Rain, rain, go away....

Well, spring has come around again, the semester's ended, time to blog again.  Well, usually I make my peace with New England's cold, wet springtimes.   Back in March, when "spring" "starts"  I remind myself that the last expected frost in Boston is at least mid-May.   And all April, when its freezing at night, I don't get bummed out. There are plenty of plants the prefer the cold weather and need an early start - especially since the window between "icy snow" and "boiling summer" is so short around here.   This spring it's been awesome to get out on the nice days and actually put something in the ground: little baby kales, cabbage, broccoli, spinach and lettuce transplants, pea seeds, onion bulbs, and carrot, radish and beet seeds.   Unfortunately, even though all these plants do ok in the cold, and could probably even stand a frost - damn, its been cold.   And cloudy.   So nothing's died, yeah, but nothing's really grown, either.   The peas came up and are a couple inches tall, and a few beet and carrot seedlings are starting to poke their heads up, but its off to a slow start.   Feeling hopeful, we got a couple of tomato, basil and pepper seedlings at Home Cheapo a couple of weeks ago (plus my one requisite eggplant) - but so far, we are keeping them inside, on a sunny windowsill, waiting for it to get a little bit warmer.    Sigh.  I'm ready for summer.

I've also done a little re-organization since last year, trying to maximize sunlight....we'll see how it goes.  Pictures to follow!

Food writing, Memoir, and fearful fiction....

Well, I like to write things on my own in my blog, but when I find someone else's writing I like, I'm inclined to share.    I'm in a master's program for fiction, but recently I find myself drawn very strongly to certain types of non-fiction - especially the kind that uses food as the hook, line and sinker to draw us into personal stories.   I found one today, by food writer, restaurant owner and, I think, MFA fiction graduate Gabrielle Hamilton.   (link at the bottom of this entry).  

We Made Cheese!!!!

This is where the magic happens!

Listen, I"m still impressed that I can grow my own lettuce.  So this next step is blowing my freaking mind.   We made.  Our own.  CHEEEEEEESE!  

And the next step to world domination is complete.   wha ha ha! 
I'm not going to describe the process in detail, since there were about eight steps.    But sufficeth to say, we bought a cheese-making kit from the Homebrew Emporium in Cambridge, MA and followed the directions.   Of all our food-craft projects we've attempted so far, I might venture to say that this was actually the easiest:  30 minutes from start to finish, minimal clean up, yummy product, and other than the kit, all the ingredients (milk, not ultra-pasturized) were available at the Stop and Shop.   Sweet.

That's me stirring the curds, and the whey, w/new apron. 

The process involves mixing rennet and citric acid into a gallon of milk, heating it, letting it sit a little....um, some more stuff (we kept the kit and instructions, don't worry!).   I will say, we separated the curds and whey, and all I could think was "Little Miss Muffet, Sat down on a Tuffet...." the whole time.   


Eventually, the curds separate, we drained the whey and stuck the whole mess in the microwave for about 45 seconds. 

    "No Whey!"    "Whey."

Then....basically, it got kind of messy and we forgot to take pictures. (There are some hilarious movies that may make it onto YouTube).  But we stuck the curds in the microwave, then, with a brand-new (almost) pair of dishwashing gloves, we followed the instructions to: stretch and pull like taffy.   ("OK," I said, "here goes nothing"  and proceeded to pull with abandon).   Then, it started looking like cheese!   I rolled it into little balls and tossed it in icewater.   Here are the results:

It's pretty delicious, and Dawn went right ahead and made herself a little tiny home-made pizza.  

I waited until tonight, and got to make "homegrown" lasagna...sort of.   Well, it has home-grown tomatoes in the sauce, plus frozen pesto and homemade mozzarella.   Pretty darn cool. 

Yum.

New Year's Eve

Pickled beets, dilly beans and canned tomatoes, all dressed up for Christmas

How do I end up posting right before the holidays?   I guess on an academic calendar that's when we have time.

Well, as the sun sets at 4:20 pm on New Year's Eve, 2010, I'm doing my little reflecting thing.  The day has been intensely, beautifully quiet, the way only winter in New England can be, especially when you have no "outside" responsibilities: family, school, work.   We're done with all the parties, entertaining and gift-giving, lesson planning and paper writing, deadlines and test-taking.   At least for a little while.   And so I, happily, turn to food.  And not just eating it, which has started to feel like a recurring bad habit with all the holiday meals we've been served (thank you, thank you, we are grateful for the hard work and abundance that went into them - oof, my pants feel tight!  :).

No, I'm talking about the work with raw ingredients that has, over the past few years, started to feel so intensely personal, soothing and healing for me.  I spent today boiling and bottling orange-flavored homemdade vinegar, my head blissfully woozy from the scent of all that boiling vinegar.

Keeping the Harvest.....

So it's been far too long since my last blog post, but now, the day before Thanksgiving, I finally have a little time on my hands.

The garden has been put to bed, almost.   Late to mid October, me and Dawn cut down the tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, beans, cucumbers and broccoli.   I pulled up the last of the carrots (some of which, left to grow the proper amount of time, actually got to a decent size!) and beets (ditto), pulled off the green peppers, hoping they'd go to red in our fridge, and gathered up all the green tomatoes to bring inside.

It's comforting, after a few years, to start to have a ritual.   Now I know when the heat goes on in late October (we can never make it to November 1!), upstairs comes the little wooden, three-shelved "onion box" I got at an unfinished wood store, with little mesh grates on the doors.   It lives in our back hallway all winter, our impromptu "root cellar" where we keep onions, potatoes garlic and winter squash.

The dried garlic and onions I grew are gone - I always mean to keep them longer, but they are so good, I always say, what the hell, what if they spoil, live for today, and they go into everything I cook between August and October and then they are gone.  :(  Every year I vow to plant more.

The last of the potatoes are hanging on, and I am carefully plotting their fate, planning my last few potato dishes with them in mind.  But we are moving into a different phase of year, here in New England, something I am slowly getting used to.   When I realized that tomatoes, eggplants and peppers were only fresh here for a few months (more like six to ten weeks!), it brought me down.  How the heck are you supposed to eat the lush, sweet, local produce everyone rhapsodizes about, when October-May practically nothing grows?

Well, some people use season-extenders, which I'd like to learn more about, just like everything else I'd like to get around to (sewing buttons back on my coats, selling my stand-alone Ikea closet from two houses ago on Craigslist, writing a novel).   Apparently, with the right cold frame, you can get lettuce in January (and I might believe it - my lettuce is still going strong!) but until then I'll have to stick to a tried-and-true old farmwife tradition: food preservation.

So, a few seasons into my New England gardening education, it suddenly dawned on me: old school (ie, colonial) housewives couldn't go to the supermarket in January to get food.  They knew this in the flush seasons of July and August, and that is where our very most basic "processed foods" come from: jams, jellies, pickles, ketchup, mustard, relishes and sauerkraut, wine and beer.   Who knows if the nutritious value was preserved (was it?) but at least they had a little variety.    It also explains the difference between what we know as "Italian cuisine"  and "German cuisine."    Italy is linked with tomatoes, basil, zuccinis, and other fresh veggies of every kind.   Well, guess what?  It stays warm in Italy for a lot longer than in Germany, which is famous for bratwurst, beer, and sauerkraut.  Or worse, Russian food, where tomatoes often barely make it to ripe at all.   This is actually where my ancestors come from, and it is known for hardy root vegetables: potatoes, cabbages and beets.   Black bread.    Why?   Not because they are unhealthful and hate salads, but because this was what was available.

A blog which has nothing to do with gardening

So, after sitting around in a classroom discussing the future of the "publishing" industry, I listened to an awesome new-ish album (2009) and read about how one local performer is DIY-ing her way to financial solvency: Amanda Palmer.

The concept is - the old model of paying artists was to have them "signed" (or for writers, "contracted") to a major label (or publishing house) which would then front the costs of producing and distributing your media.   Now that often that we as writers can create and distribute our media ourselves....do we need that big contract, that big signing?   Well, it certainly would be nice to get an advance..... but is there another way?

I liked this short description of how Amanda Palmer made money simply by promoting herself.  Of course, its a bummer that such a cool, off-beat punk-indie-rock-cabaret (caberet??) artist would not make money off her album.   But its fantastic that she is doing her own promotion, and getting contact with her own fan base directly.   As such a quirky (and dark) non-pop artist, there's always going to be a limited audience - so how do those of us interested in quality over popularity, innovation over selling out, um, sell ourselves?
read on for one possibility....
(I of course would prefer that I didn't have to auction off my stuff, but whatevs...)

http://www.suite101.com/content/amanda-palmer-saviour-of-the-music-industry-a130519

ps: the album is great.  Paste to browser to listen to a song....

http://ilike.myspacecdn.com/play#Amanda+Palmer:Guitar+Hero:44419473:s28038082.9144795.3088909.0.2.221%2Cstd_36382125cd664a549cad6ca3fb25527d

Annie Proulx, gardening and fiction

E. Annie Proulx: (2000) "All over this scratched and worn earth regional and rural cultures, the natural world, and the diversity of life itself are eroding and crumbling under terrific outside pressures. For more than a decade, through the medium of fiction, I have been trying to catch pieces of North American rural lives and ways squeezed in the pincers of change. For me everything begins with the great landscape—not scenery but soil and water, climate and weather, indigenous plant and animal life, geography and geology. Against this background human adaptation to, and exploitation of, that landscape in a particular time orders the personalities and characaters of my stories, shapes the stories themselves which must tumble out of the place portrayed. I am concerned as well with the growing gap between rural and urban attitudes and behavior, the rural perception of the economic forces that call out the marching orders."


This summer I started two blogs: one about my garden, and one about my writing and teaching.   I haven't wanted to write too much about the teaching, namely because I tell all my students (I can't believe I have students!) to look at my blog, and then where am I? 

But it's felt like a funny stretch for me, writing about my backyard and my devotion to my tomatoes, beans and peppers, and then also trying to keep up my fiction.  I've always placed these in two separate boxes - writing is indoors, public, and professional, while gardening is outdoors, a private and amateurish pleasure.   But I've known in my heart that they were linked, a kind of ying and yang.   Writing involves sending my mind fixedly far away from the here and now.   Gardening pushes exactly the opposite buttons - it is a radical rooting in the here and now - the smell of this tomato bush, the stink of the compost, the wet or dry dirt, the hidden bean harvest, the way my fingers learn to find little weeds and pull them out.  It's an immersion in sights, sounds and smells - tiny little lacewing insects, flies, worms, birds, caterpillars, rot or growth on a plant.   The information is here and now.  And the product is for my pleasure only: no matter how hard I work to preserve the harvest, it will go.   Eventually, no matter how delicious a meal is, it will disappear into the belly of one of my friends, to be absorbed into their bodies or gone forever. 

Writing is the opposite - it is sitting alone in a little room, the quieter the better, and the only senses triggered signal distractions: a tea kettle, cold feet, the phone ringing, someone at the door.   The world here has to come entirely from our mind.   And it's not to be enjoyed now - what we make now might disappear forever.  But the final product is a kind of everlasting pie - I can (hopefully) pass it around to a world's worth of "relatives" - and unlike a pie, enjoy it or not, it will last months, maybe years.