Eggplant, Death, and Taxes

I have a plethora of pretty eggplant pictures to share but my six year old broke my computer so I'm writing from our laptop which I haven't been able to upload pictures to.

Yesterday I did a lot. I worked from morning until night while letting Max ruin my computer playing some car racing game. I made ratatouille. I grilled eggplant rounds. I baked eggplant. I took pictures of the baked eggplant I gutted and stuffed with the most wonderful lemon thyme stuffing that I made up on the spur of the moment. Then I ate eggplant. I burned my tongue on eggplant. If I was a cartoon I would have eggplant reflections in my eyes instead of pupils.

I want more eggplant. But first I need to finally procure the freezer I've decided to buy. I found it at Lowe's for a good price. A 14.1 cubic foot upright manual defrost unit made by Fridgidaire. I plan to fill it with eggplant so that when I am longing for an eggplant sandwich in the middle of winter when the icy rain is coming down, I can defrost myself some sunshine. I want to also fill the freezer with tomatoes.

I find it fascinating that my favorite vegetables are all related to bella donna. Potatoes, tomatoes, and eggplant all belong to the same family. All of them have either been believed to be poisonous at one time or another, or actually have poisonous components (as in: potato leaves). I hear about all these diet restrictions that people impose on themselves through a nutritionist's advice, or through blood-type diets and tomatoes are frequently cited as a problem food.

So could a person like myself be suffering because of eating too many tomatoes, but not realize the life of blooming health I could be experiencing, if only I would give up tomatoes? I wonder, because in my experience, when one is allergic to a food, even in a mild way, one can't help but notice that they don't feel good after eating said food. If tomatoes are bad for me, I think I wouldn't feel so damn good after eating them. They don't just taste good to me, they feel good in every way.

I don't eat bell peppers because they repeat on me. They've been repeating on me since I was a small child. I would watch my mother prepare stuffed green peppers with dread because I never felt good after eating them. I didn't get sick, I would just burp them up for twelve hours afterwards. It wasn't until I was an adult, cooking for myself, that I realized I didn't have to eat them anymore, and that if my body consistently burped them up no matter how they were prepared or whether they were red or green or yellow, I probably was mildly allergic to them or incapable of digesting them well. Both good reasons not to eat them. Since eradicating them from my diet, I have been much happier and felt much better.

You'd be amazed at how many dishes bell peppers end up in. You could macerate them and hide them and I will always know if they've been in the food I'm eating. It's like meat, you could make a dish that gave no hint of meat, cleverly disguising it, but I will know within an hour that I have eaten flesh or eaten something that's been cooked with flesh. Why? My stomach doesn't digest it. I burp up meat flavor. Seriously. Can you think of anything more revolting? I know, I can too. But still, burping flavors I don't like in the first place is one of those experiences in life that I can just do without.

You know what freaks me out? To eat black bean soup and an hour later suddenly burp up pig flavor. That happened to me once. Do you know how freaky it is to never eat meat, not even as a kid, and suddenly have meat burps? When that happened to me I dug the soup can out of the trash can at work where I had eaten it and read the ingredients. Sure enough, the beans had been cooked with ham hocks or some such piggy parts.

Potatoes are one of those foods I can eat endlessly. Every single day. Almost any way. Except with bell peppers or meat, obviously. I love potato lore, it's history, it's plenitude. I love it's earthiness. I love how well it goes with everything. I don't actually eat potatoes as often as I would like. Especially since vowing never to buy conventionally grown ones ever again.* So I have my twenty pounds of garden potatoes that I've been slowly working on from the pantry since early summer, and the supply is getting low.

Today I'm reluctantly setting aside my obsession with storing nuts in my cheeks for the winter and I'm going to work in my studio. Finish up a few projects. (To pay for the freezer, actually). But my mind is going to be drifting through recipe books, the farm fields where tomatoes and eggplants continue to ripen just for me. I'm sending them messages that I will come for them, like a mother-ship to her alien babies.**

My own garden is finished for the year. I just picked the last bowl of produce last night. If I had had my act together, I would have planted a winter garden and it would be gearing up. But I didn't. That's alright. There's always next year. Unless death or taxes get to me first.




*You won't either if you read Michael Pollan's book "The Botany Of Desire".
**What the??!!!!!!

The Earliest Birds Aren't Birds At All

When Philip was hacking down our field of carefully cultivated six foot weeds in preparation for mowing, he stumbled over one of our volunteer potato plants that cropped up in last years spot. He pulled it up and found those cute little red babies. The very first potatoes of spring. You can't show me potatoes you've just dug up and not expect me to go and toy with my potato bed to see what I can find. I have to have fun too. Have I mentioned how much fun it is to grow potatoes before? It's like digging for buried treasure.

I grow potatoes for the "new potato" size. Still, I have to admit that these are still too small. Must wait. I may have to tie my own hands behind my back to keep them out of the dirt for another month. My mulch is working well to protect them. Unfortunately I noticed some slug action in the wet straw. If anything can make me feel giddy like a kid waiting for Christmas morning, it's a bed of growing potatoes.

You won't be surprised to know that I can fill an entire hour talking exclusively about potatoes.

Don't worry, I'm not going to. I'm about to change the subject.

So here's a revolutionary idea: what if I don't develop a signature color story? What if I just pick the colors that inspire me most right now and just when people start associating me with those colors- I throw everyone for a loop? I don't have to have a signature anything, as a matter of fact. I've been thinking a lot about how many crafters are trying to develop their own look and proprietary patterns in order to stand out from the crowd. It's called branding (for anyone who didn't know that) and it's important. But I sometimes feel that there's so much "owning" of our own art and crafts that something gets robbed.

What I like about design is that most designers are snatching ideas from the same pool or resources and inspirations. What you then get to see is how each individual interprets the same stimulation. That's what makes them special.

No crafter can own flower pins, felted dolls, stuffies, or aprons. We can own the patterns we've personally made for our version, but anyone has a right to take your idea and reinterpret it. They do. They can't copy it, but they can change it a little and it becomes their own thing.

I understand the importance of branding. So many of us need to make a living off of our designs and if everyone is stealing them from under our noses and making a living for themselves it sets us back, which is why we have so much copy righting going on. We need some protection.

But what I love best is the free flow of ideas without paranoia. Which is why it's weird for me to be working on a project that I can't share right now. I put the potatoes up today because I can't show you what I was working on all day yesterday. This sucks because I have finally come up with a recycling project that would surely impress most of you. (Listen to that ego my friends. Healthy as hell and maybe just a touch puffed up today?) Don't worry though, I'll be able to share it later on. I wouldn't be able to even work on this project right now if I wasn't closing my store this month. So I'm going to say that PKM is totally right when she quotes that great old saying: when one door closes, another one opens.

This week-end Lisa E, my mom, and I all went to a craft fair in Portland put on by the new craft store site called Lov.li and I mean to report on it with pictures but my pictures come courtesy of Lisa's camera and I happen to have that at my house. So until I get her her camera back the pictures will be locked away. I'll bet she's wondering why we're such deadbeat friends right now. The craft fair was a lot of fun and we found out that there are two more going on in Portland next week-end. So we're plotting another day out.

We did feel a little old and under-tattooed though.