Category: Writing

Writing about writing, autobiography, cross posting selected work from other places.

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Writing

Checking out The Dock

The DockSOLON— In a small town any new restaurant gets a try from locals and last night we had dinner at The Dock on Windflower Lane. Billed as “Fine Dining and Spirits,” there were white tablecloths set out amid decorations reflecting proximity to a place where fish live and boats tie up. Despite nearby Coralville Lake and Lake Macbride, where fish live and boats do tie up, the experience was not intended to be local. The main sign on Highway 1 offered Seafood, Steaks and Pasta, and there were a number of additional signs the size of political yard signs stuck in the ground along the way to get the attention of passers by.

Whenever a new restaurant opens, we check out the menu for the ovo-lacto vegetarian in the house. On-line there was no mention of vegetarian fare of any kind, and while that is a sign, vegetarians know that in the Midwest, sometimes they have to choose some combination of salad and side dishes to fill up the plate. When asked, the server did not have an answer about the offerings for vegetarians, leaving an uncomfortable silence, which my dining companion filled by making some suggestions. Many of the 14 other dining places in our small town acknowledge vegetarians do exist and offer entrees for them. Nonetheless, when my omnivore friends come calling, there is no reason to rule out The Dock.

There were three seating choices: “high,” “low” and outdoors. The high seating was in close proximity to the bar where television sets were mounted to the wall, and a person could hang out, appreciate the work of the resident mixologist and catch a popular televised event. The low seating was in a dining room where the tables were a bit close together. I bumped a person at the table next to us when moving my chair. We didn’t try the outdoor seating, but might have had the greeter mentioned it upon arrival as it was a beautiful summer night.

When asked about specials, the server indicated there were none, attributing it to the fact that the chef was serving on reserve duty that weekend. He seemed a nice young man, but apparently had not been trained to market the offerings of the kitchen, chef or no. In fact, our dinner conversation turned to how the food came from farm to plate, trending toward late 20th century consumerism, where diners sought specific items, the act of purchase having hegemony over any celebration of food. Not a place a restauranteur wants customers to be.

The food was good, and reasonably priced, and that is a positive. However, rather than the good food, the restaurant’s operational issues dominated the evening. When one dines out once or twice a month, that matters.

Dining out is about expectations met, and The Dock has some work to do to earn repeat business. First, and foremost, the staff needs training. Everyone we encountered was friendly and sought to be helpful, but management hadn’t done their work. Staff is at the core of a positive restaurant experience, and while they promptly replaced the dirty forks on the table,  there shouldn’t be dirty forks, prompting diners to recall the Monty Python sketch on the subject.

An example of a mismatch between the kitchen offerings and the menu is that a side of coleslaw is listed on the online menu for $2.50. In the restaurant, the price had gone up to $3, and they were no longer offering it, the server said, indicating it should be taken off the menu. We agreed. Set aside that local cabbage is in season and abundant. All of this is an easy fix, the responsibility of management.

So at the end, the food was good and reasonably priced at The Dock, but they have some work to do to stay open in what is becoming a very competitive Solon restaurant scene.

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Eleven More Days

Trimming Onions
Trimming Onions

LAKE MACBRIDE— There are eleven more posting days in my work for Blog for Iowa, after which I’ll fade into the background from that very public blogging. I have been covering for a colleague who is taking a summer break and if the opportunity is around next summer, I might do it again.

After re-starting pauldeaton.com last March, I didn’t know where it would go. The 196 posts thus far have been focused on topics related to the blog’s title, “On Our Own: Sustainability in a Turbulent World:” Farming, gardening, cooking, eating, work life, home life, local event coverage and discussions of the two biggest threats humanity faces: climate change and nuclear proliferation. There is more to say on these topics.

Today, there are 281 followers of On Our Own, which is posted on my home page. Of those, WordPress is counting my 233 twitter followers who see a link to my articles after they post. I don’t see readers who find me through WordPress’s reader, except if they like my posts or begin to follow me. I appreciate every person who finds their way to pauldeaton.com.

After Labor Day, the posting is expected to settle in around homelife and worklife, which have been the most popular topics. I’ll revisit this year’s work on the CSA and in my garden, and who knows what else? Here’s hoping followers and readers stay tuned.

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New Restaurant in Solon – Again

Salt Fork Kitchen
Salt Fork Kitchen

SOLON— While stopping in town to pick up a gallon of milk, I spotted something in the door of the restaurant previously known as Reggie’s Weenies. Salt Fork Kitchen, hoping to be open Sept. 1.

I checked with the Secretary of State, and Eric Menzel of Sutliff Road near here registered Salt Fork Kitchen, LLC. on July 8. It’s hard to read the sign, but it looks like they intend to compete in the breakfast business, cater and make other food related offerings.

A quick Internet search revealed the following by Pascale Brevet in The Atlantic:

I met Eric Menzel, a doctor of anthropology in his thirties who turned to farming because he couldn’t find the high quality of food he was looking for. Eric helps Bill (Ellison) on the farm and gets to use part of Lois’s (Pavelka) historic farmland in exchange. He organically raises chickens for eggs and meat, and in season he cultivates a vegetable garden. He sells at the nearby farmers’ markets and supplies restaurants. Eric worked as a chef for many years to help pay for his studies. He loves food and experiments with Bill and Lois’s cows’ milk. I tried one of his fresh cheeses. Similar to a ricotta, it had a slight tanginess nicely offsetting the richness of whole milk. The creamy yet pungent Camembert-like cheese I tried on my second visit was delicious too, and it made me nostalgic for France.

Whether the town of Solon, population 2,037, can support three new restaurants is an open question. The Dock recently took over existing space in a strip mall on Windflower Lane and turned it into a white tablecloth place with resident mixologist, Mick Malloy. The Dock is open now. Big Grove Brewery started brewing their first beer this week and brought executive chef, Ben Smart from The Herbfarm outside of Seattle, Wash. The Herbfarm was one of the first restaurants in America to focus on regional foods from local sources, and is widely considered one of the top 50 restaurants in the U.S. They also brought Doug Goettsch from the Culinary Institute of America in Napa Valley, Calif. With all of this talent, the food in town is expected to be good.

Here’s to the prospect of excellent dining during the coming months. I hope they aren’t relying on our family’s once per month eating out habits to survive.

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Writing

Picking Up the Pace

Summer in Iowa
Summer in Iowa

LAKE MACBRIDE— Harvest season is accelerating, and there is more food available than we know what to do with. Through a complex system of work for food, gardening, barter and foraging, purchases at the grocery stores have averaged a ticket total of well under $20 consisting mainly of dairy, canned goods and sundries. It is down from an average closer to $100.

Last night we made a meal of a big salad that included lettuce, green peppers, kohlrabi, tomatoes and broccoli from our garden. The eggs came from bartering, the carrots from California, canned kidney beans from the grocery store, and everything else was part of my work for food deal at the CSA. That is, except for the dressing— balsamic vinegar of Modena (the less expensive stuff), first cold pressed extra virgin olive oil and salt and pepper. It is pretty exciting to have a salad with home grown lettuce in August, which is a result of my first attempt at sequential planting.

At the CSA, I picked half a bushel of ripe apples yesterday. On the kitchen counter a large bowl of them waits to be peeled and cut into slices for apple crisp. The apple harvest is going to be incredibly abundant this year, and will involve a lot of processing work. I am already thinking about grading the harvest into apples for hand eating, apple sauce and apple butter, juicers and livestock feed.

Likewise, with my work for food project with a second CSA, there will be an abundance of tomatoes for canning. We’ve been eating fresh tomatoes for a few weeks, and there is an abundance on the vines. We’ll be in tomato city soon.

The point in writing about this is to organize my thoughts and priorities. Without organization, the summer will be a hodgepodge of inefficiency. Too, if there is a chance to be a food broker, and leverage some of the abundance for sales, now is the time, despite being very busy. Even if a lot of other producers are thinking the same thing.

There is something about the transition of summer from celebration of Independence Day until Labor Day that is at the center of life. With the milder weather this year, cooler and wetter, we’ve had close to ideal growing conditions for home gardening. Every bit of food we can or freeze, is money in the bank. Now is the time to get this work done.

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Writing

Tomato Sandwiches on RAGBRAI

Fresh Tomato Sandwiches
Fresh Tomato Sandwich

BUSSEY– Trish Nelson is enjoying RAGBRAI and sent a brief note with a couple of photos. Trish wrote on her mobile device, “another shot of the tomato sandwiches being made. Very Iowa. Selling like hotcakes at 2 bucks apiece as fast as they could make them. I haven’t experienced a more flavorful red juicy tomato like that since I was a kid.”

What else to say, but it is Iowa summer.

Making Tomato Sandwiches
Making Tomato Sandwiches

~ Written for Blog for Iowa

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Writing

Zucchini Madness… Again

Zucchini
Zucchini

LAKE MACBRIDE— More has been written here about zucchini than any vegetable of late. In an effort to figure out more ways to prepare and preserve it, I posted a note on Facebook. It proved to be beneficial.

Not only did I receive good suggestions on how to prepare the vegetable, several ways to dispose of excess were identified. This is an inherent part of a local food system— social networking to resolve issues like an abundance of zucchini.

It’s not that I have been short of recipes, I haven’t. So far, I have prepared crudites, toppings for salads, soup, zucchini fries, baked zucchini, a squash casserole, zucchini lasagna, mandolin sliced zucchini pasta, and as soon as there is eggplant, the classic zucchini dish— ratatouille.

There were new ideas for cooking. A friend wrote, “Oh and re. Zucchini— they’re never to big to stuff!  That’s what we do.  Cut in half length wise, core out the seeds.  In the depression add your favorite things  For us that’s lots of walnuts, mushrooms, celery, rice? and what ever else you have laying around— almost anything can make for a fine stuffing. Use favorite spices.  Melt Cheese on Top.   Enjoy again, and again.”

Here are other preparation suggestions:

“Sausage stuffed zucchini boats & zucchini fries.”

“A friend had a pretty good recipe for “mock apple pie” that was made with zucchini and a lot of cinnamon.”

“Sliced in half with some olive oil and garlic salt, then grilled. We’re also big fans of zucchini bread.”

“I just shared a thing about oven baked zucchini chips. never heard of them done that way before myself, but could be worth a try.”

What else to do with excess? There were people that wanted some to eat. Also here are some comments:

“Chop them up and feed it to the chickens. They love zucchini.”

“right to the compost”

“Sounds like you have the basis for a cottage industry… upgrade the packaging and sell frozen zucchini for those of us who aren’t in a position to have any in our own freezers!”

“Contact the veterans shelter house in Cedar Rapids, … they have storage and will distribute green grocery items to their homeless veterans.”

…and there is my favorite, trade zucchini as chicken feed for farmer’s eggs.

As we savor the most recent pick of zucchini, we’re far from exhausting the possibilities. And thanks to social networking, we’re better together.

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Zucchini Days

Zucchini from the Ice Box
Zucchini from the Ice Box

LAKE MACBRIDE— Yesterday zucchini came in from the garden, a lot of them. Knowing the CSA share would include more, I called a friend who manages the local food bank and arranged to donate freshly picked vegetables. Posting on Facebook, I encouraged others to do likewise,

Just donated ten pounds of organic zucchini and yellow squash to the local food bank. They really need our help. If you have garden extras, I hope you will pick up the phone and call the nearest food bank to see if they could use it. Willing to bet they will.

A commenter on this blog wrote,

It is the only time of the year you have to lock your doors when you go to the local drug store, grocery store or funeral parlor in a small town so you won’t receive the “bounty” of someones inexperience of planting way to many summer squash! If you aren’t cautious, they will hunt you down and fill your back seat in a New York minute!

It may be possible to have too much of a good thing, although I won’t admit it. Even though ten pounds was donated to the food bank, there is an abundance in the ice box and plenty more growing in the garden. Soon the recipe for zucchini chocolate cake will come out of the arsenal to be deployed in a last ditch effort to deal with the proliferation. Maybe I need to deescalate.

This is the first year zucchini growing has been an unmitigated success in my garden. It is attributable to working at the farm and seeing how professionals do it. In past years, I planted squash in mounds with a number of seeds in close proximity to each other. They grew in a tangled mess and never produced very well. This year was different.

Using some plastic trays provided by a friend, I planted the seeds in individual soil blocks. They germinated and grew well, and when the plot was ready, I transplanted them in tight rows next to a big patch of radishes. Once the radishes were harvested, the squash vines had room to grow. It may seem simple, but the results were dramatic.

As long as we repeat the same behavior, change is unlikely. More than anything else, a gardener should be a tinkerer with cultivation. Trying different tilling methods, considering shade that falls on the garden when planting, seed variety selection, row arrangement, and adjusting every possible variable in the garden. Most importantly, a gardener should let the seed genetics do their work after creating a suitable environment. If we sometimes hit the zucchini jackpot, then we learn from that and adjust next year.

With a bit of thoughtful work, it is much more likely to succeed in gardening than in winning the lottery of a random life.

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First Tomato

Lake Macbride Beach
Lake Macbride Beach

LAKE MACBRIDE— The first two cherry tomatoes were ripe in the garden, so I picked them, along with three meals worth of green beans, two cucumbers, a bunch of kale, two stalks of broccoli and two kohlrabi. In addition, I planted more cucumbers and Swiss chard. There remains plenty to eat in our household.

It’s time to review the seed packets and plan the rest of the year’s planting. July 25 is the traditional day to plant fall turnips, and more radishes, green beans, cucumbers and spinach are in the works. The lettuce seedlings I planted about a week ago appear to be taking, and I’ll plant more before the summer is over. Because of succession planting, the salad days, where we can have fresh salads with dinner, may extend the whole summer. Here’s hoping.

When the morning garden work was finished, I cleaned up and drove to Lake Macbride State Park to sit on a bench and write. On an impulse, I stopped by a friend’s home where he was returning from a neighbor’s home with a bucket of just-picked Lodi apples. Lodi is one of the earliest producing cultivars, and the fruit is used in baking, applesauce and cider making. He offered and I took four to make a dessert. We chatted for a while, and then made arrangements to go foraging for black raspberries after supper.

Black Raspberries
Black Raspberries

With the sun heading for the horizon, we met up and drove a few miles to a mutual friend’s acreage. We spent about 90 minutes trolling the wood line, where all kinds of produce was evident. Wild plums, hickory nuts, blackberries not ripe yet, and plenty of ripe black raspberries. We filled two gallon jugs and split the proceeds.

We toured the property owner’s garden and the apricots were ripe, falling from the tree. Like many gardens in the area, this year it is doing well.

On the drive home, we talked about the Michigan cherries due in at a local orchard on Saturday. I plan to stop by and participate in the summer cycle of fresh produce and the social life surrounding it. Not sure which I like better, and both seem inextricably intertwined.

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Writing

Toward a Local Food System

Lake Macbride
Lake Macbride

LAKE MACBRIDE— Writing about gardening, farm work, fermentation, soup-making, canning and cooking is personally satisfying, but what is the connection to our broader society? Why does one person’s journey in life with friends and family matter in the broader scope of things? With a global population of more than 7 billion, and expected to hit more than 9 billion by mid-century, life on earth is changing in ways that test the limits of our ability to comprehend. Will the lives of individuals matter as Earth reaches its tipping point, pushing the envelope of its geophysical limits?

American society, founded in part on the cultural resonance of eighteenth century agrarian individualism, promotes the moral worth of an individual. Independence, self-reliance, freedom and the ability to work toward self-realization are core values of our society. The idea that we can own a plot of land, grow some of our own food and prepare it in ways steeped in process, learning and tradition, yet how we want, is as American as the apple crisp I make from my apple trees. What is often forgotten is that individual lives occur in the context of a society that was founded during the Age of Enlightenment, and that society is coming apart at the seams.

If romantic concern for the good old days is what drives people to work toward a local food system, the idea is bound to be abandoned. In Iowa, we created the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University. The center has conducted hundreds of grant studies and reported on them with an eye toward sustainable agricultural practices. The Leopold Center is key to understanding our food system and providing reasons and process to create and strengthen community-based food systems. It is uncertain their work will take, despite the fact that locally grown food produced with sustainable practices is highly cost competitive with the products of the industrial food supply chain.

What makes a local food system possible is not the development of practices and high level theory, but the support behavior change receives in society. Behavior that congealed during the post World War II economic boom that included development of our industrial food supply chain. With population growth, society requires an organized mechanism to produce, preserve and distribute food to a growing population. In that sense, the industrial food supply chain is as necessary to a local food system as are the practices developed by the Leopold Center. To choose between them is a false choice.

Based on my experience with local farmers who use sustainable practices, there is tremendous capacity for improvements in efficiency, fuel use, water management, labor practices and mechanization that are untapped because of capital constraints. What the local food system may need most is an infusion of capital to create business incubation centers, sustainable water management systems, efficient farm to market systems, and most importantly, a sustainable source of labor that pays a living wage. The industrial food supply chain, because of its strong capitalization, has essentially blocked out competition from sustainable local growers who struggle to pay bills each month.

The question comes down to what individuals do in society with others, and there is no template for it. Stories about dealing with excess zucchini, kohlrabi and leafy green vegetables serve as examples of how to live with the challenges of a local food system. My garden won’t grow everything we need to provide all of our own food, so we leverage outside entities. Whether it is electricity to run the stove, cheese and milk from dairies, veggie burgers from Morningstar Farms®, or cooking oil from California, Italy and Iowa, how and why we leverage these entities and others matters a lot to a local food system.

That’s why I write about local food systems, as an example in which I hope others find value. If we’re lucky, and with collective action, tenuous local food systems will be strengthened as we work toward sustainability in a turbulent world.

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Guest Editor

Blog for Iowa

LAKE MACBRIDE— Trish Nelson, editor of Blog for Iowa, will be taking a summer break and I’ll be pinch hitting as weekday editor from July 15 until Sept. 2. I’m looking forward to regular posting on the Online Information Resource for Iowa’s Progressive Community.

The blog originated in the wake of the Howard Dean for President campaign when John Kerry won the Iowa Caucuses in 2004 and Dean dropped out of the race. Dr. Alta Price, a pathologist from Davenport, helped lead Democracy for Iowa, and decided to publish Blog for Iowa, a role she continues to play today. The first post is here, although what may be most relevant from it today is this statement, “we also seek to make Democracy for Iowa a place where all progressives and moderates are welcome, whether they consider themselves Democrats or not.” More than 5,000 posts later, Blog for Iowa continues to present a progressive viewpoint and maintain a friendly relationship with Democracy for America, the organizational successor to Dean for America.

When I write original content for Blog for Iowa, it will be cross posted on this site a day later. Among the topics will be the challenges of temporary workers in Iowa; implications for Iowa of the immigration legislation working through the U.S. Congress; Iowa’s role in mitigating and adapting to climate change (not the same thing); and occasional posts on energy policy, local food system issues, and peace and justice activities in the state.

I hope you’ll check in at Blog for Iowa from time to time, and continue to read my original content on On Our Own. It should make a great end to an already fine summer of 2013.