenly tell you that eating bread will make you fat. and chances are you probably won't be fat because you will know that eating tons and tons of food (or all your bacon in one sitting) will leave you with nothing come winter, and on and on. food knowledge is power. i'm a believer and i'm going to work hard to be an American willing and ready to come up with a responsible, tasty food culture i can be proud of. too bad i have to divorce the one i've got first.