Friday, December 25, 2009

Winter

It is winter's darkest hour; we passed the official marker just a few days ago, but even as the houses glow with icicle lights and trees in front windows, the earth sleeps. Unlike excited little boys straining to hear hooves on the roof. In the kitchen, the local roast is sitting on the counter salted, waiting to enter the hot oven in a few hours.


Our vegetable stores are slowly emptying from the bounty of the fall harvest: first the frost-tinged greens, made all the sweeter by Jack's kisses, then the crcucifers and squashes; we are now into the roots. A generous handful of Brussels sprouts made it this far, and by coddling them and sacrificing the outer leaves to the compost heap (oh, if I had chickens, how happy they would be today!), we will have greens on the table. Some of the parsnips and beetroot will join the roast and last of the fingerling potatoes in the oven.


We still have five weeks before our weekly deliveries from the farm resume. But all is not entirely bleak. We have pears, and the little bundles of sunlight that my family call "Christmas oranges" have burst on the scene. We are fortunate to live in an era and area where we may choose to eat local, and supplement those dark days with sunshine from faraway.


In some cases, very far away: A bottle of red wine from France will come off the rack, set aside for such a day. Spices that filled the corners of our cases when we returned from Morocco released their prize under the pestle yesterday, and joined nuts and candied fruits in holiday baked goods, some of which were offered on a plate in front of the fireplace last night by children waiting to be nestled snug in their beds. And chocolate from places so distant we have never been there, warming our hands in hefty mugs, drunk under warm wooly blankets and in the glow of candles on the tree.


We may be assaulted this time of year by the loud jingles and incessant chatter reminding us to consume for the sake of our loved ones, to save money by getting everything we need for our table from one national chain store at unbelievable prices. But I for one shall snuggle into the warmth of family and small treasures chosen or crafted with love, and let the bounty of the now faded sunlight grace our table and nourish our souls.


And so I send my wishes for warmth and peace to you in this quiet season.

Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Gobblers

With the book finally put to bed (shameless plug: available here), and the frost settling on the pumpkins, I once again turn my attention to matters of food and sustainability, with a little bit of poetic edginess and inclusiveness thrown in for good measure.

Turkeys are on my mind this cold, misty morning (it really is pretty the way the mist clings to the neighbor’s cedar trees). Yesterday’s morning was full of similar beauty, but like many others this week, I was focused on getting my Thanksgiving meal birds in a row. What a luxury to not only have to locate a turkey we could feel good about (I’m thinking of last year’s Irish turkey hunt), but to actually have a choice! For the co-op was offering four different organic birds, one of whom had had black feathers in its previous life (Before Roasting). Recalling the one heritage turkey we had been fortunate to partake of before, I thought that an easy choice, for we have much to be thankful for.

It was easy to accept the bagger’s offer of help out to the car, given the way the cart groaned going around corners. With the bird and seven bags of groceries ensconced in the back of the car, I set out for home. One of the fallouts of our year abroad is that the radio antenna got snapped off my car, victim to a well-intended car wash before our return. What this means in practical terms is that I can no longer listen to the classical music station, and am relegated to pop (though I have to say, there are some very impressive lyricists in the up-and-coming generation). This also means I’m getting ads for a different demographic: instead of mattresses and Bose headphones, I’m getting supermarket and TV program ads. Albertson’s informs me that they’re thinking of me during these trying times, and offering the centerpiece of my Thanksgiving table for a mere 27 cents a pound! QFC takes a different tack, stressing the quality of their birds, which can hardly compete at a whopping 29 cents a pound.

It’s hard not to compare the bird in my backseat (while I’ve been shouting back at the radio, it’s been demurely quiet all through these ads) with these poor creatures. The first thing I noticed about it was its color. It had some. It wasn’t a pallid yellow-y white, but a variation of colors. I salivated at the thought of the incredible dark meat this free-range fellow will bring to my plate. It’s also a different shape, not scrawny by far, but longer, and not dominated by those Dolly Parton breasts so common in the factory-bred white birds.

Needless to say, its price tag reflected all its potential tastiness: this tom was priced at $3.99 a pound, or more than the tenfold of its supermarket cousins. Unconscionable, they scream; taking advantage of the consumer! I must be crazy, you think. But if anything’s crazy, it’s a ten pound bird for less than the cost of a gallon of gas. It makes sense to me to reward the farmer who went to the trouble of sourcing a bird with a lineage, one who will do well in the climate where it will live, and then makes sure that its short life is spent pursuing its nature, scratching bugs and whatnot out of the earth, and gaggling about with others of its kind. I am reminded that the wild turkey is an intelligent and noble beast, and would be our national bird if Ben Franklin had had his way.

Some digging reveals that the 27-cent bird is an in-house brand, and that price only applies to smaller birds and folks with a customer loyalty card. Everyone else must pony up $1.29 a pound. But I still have trouble making sense of the math for the big box bird: how can they ship a bird halfway across the country—most of them come from a warm clime—and sell them for so little? Are they packed into such massive factories that the economy of scale is so great? And where, pray tell, is the farmer in all this? Is he making anything? It seems unlikely that there are any farmers for these factory birds, only button-pushing employees of a large multinational corporation, many of whom are likely not making a living wage.

If you haven’t lost your appetite yet, read on. For the real reason I want my colorful bird is because I want to share my meal. If I were a filmmaker, I would have a cute graphic of me and my family, and a few friends (maybe I could use cute avatars) all standing together with smiles on our faces. If we brought out the cheap turkey, two of us would walk away with frowns on our faces. You see, two of us are allergic to antibiotics; eating a factory-farmed animal can’t happen without making us ill. And when we read the label, one more would leave, as she can’t eat the corn-based food starch it’s injected with. The remaining five would still be hopeful, but one of them would have to place a call to the 800 number on the label to determine if the “modified food starch” or “natural flavorings” contains any gluten, which would exclude all but one. One lonely turkey diner, seven others with only Brussels sprouts (tasty, but a bit meager) on their plates.

Perhaps we are the canaries in the mine shaft, or perhaps just the unfortunate ones who have tied the symptoms to the cause. But either way, $2 a pound seems a small price to pay for the joy of the communal meal, one in which we can all partake, including the farmer, for whom we are very thankful.

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Airing our laundry

Our little rented house in Ireland has all the modern conveniences save one: a dryer. Make no mistake, the winters (and autumns and springs) are wet, whence the green hills that justify the famous moniker. It has been a challenge to work with time, planning ahead, making sure clothes are washed in time to line dry before trips and scheduling in sheets and towels to not leave us without underwear and socks.

We have cheated a couple of times, borrowing a friend’s dryer for a down jacket and availing of my mother-in-laws capacious laundry room over Christmas, luxuriating in the easy life. But by and large, we are simply living with laundry constantly hanging in the living room, and crunchy towels. We even rearranged the sofa so we could get the rack closer to the radiator, which cuts drying time to only a day.

Our first power bill made me gasp: €780, and it wasn’t even winter yet. We understood why everyone else hung out laundry, even on cool, moist days. A dryer would simply be an unaffordable luxury, one that could easily double a power bill. And so, we see peach-colored sheets and long nightdresses along the N81 just past Silverhill on all but the soggiest days, and compare the virtues of various folding racks with our neighbors.

Our three-week visit to the US has coincided with an amazing stretch of fine weather, which I hope to not jinx by mentioning. As our folding line gets a workout, our Swedish dryer sits unused as of yet, and we depart for the old country again in a few days. A fellow mom at the school has just convinced her husband to put up a clothesline in their side yard, and has been asking advice about hanging laundry: How many clothespins do I need? (More than a single pack of 50 for a family of four!) What is the protocol for hanging underwear? (On the inside of the rack, where nosy neighbors won’t see your shy tween’s smalls or your unmentionables) When do you need to bring it in? (Only if it is pouring, since wind will evaporate light moisture quickly.) Another mom overhears us chatting, and says, “Oh, I miss how line-dried sheets smell. Maybe we should put up a line too!”

How funny that something as simple as hanging up laundry, a task that our grandmothers saw as a chore (this woman’s thoroughly modern suburban mom had a dryer), has become something we must learn. And how odd that these college-educated women—and men—have bought into laundry additives, and scented dryer sheets and asthmatic children to make their laundry smell good, when the sun is there for free. How ironic that we are having to relearn something as simple as how putting the clothespin on only one side of the sock makes it dry more quickly. But how delicious to rediscover the quiet meditative quality of hanging laundry on a cool morning, listening to exuberant birdsong while we plan our day in our minds. And how lovely it is to snuggle into sheets that smell like sunshine and takes us to pleasant dreamscapes. Like crafts of old, the wisdom of the generation was nearly lost. Nearly.

Monday, June 8, 2009

Nothing and everyone

At the beginning of my voyage as a parent of a school-aged child, the dainty preschool teacher pulled me aside at pickup one afternoon, and said, “we’d like to celebrate your son’s birthday next week. Could you bake a cake for him to share with the class?” Of course I can, thought I. And then the restrictions started: Please don’t use sugar or chocolate (there went my first choice); we have one child who cannot eat wheat (ok, so no cake, maybe an apple tart), another two who are vegan, one who can’t eat apples (maybe not the tart).

This posed a challenged, since our family had not yet dealt with our own food sensitivities. But I had an inkling it could be done, and hit the books: the cookbooks, to be precise. Working from a Cynthia Lair recipe (and learning in the process that she was a fellow Waldorf parent), I concocted what came to be known as “The Nothing Tart,” because it had nothing in it that excluded anyone and can be easily modified to conform to the ever-shifting matrix of a class' dietary restrictions. It became a birthday staple, and is still requested on a regular basis.

The Nothing Tart
Crust:

1¼ cups rolled oats or quinoa flakes (Bob’s Red Mill brand oats are gluten free)
½ cup ground nuts (any combination of walnuts, pecans or almonds)
¼ cup flour (wheat, spelt, barley, amaranth or oat)
pinch of salt
2 Tbl maple syrup
2 Tbl cold-pressed vegetable oil
2 Tbl water

Filling:

2 cups frozen berries, thawed (any combination of berries you like)
1 cup apple or berry juice
2 Tbl kuzu or 4 T cornstarch

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F. Combine oats, ground nuts, flour and salt in a bowl. Add syrup, oil and water, mix well. With wet hands, press the mixture into a 10-12" tart pan. Bake 10-12 minutes. Remove from oven and let cool. (Can be done ahead.)

Mix juice and kuzu or cornstarch together in a saucepan until dissolved. Add thawed berries. Heat mixture over medium heat, stirring constantly until thick and clear, about 5 minutes. Remove from heat and pour into prebaked crust. Cool at room temperature or in refrigerator before serving.

Over the years, I have been joined by one or two moms as we filled out school potlucks and dealt with class outings of increasing duration and complexity. And before we knew it, our babies were departing on their final voyage as a class last week, a six-day trek to the middle of nowhere. We had three hectic days to pull together 30 alternate meals that could survive horseback riding and river rafting while feeding five kids with sensitivities ranging the easy (gluten, eggs, dairy) to the more challenging (corn, pineapple, almonds and rice). One mom kicked into full quinoa mode; one shopped and froze; we all planned. I pulled baking duty, which covered breakfast and dessert. In the end, we filled one cooler and one roughneck with packets painstakingly labeled with ingredients and days. And we were successful: our kids were fed well, and only a little food came back (one quinoa salad was a clear bomb, and will not be repeated).

Yesterday, we “graduated”our nine children from eighth grade. Others made cards and presented token gfts and flowers. But I cook. And so, in recognition of this milestone, I offer food for all: from the Nothing Tart, through Maria crackers (amaranth-based) and Lucia buns, to the Class of 2009 Everyone Granola.

Class of ‘09 Everyone Granola

8 c rolled oats (Bob’s Red Mill brand)
1 c raw honey
1 c pure maple syrup
1 c vegetable oil (canola or safflower)
1 T vanilla extract (any brand without maltodextrin)
1 T sea salt

1 T cinnamon
½ t nutmeg
1 c dried apples
OR
2 t cinnamon

2 c dried berries (strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, blackberries)

  1. Preheat oven to 325 degrees F.
  2. Place the oats in a very large mixing bowl.
  3. In a very large saucepan over medium-high heat, combine the honey, maple syrup, oil, vanilla extract and salt. As the mixture begins to boil, it will increase in volume considerably. Stir and watch closely!
  4. Pour the boiling mixture over the oats in the mixing bowl and stir with a wooden spoon until well combined.
  5. Distribute the granola on two large baking sheets and bake for 10 minutes.
  6. With a metal spatula, turn the granola without too much stirring, and bake 10 minutes more.
  7. Add any nuts and turn the granola again, making sure to not break apart the clusters that are forming.
  8. Return the granola to the oven for 5-6 more minutes; remove and gently stir in the dried fruit. Do not overbake.
  9. Cool the granola completely and then transfer to an airtight container.

Friday, April 3, 2009

Shopping centre

When we first moved to Washington, our quiet little town was enjoying the boon created by the then relatively young tech companies who chose it as their home. As the population swelled during the day, the city fathers (and mother) decided that the quaint historical downtown was woefully inadequate for a town of its stature. "You can't even buy a pair of socks!" exclaimed the mayor. And so, they decided to create a concept shopping center on the other side of the railroad tracks. It would be an outdoor shopping center (clearly a California developer), and would continue the city's street grid across the tracks and into a retail center. The concept was that it wouldn't be a mall, but akin to the experience of shopping in an old-fashioned downtown.

Of course, the built reality is a mall in sheep's clothing; one look at the names of the tenants tells you that it's a mall. You can buy fancy clothes in a chain department store, browse books in a chain store and eat in a chain restaurant. But you can't buy an envelope or stamps, food for supper, or an aspirin for your head that is now throbbing from the assault on your senses that is mall shopping. And you have to constantly climb back into your car.

Consider, if you will, yesterday's shopping list: I needed a book of stamps, two maps (for the weekend's road trip), maple syrup, lentils, turmeric, soy milk and rice noodles, candied fruit and yeast (think hot cross buns for Easter morning), chocolate eggs, and wintergreen to keep the village strays from using my flower beds as a litter box.

At home, I could have looked in the national chain bookstores for the maps (you know which two), and there is a supermarket for the foods and a drugstore (local, but still chains) that should have the wintergreen. Chocolate eggs would have been available at either, no doubt, but they are far away from the "town center" and set back from the road by the ubiquitous immense parking lot (which is never full, indeed, usually less than a quarter full), which means I need to drive there--over speed bumps on an empty four-lane road. For stamps, I would have had to load the kidlet in the car yet again, cross the railroad tracks, and head to the real downtown post office.

But I'm in rural Ireland, in a town that reminds me forcibly of one of Lake Wobegon's fictitious stores, Ralph's Pretty Good Grocery, whose slogan is, "if you can't get it at Ralph's, you can probably get along without it." Likewise, if you can't get it in here, you can probably do without: if they don't have it, chances are they'll have to order it, usually from the UK. It makes you think twice before buying something.

I start by parking the car along the chaotic street. At first glance, it's a traffic engineer's nightmare: the major arterial (two lanes!) from Dublin doubles as the main street, which means traffic can be heavy in the morning (folks heading up to the city), in the evening (coming back down), and when the afternoon buses arrive (2:15, 3:15, 5:10), dropping kids who go to school up in Dublin. Traffic is slowed additionally by the fact that cars park head-in along both sides of the wide street, and need to back out. You'd think no one would ever get out of the parking spots, but they do, and quite easily. You see, since that's how every one parks, they understand that niceness is the only way the system will work. And besides, with only a few spots free at peak times, people may want your spot, and are happy to hold up traffic for you. Speed bumps are unnecessary, traffic calming is built in.

Little One and I head down Main Street, past the pub, the betting office, the pizza place (Mommy, see the dough rising?) the church, the florist, the bank, the butcher, and the video store and duck into the office shop cum post office. There are a few folks in the line, but that gives us a chance to read the bulletin board. Puppies and a car for sale, a new treatment room at the health food store, and vegetable garden allotments available at Hunting Brook. We buy our book of stamps, and have a look at the map rack, but it doesn't have what we want.

So, we head back up the street. The church is quiet, but the doors of the betting office and pub are open to the lovely warm day, and we can hear the conversation and horse races inside. The bread is out of the pizza ovens, cooling in the window. It smells lovely. The fellow from the print shop where we got the apple juice labels done greets us on his way into the pharmacy.

We cross the street and duck into the bookshop. The lady has the same sniffles as me, and we commiserate. She digs around in the map rack with me, and we find #61 (which I've been looking for all over Dublin), and gets on the computer to order the others. She takes my mobile number, and promises to send an SMS when they come in in a few days. She sticks the yellow note on the wall next to the till.

Two doors down (skipping the beauty shop), we duck into the health food store. The shopkeeper saw us on the other side of the street and has already brought the case of milk I ordered out, and ducks into the back room for the noodles while I take the last tomatoes and scour the shelves for the other items. Turmeric proves elusive, but I'll try across the street. We--that's everyone in the shop-- have a chat about the best way to keep cats out of the garden, and how lovely wintergreen smells, and no, they don't have any, but McGreal's across the way might.

We pop our groceries in the car and pop down to the pharmacy--sure enough, they have the wintergreen in a spray can. We have ice cream in the car (our veg box had rhubarb in it, which screams to be made into cobbler, which needs ice cream). We duck into Kenny's SuperValu, where the butcher sharpening his long knife greets us coming in. We get the makings of an Irish breakfast from him, peek to see if there are any white eggs for dyeing (nope!), and find the turmeric in the spice rack. With that, we have everything on our list, and an ice cream cone goes into the cart as a reward to a patient little boy.

Happily licking his cone, we head to the car. The church tower clock tells me it's already 5:15: all that chatting and walking does take time, or rather makes the time pass pleasantly, and it's clear that we can't possibly get the chicken cooked tonight. The funny thing is, I don't feel tired and stressed, as I usually do after a couple of hours shopping in the States.

So we beeline to Pizza 2000 (hey, that's the year it opened, and the cheesy name stuck), where we order up three pies (margherita, apollo, quatro staggioni) and chat with the lady making them. As I stand there reading the board, she reminds me of what Number One son ordered last time he was in--she remembers better than I do!

I think a town like ours is what that California developer may have had in mind, except he or she forgot that making something look like a town center on paper does not make it one. Little One looked at the title over my shoulder as I wrote this morning and said, "which shopping center?" I asked him if he thought our town was a shopping center, and after a short think, he responded, "no, because people live there."

Friday, January 30, 2009

Idle driving

I recently returned from another business trip to the States, this time to Florida, land of the artificial. Everything, from the plastic lawn flamingos to the fan-generated breezes (I’m not even going to talk about the giant Lego sea serpent in the man-made lagoon), was artificial. I found myself longing to get back to the authentic mud and puddles that characterize the Emerald Isle in the wet season.

After landing, a bus from the airport took me as far as South Dublin, where Darling Husband had spotted my car, so I could make pickup time at Little One’s school (about as muddy and authentic as can be). And as I slid in behind my right-hand drive wheel, it felt comfortable, even with my jet lag-induced grogginess.

The day before leaving, I had been stressed, especially about dealing with immigration authorities. Having sailed through, thanks to a friendly Garda down the road, I realized I was actually enjoying the drive over the hills and dales of County Kildare. The windy-twisty three-track roads demand a certain skill and attention, not unlike those Driver’s Ed movies of our youth. But the ever-changing scenery (snow on the mountains today, neighbor finally finished his fence, oh, look, three sheep on the road today) keeps things interesting.

Once a week, Darling Husband’s work schedule means that I need to trek into Dublin and pick up Number One Son from his school. The path takes me over the hill at Bohernabreena and drops me into Dublin’s south suburbs. The older roads are dotted with roundabouts; the newer ones with signals and right-turn pockets. Not surprisingly, the roundabouts move, while the signals back up. I am thrust back into American Mode, twiddling my thumbs while waiting for the light to change.

And then it hits me: I enjoy the break from driving that Ireland and my business trips give me. American transit systems are built up around business travelers, who can easily get from the airport to the everything-you-could-ever-need hotel; often at the expense of infrastructure for the everyday masses. And yet here I was, looking forward to driving, even comforted by it. Little One notes that there is only one stop sign between home and school, one place of rest on the 20-minute drive. And there it was: most of my driving here is driving, not waiting to drive. Most of my driving in the States is waiting, not driving.

Every now and then, I see a Prius in the city, and think maybe I should have got one of those. And then I am reminded: in the city, where waiting is the game, having a car that does not idle is a huge advantage. But out here in the sticks, we do not idle (except when we meet someone we know in town), and there is only one Prius around here (and I have met the driver--she's American). The rest of us drive, efficient small cars, covered in mud. Because we drive rather than wait.



Tuesday, January 20, 2009

Peanuts, get your peanuts!

Along about the time that the Irish government issued a blanket recall for all pork products, I logged on to the FDA website, partially to see if there was any information there for American consumers of Irish pork products (there was, a single entry), and partly to research information on the large beef recall of 2008. While I was there, I subscribed to an email feed of recalls.

Every week, I receive a list of company XYZ and ABC company recalling a small batch of contaminated this, and another bit of mislabeled such-and-so. The fact that not a week goes by without one is a cause for alarm on its own. But there hasn't been a thing since the recent "peanut story" broke. Were there no active recalls? Were the servers overloaded? Or did they eat some Nutter Butters?

It is, of course, a classic example of the complicated web of industrial food supply. Many are questioning the slowness of the response (the toxin was first detected around Labor Day, it's Inauguration Day today). But tracing the ingredients in our food is no easy task, especially given the complex web of distribution, with trucks and boats ferrying ingredients all over the world. The ability of the government to oversee our food safety is severely hampered by the crushing pressure to produce cheap food.

Lest we point our fingers at the government and say it's all their fault, I would remind us that our own desire to save money means that we have also willingly aided and abetted business and our government. We are the ones who shop the discount stores, who stock up on the marked-down cookies and who look at the price per unit instead of the ingredients. Chain stores are doing their part too, putting suitable pressure on producers to not only keep prices low, but make them lower (thus increasing profit margins and shareholder value, cornerstones to our "keep growing" economy); retailers are marking down things before they go past date to increase profits; and mother corporations continue funding lobbying to resist labeling requirements such as country of origin or genetic modification of ingredients.

But I would put to you that there is a way around all this mayhem. When bags of spinach from California were contaminated with E. coli, we munched on fresh spinach from Carnation; when the Irish government told us pork may have eaten dioxin-contaminated feed, we dined on apricot-glazed pork loin chops, reassured by the farmer that his beast had eaten kitchen scraps; and if we really want peanut-butter cookies, we can grind peanuts at the co-op to make fresh peanut butter, and then go home and bake our own.

Is it cheaper? I may have had to shell out a few more cents for my bunch of organic spinach, but the loss to the industry topped $350 million; those loin chops seemed expensive at the time, but no amount of money could buy any bacon or sausage during the first two days of the recall; and my peanut butter sandwich cookies are far tastier than anything you can find in a big box store. Whether they cost more--in terms of time or money--is your call, since I personally consider the time spent making (and eating) them enriching, not costly.

I guess it's just a matter of value. Or values.

Peanut Butter Cookies

1 1/4 c flour
1/4 t. salt
1/4 t. baking soda
1/2 C butter
1/2 C freshly ground peanut butter
1/2 C granulated sugar
1/2 C brown sugar
1 egg


Combine flour, salt, and baking soda, and set aside. In large mixing bowl, mix butter and peanut butter until well blended; add granulated sugar and brown sugar, mixing well, and beat in egg. Stir flour mixture into peanut butter mixture until well blended. Drop by spoonfuls onto lightly greased cookie sheet; flatten with a fork, and sprinkle lightly with granulated sugar. Bake at 375 for 10-15 minutes, or until lightly browned. (the key is really to watch them very closely--pull when just browned and let set before moving to the cooling rack / paper sack or whatever you use).


We dunk in this:


Chocolate soup


2 cups half & half
6 oz. bittersweet chocolate, chopped


Pour milk into a 2 quart heavy-bottomed saucepan and bring just to a boil. Remove from heat. Add the chopped chocolate and stir until well combined and the chocolate has melted. Cool a bit and serve in small espresso cups.