CSA reflections

I picked up my last Tantre Farm share this past Wednesday (sorry, no photo--I had a sick kid this week and obtaining the share was challenge enough). I thought it would be appropriate to reflect a little on the CSA experience.

Question: Was it worth it economically?
Answer: Yes, for the full 20 week summer share. No, for the 3 week autumn share. I learned a little something about my cooking moods and temperament by signing up for both the summer and fall extension. We saved a LOT of money over the summer by ordering virtually no carry out. It works out that each week's share is $30 and that is at least how much we'd spend on one Chinese or Middle Eastern carry out meal. My grocery bills for the summer were pretty low, more than a $30 reduction. And we ate more healthy and tasty meals with much less meat. The autumn share suffered both from the vegetable selection (hard squash and loads of brassica are ok, but didn't really get my creativity going) and from my own increase in rigidity

Q: Was it stressfull having to deal with all that produce at once?
A: Sometimes. Though I did learn that when the greens threatened to overwhelm me, I could always blanch and freeze them. It did take a significant amount of time planning meals so that the produce would be used in the right order (carrots can wait until the following Monday, spinach must be used pretty quickly), but I did enjoy that part, particularly prowling about for new recipes which were worthy of the vegetables.

Q: Discover any new likes or dislikes?
A: Turnips! Oh my lord do I love fresh turnips now. I had bought grocery store turnips before and liked them well enough but the small, fresh tender ones we got in the farm share were transformative. Brian and I would fork-battle for the last one. I also loved the black-veined peppermint--it made the best tea ever. The only thing I disliked was the kohlrabi bulb (the greens were just like kale so I was fine with those): however I prepared it I would think that another vegetable would be better. Roasted? Prefer potatoes or parsnips. In stir fry? Harmless but just filler. Raw shredded? Prefer cabbage. True, I didn't try it pickled. Maybe next summer that'll convince me of its worth.

Q: What about the control issue?
A: My summer self found getting the box a thrill. I looked forward to seeing what would be in there and letting it challenge me preparation-wise. As I mentioned before, my autumn self found it tiring.

Q: What about variety?
A: Tantre is very good at balancing the week's share so that there is variety from week to week (different varieties of potatoes, onions, greens, herbs each week). I think it would have grown tiresome if every week the same curly kale was there. There isn't a big difference between the three kinds of kale that I received but enough so that it didn't feel monotonous. There weren't very many times that I wandered through the market looking at the offerings from other farmers and wishing that something else had been included in my share box.

Q: Wishes?
A: I wish there had been more garlic in the shares and some green zucchini. I know summer squash is almost identical in flavor, but I missed getting the green torpedoes. I also could have eaten turnips every week, but I know that not everyone feels that way.

Q: Knowing what you know, what will you plant in your garden next year?
A: Absolutely NO potatoes or basil! (Folks warned me of those bounties and they were right). I'll plant tomatoes--definitely green zebras and romas, my own turnips (since I can't get enough), leeks, and peas.

Q: What about the critters?
A: Sigh. The farm share did not magically transform my kids into vegetable lovers, but I'd say they are marginally more tolerant of different produce. In order to get their weekly allowance, they had to try one new thing from the farm share box and even though this was often accompanied by squinched up faces and minor gagging, they did it. And didn't die.

Any questions you have about the CSA experience?

Batty

I'm a little amazed, but my latest attempt with my sewing machine did not leave me batty or swearing a blue streak (unlike, dare I remind you, last time). The girl critter wanted to be a bat for Halloween and no, she would not be satisfied with a purchased bat superhero costume--she is into animals, not superheros. So it was time to drag that crafty side of myself out of hibernation.

First we assembled materials:
Some black satin that was on sale at Joann's, a McCall's #3329 pattern to crib the bat hood and smock (the pattern is for a superhero jumpsuit) that was on sale for 99 cents, and a black umbrella from the dollar store.

The hood and the sleeve caps were a little fiddly, but luckily a costume that has to hold together for three events (Halloween concert at Hill, school party on Friday and Saturday trick or treating) can have plenty of wrinkles and fraying edges and still look ok.

I contemplated leaving some of the wire frame on the umbrella to look like wing-bones, but then realized the kid would probably impale herself or one of her friends. So off they came! It looks good enough to me, and, despite her very serious visage in the photo below, the girl critter is happily flapping around the house.

After my encounter with a real bat in the house this summer, I just have to resist the temptation to reach for a tennis racket and take a swing.

Oktober-FEAST

Thanks to Sarah's efforts (and willingness to have a crowd of drunken revelers in her home) we did it--we had our Oktoberfest/feast!

Yes, one must wear silly hats or little-lederhosen outfits. Funny how only Brian and I remembered that rule...My photos have some major gaps in them--primarily of the stuff I brought (German soft pretzels, braised cabbage with bacon and apples, green salad and sauerkraut) which I blame on the stuff that my Brian brought: BEER! The Dark Father in particular packed a punch, though there was also his Belgian White and hefeweizen to choose from.  I'll have to make the pretzels again because they were terrific and a recipe worth sharing here. Next time I promise I won't have a beer until after I take a picture of them.

Brian P made and grilled a copious quantity of sausages:

There's smoked, bratwurst and a fennel-heavy Italian sausage (because, as Sarah said, "It doesn't matter if it isn't German: women love fennel!")

Here's a glimpse of a partial plate of plenty (missing the braised cabbage; the pretzels were long gone by this time):

Meg's spaetzel, made moments before serving, Sarah's wild mushroom rice cakes (for the vegetarians among us, though there were plenty for the rest of us to try), a selection of Brian's sausages with sauerkraut, and my big green salad with honey mustard vinaigrette.


We discovered that Dark Father goes really well with dessert:

Meagan's German chocolate cake and Deb's chocolate ginger cake were great accompaniments to the dark-sweet beer.

The gathering fulfilled my revelry quota for the month. Now I can crawl back into my reclusive autumnal hole and wait for the next book-group feast to lure me out.

Tantre farm share, Fall Extension, week 2

Bottom row (left to right): red onions, Easter egg radishes, spicy greens, arugula, wee red peppers, garlic, hot peppers
Middle row: kohlrabi, sweet potatoes and yams, salad greens, fingerling potatoes, delicata squash
Top row: shell beans, carrots, some sort of Asian greens, huge cabbage, huge bunch of kale

Next week is the last week for my Tantre farm share (since I chose to do the 3 week extension) and that's a good thing, because for the first time, when I picked up my box yesterday and unpacked the contents, I felt tired. No thrill of excitement when I saw all the pretty vegetables, just a weariness that I'd have to do something with all of them.

I think my burn out has to do with my non-summer cooking habits and moods. I tend to get a wee bit reclusive in the darker months and I think that my flexibility suffers as well. In the summertime, I'm game to try anything--why not? The sun is shining! The world is beautiful! I can do anything (within reason and only in the kitchen)! But my autumnal self really wants what she wants and this week I want to make roasted cauliflower with tahini sauce this week. While there are a ton of brassicas in this week's share, there isn't any cauliflower. And that is making me feel a bit cranky.

So this week's recipes and plan may not be terribly inspired. I'm going to make and freeze some stuff so we have a stash of things to pull out on those evenings when I'm on the run. And since Sarah is hosting an Oktoberfest party this weekend, I'll use up a significant amount of the above by pushing my produce on other people.

• kale and apple soup (to be frozen)
  
• kale and potato gratin (there's A LOT of kale) served with turkey burgers
• EZ part (i.e. make other people eat the stuff)--the cabbage will get sauteed with apples and caraway seeds for the Oktoberfest party. (I'll also be bringing a salad with the arugula, salad greens, carrots, red peppers, radishes and red onions, some of my homemade sauerkraut and lots of pretzel dough so people can shape and bake their own pretzels.)
• Shelling beans will be sauteed with garlic and olive oil and served as a side with homemade mac and cheese (with some of last week's pureed squash sneaked into the cheese sauce).
• Marinated, pan fried tofu slabs with stir fried Asian greens with garlic, and some brown rice.
  
• I'm going to shove the rest of the potatoes, the sweet potatoes, yams and winter squash in a dark cupboard and ignore them for a week or so.
• I'll slice and freeze the jalapeno peppers. They'll be good for Indian cooking this winter where the texture isn't as essential.
  
• Anyone want a kohlrabi? I can leave it on a doorstep if you live nearby...or we can play kohlrabi catch if you're passing by in your car (if I can whack a bat out of my bedroom window with a tennis racket, I should be able to pitch this into the open window of a slow moving car.)

In which the word "fuck-wit" is exemplified

Sigh.

I am a fuck-wit.

If you don't know what a fuck-wit is, come on over and have a look.

I still can't figure out how I wound up with the only copy of my work-in-progress novel being a version from September 22nd. Somehow all the work I'd done and all the versions saved since then went into the trash and, being a little compulsive (as fuck-wits are) I emptied the trash. Bye bye 3+ weeks of work!

Thank god for Mac Time Machine. It saved my ass, though only after a great deal of psychic pain and self-flagellation and the waste of a good writing day (or, if not a writing day, a good day to go for a walk--sun shining! leaves changing color!) But the fuck-wit was inside grinding her molars down into stumps.

About the only thing I feel proud of today is the fact that I have not turned to the gin (yet). Later, once small people have been toted to piano lessons and other forms of cultural enrichment, I, the fuck-wit, have a date with the gin bottle in the freezer.

Tantre farm share, Fall extension, week 1

Bottom row (left to right): big chunk of a massive winter squash, spicy salad mix, turnip greens (and a few wee turnips attached, 1 qt beans, Brussels sprouts, big bunch of parsley
Middle row: beets, onions, purplish broccoli, red peppers, purple potatoes
Top row: Easter egg radishes, bag of spinach, bag of baby greens, Italian kale, carrots, russet potatoes

• I still have some eggplant and red peppers leftover from last week which, when combined with this weeks' red peppers and onions will become roasted red pepper and eggplant soup. With a salad of spicy greens and Zingerman's farm bread (on sale this month) it should make a comforting meal now that the weather is cold.
• The broccoli will go into broccoli cheese soup--I might freeze this if we are all souped out from the previous soup.
• Spanikopita with radish greens, turnip greens, and spinach will make good use of those greens, served with a salad of baby lettuce, parsley and roasted beets.
• The kids will get homemade pizza while Brian and I have calzones with turkey Italian sausage, feta, kale and roasted red peppers.
• The radishes were a bit strong when eaten raw last week so this week we'll be eating them cooked--braised radishes to be more specific, served with mashed russet potatoes, roasted Brussels sprouts, and pork chops.
• The green beans look a little tough, so they'll get slow cooked with a slice of bacon and onions and served with hot sauce.
• I'm going to steam the big hunk of winter squash and puree it; I'll freeze some and use some in pumpkin turkey chili.

Tantre farm share, week 20 (plus interlopers)

Bottom row (left to right): Sweet dumpling squash, buttercup squash, red peppers, Easter egg radishes, spicy salad mix, red torpedo onions
Middle row: Tongue of Fire shelling beans, turnip greens, baby lettuces, hot peppers, garlic, cilantro
Interloper's corner (upper left): doz. eggs, huge bag of Asian eggplants, Roo's French Roast, qt Concord Grapes.
Top row: savoy cabbage, spinach, sweet potatoes and yams, carrots

For a lot of people this is the last week of the Tantre farm share, but I signed up for the three week extension so I'll be blundering along for another three weeks.

• Southwest style buttercup squash soup with chopped cilantro (recipe from Cook's Country which makes you pay for on-line access to their recipes, but the library subscribes to the paper version which is where I got this), corn bread, and salad with spicy salad greens, baby lettuces, radishes, red peppers and carrots.
• I can't decide what to do with the shelling beans--there are lots of tempting recipes out there, like this one for a lamb/cabbage/bean stew, pasta with beans, or fried gnocchi with shelling beans. Do you have any favorite recipes for shelling beans I should know about?
• Thai style eggplant/tofu/red pepper/cabbage/basil with red curry and rice.
• The rest of the eggplant will be made into Nasu Dengaku (Japanese eggplant broiled with miso), with rice, it should make a nice light lunch.
  
• "Cheaters" palak paneer (replace the paneer with tofu) with spinach, turnip greens, radish greens, hot peppers and (separate dish) stir-fried cabbage with cumin seeds. Maybe some daal too if I have time.
• Sweet dumpling squash stuffed with quinoa, with salad and probably something meat based or the meat lovers in my house will rise up in fury at the quantity of vegetarian proteins I expect them consume this week...

The yams/sweet potatoes are supposed to "cure" for at least a week so I won't be doing anything with them yet.

Snacktime

I don't remember Summer asking my permission to be excused.

That's how I feel, like a grumpy mama whose kid ditched the table with their plate half-full. (This is a feeling that I am all too familiar with since both critters continue their disinterest in food...)

Perhaps it's because we had an extraordinarily wonderful summer (for humans, not so good for tomatoes) that I didn't really look forward to Autumn the way I usually do. Usually by the end of summer, I'm so beaten down with sweating and mosquitoes and sick of feeling dehydrated no matter how much water I drink that Autumn feels like bliss.

This year, not so much. I'm loving the critters both being in school full day (finally) and they are thriving, so it isn't as though Autumn hasn't brought good stuff with it. Somehow, I just wasn't expecting it so soon. (In fact, I'm not really clear on where August and September went...I remember about a week of each.)

So in order to make myself feel better and to be a wee bit more accepting of the present, I've been indulging regularly in my favorite snack/desert/even (ahem) breakfast:

One Jonathan apple and one square of dark hazelnut chocolate.

Jonathan apples are my favorite variety by far. They don't last long because they don't store well, but when they are freshly picked they are just what I'm looking for: crisp, spicy, tart and not insanely huge. They remind me of Cox's Orange Pippins--an English variety that, when we went on hikes up to Captain Cook's Monument or Roseberry Topping, my Granny always had stashed in her jacket pocket along with a bar of Terry's dark chocolate. Alternating bites of apple and dark chocolate, particularly on a windy, nippy day, helps me accept, even enjoy, my present environment.

If you're having trouble accepting the season, give it a try. Jonathans are at the Ann Arbor Farmer's Market and even at Meijer's. Trader Joe's is my source for the dark chocolate hazelnut bar.

Faceted

I recently finished a book that does something quite remarkable: it presents all the sides of a conflict so evenly that as soon as you have sympathized and supported one side of the conflict, the author makes you see and understand it from the polar opposite perspective.

Paulette Jiles' The Color of Lightning begins with a scene of remarkable violence: a Comanche and Kiowa raid on a northern Texas frontier settlement, the murder of some, the torture of others, the brutal rape of two of the women and their capture along with four of their surviving children. If you told me that 100 pages later I would feel heartbroken when one of the captive children who has been adopted by the tribe has to leave the Kiowa to return to his family I'd have thought you were off your rocker. But that's what happened.

Jiles has written an historical novel that does not flinch at the complexities of history: she shows the flaws and the virtues of three disparate cultures that collided with tragic results. There is the story of Britt Johnson,* a freed slave, and his wife and children who are negotiating the freedom of the Texas frontier while tiptoeing around some very angry white people who are pissed about losing the Civil War. There is the story of Samuel Hammond, a Quaker from Philadelphia, who is sent as an Indian Agent to some of the most war-like and violent tribes, to preach peace and convert them to Christianity and an agrarian lifestyle (unsuccessfully in both cases). And there is the story of the Comanche and Kiowa whose traditions and way of life are disappearing and who react with both extreme violence toward the settlers, and extreme tenderness toward the captive children they adopt. Most vivid is the portrait of a particular warrior, Tissoyo, whose love of gossip and befriending of Britt make him a complicated bridge between two of the worlds.

Using Samuel and his friend the illustrator James Deaver as her mouthpiece, whose biblical morals (in the case of the former), and liberal cultural appreciation (in the case of the latter), make them echo the contemporary questions that were popping into my head as I read, the author probes the clash of the cultures: at one point Deaver remarks to Samuel that "Americans are uncomfortable with tragedy." Near the end Samuel, who finally sees the futility of his position, violates his principals of non-violence, and says to Deaver, "And here [tragedy] is. We are regarding it. Like an audience." Shortly after this statement, he leaves the territory and the role he has played forever. In a way, he is less like a member of an audience, and more like a character who walked off the stage when it is clear that things will turn out very badly (something that I've always secretly hoped Edgar might do in King Lear...)

I thought that one of the most memorable and heartbreaking moments in the book (and there are many) was watching Jube, Britt's son who was captured and adopted by the Kiowa, decide to return to his family. His loyalty to his parents, particularly seeing the sacrifices his mother made to keep him and his sister Cherry alive, motivate his actions. But he is ripped up inside because on an individual level, staying with the Kiowa would have been much better for him as a black man. For his own sake I wished he could live in a place where he could grow into an equal member of the community. His longing for the freedom and the self-esteem that he left behind is a difficult compromise to watch.

And on the other side, I loved Elizabeth Fitzgerald, a white captive woman who dubs one of the wives of the man who captured her "the Dismal Bitch." She is so terrifically foul tempered (with good reason since she is a slave and treated brutally, not adopted like the young captives) that she eventually causes the Dismal Bitch to commit suicide. After this, the Comanche are convinced that she is a witch and eventually when Brit arrives to ransom the captives, they pay him to take her back. Moments of levity like this help keep the book from sinking into a morass of historical misery.

The book kept me emotionally charged by my feelings for all the different characters and their cultures. But I would be remiss if I didn't mention all the physical beauty in the book: the way the mountains rise out of the plains, the horses that gallop in giant wild herds, the quick on-set storms rushing towards a settlement, the view of a buffalo calf tottering near its mother. The author's gorgeous prose makes this a tragedy that is drenched in beauty. Jiles facility with language makes the landscape sounds so exquisite that I understood why people loved it so fiercely and fought so hard to claim it for their people.

________
*I only discovered in the author's end-note that Britt Johnson was a real person and many of the events that she depicted were based on historical records.

Tantre farm share, week 19

Bottom row: carrots, qt of Brussels sprouts, onions, French radishes, tatsoi, two hot peppers and basil
Middle-ish row: red fingerlings, lots of red peppers, cilantro, tomatillos, turnip greens
Top row: green beans, broccoli, baby lettuces, butternut squash

I can't say that this week's menu plan is terribly inspired or inventive, but hopefully it will be tasty:

• The tomatillos, some onion and the hot peppers and cilantro will get turned into tomatillo salsa.
• I'll make cheese grits with spicy turnip and radish greens for breakfast.
• Tonight we'll have roasted red pepper pasta sauce on whole wheat penne which will use up some peppers, onion and basil (I don't have any heavy cream, so I'll use some milk and a little sour cream--it won't be quite as luxurious, but hell, it's a Thursday and we don't need luxury on a Thursday); steamed broccoli will be served with it. (Boring, I know, but the girl critter actually eats it).
• The tatsoi will go into a lunch stir fry with tofu and any of the broccoli that is left over.
• My book group is meeting this week and I'll bring a salad with the baby lettuces, radishes, red peppers and carrots. I might mix up a blue cheese vinaigrette to make a change from our normal dressing.
• Some of the butternut squash will be used to fill homemade ravioli and I'll strip the sage bush outside to add fried sage leaves to the brown butter sauce.
• We need to have a roasted night with roasted Brussels sprouts, fingerling potatoes and what's left of the butternut squash. We might need some protein source to go with it...personally I could just pig myself on roasted vegetables but the other members of my household will probably feel like their needs have not been completely met.