Saag Paneer Goes Local

(overcoming specificity)

I am a very specific person. In every way. In every facet of life. There is no corner in my brain that doesn't have very specific guidelines for existing, for processing thought, for storing memory, or for experiencing life. This is why you will never find the word "relaxed" as a descriptor of my personality. When I get an idea for something I want to cook, therefore, it is always very specific. I am often trying to reproduce in my kitchen fond memories of food I've had out in the world. I don't want something "similar", I want the real McCoy.

I have always loved Indian food, though I have taken very long breaks from it at times, and there are some dishes that every good Indian restaurant serves that I want to be able to make at home. Saag Paneer is one of them. Palak Paneer is another one. My friend Chelsea loves Indian food more than I do and is on a long journey of discovery with variations on many dishes in her own kitchen. Lately she's got me hankering for a little Indian food. In McMinnville, if you want something as exotic as this it is best to make it at home.

I have a great Madhur Jaffrey book that Chelsea gave me with a recipe for Saag Paneer. I happened to have a ton of fresh local gorgeous spinach that it would have been a food crime to waste. But being in the middle of a lot of change prevents me from getting my elbows whey deep in cheese making so where the hell could I come up with some Paneer which is a kind of farmer's cheese? No where, that's where. So I channeled my many resourceful friends' spirits for the answer. It was happily right under my nose at the Hillsdale farmer's market this week end. The price was high enough to scare the pants off of Vincent Price.

We'll call it a splurge. Fresh mozzarella. This stuff is amazing. It isn't like that really spongy wet stuff that floats in water. It's more like feta curds, a little salty, and tasting like the kind of slightly more aged mozzarella that is actually my preference*. It has the texture of a farmer's cheese. Voila! There was my answer.

The recipe also called for slightly more spinach than I had, dried fenugreek leaves, and a fresh chili none of which my kitchen could furnish. No fears! I just used a jar of my home canned diced tomatoes, more onion than the recipe called for, and left out the pepper. (I didn't feel like defrosting one of my roasted frozen ones.)

The other major issue is rice. Although I have a very small amount of rice left and could have used it for this recipe. I wanted to see what it would be like to go way off the Indian map and serve this dish on polenta.

It was superb! With a little cayenne and a lot of ginger it was warming (we've got a chill back in the air here) and filling. The cheese was perfect- it didn't melt but added the perfect mellow foil to the spicy spinach. The spinach was like butter and now I'm craving a bucket-full of this dish. I restrained myself to just one serving, but I could easily have inhaled the whole mess of it. I feel totally rewarded in my efforts to be less specific when it comes to recreating something that lives in my taste bud hall of fame.

Baby update: they are both doing quite well. Very spunky and now that Pippa is a whole week and a half older than she was when we got her- she's playing with Penny and watching them leap around on each other is so cute I could just cry. They are (sadly) still continuing to show more bald spots. Penny's stomach is still distended which worries me but not the vet.

We have moved them out of the tub and into our other bathroom. The problem with this is that now we open the door and they bolt out in hopes of exploring. Chick is often camped out at the bathroom door and sometimes lunges at it with snarls. Then licks her chops. So obviously I'm concerned about the eventual introduction of kittens to dog. Such meetings will obviously be heavily supervised for quite some time.

Here's something that makes every day a pleasure: every time Pippa sees me come in she cranks up her purr machine immediately.

These are some busy times for us. Cooking really good food when you're overloaded with things to take care of can seem impossible and yet there's never a time when it's more important to have home cooked food. I find it relaxing and soothing to cook. It stresses me out to not have any time to do it. I actually made some potatoes that would have been fabulous if it hadn't been for the fact that they got burnt due to my washing the kittens and not turning off the oven first. No worries though. Apparently Philip likes to eat burnt bits. I ate the good stuff. They were Greek potatoes with lemon juice, olive oil, and oregano. The lemon juice came from my friend in California. If we hadn't been able to eat those potatoes I would have been devastated by the waste of such a precious commodity.

We have lots of papers to sign, babies to care for, and a boy who's gotten his first note sent to the principle by his teacher. To be honest, I don't think this punishment is deserved for his crime which was one of blurting out something apparently shocking to the class. He didn't use swear words and I think it really boils down to the fact that us Williamsons lead a much less gentle existence than many other people do. What Max blurted out wasn't directed to anyone in the class and so I have a hard time understanding why it wasn't enough to punish him with one lost recess instead of a string of them.

In fact, my boy is feeling very out of place at school. He's been complaining of being made fun of for his name. He doesn't take teasing in stride. (I'm trying to use this fact to help him understand how others might feel when he teases them). This is the part I didn't think through when deciding to have a baby. That I would have to watch him go through all the stupid awful crap I went through as a kid. Misfits generally give birth to more misfits and it is awfully difficult for Max to really hear us when we tell him how it's often the misfits who achieve the most amazing things in life and end up having the best friends and that some day he'll be glad to be who he is.

Today I have to complete my Master Gardening final exam because tomorrow is the last class. My friend Nicole is putting together a local food group for our county and I'm going to a meeting for that tonight. So much to do! I also have to fill out papers to renew my passport because in May I'm going to go to my dad's wedding in Scotland! Right now I'm trying to think of what articles I might be able to pitch to magazines to make good use of the trip and what magazines?

I was thinking about doing a piece on eating vegetarian in Scotland. (Potatoes and beer is where it's at! Ha! Oh, but also the pub soups...often there is a meatless choice and I've had some excellent ones.) Scotland is my favorite place on earth besides Oregon. Not surprising since they are a lot alike. Especially climate wise. I've never been to Scotland in the spring, only the winter which is when I generally prefer to travel. Maybe I'll get to see some roses?!

Oh my god. I just realized that there must be some public access historical gardens I could see. OH what a dream that would be!!! Oooh, I wonder if there are any monastery gardens there to see? Clearly research is called for. But I don't have time for that yet. I also have to prepare my taxes and I don't even know where to begin with that this year. What a mess!

*The stuff being sold as "fresh" that's soft and spongy is not my favorite. Sometimes if it is stored in oil with herbs it can be delicious but generally I find fresh mozzarella to be lacking in flavor or character. This is why I will never be considered a true epicurean. That and the fact that I don't eat any goat or sheep's cheese.

Shush. I heard you gasp in the back row!!

Everything Good In One Post
(food, sex, secrets, sarcasm, self righteousness, and fresh mozzarella)

A very local meal: rosemary focaccia with homemade pesto (from the freezer) sauteed onion spinach and mushrooms...all crowned with some local mozzarella which is so good I almost ate an entire expensive container of it myself. This meal is not acceptable for my dieting efforts but is so good I am willing to eat gruel for the next two days to make up for it.

A big question with canning is always whether or not you will eat the things you make. These are a part of the growing collection of empty mason jars that were previously filled with all kinds of good fruits and pickles and jams. If you are not making a dent in your canned goods by this time in the winter then you either didn't can things you actually like to eat, you have no confidence in your canning abilities and are afraid of what's in the jars, or you canned so much that you are going to have to be my canning guru. There are big holes in my pantry now where there used to be tons of peaches, pickles, jam, and marinated two bean salad.

The piccalilli remains untouched as it is likely to do until the end of time. Or until I dump it all out and actually admit I'm never going to eat it because it scares the pants off me and not because I'm worried it isn't safe.

Since starting my local challenge I have had almost no mozzarella and it's kind of hurt. Being left out of mozzarella usage is very sad. We tried the only kind we could find which is made by Tillamook and I hate to report that mozzarella is not something they make well. In fact, it was awful.

These mozzarella curds taste just like the kind made by the "Precious" brand, only better. Fresher! I bought them at the Hillsdale farmer's market. I believe they were made with raw milk and there is a slight after taste that is a bit rangy, the same kind of after taste you might experience from goat cheese if you were me. Which you're not and are probably feeling pretty happy about.

Still no tender lettuce mixes at the farmer's market. Well, no lettuce mixes at all yet. There was one calling itself a "lettuce mix" but it was just baby winter greens like kale, chard, and beet greens. I was fooled into spending lots of money for that mix last time they had it and it was quite tough to chew. We got to the farmer's market early enough to snag some fabulous greens. I got two huge bunches of spinach and three bunches of collard greens. There were long lines at most of the produce stalls and even though it was reminding me of Eastern Europe in the eighties, it also made me excessively happy to see a market so well attended and supported.

I'm sure there is no farmer who would be sad to find themselves selling out of every green thing they grow within thirty minutes. As a farmer I'm thinking you always want to find the demand for what you do growing rather than diminishing.

One lady I waited in line with was asking me about my local eating challenge and raised her pert brows and said "So you're doing an eat local challenge and driving a long way to get your food? Doesn't that defeat the purpose?" Pert ho. Of course it doesn't defeat the purpose! I can drive 20 miles north to the only open farmer's market with a friend (car pooling is good) or I can go to the markets in my town and buy produce that has traveled anywhere from 600 miles to 3000 miles to get to me. That's not difficult math to do.

I'm getting really tired of people who seem to think that if you're trying to make any effort at all then you must make extreme sacrifices. All or nothing. C'mon people, every effort counts. Getting spinach from 20 miles away takes less gas and refrigeration than is used to bring me spinach from central or southern California over 600 miles away. That's 580 miles of gas use saved. (In case anyone had trouble with that math).

Can we please all stop worrying about being purists and just make some effort to make change? If a million people saved 580 miles of road travel buying one bunch of spinach we would collectively be saving 580 million miles of road travel. That's it in a simplified nutshell. You can go make it more complicated and pull this paragraph apart for it's flaws but people are living in this country by the millions, like busy little ants, and if every single one of us made some efforts, even "small" efforts, we could make a huge environmental change.

So all you pert hos and snarky pimps out there just waiting to pounce on anyone who is attempting to adjust their lives into being more thoughtful, I will bite you. (And that means YOU, anonymous commenter on Cindy's blog "Figs, Lavender, and Cheese". You really need to go sit on your own personal trash heap and ask yourself what you're doing to make change and stop heckling people about what they're doing.)

I need to take care of a couple of memes I've been tagged for. I'm not going to reprint the rules or anything like that. I'm very uncooperative that way. The first one is from my new blogging friend Cindy over at Figs, Lavender, and Cheese:

List Five Things About Yourself:

1. I really want to raise quails so I can cook tiny eggs but I'm afraid I won't actually like quail's eggs. But jesus! Have you seen how flippin cute quails are? I've seen a button quail come out of it's dime sized egg and almost passed out from the cuteness. I could have bought some quail's eggs at the farmer's market this week-end but didn't think of it until too late. Perhaps next time?

2. I think bone marrow smells like death. (Thanks, Chick, for giving me the gift of smelling raw bones which I would otherwise be oblivious of, being a life long vegetarian.)

3. The second Mr. Thornton loses his taste for beautiful wasp waisted females and develops a relish for tubby gals with blood shot eyes, my marriage will be in danger.

4. Something that makes me tremendously happy is having my house filled with flowers cut fresh from my own back yard. I get a special delight when most of them are strongly scented roses. The whole happy effect is enhanced even more when the walls of all the rooms in my house are painted the kinds of colors that set my cut flowers off to great advantage. If I could have cut flowers in my house every week of the year I would.

5. I love having philosophical discussions with my seven year old who thinks this whole "God" thing is a fairytale. (I never called it that, in case you were wondering and considering the merits of working up a good indignation about it.)


The second meme comes from my old blog friend Tracey from The Everyday Unitarian:

1. What's one thing you do every day?

Drink 3 cups of black coffee that is 2/3 decaf and 1/3 regular. I am only allowed one cup of caffeine per day because I am a delicate flower with heart palpitations. I've done the stress test for old people (for which you have to sign a form saying you understand that the test can cause a heart attack), I've been shoved in that claustrophobic imaging machine to take pictures of my heart, I've worn the 24 hour heart monitor, and I've seen my heart with ultrasound and while I came to the conclusion that one should never see their own heart under any circumstances, the doctors came to the conclusion that while my palpitations were vaguely worrying, there would be no real answer unless something really bad happened to it to give them more clues.

2. Name two things you wish you could learn.

To be silent once in a while when it really counts
To make my own cheese.

3. Name three things that remind you of your childhood:

Hearing Simon And Garfunkel.
Hearing married people bicker.
The smell of sun ripened blackberries.

4. Name four things you love to eat but rarely do:

donuts
marinated mushrooms
brie cheese
plums

5. Name five things/people that make you feel good:

my family (you knew I'd say that, huh?)
having a waistline (I don't have one right now, sadly)
baking bread and making soup on the same day
snow
my chickens

6. List six facts about yourself:

I love being a housewife.

If I had more kids I'd die.

I love winter best of all seasons even though I like the other three quite a lot too.

I have thousands of half written letters floating around in my head.

I have an unholy love for office supplies. I especially love green graph paper and Papermate "Flair" pens in black.

I am not at all kinky. Not even in my most private fantasies. In fact, I don't have sexual fantasies at all, I have romantic ones. I think this is because sex is a fact of life and it's practical and very nice but romance, to me, is the real elusive monkey. You know the last scene in "North and South", the one at the train station? That would never happen to me. Not only because I'm not a wasp waisted Victorian chick but because I'm very uncomfortable with romantic moments and even when they have come my way in real life I botch them up by making sarcastic comments or delivering a real hit of bathos to the moment. Because of this, romance holds a higher place in my fantasy life than sex does.



There you have it. Does it make me narcissistic that I love these kinds of memes? No, I don't think so (to answer my own question) because I adore it when other people do it too. My favorite of all time is reading people's "100 things" lists. Many of you have not yet done a "100 things" list and I think you should. Just for me. Just so I can sit down with my cup of coffee and hear you deny that you can come up with that many things and then see you totally do it.

Well, I'm off to get a little work done for my part time job. If I don't do some work it will become the no-time job in which I've greatly disappointed my good friend Angela and also failed to make enough money to cover all my garden purchases of roses and fruit. Have a great Tuesday everyone!

The Parsnip Lines Of Western Oregon

There's been all kinds of speculation around the local eating tables about the possibility that if everyone was to realize how important (and better) it is to eat locally grown food that small farmers will not be able to meet the demand for it. Land is expensive and there isn't a whole lot of it available anymore for agriculture.

Whenever I hear this I think about how people have thought the world is gonna end real soon for the last two thousand years.

Of course, it's true that there has been mass starvation in the world. You don't have to go far to find someone who remembers the dust bowl depression of the last century in our own country when many of our own great great relatives were starving. Hell, there are people in the United States who are starving right now. So I'm not going to dismiss the fact that finding food can be a serious business everywhere.

But an increased demand will always come before a surfeit of supplies. That's economics. In order to get our country to produce more of it's own food, to turn more of it's arable land to responsible crop production, there must be an uncomfortable demand for it. There's plenty of land not being used for food that could be. There's plenty of land being turned to the production of corn for fuel right now that could (and should) be used to grow more food. Instead we're trying to figure out how we can continue living exactly as we are, without any change in our comfort, without any alteration in our consumptive habits. Americans apparently think having cars is more important than eating.

Yesterday at the farmer's market in Hillsdale there were long lines for some of the vendors. We waited twenty minutes to buy freshly ground polenta and some very expensive parsnips and winter squash while the savoy cabbage I also wanted to buy sold out at the next stall over. Greens were in very short supply. As in: there were none except for cabbage. I said to my friend Nicole "This is like waiting in breadlines in Russia, except that we know we'll end up with some food at the end." Then I waited in line at another stall to buy one head of cabbage (the regular kind, the ONLY kind left at the whole market) and the guy behind me says "This is like waiting in line for food in Eastern Europe."

He then went on to predict that this very well may become more and more of a trend as food is harder to find here, more expensive, and everyone needs to depend on local growers. I told him not to be so dire. At the same time I thought "I just waited in line to buy some grain and some parsnips."

What to do? What to do...? (Lots of hand wringing ensues...)

Victory Gardens are the answer. Who has room for vegetables in their yards? Hmm. Let's see...according to this article there are 40 million acres of lawn planted in the US. That's 40 million acres that could be planted in edible crops and plants. That's a whole lot of room for extra food. Do you want to see a patch of perfectly coiffed green in front of your house or would you rather eat?

Perhaps all these predictions of shortages are a bunch of hyperbole. I, for one, don't believe the world is going to end anytime in the near future. I do believe that if every single one of us supplemented our produce supply by growing some of our own, as they did in World War II, we could all be taking part in our own destiny instead of waiting for someone else to come up with some painless solution that doesn't require us to do a lick of work.

During World War II the government was entreating all Americans to plant a victory garden to help ease the burden of demand for produce, to help ourselves from starving, to can our own food so that our supply of commercially canned goods could be shipped to our troops; they requested that all Americans start a victory garden in an act of patriotism.

I think it's time they reopened that campaign.

The biggest lesson I have learned with this eat local challenge is that in my region it's not too difficult to get your hands on root vegetables but if you want a steady supply of greens in winter you must grow your own. Which is why I will be establishing a ton of kale, chard, and collards for overwintering next year. In addition to that I am going to build two cold frames so that I can grow lettuce through much of the cold season.

All I can say is that I'm glad I'm getting my garden established now. I may have to wait in line to get some grains, but I won't have to wait in line to get some fruit, vegetables, or eggs.

Midwinter Eating

(Local Eating Challenge Update)

Apples at the Hillsdale Farmer's Market. They have a "Newtown Pippin" that I tried this week and it was amazing! I rarely munch an apple for a snack but fruit is pretty limited right now and I brought one to my Master Gardening class in an effort to avoid their evil "snack" table which is a nightmare of sugar goods. The apple was huge, juicy, crisp, tart, and flavorful. I also bought a couple "Black Twig" apples to try but I admit I'm afraid of finding out that I don't like them which would be a shame since they have such a great name.

There is a surprising amount of variety to be had at this winter farmer's market. Lots of onions, potatoes, sun-chokes, salsify (I am not attracted to anything that can be described has having an "oyster" flavor), turnips, cabbage, collards (I got some because I've never had them before), leeks, chard, apples, pears, cheese, mushrooms (way too expensive for me but they look wonderful!), fresh milled polenta made from locally grown antique corn varieties, and a few winter squashes. I'm a little alarmed by how little winter squash is left. I am going to try to grow a lot more on my own this year. I also plan to bake and freeze more squash in the early season.

Some vendors came with lettuce but most of that was sold out by the time we got to the market. I got a very expensive bag of "lettuce" mix which mostly consisted of tough baby winter greens like baby kale, chard, beet greens, radicchio, and very little actual lettuce. Soon I will be planting my own.

I am waiting for only a couple more seed packets now to complete my seed collection for planting this spring. I am especially excited to grow "Lazy Housewife" pole beans. I am now trying to come up with strategies for seed saving this year. I need a good reference book for seed saving and I think "Seed To Seed" is the one I will get. I have been intimidated by seed saving for years. You have to isolate many plants whose seeds you want to save to prevent cross pollination or you have to net the plant entirely. I'm considering asking some various people with property to let me plant specimen plants for seed saving on their property if they are not also growing what I am.

I am beginning to lean more on my freezer goods. Last night we had pesto pasta with a sauteed bag of mixed frozen vegetables. Frozen vegetables will never be a favorite of mine but when it gets difficult to get my hands on broccoli and cauliflower I'm happy enough to be able to pull some from the freezer.

Speaking of the freezer though...I am still concerned by the use of so much plastic. I am beginning to experiment with glass jars but my soup didn't turn out (potato) which Lisa B. tells me isn't surprising since potatoes often don't freeze well. I would like a much larger proportion of my frozen goods to be frozen in glass rather than plastic. For things that really seem to need to be in plastic, if anyone knows of a safer (and biodegradable) vacuum seal bag product, please let me know. I'm concerned about the plastic contaminating our food. Lisa B. also mentioned the possibility of vacuum sealing jars for which there are attachments. I'm wondering if they make the vacuum seal lids for canning jars? These are things I must look into.

Mustard. I made some more mustard this week using mustard powder and I have to say that I'm not satisfied. It's too hot and I want something more similar to my standard Gulden's*. I don't like hot mustard and I don't like it to have that horse-radishy finish that Dijon usually has. It's funny because Gulden's calls itself a "spicy brown" mustard but I would call it mild and tangy. If I can't make a decent home version of Gulden's then I might be forced to re-examine my exceptions list and trade something out.

Mustard is really important when you are trying to prepare tasty foods using less fat. As boring as it is, I'm trying to cook food that isn't as fattening. Potato salad isn't too fattening if you don't use too much mayonnaise and add a lot more mustard.

The trick is finding the right mustard seeds. There are at least three different varieties commonly used in mustard making. I think a book on making mustards might be really useful at this point too since I seem to have exhausted my Internet resources for mustard making information.

Some things I will be pulling from the freezer this week: ratatouille, Brussels sprouts, green beans, hot peppers, zucchini fritters (just like latkes but with zucchini).




*I have just read that Gulden's is a ConAgra product. Even though the recipe is supposedly "140 years old", and it's nice to note that there is no crap in Gulden's mustard, I don't want to support ConAgra in any way if I can avoid it. So I really must work hard to become a great mustard maker. It isn't a difficult condiment to make, but it is certainly tricky getting the right seeds to start with.

The Local Food Challenge Report
(Day 4)

Not full enough yet. I have freezer food greed.

So the first thing Philip did on October first was buy some beer from Washington. Oops. It isn't as easy as you would think to remember to always be looking at the label of origin on the things you are buying. You say you're going to only buy local and only eat seasonal "next month" but when next month finally arrives, after tons of careful and scientific research, (obviously) you go to the store and it looks like a great big woolly universe of forbidden road-traveled treats.

I went shopping yesterday at Winco, our local bargain shopping store and had a fun time scouting out what is local and what isn't. Most of the produce personnel look prepubescent and I was worried that their information about the origin of their produce might be less than accurate so I devised a way to get the answer myself. I was the lady pulling and prodding at the tightly packed produce boxes to uncover the information which is usually printed on the box the produce comes in. In this way (with not just a couple of suspicious stares from others) I was able to find three kinds of onions from Hermiston (a local farm) and potatoes from both Hermiston and Sherwood. But best of all? I discovered, to my great surprise, that the cilantro at Winco comes from Aurora Farms. What a choice piece of luck!!

I may have already mentioned that I have about 125 lbs of dried beans in my pantry (most of them grown locally- from Azure Standard's farm) and there is nothing I love more than a black bean stew with jalapenos, diced tomatoes, tons of cilantro, and lime juice.

Sadly, I will have to do without lime. Extra sad because my friend Angeleen, a farm chick over at Lucky Seven Cat Ranch, suggested that lime juice might be a better liquid in which to freeze cilantro than oil, which is what I was thinking of doing. My mouth is watering at the thought and my mind keeps whispering "one more thing on the list of acceptable non-local foods isn't going to hurt...just one more...who will notice?" It's a slippery slope though. I have already been trying to convince myself that perhaps I should allow yams, and garlic, and why the hell not add peanut butter chips too? And coconut milk...

That's the whole point of this exercise though, isn't it? To actually go without those things and discover what I can do with local fare. Yes, my diet will change a little. Yes my cooking will have to adjust. The whole point is to remember how to do that, like people have done for hundreds of years without gasoline. No one is going to say that it's ideal to only eat salt pork all winter, or fermented fish, but there's no need to be so extreme.

So, I was buying up more fresh (local!) basil at Harvest Fresh, the best most beautiful basil I have ever seen and tasted, to make more pesto for freezing. I asked the cashier if she could find out for me what state the bulk pine nuts came from. I explained that I was taking on a local/seasonal food challenge for a year and was going to run out of pine nuts soon. She asked me what state I wanted them to be from.

That's not the kind of question you want asked...are they going to tell me what I want to hear? I told her anyway. I figure no one in Oregon produces pine nuts. She told me that no one in Oregon, to her knowledge produces pine nuts. Then she did what all people do because I'm not wearing a sign on my forehead that says "I HATE HAZELNUTS" and suggested I use hazelnuts in my pesto. As everyone around here knows, it is like state treason not to like hazelnuts. You have to like them because they are covering the Oregon tilth like a disease.

I have decided that when the dire moment comes that I run out of pine nuts I will use walnuts instead. Pesto with walnuts isn't bad. Not as good as it is with pine nuts, but these are exactly the kind of adjustments that must be made in order to slow the world's trucking miles down.

The cashier went on to let me know that it was pretty DIRE to go the whole winter eating only seasonal food. "You won't be able to eat anything fresh for months. What about vitamin C? You can't eat oranges. What will you do? You'll have to take vitamins."

Nice optimism.

This is a question deserving an answer. What will I do about vitamin C? I'm used to questions like this because my mom raised three kids as vegetarians and she thought out all the nutrition factors and fed us accordingly and so I have never really had to examine how the hell I will get enough protein. (A major concern amongst non-vegetarians.) The beauty in a diet that includes a wide variety of grains, fruits, vegetables, as well as dairy and eggs is that it's actually quite hard to develop a deficiency in protein. We ate beans, grains, tofu, cheese, and eggs which are all high in protein. In addition to this we ate bread which most Americans don't think of as having protein, but it does. So do bananas and avocados. If you eat a lot of all of these things you will never waste away.

The same is true for vitamin C. While it is certainly much easier to get a huge hit of vitamin C from eating an orange, and this is desirable for anyone who doesn't eat anything else with vitamin C in it, there is vitamin C in a lot of fruits and vegetables in smaller amounts. Potatoes have it, tomatoes have it (even after canning), and gooseberries (which grow very well here, by the way) all have significant amounts of it. But listen to this: 1 cup of cooked cauliflower has 69 mgs vitamin C, 1 cup of cooked Kale has 100 mgs of vitamin C, 1 raw sweet green pepper has 94 mgs of it, and best of all... 1 medium stalk of broccoli has 160 mgs of vitamin C.*

1 medium orange has 85 mgs of vitamin C in it.

That's all?

The recommended daily allowance of vitamin C is 75 for women, and 90 for men.

Suddenly I have a hankering to eat some fresh broccoli which I just saw, (and didn't buy), at the farmer's market. I'm also kind of thinking I better start thinking of putting some up in the freezer. So now I understand why every one's always pushing broccoli around as this uber-healthy vegetable. Turns out it kind of kicks dark leafy greens in the butt.

Has all this talk made you realize what a serious and scientific experiment I am conducting on myself? I think you should be very impressed by now.

To tell you the truth, I had no doubts that I would be able to get the nutrition needed through the fall and winter, even with my SUPER STRICT** challenge. My mom knew all this stuff when I was growing up and she took it seriously enough to teach me how to eat well. It's just too bad I learned to love cheese so much, but that's not her fault. I don't have exact nutritional values constantly floating through my head. So if you suddenly said:

"Quick! Angelina-tell me how much vitamin A is in a cup of butternut squash?!"

I would look at you with that distantly pleasant stare that a moose has while chewing cud. And I'd probably say:

"Uh, dunno. Maybe 1,000 IUs?"***

I would be wrong by 12,000.

But the point is that I only need to take in about 700 IUs of vitamin A a day. My mama already taught me that eating a helping of winter squash with butter is really good for me. When you grow up knowing this stuff you don't know the precise numbers, but you can look at what you've been eating lately and have a pretty good idea if you are going to get scurvy or not.

And seriously, everyone should be concerned about landing themselves in scurvyville.

So the verdict for today is that eating locally and seasonally, even if that means consuming lots of home canned and frozen goods****, is not automatically going to make you wither up like a dried apple, which is literally every one's worst nightmare, is it not?






*All of this nutritional information has been taken from Laurel's Kitchen (the 1978 copyright), the hippie cookbook that helped people understand how to be healthy vegetarians. They got all of their information through Standford and Berkeley. I have never once made one of their recipes but their nutrition charts for all basic fruits, vegetables, grains, and dairy have been thoroughly thumbed by me over the course of the last ten years. It is an invaluable guide.

**That is not laughter you hear in the background.

***Vitamin A is measured in IUs which I am too lazy to look up and explain. You should consume 700 if you're female and 900 if you're male. Check the USDA charts for yourself. These charts are more current than the Laurel's Kitchen RDA charts are. The USDA has since decided we need more vitamins and minerals in our diets.

****The USDA says that home canning and freezing is likely to retain more nutrients than commercially canned goods because the produce is usually put up when at it's peak and eaten sooner than commercially canned goods usually are. There really is a difference.

Baby Lettuce: Cuter Than Kittens?

My lettuce patch has become choked with growth. I scattered the seeds and raked them in. I thought that would evenly distribute them and I couldn't have been more wrong. Those seeds stuck together like immigrants on a ship to a brand new mean life. The idea is to thin them for an early summer baby lettuce salad. Although I spent a good half hour carefully rearranging the density issues in my lettuce patch, it doesn't look any different than before.

Yet I removed enough for two big salads. Tender, sweet, delicate, fresh greens. That just makes me salivate. My mom has pointed out that now is the time to scatter seeds in the bare spots of my patch to stagger the harvest. Good point. That's the kind of thing I never get organized enough to do.

I can't leave the potato bed alone. My deep wisdomous inner voice says to let them all get bigger because the more you mess with the plants the greater the chance I will interrupt their growth by damaging them. One of the services my garden provides is something to pick at and on that isn't myself. That may sound strange, but I tend to pick at things: my skin, labels on bottles and jars, loose threads, the hems of my shirts, my blog.

In the garden I can channel this nervous need to worry at things by providing endless weeds to rip out or hack down, snails to find and feed to the hens, fussy staking jobs, an opportunity to check on it's progress every hour of the day without feeling like a total crazy person because things like lettuce tend to grow so much you really can see the progress. And of course: the chance to dig around for tasty tubers.

So here we have the basis for a wonderful Sunday night dinner. We used beets and tomatoes from the farmer's market too. Here's what we had for dinner:

• Baby lettuce salad with feta cheese, pine nuts, avocado, and the first cherry tomatoes of the farmer's market season.

• Cooked beet greens with sauteed shallots and butter.

• Roasted root vegetables including: beets, potatoes, onions, whole garlic cloves, and yams.

It was so good, and as usual, reaffirms my dedication to eating fresh food. Not everything was in season and that's something I keep trying to work on but sometimes I just can't resist what I find at the grocery store. One thing that will never be in season here in the Pacific North West is avocados. I could eat two of the good kind every single day. I love them that much. Not only would I never get tired of them, I am sometimes willing to pay in gold ingots to have them.

I have avoided eating beet greens for years because I have suspected that they would be tougher than chard. Although I love swiss chard, I don't enjoy a mouthful of iron-ladened greens that have a tough finish. The cheery fresh faced people at Oakhill Organic Farm back my mom up on the assertion that beet greens are delectable and I am a fool to avoid them when they are more tender than chard and sweet, and everything good....seriously, they waxed poetic just as much as my mom does who's been trying to convince me to eat them FOREVER.

Apparently, there's a good reason for their rhapsodies. Beet greens are so tender, so sweet, so fine...they almost melt in your mouth. Damn! I have been missing out on a really good thing all because I'm afraid of a mouthful of bitter tough greens. Even though I rarely eat green things for breakfast, I could really go for a plate of beet greens right now.

So, have any of you ever gotten a butt burn?

Yes...yes I did say BUTT BURN.

Remember way back when I was mentioning how I had possibly shown off my butt-crack to all my neighbors? You don't? (How lucky for you). Well, I was out in my garden for an hour yesterday removing weeds, thinning those greens, and getting my hands covered in dirt and trying to see if I could go fifteen seconds without a thought. It wasn't particularly sunny so I didn't think about putting sun screen on.

Besides, who puts sunscreen on their BUTT CRACK?

The answer: PEOPLE WHO GET BUTT BURNS IS WHO!

And that includes me, apparently. Because right above my ass is a swath of lobster red painfully burnt skin where my pants pulled down and my shirt inched up. Shit, as if I don't have enough to be embarrassed about already. How did I find out about this burn?

BECAUSE I HAD TO SCRATCH MY BUTT LIKE A MAN AND FELT A SEARING PAIN WHEN I DID.

I SCRATCHED MY ASS LIKE A MAN.

I'm going to leave you with that dainty image. No need to thank me for making your day.


Peace Apron Update: As soon as I find out where to send the check, I'll be mailing out my first check to Moveon.org! It's only for $24.00 so far, but every bit counts and I want to thank all of you who have bought Peace Aprons and have made it possible for my poor sun-burnt ass to donate some money towards the peace efforts!

Righteous Affection Or Sicko Love?

(plus an excellent spring soup recipe)

No one talks about it much. Not even on "foodie"* blogs; the fact that some of us could look at a bunch of radishes all day long. Or the fact that some of us wish we were planning a wedding so we could insist that the bride carry a radish bouquet. Or the fact that our picture files are filled with produce tableaux and it isn't even our own produce all the time, which would be completely warranted from the pride angle. So is this love of produce an innocuous small joy in life or a deep seated disturbance of the psychie that could prove to be dangerous?

I don't even like radishes. I thought about growing them because they're so pretty. See what I mean? Isn't that just a little bit off? There is one soup I love to make that calls for a bunch of radishes and their greens. This was my excuse to buy this gorgeous bridal bunch of radishes that stole my heart at the farmer's market.

The farmer's market opened here in McMinnville for the first time this season yesterday. Have I mentioned how much I love to shop at farmer's markets? I really don't understand anyone who prefers the grocery store. Maybe it reaches out to my hippie roots and tugs the ol heartstrings, but I think that's not it because I'm pretty sure I don't have any of those. I love the open air of it (although I could do without the skin boiling sun) and the festive feeling it brings to a town. I love meeting the people who grow the food I photograph and look at for hours on end, even when they are surly farmer women who look like they might implode at any moment. (I will not disclose who the surly woman was, but I am not kidding, I was scared.)

There is a woman at our farmer's market named Kate Parker who has a business called Katula Herbs LLC who sells quite a few medicinal herbs. My mom bought some great additions to our medicinal herb garden: arnica, angelica, and valerian. She also bought some French sorrel and lovage. Kate says that she sells so little of the medicinal herbs that she is beginning to phase them out. PHASE THEM OUT? See, this is why all of us (that means you too) need to start growing medicinals. What if they become so scarce that the average person can't even find them anymore? And what if the average person finds they need them because processed medicine becomes too expensive?

One must remember to get off the soap box every once in a while. I am growing them. I will keep them seeding and rooting and thriving and some day when everyone is scrambling to get themselves a little arnica I will feather my nest with the hundred dollar bills I will charge everyone for each little plant as a mean punishment for having let them all become so scarce.

Seriously though, it scares me that it is becoming harder and harder to find medicinal herbs. From an environmental stand point they are important to the bugs that are important to us and are therefore quite important to us. I don't blame Kate though, she has a business to run and if no one is buying the medicinals, there's no point in wasting space in her booth.

But back to the radishes. These came from a farm that is actually two farms: Figment Farm and Summer Harvest. These are two ladies who have joined forces because singly they didn't have as much to offer but together their farm is nearly an acre. Last year I didn't buy anything from them because their produce is quite expensive but yesterday I fell in love with those radishes and I love them so much that I can't remember what I paid for them but it really wasn't much and they are the single most beautiful radishes I have ever seen. Plus the ladies who run the two farms are really charming (and annoyingly fit and lovely too) and I had such a pleasant time buying their lettuce for $1.75 a head which is actually cheaper than lettuce has been in the stores. It also looked infinitely nicer.

I also stopped by Oakhill Organics and bought more lettuce. I've been craving greens and have been so disappointed by the expensive, tough, bitter greens I've been finding at the health food and giant conglomerate stores. Oakhill has the most tender looking lettuce mix I have ever seen. I plan to try it out with lentil salad today.

Now I would like to share the recipe I use for a French spring garden soup in which radishes are used to great purpose:

My version of Garden Potage

1 head any tender lettuce
2 carrots
1 bunch radishes with leaves intact
4 or 5 new potatoes, unpeeled
1 bunch green onions including tender portions of green tops
1 Tbsp butter
1 Tbsp olive oil
2 cups water, or vegetable broth
1/4 cup parsley
1 tsp salt, or to taste
freshly ground pepper to taste

Coarsely chop all the vegetables. In a soup pot, over medium heat, melt the butter and add the olive oil and when the butter begins to foam, add the vegetables. (I'm pretty sure the earth will not open if you add the vegetables before the butter foams, in case you're worried.) Cook the vegetables with the lid on for a few minutes (no more than five, and be sure to stir them occasionally to prevent sticking). Then lower the heat and continue to cook for another five minutes.

When the vegetables have softened and the greens wilted, add the water or broth, parsley, and the salt. Cover and continue to cook over low heat for fifteen minutes. (To be honest, I think I actually usually cook it on a medium heat.) Make sure you continue to stir the soup.

Puree the crap out of it.** This is a smooth light soup. The original recipe suggests that you can add rice or pasta to it prior to pureeing it. I have never done so because I like that this soup feels so clean and besides, it already has the potatoes for starch. But whatever, add rice or pasta if you want.

*I dislike this word. Please don't ever describe me as foodie or as a drinkie.

**Use whatever appliance you prefer for the job, just don't hurt yourself. I prefer using my immersion blender which my friend Chelsea had to beg me to buy for two years before I listened to her. If you don't have one yet do I need to come over to your house and beat you over the head?