Feasting from my garden

There’s something so satisfying about cooking dinner with food from my garden.

Dinner tonight - currently bubbling away on the stove — features tilapia (from who knows where) cooked in a tomato and pepper sauce. The tomatoes, red pepper and herbs all come from the garden. The green pepper comes from our CSA (I love getting organic peppers in my bag each week!) and the garlic is from Seven Bridges Farm from the South Wedge Farmer’s Market. The only other seasonings are salt and pepper — I brought back the salt from a trip to France and the pepper is freshly ground from organic black peppercorns.

It will be accompanied by brown rice and broccoli (conventional, both - but at least broccoli is now on the “12 Foods You Don’t Have to Buy Organic” list.)

I’d better get back to dinner, but I snapped a couple of pics with my camera phone.

Here’s dessert - home made peach pie. The pastry is an oil pastry recipe and the peaches, while conventionally grown are at least from a local farmer, bought on Saturday morning at Gro-Moore Farms in Henrietta.

What do I do with the worms in my compost?

I love my compost bins, tucked away behind the garage. It’s so quiet and private back there (a big thing in a city backyard) and smells of leaves and rain and the forest.

I finally got around to screening my compost. Oh, what beautiful stuff. It’s not such good work for my back, but good for the rest of me (thigh muscles, spirit, etc.).

This was the best batch of compost I’ve made yet. Full of worm castings, hummus and rich black stuff. And worms. I’ve never seen so many worms (except maybe on RIT’s sidewalks after a heavy rain).

What am I supposed to do with the worms in the compost? Put them back into the pile? Put them in the garden? Eat them for dinner?

I tried hard to sift the compost lightly, to reduce the likelihood of grinding any worms on the hardware cloth. I probably cut a few in half as they desperately tried to wriggle through the holes into the lovely black screened compost beneath. Most of my worms went into the screened compost and then into the garden. I figure the garden can always use them. And, since I didn’t put any worms in the bin to begin with, they migrated from somewhere on their own and more worms will find the bin again for the next batch.

In order to answer my question — so I know what to do next time — I turned, as always to the Internet. Not, say, the Cornell Cooperative Extension, a reliable source of knowledgeable information. Why do that when you have Google at your fingertips?

What I found? Not much.

In worm composting (where you have a couple of pounds of worms in a bin!), you put the worms back in the bin. Gives me the heebies just thinking about it. I can touch worms, with gloves on. But I don’t want 2 lbs of the them in a container, thanks.

According to compostinfo.com:

Screening Compost

Your composting system may not break down all the larger materials, such as corncobs or wood chips, in the first batch of compost that you make. When you screen your compost, any material larger than your screen size can be removed. These materials are called “overs” which can go back into the compost system the next time that you build a pile. The overs provide bulk for aeration and microbes attached to these pieces will help jumpstart the new composting process.

Yes, nothing about worms.

The Pennsylvania Department of Environmental Protection has directions on how to build a free-standing compost screen, but, again, no worm info.

Surely I can’t be the only person with this question? I guess I’ll have to ask the Co-operative Extension folks at the South Wedge Farmer’s Market this week after all.

Putting a number on the earth

We (finally) hear and talk a lot about global warming and carbon footprints. But it all seems very vague and nebulous. I know my impact on the earth is larger than I’d like it to be. I know, as a society, we’re living way out of balance. But what exactly do we need to do to get back into balance?

350.org puts it into perspective:

The most recent science tells us that unless we can reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere to 350 parts per million, we will cause huge and irreversible damage to the earth.

There are three numbers you need to really understand global warming, none of them very complicated. For all of human history until about 200 years ago, our atmosphere contained 275 parts per million of carbon dioxide (that’s the first number).

Beginning in the 18th century, we started to burn coal and gas and oil to produce energy and goods. … By now—and this is the second number—the planet has 387 parts per million CO2 – and this number is rising by about 2 parts per million every year.

In the past year, some of the world’s leading climate scientists have told us what the highest safe level of CO2 is: 350 parts per million. That’s the last number you need to know, and the most important. It’s the safety zone for planet earth.

Wow. Seems like we have some work to do.

How to peel a hard boiled egg - use your hands

My mum sent me a link to the “Four Hour Work Week” guy peeling a hard boiled egg by blowing through a hole in the top. It sounded very interesting.

I buy free range organic eggs, usually directly from the farmers (rather than the supermarket). Their yolks are so rich they’re almost orange, they taste delicious and they’re very fresh. Being very fresh makes them hard to peel. So any technique that will help me retain the most egg — instead of the outer layer of white staying stuck to the shell — sounds good to me.

Of course, I had to immediately try this out. We had 4 eggs left in the fridge, so egg salad sandwiches for lunch it was.

I put the eggs in cold water and set it to boil. I then promptly went back to whatever work I was doing and forgot about them until the sitter reminded me. Not to worry. I turned them off, put them into cold water and added some baking soda.

A few minutes later, we all gathered around as I attempted to make little holes in either end and blow the egg out of it’s shell.

No go.

I assure you that I blew well and hard. I created suction around the top of the egg (and got little bits of shell in my mouth. Yum). The egg did separate a little from the shell. But they didn’t pop out like in the video.

Oh well. They were much easier to peel the regular way, though (with your fingers). It’s the baking soda that does that trick — and a tip I will remember for every subsequent hard boiled egg I make. So I learned something useful after all.

Keeping birthdays naturally colored

I had so much fun at Duncan’s birthday party that - as exhausted as I was - I had a hard time falling asleep last night. This morning, even though Kevin has Berry downstairs and Duncan is still sleeping, I can’t get back to sleep for thinking about it.

All considered, everything went well. It rained practically all day, then stopped for 1hour and 55 minutes of the party. Pouring recommenced at 5:55 p.m. But it worked out OK as almost all the kiddos left, a few people and family stayed and we opened presents. Opening presents took an entire hour. Were there a lot of presents? Yes. Was he totally focused on thoroughly playing with the present he’d just opened, showing no interest in opening the next one? Totally. Bless him.

So Duncan is now 3 years old. Both he and Berry have a love of the Little Einsteins TV show, so we decided to use that a theme this year. In prior years (both of them) we went for a small, family party with “birthday” as the theme. But, as Kevin says, “you’re only 3 once.”

To go with the Little Einsteins table cover, plates, napkins, party hats and balloons I decided to make a Rocket cake. There were several obstables to that.

1. Um…a cake that’s not just round? That defies my cake making abilities.

2. How do I get red and blue icing without using Red No. 40? Artificial food coloring is banned in this house (along with MSG, artificial sweetners, high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated oil *).

So Kevin and I (mostly Kevin) set about experimenting with natural food colors. For Berry’s birthday, I found a bottle of natural food coloring at a local health food store.

Seelect 100% Natural Food Coloring, Red/Strawberry, 2-Ounce Bottle (Pack of 4)

But it didn’t turn the icing strawberry red. It make it…well…kinda purple-y red. The cake was good, anyway.

For Rocket, I wanted RED red.

First Kevin tried boiling down some rhubarb from our garden. Then he added lemon juice to…um…change it from a base to an acid or something. There was an actual scientific principle at play.

(Must pause here, Duncan has woken up.)

Rhubarb made a pink color. Rhubarb + lemon juice made an orange-y pink color. Crushed cherries made a nice dark red shade — but cherry red (duh!), not Rocket red.

Next I tried melting and reducing a strawberry fruit pop. According to the ingredients, those are colored with the strawberries themselves, beet color and turmeric. I guess the yellow of the turmeric is supposed to turn the purpleness of the beet color into red. In any case, boiled down a bit it turned into a murky brownish orange. Not something I want to frost a cake with.

Finally, I decided to simply puree some strawberries. Mmmm…a nice red at last. Unfortunately, when mixed into dairy-free buttercream icing (earth balance margarine instead of butter), it turned a lovely shade of pink. Since it had a bit of an orange tinge, I added our red-purple natural food dye. It darkened it up a bit, but remained quite pink. The icing was also a bit soft.

The blue (for the windows and belly) was fairly easy to figure out. Crushed blueberries. I can’t remember if Kevin cooked them a bit first. Then he added baking power (or soda) — again to do something chemtastically scientific with the adic/base composition. It made a nice light blue/grey.

To actually make the Rocket cake, I found these instructions online (they’re down at the bottom of the page). I went one step further and made a bottom for Rocket as well. Since I wasn’t about to buy Twinkies, I used some extra cake for the engines.

And here it is - the edible, melting, pink finished product. Not as good as the creations on Andrea’s Recipes (her husband made it, no less), but did I mention that it was edible?

* Disclaimer: there are some MSG-containing soups in our pantry, but I will not be buying any more after a recent declaration (I believe I proclaimed: MSG is evil! at the dining room table). Kevin still drinks soda. Ugh. And, occassionally, we eat foods with hydrogentated oil, but as little as possible.

Garden news

I’ve been woefully ignoring my blog again. Must be too busy picking weeds out of the garden.

OK, so I’m not yet a master composter. I was a bit desperate for soil to fill in a new bed, so I used compost that hadn’t been properly heated, and was full of maple tree seeds, and so ended up with about a million weeds to pull out of a 9 square foot space.

In other garden news, my garden is lush, green and delicious. After making 5 rhubarb cakes — and still givin some rhubarb away — I’ve moved on to sampling lettuce, spinach and herbs. The spinach is so good I like to pick a leaf and eat it right off the plant. I’ve got to keep my energy up for all the weeding, after all.

My pole beans didn’t come up well — too much cold, wet weather right after I planted them. So I replanted and only half came up. So I’ll replant the other half. Again. The straw potatoes are growing like crazy. I’m not sure I’ll be able to build an enclosure high enough for them to keep adding straw to! Pictures would help to illustrate what I mean.

I don’t think we’ll be getting much from the strawberry plants this year. I’ve picked a dozen juicy, sweet berries, and I see a few more forming, but it doesn’t look like much. Shame. They’re lovely.

I feel like I should have some great recipes for what to do with my bounty. The spinach I’ve mostly been making into salads (with the lettuce), although I did sneak a few leaves into grilled cheese sandwiches one lunch time. Yum. I have secret plans for all the herbs, but mostly I chop them up into sauces and salad dressings. Not very thrilling to read about, but very good to eat.

And that’s about it for garden news for now.

Rhubarb Cake

At the bottom of our garden in my childhood home in England, we had a large rhubarb plant. Every now and again, my step-mum used to send me down to pick a few stalks, which she’d usually make into rhubarb and apple crumble. I loved its tangy sharpness.

As soon as I had a garden of my own, I got a rhubarb plant. The first year, I didn’t harvest it. The second year, I picked a few stalks. And every year after that, it just grew huge and I felt overwhelmed by the amount of rhubarb it produced and didn’t know what to do with it all.

Last spring, I offered some to our new neighbors, who were delighted. They made rhubarb cake. And gave me the recipe.

Perhaps I was already overwhelmed with rhubarbness (or a new baby) last year, but I didn’t make any rhubarb cake. This year I have. Twice. Plus I gave the recipe to our babysitter.

I think the recipe comes from a Moosewood cookbook. It’s called Erma Mabel’s Rhubarb Cake. My version is dairy-free (for Kevin):

1/2 cup earth balance margarine

1 cup sugar (you can use a little less than 1 cup)

3 large eggs

1 1/2 cups organic white flour

3 tsp baking powder

1/4 tsp salt

1/2 cup organic soy milk

1 tsp vanilla extract

2 1/2 to 3 cups rhubarb chopped into 1-inch pieces (4-6 stalks, depending on their size)

Preheat oven to 350F. Spray the baking dish with spray oil. (I use an oval baking dish, but something about 7×11 is the right size).

Cream the butter and sugar until light and fluffy. Add eggs one at a time, beating well after adding each one. Sift in the flour, baking powder and salt, alternating with the milk and vanilla.

Spread a little more than 1/2 the batter in the baking dish, Sprinkle on the rhubarb. Add the rest of the batter, spreading evenly. Bake for 35 to 40 minutes until a knife inserted into the center comes out clean. Eat! Eat! Eat!

This is one yummy cake — even dairy-free. It comes out golden brown on top. The cake itself is sweet, and the rhubarb is perfectly soft and tangy.

The compost update

It’s been cold and rainy here lately, so I haven’t been spending much time out in the garden. I haven’t even had a chance to go outside and take a picture of my new compost bin that Kevin (finally) built for me. Not only do I now have one compost bin — I have two!

We had a dismal yard sale last Saturday (which also cut into my gardening time). We made all of $20. But we got rid of a bunch of stuff (most of it at Goodwill on Sunday morning). And we gave away some slate tiles we had on the turtle tank to a guy who stopped by. As he was picking them up, Kevin was working on the compost bin. And he offered us one.

It’s one of those big round black plastic jobbies. I can’t remember the name right now. But it makes me so happy to see it next to my homemade one (2×4s and hardware cloth) behind the garage. I love it back there. I can’t explain why the smell of old leaves and decomposing vegetable matter makes me so happy and peaceful. But it does. Maybe because it’s the only private, quite, kid-free space in my little universe at the moment.

I also have a compost sifter to show off. It was my Mother’s Day present — the Compost Sifter 6000 is what Kevin calls it. I do have a picture of that. Somewhere. (I’m blogging from Kevin’s computer at the moment, I wonder if it’s on here?)

Here we go:

It is an awesome compost screen. I’ve been missing having one since I left mine in North Carolina (in 1999).

So now I’m set up with 2 compost bins (one to turn, one to add to), with the possibility of 3 bins in the future (the one Kevin made is expandable) an a compost screen. Lovely.

The garden looks like it’s doing well. The spinach and beets are growing. Everything I planted from transplants (from the nursery) look good, even through the cool weather lately. Somehow it’s more satisfying to see plants grow that I started from seed myself. Which has inspired me to take my Square Foot Gardening book and figure out the planting dates for everything I want to grow this fall and next spring based on the first and last frost dates.

Am I a gardening geek yet? I love this stuff. It makes me happy. And with 2 little kids and not a whole lot of time to myself, I need something to absorb myself in.

Growing herbs and supporting community

My herb garden is growing.

The blog article I posted a link to the other day reminded me that I do like growing herbs. They’re very satisfying - easy to grow and offering an almost immediate harvest.

So far, we’ve eaten asparagus and rhubarb from our garden this year. Maybe I should make a side bar widget with what we’ve harvested. I expected to get more asparagus than I got, but what I got was good. Even Duncan ate some. And knowing that I grew it and that it was full of fresh organic goodness made me smile inside.

I’ve had chives, thyme and oregano growing in the herb garden for a while. The oregano always does great, even though it’s swamped by the rhubarb plant. I need to figure out if I can separate the rhubarb and, if so, when. The thing is monstrous and it gets bigger every year.

The thyme…I think I’ve replaced it a couple of times. The winter seems to do it in and I’m not sure if it’ll come back this year. I saw a pot of it at Wegmans yesterday and got one for my windowsill herb garden. I find I don’t actually go out into the yard when I’m cooking to cut fresh herbs. So I decided to grow basil, thyme and garlic chives in a pot on the front porch. I can bring it inside in the winter, too.

Cooking dinner is hard enough sometimes, with a one-year-old clinging to my legs and fussing for me to pick her up. Getting outside in the yard to snip herbs becomes almost impossible. Because then the almost-three-year-old will want to come out too. Which means putting on shoes, bring various favorite items and never wanting to come back inside again. One day I’ll be able to send him out by himself with a pair of kitchen scissors.

I also got some purple sage at Wegmans and put that out in the outside herb garden.

The latest addition to the herb bed came from the South Wedge Farmer’s Market today. Plain leaf Italian parsley. I don’t usually cook with parsley, but I have a secret plan for it and the sage. I can’t reveal what it is yet, though.

I love the farmer’s market — especially when it’s about organic, local, sustainable food. I know the “About Me” section of this blog says I’m getting “greener one environmentally safe product at a time,” but I’m really more about the food than the products. I need to change that. Knowing where my food is coming from — and what’s in it and not in it — is very important. Plus, sustaining the local economy is just a common sense good idea.

After a long day at work, getting outside and hanging out with the kiddos (Berry LOVED the music and made the whole stroller dance with her) was refreshing.

Grow it anyway

You know that poem, Anyway, usually attributed to Mother Theresa?

People are often unreasonable, illogical and self centered;
Forgive them anyway.

If you are kind, people may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives;
Be kind anyway.

If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies;
Succeed anyway.

If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you;
Be honest and frank anyway.

What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight;
Build anyway.

If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous;
Be happy anyway.

The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow;
Do good anyway.

Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough;
Give the world the best you’ve got anyway.

You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and your God;
It was never between you and them anyway.

[Reportedly inscribed on the wall of Mother Teresa's children's home in Calcutta, and attributed to her. However, an article in the New York Times has since reported (March 8, 2002) that the original version of this poem was written by Kent M. Keith.]That poem makes me think of my garden. (I’ve only had 2 cups of tea today, it may take a while to get to my point. Bear with me.)

We’ve lived in this house for 5 years. We’ve been wanting to move to somewhere larger for probably the last 3. Until recently, we had plans to move to Oregon before the end of the year — but that’s now on hold indefinitely. Duncan will be going to a really good school in the fall, somewhere we can envision him staying until he graduates high school (with Berry following in a couple of years). Kevin is still in school. We’re staying put for the time being.

My point with all of that is that it’s hard to think about long term plans for your current location and invest lots of time and energy into it when you think you may not be there for the next growing season. I think I have an issue with the emotional commitment and my visions not being fulfilled.

Anyway. That’s where the poem comes in. I need to do it anyway.

Gardening organically, doing what I can to live a little more lightly on the earth, teaching my children to respect and appreciate the wonder of the natural world…those are things I’m passionate about. They’re part of who I am in my core as a person. I knew that when I lived on a mountain in North Carolina, off-grid and with no running water. I embraced it then. (I also wanted to move and live in a house, instead of an Airstream.)

I think the difficulties we went through during that time — probably mostly due to the extreme poverty we experienced — made me run into the arms of commerce and hot running water. At least for a while. You can never get away from who you really are, though. And I’m a composting, veggie-growing, recycling, organic-food-eating girl at heart. I need to feel my connection with the earth to be grounded and happy.

I’d really love to live in a bigger house with more land around us. We could have a greenhouse and extend our growing season. We could get into greywater systems. Build an earthship. I still have all the dreams I ever did — back when being green wasn’t cool or popular.

But I can do a lot with what we have right now. Make compost. Grow food in our little garden. Catch rain water from the garage roof. Teach my children to tend the earth. Go for walks in the woods.

If we move next year, we move and start again somewhere else. If we don’t, I’ll have more asparagus to eat.

I started this post with the intention of linking to a blog I just discovered and a good post about getting into gardening. So here that is.