Friday, June 29, 2007

Blind dates

One of the side effects of our peripatetic lifestyle last week was needing to shop in unfamiliar stores. Initially, I was feeling guilty about shopping somewhere other than the coop, like I was cheating or something. It’s been a long time since I’ve been in the mainstream supermarket scene.

My first dalliance was on the way home on the last day of school. I just didn’t have time (or so I thought) to get all the way out to the co-op and back and still have time to get my cooking done. Into QFC, the local Kroger brand, I head. I find the “natural” section, flanked by fake hardwood floors and pretty borders of silk greenery, and locate some organic sugar. I then head for the produce department for celery for shrimp étouffé. I am taken aback that produce is not labeled by its provenance. Yes, the shelf tag tells me things like what it is, how much it costs, and even some nutritional information (did you know celery was high in fiber? If you didn’t, you haven’t been paying attention), but nowhere can I find anything about where it was grown. There’s no breaking the bundle apart either, so I take a huge bunch of generic celery home with me, and I’m not still sure if I should encourage or discourage the kids from eating it.

On the way to Portland the first time, we make a bathroom and lunch break in the parking lot of a Fred Meyer somewhere south of Olympia. I grab sushi for the boys and bread for Darling Husband, and then look around for something for me. A big tub of organic greens sounds good, I just need some dressing. And here I discover that my co-op has been holding out on me: Freddy’s, another Kroger puppet, has five milk-free salad dressings made by Nasoya that I’ve never seen before. With a stinging sense of betrayal, I grab a bottle of Garden Herb. It is delicious, and I am overjoyed that I don’t have to eat allergens to have a creamy dressing.

In Redding, I don’t expect to find anything I can’t get at home. No Trader Joe’s, no co-ops here. Raley’s is the high-end supermarket, and the one-and-only place in town to find organic meats, which I must buy, since my mother doesn’t consider it a meal without meat (I didn’t tell her about the soy grind in the spaghetti until after she’d eaten it). As I cruise their natural foods section, my jaw hits the floor. Glutino, makers of yummy gluten-free sandwich cookies that I have been known to dabble in, also makes crackers and – gasp – bread sticks! In two flavors! I read the label twice, just to be sure it is not too good to be true. What’s more, they’re so tasty the kids start munching them out of the box.

I ask myself why I can’t get them at my store? The answer is simple: shelf space is at a premium. However, a supermarket manager once told me that they take customer comments very seriously, reckoning that for every person that speaks up, ten hold their tongues and just go elsewhere. I’ll be talking to the manager at my local store, and failing seeing these products, will be buying online.

Thursday, June 28, 2007

From the mouths of babes

I vividly remember a worksheet my first grade teacher gave to us. It had pictures of everyday objects on it, with a few letters below each picture. The object was to circle the first letter of each image. Below the picture of the refrigerator, I dutifully circled the “F” – for fridge. The teacher marked it wrong, and I was very upset. I discover many years later that my mother has kept the worksheet, that it is a bit of family lore by virtue of the ensuing tantrum. Then today in the car, Little One, knowing that warm summer days mean ice cream, sings a ditty about the stuff of his desire, “in the fridge, and fridge starts with F.”

One time, we’re driving home from doing the shopping, and he blurts out, “Penguins make ice!” I make some non-committal Mommy-type grunt, since utterances like this are quite common. Still, I can’t help but wonder where he got that one. Then I see it the next time we shop.



A few weeks ago, as he took a bite of his supper, he considered for a moment, then looked at me and said “Everything we eat grows.”

Clearly, he continues to blur imagination and reality, but I am in no hurry to see him grow up. He will not be subjected to the same worksheet; he doesn’t need it. He’s already plenty wise.

Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Waste not, want not

In the 1920's, my Great Aunt Ruth Richardson came to Sutherlin, Oregon as a bride. One of her letters written back home to Minnesota talks about when she went out to the springhouse to get some butter for her mother-in-law:

"And this is what I saw - shelves all the way around filled with jars and jars of canned fruit! I am going to offer to get the butter and cream every meal and count them.

"...Tonight I went after butter again, and I asked Mother Morgan if she would think me dreadfully snoopy if I counted the fruit jars. Now, darling, you simply have to believe me - there were six hundred quarts, and jars and jars of jam, preserves and chow chows, and a big immense jar of wonderful pickles. There were the most wonderful assortments of fruit, meat, fish and vegetables, and she had done it all herself. She is just so nice and modest about it; I'd think anyone who had done that ought to broadcast over the radio. And then she said in that nice quiet voice of hers that I am learning to love and respect, "But I canned a few more this year than usual." And what do you think she said? That two hundred of them were for us. Jim had bought the jars and sugar and she canned them."

The first time I met my husband’s aunt, she was in the kitchen of her farm in Southern Germany, cutting brown bits off a head of cauliflower, her fingernails blackened by soil and paring. My father-in-law did much the same with shriveled apples, taking them one by one from a cardboard box next to his chair. I recall being repulsed by the condition of the produce; indeed, it was the kind of stuff you would see in dumpsters in this country, never in the stores. But these people had been through a war on their own soil, and knew what being hungry was like. For my generation, who has lived in a world at war for nearly their entire life, there is no shortage, no hardship. But just as putting up less-than-perfect fruits and vegetables made sense back then, it makes good sense today. When we think of the energy (both human and petroleum) that goes into shipping produce and groceries on a mass scale, the short voyage from yard to jar to table preserves many things.

All over our neighborhood, fruit trees and bushes drop their fruit, only to be raked up by gardners and plopped in the garden waste. In our municipality, people can place yard waste and food scraps into the black toter and it will be recycled into compost, so all is not lost. But most of that compost is purchased to top dress ornamental plantings, not to enhance food-producing gardens. But the law actually favors gleaning: if a tree's fruit-laden branches hang over the fence into your yard or, even better, a public right-of-way, then you have the right to pick and enjoy said fruit. And we do.I keep containers in the car during the summer for roadside blackberry picking. If the fruit is in someone's yard, I have been known to ask if they will be eating it. Usually they're so sick of it that they're happy to see it go. When they receive a jar of homemade jam as a thank you, they call me the next year when the fruit is ripe.

Today, as I took my first jam of the season down to the shelves in the garage where they reside, I rotated the jars (older jam near the door, newer jars on the left). I also took the opportunity to channel my ancestor and count the jars, and did you know, there were 126 jars of jam, and 36 of applesauce! I will share some, and some will go to the school auction, but my family will enjoy the lion's share of the bounty and I admit to a great deal of satisfaction from seeing them, rows of soldiers ready for toast.

No, we don't buy supermarket jam, made with tired fruit rejects and corn syrup, and trucked long distances. We live off our suburban landscape.

Monday, June 25, 2007

Homesick

We are finally home after a whirlwind of family time. We are all a bit tired, more than a little tanned, and well-fed. I do feel a bit like some very squished peanut butter and jelly, proverbially sandwiched between my the needs of the family I was born into and the one I was party to creating. The good news is that my brother is out of the hospital (but not entirely out of the woods) and my mother will be moving (not into the retirement home, but to a lovely condo).

During our stays with both of them, I cooked, both to feed us and to give them good food; since they both live alone, they are less motivated to cook every night, but they both have some foods habits that need adjusting. I aggressively sneaked soy grind onto my mother’s plate and organic peanut butter into my brother’s larder. But all was not mature and responsible: we ate loads of ice cream, to combat the blast furnace weather that Redding is so famed for, and a fair amount of ice-cold alcoholic beverages helped cool us by the pool.

I resisted cleaning out my mother’s fridge, though I did chuck some scary meat and mouse-gnawed rice. Likewise, I did not remove all the industrial “foods” from my brother’s house, but I did make sure we left behind some more sensible choices.

The bad news is that I woke with indigestion. All those days of plentiful ice cream and cheese left me feeling impervious, so I went ahead and poured cheap root beer over some ice cream last night. It was the bright pink bendy straw that broke this camel’s back; I will subsist on mint tea until the churning ends, and resume my responsible, mature, non-vacation diet and life anon.