The Ant and the Grasshopper

Without a ready source of tomatoes for canning this year, I decided I would be like the grasshopper and enjoy the last lingering days of summer and buy canned tomatoes this winter. Around about last week when the weather got chilly and I wanted to make chili, I realized the folly of my ways. To top it off, a friend told me that commercially canned tomatoes -- even the organic ones -- came in cans lined with plastic. Gack! Like some poor sea creature caught in plastic 6-pack rings, I could feel myself choking on the stuff! In unseasonably cold weather -- snow, even -- I took myself down to the farmers' market on a mission to buy tomatoes. Surely someone had stripped their plants the night before in anticipation of the first frost!

Pumpkins galore, potatoes, doughnuts, ostrich meat … Roma tomatoes, $20 for 25 lbs! I paid for a 25 lb. box, finished shopping (buying apples from novelist Jane Hamilton -- one of the perks at the Dane County Farmers' Market) and drove my car around to pick up my tomatoes. Thinking, "Hmmm … are those tomatoes going to be enough to carry me over until next tomato season?" With my car in the middle of the street, emergency flashers going, I quickly made a deal to buy another 25 lbs. of tomatoes.

This is the 3rd year I have canned tomatoes and the first time I did it all by myself. I canned half yesterday and half today, all in all 6 hours of intensive labor -- blanching, peeling and coring the tomatoes, partially cooking them, sterilizing the jars, filling the jars, boiling them in a hot water bath … Rather than trying to multi-task, I broke the process down into discrete steps -- a decision that I think saved time in the end. Hallelujah, all the jars sealed nicely, and lined up on the kitchen counter they look like sparkling jewels.

Bon appetit!

Food For Thought

On Saturday I attended the annual Food for Thought festival, put on in Madison by the REAP (Research, Education, Action, and Policy) Food Group. It is such a cool event, starting in the morning and going into the early afternoon, in conjunction with the Dane County Farmers' Market. I roused myself from my Saturday morning stupor to go and hear Michael Pollan speak. He was speaking under a large tent, with many people spilling out the edges. I settled myself on the sidewalk, pulled out my knitting (of course), and was thoroughly inspired.

There was some (what I consider to be) trumped up controversy surrounding Pollan's visit to Madison. This from a REAP email:

The president of the Wisconsin Farm Bureau suggested that Pollan is against farmers and in an op-ed called some of his ideas "disturbing and immoral."

A bus load of farmers showed up, wearing "In Defense of Farmers" t-shirts and calling Pollan's work "elitist". Personally, I think they lost a great deal of credibility when I found out that a big agri-business had chartered the bus and rallied them. I also wondered how many of them actually have read Pollan's work. It smacked of tea party politics.

Pollan called for a regional food economy, saying he is not a dogmatic locavore. A regional food economy has room not only for the small farms producing heritage and artisan foods, but the mid-sized farms as well. He emphasized the need for all farmers to diversify, noting that separating animals from crops (to paraphrase Wendell Berry) took a near-perfect system and created 2 big problems: what to use for fertilizer and where to dump the animal waste.

He also issued a passionate call for people to prepare meals at home using real food. I know that will raise some people's hackles -- but tell me, just how convenient is so-called "convenience food"? I was thinking, I can make a pan of mac & cheese in 25 minutes, plus baking time. The boxed stuff is not much quicker than that!

He also warned that the food industry is beginning to fight back, and it is important to vote with your dollars and be a food activist.

I also enjoyed browsing among the many displays from food-oriented businesses and non-profits. I had to resist the urge not to say something snide to the Whole Foods people. I went out of my way to greet chef Tori from L'Etoile and thank him for everything he does for my daughter's middle school (while munching on one of his homemade brats -- mmmm.) I picked up a recipe for making an anti-viral tea ('flu preventative) from Community Pharmacy.

Oh yeah, and I bought In Defense of Food from A Room of One's Own, my favorite independent bookstore. I was so happy to see them there and told the owner so, as I paid cash for my book. "Thanks, Suzy. We appreciate your support," and I thought, "She knows my name!!" Guess I'm a preferred customer now. (Yeah, yeah. Little things can give me big thrills.)

I was still a bit buzzed about the festival when I went a book sale at one of our branch libraries on Sunday. I bought a 1946 edition of Irma Rombauer's Joy of Cooking for $2.00! At first I was thinking it would just be a neat curiosity, but as I read through the recipes I realized that it has a lot of relevance to what Michael Pollan had been saying. Real food, prepared at home, on a family budget. I quickly cleared two froo-froo cookbooks off the shelf -- ones that I sometimes salivate over, but never cook from -- to make room for my vintage Joy. (And I just read that this is a virtually the same as the 1943 edition -- the one that Julia Child received as a wedding gift -- and has a collectors' value of $60 - $200! How cool is that? Of course, I will not be selling it.)

That was my weekend. Yours?

Tomatoes for Peace!

6 hours of work, 37 pints of tomatoes. And two bushels remaining in the basement! I think the rest of them will be roasted and frozen. But not tonight.

Abundance

Poodle Doc and I have both been reading Barbara Kingsolver's new book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. In fact, he bought it for me for my birthday. We keep comparing notes, and we're both a little obsessed with this idea of eating locally. So last Sunday after Meeting, when I casually mentioned that I really wanted to can tomatoes, he immediately offered up his share of tomatoes from the community garden of which he is a member.

After work today, Poodle Doc, Mr. Ether, and I drove out to his garden about half an hour out of town. We braved the mosquitoes -- oh my God, they were fierce, but my Repel Lemon Eucalyptus goop seemed to really work. (I was a little concerned that any marauding koalas might catch wind of us, and then we'd really be sorry, but they must have all been sleeping.) We harvested 5 bushels of tomatoes, plus a variety of both sweet and hot peppers, leeks, basil, eggplants, and a couple of tardy watermelons and cukes. Poodle Doc also generously gave us a portion of his onions and garlic for the year. It is truly an astounding amount of food.

Now comes the part that is both wonderful and difficult -- figuring out how to deal with it all. Making the time to make up a big batch of baba ganouj, roasting the peppers, making salsa ...

Yesterday Quaker Dave asked what each of us will do to end the current wars and prevent the next one. My answer was, "Can tomatoes." What I meant is, we need to do the protesting and the activism, but we also need to remember to find joy, to build our communities, to hold a vision of what we want the world to be and to work toward that. That's what I am doing as I celebrate this amazing abundance.

Cheesy Title for a Post

I've just gotten to the chapter in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle where Barbara Kingsolver explains how ridiculously easy it is to make cheese at home, and she references the book Home Cheese Making by Rikki Carroll. I went to our public library website to look it up, only to find that all 7 copies of the book are currently checked out and I had to go on a waiting list!

Glad to know that Barbara's book is making an impact …

Modern Day Snake Oil

I'm sorry, but I find this just absurd.

First read this article about new cholesterol-lowering snacks coming on the market. Then walk or bike to your nearest public library or independent book store, and pick up a copy of Barbara Kingsolver's newest book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Kingsolver's family carried out an experiment of spending a year eating foods that were almost exclusively locally grown and in season. While you may not feel you can go the extent that Kingsolver did, eating closer to home and less processed foods is within many people's reach.

What I have read in various sources is that, prior to the widespread use of hydrogenated fats and high fructose corn syrup in this country, back when people consumed more whole milk and butterfat, the incidence of high cholesterol, heart disease, and stroke was far less than it is today.

Then add in the energy it takes to produce the enhanced super-snacks: fossil fuel energy, intellectual energy, energy spent marketing the stuff -- which may or may not do what it claims to do. Is it worth it?

I do most of the shopping and cooking in our household. Over the last 10 years I have been adding in more and more locally and organically grown foods. I've tried having my own garden, have been a member of various CSAs (community supported agriculture -- farms where you buy a share and then get a box full of vegies each week throughout the growing season) and one season was a member of Zephyr Garden about which my friend Poodle Doc writes so deliciously from time to time. This year I'm doing most of my shopping at a little farmers' market every Tuesday evening, and we're blessed with a wonderful food co-op. And thanks to another friend, The Sminthophile, I just found out about a place that will deliver meat and dairy right to my door!

Anyway, for a long time I wouldn't necessarily admit that I was buying organic foods -- or I'd be apologetic about it, because it seemed posh and snooty. But I actually think it costs us less than if I was buying the amount of processed foods -- the frozen microwave dinners and so on -- that so many people buy. So I'm out of the closet [pantry?] in my eating habits.

Anyway (Danger *Warning*Bad Pun Alert!) it's food for thought.