Tag: homelife

Categories
Writing

Shared Culture by the Lake

Making apple cider vinegar.

When we moved to Big Grove Township we had expectations about building a life here. These expectations spoke to our shared culture.

We built a new home, settled into the public school community and began getting to know people as I worked a career that would eventually take me to a job in Eldridge, Iowa where I managed a dedicated fleet operation for a large steel service company. At the time I thought the 55-minute drive was a reasonable commute.

While there, in a staff meeting, news of the planes hitting the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and crashing in a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania began to emerge. I was scheduled to fly to Philadelphia that morning but the flight would be delayed. That day became part of an American cultural heritage.

The events of Sept. 11, 2001 were an opportunity for the country to pull together, to unite in shared values. It was squandered by our national leaders who used the terrorist attacks as sufficient reason to invade Iraq. Our disdain for the national culture has increased since then.

Participating in a national culture is made worse by growing income and wealth inequality. If comparisons of modern capitalism with the Gilded Age and the rise of Rockefeller, Morgan, Vanderbilt, Carnegie and others is apples to oranges, Republican leadership of the U.S. government is systematically undoing every constraint on wealth and business implemented since the 1890 Sherman Antitrust Act. This is intentional, and under a government subject to the unlimited financial contributions of businesses. In part, we can thank the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Citizens United v. FEC for unleashing the power of the wealthy in our governance.

Not only do we view the rise of the wealthy into power over our lives with disdain, we spend more time thinking about it because of new media available to us 24/7. We tend to forget our local culture, the culture we share with family, friends and neighbors — things that are shared, yet personal to us.

Mom’s funeral on Monday started an immersion into cultures I forgot existed. Greeting people from every part of Mom’s life at the visitation taxed my ability to remember. I don’t believe I come up short. At the Knights of Columbus Hall after interment I sat with three of my cousins and talked about things I’d forgotten existed. Aunt Wini’s wringer washing machine, Orsinger’s ice cream, Uncle Vince’s photography culture, Chicago steel mill culture, and more. I was able to keep up even though it has been years since I’d seen any of them. I could keep up because it is our shared culture.

Yesterday I took the crate of apples from the summer trees in our backyard and made a gallon of apple cider vinegar. By this morning the brewers yeast was working. After skimming the scum, I put the two half gallon jars on the pantry shelf to ferment. I got the mother of vinegar from a neighbor. His family had been making vinegar with it since the 19th century. The distribution of our vinegar is in a short radius with most of it used in our kitchen. I’d be willing to bet I’m one of a very small number of people fermenting vinegar in our township.

The point is we have shared cultures and the only way they exist, now and into the future, is by participating in them. The sad occasion of Mom’s passing was made better by the celebration of her life by the living. Our cuisine is made better by making our own vinegar for pickles and salad dressings. Eventually our national culture will regain its value but we are not there yet.

We chose this township based on the logistics of living. To make it meaningful we’ve had to participate in local cultures. As bad as the national culture is now, we can’t stop participating because so much is at stake. What happens near the lake ripples throughout society. If enough people engage, that could be life-changing for us, and for us all.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Cooking in Transition

Go-to Summer Meal – Sliced tomato, toasted whole grain bread, basil pesto , salt and pepper.

Our family cuisine is in transition. I’m hopeful for positive new menu items as summer turns to fall.

My spring diagnosis of high blood sugar brought changes. Through behavior modification I’ve been able to reduce key indicators and hope to continue to do so until the physician takes back his diagnosis of diabetes. At the interim check on Aug. 19, I was well on my way — solely by cutting the quantity of carbohydrates and exercising more.

Most nights it’s easy to get a meal ready for dinner. Our repertory includes easy and complex dishes which satisfy if done right. I prepare dinner for both of us four or five nights a week and we are on our own for breakfast, lunch and snacks. It works.

The cuisine we developed in Big Grove focused on techniques to use readily available ingredients to make repeatable dishes. We regularly eat pasta, pizza, macaroni and cheese, bread, chili, soup, casseroles, toppings with rice, and manufactured non-meat burger patties. Fresh and frozen vegetables are basic. Fruit is seasonal and desserts infrequently made or purchased. To meet a carbohydrate budget, I’ve had to regulate and mostly reduce portion size of these staple dishes. When I make a batch, I use a scale. Dishes last longer with leftovers for the next day or two.

When the garden comes in vegetables dominate the plate. Tomatoes are a favorite and we have fresh with most meals while they last. When lettuce comes in we make big salads for dinner. For the time being, I don’t bake bread very often, eschew meat and meat products, and use only a few manufactured products for their ease and serviceability within the context of our cuisine.

I’ve been cooking since I left home, although some of the dishes I prepared in the 1970s were hardly edible. My main cooking lessons began during a long assignment in South Georgia where I worked long days and crashed in the motel where Food Network was daily relaxation fare. The televised repetition of technique by multiple chefs helped me determine how they would fit in dishes I made. Every cook needs basic lessons in technique.

With the challenge of high blood sugar a new cuisine is in the works. Even if I beat the disease, permanent changes are required to prevent recurrence. Part of our aging in place will include development of a simple process to meet dietary needs in a tasty, efficient matter — focused increasingly on ingredients we produce or source locally.

My go-to recipes are memorized or written in a red spiral-bound notebook I bought on vacation in Stratford, Ontario. My go-to cook books are Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Joy of Cooking by Marion Rombauer Becker, and a couple of others

Part of this means downsizing my collection of a couple hundred cook books. There is a lot of good stuff there, although a lot of repetition as well. Over the years I’ve been enthusiastic about certain chefs — Child and Rombauer Becker, Rick Bayless, Mario Batali, Giada De Laurentiis, Tamar Adler and, of course, my mother and grandmother. I’m hoping to find new inspiration in Anthony Bourdain, José Andrés, Sally Schneider and Nigella Lawson. In any case, the result I envision is a new repertory of about 25 main course recipes that have predictable nutritional value and can be made with mostly local ingredients. I also hope to learn new ways to prepare vegetables.

During the first seven months of 2019 we spent $124 on restaurant meals. I have a gift certificate to a highly acclaimed restaurant I won at a raffle last fall stuck to the refrigerator with no plans to use. Eating at home has been and will continue to be our focus.

Change is frequently unwelcome. In this case change is driven by health concerns about which I feel compelled to act. I expect it to be a good fall and winter sorting this out.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Tomatoes on Everything!

Slicers, plum, paste, cherry and grape tomatoes.

The 2019 tomato harvest has begun.

We have fresh tomatoes with every meal, for snacks, and with everything.

We aren’t sick of them yet and work to preserve some of them is imminent. There’s a lot going on in the kitchen garden this August.

Sweet corn is in. Our local farm has had a spotty year, yet we’ve been able to freeze enough two-cup bags to make it until next year. Last night for dinner we had corn on the cob with sliced tomatoes — a classic summer combination.

First up in tomato preservation is to make a dozen pints of diced. This, combined with a backlog from previous years is enough to run the kitchen. I’ll also make as much tomato sauce as I can. Last year I froze it and that worked well. The freezer is filling up already so I may have to can some of it this year. Last year I froze small tomatoes whole and used them during the year to make sauce. I may try canning them whole to supplement the diced.

Yesterday I picked about two bushels of the first apples. A lot more wait on the trees. Our early apple is sweet and makes a great base for apple cider vinegar. I make a couple of gallons each year and the jars to do so are empty and just need cleaning. Our cupboard remains full of apple butter and apple sauce, so maybe a few jars of each is all I’ll make this year. They are good for out of hand eating as well. I’ll need to find a home for some of them or leave them to wildlife.

I froze enough kale for the year early in the season. What I harvest the rest of the year will be to give away or eat fresh. There is enough vegetable broth for the year, frozen jars of pesto, frozen okra, frozen celery, grated and frozen zucchini,  and the hot peppers are beginning to come in. It’s been a good year so far.

The garden didn’t produce green beans. The plants look healthy and there have been flowers. Almost no beans have been produced.

The variety of red beans planted needs to climb and I thought they were bush beans. There are bean pods forming, so there will be some harvest. Next year they need a fence to climb on, if I plant them again. I planted beans mostly to fix nitrogen in the soil.

It seems like there can never be enough beets. I started some in trays and those fared much better than the ones sown in the ground. Will do more of that next year. For now I have one jar of pickled beets to last the year.

The tomato and apple harvest signal the garden’s impending end. There’s a lot of work to be done, but we enjoy the taste of fresh tomatoes as much as anything we grow.

Categories
Home Life

Trail Walk

Lake Macbride State Park – Aug. 9, 2019

A main feature of the vacant lot we bought in 1993 was its proximity to Lake Macbride State Park.

When we need exercise, or just want to get away from the house, it’s a short walk to the trail that runs five miles from our nearby city to the main park entrance. In August the park is filled with wildflowers, insects and other flora and fauna of living in Iowa. There is as much to observe as there is to escape in quotidian life.

A trail walk can reset our lives each time we venture out.

Two weekends into my seventh season at an apple orchard I continue to enjoy the work and its customer engagement.

A family drove over from Chicago, one stopped on their way back to Rochester, Minn., and regulars return with the micro-seasons within a procession of a hundred apple varieties. Every chance we have to converse is a window into lives where with at least one common interest. It is the beginning of something positive.

A trail walk can get us centered and ready for such engagement.

Categories
Home Life

Lifestyle Changes

Breakfast – Aug. 9, 2019

I took five sessions with a nutritionist and wellness professional, once individually and four times as part of a group. I email her questions and she quickly emails answers back.

Based mostly on blood test results, the clinic diagnosed me with Type II diabetes in May and like many, I immediately went into denial.

Listening to the professional — a person with lots of letters following her name on the business card she handed me — I’ve been able to lose 10 percent of body weight, exercise more, and feel better. Monday is a reality check as I have blood drawn for another test and a meeting with my care-giving team the following week.

Whether my diabetes can be controlled through lifestyle changes is an open question, the answer to which is I hope to avoid diabetes’s advancement and physiological deterioration. By finding it early, the diagnosis may be beaten back. Included in this sentiment is a bit of lingering denial that I have it, but I am less worried about that than other things.

When my then septuagenarian grandmother was diagnosed with diabetes I was in the U.S. Army, stationed in Mainz, Germany. One day without warning I received a large box from her with all of the instant pudding and gelatin desserts from her cupboard. She accumulated a trove of these small boxes during her food stamps shopping trips and felt she could no longer eat it and I could. Cookery was not my specialty then. I made and ate some of it, favoring the pudding. I don’t remember how much. I am about ten years younger than she was when she had her diagnosis.

The physician’s assistant made a short list of things I should do. I followed them as best I was able: a diabetes screening from an ophthalmologist, the nutrition classes, more exercise, and regular checkups. I avoided taking regular self-administered blood tests and medication, except for a daily low-dose aspirin. Based on the nutritionist’s recommendation, I started taking vitamin B-12, which seems to have improved my sleep. As a mostly ovo-lacto vegetarian I probably get enough B-12, but the supplement is inexpensive and the downside of taking it minimal. The nutritionist taught us about the USP label for dietary supplements and what it means.

The focus of counseling has been to count carbs and establish a carbohydrate budget for each meal, snacks, and for each day. Enjoy food more, including things culturally favored, but stay within the budget. That means one ear of sweet corn, two ounces of pasta, smaller portions of rice and noodles for meals. Nearly complete avoidance of simple sugars is recommended. When one of the group asked about something else — BMI, protein, weight loss or whatever — she steadfastly returned to the need to control glucose when diagnosed with diabetes. She acknowledged there were other weight and nutrition aspects to life, but we were there to learn about how to eat with our diagnosis. I’m trying to own “my diagnosis” but am not there yet.

I’m modifying my behavior although I could relapse at any moment. It hasn’t been easy. It may continue to be not-easy. As a gardener I have access to fresh vegetables that can fill my plate as in the photo of Friday morning’s breakfast. When I returned to work at the orchard, I told my supervisor I had to refrain from eating almost everything we make with the exception of apples. What will I do when winter comes? Near yesterday’s anniversary of the atomic bombing of Nagasaki, I’m thinking if it’s a nuclear winter I may not have to worry about it. However, using that as an excuse for denial of my diabetes diagnosis is pretty lame.

I’m pretty sure this won’t be the last impactful lifestyle change I have to make as I age. Big picture? I’m okay with that. It’s better than the alternative.

Categories
Home Life

Sunday Drive for Ice Cream

Lake Macbride, July 8, 2019.

Sunday afternoon I was getting cabin fever so I drove to Ely, bought gasoline, played Powerball, and bought a pint of mint chocolate chip ice cream.

It is six miles to Dan and Debbie’s Creamery where I shop a couple of times a year. I’d go more often but I keep forgetting they are closed Monday until arriving when the building is locked up. I’m also avoiding sugar and carbohydrates for health reasons or I’d work harder at more frequent visits.

The ice cream was delicious. I debated whether to get a half gallon for $9 or a pint for $5. Economy would have me buying the larger size, but chances are I would have eaten the whole thing in one or two sittings. I managed to split the pint into two dessert-sized servings and fit it into my daily carb budget. I have a carb budget.

Wildflower

Sometimes one has to get out of the house.

My imagination let loose as I drove on Ely blacktop through the Atherton Wetland. So much so I didn’t notice whether flooding has receded, or whether people were using the ATV park.

When I reduced my schedule at the home, farm and auto supply store to leverage Social Security and phase into a slowdown, I had no idea how it would impact me. Mostly, I’m becoming more aware of who I am. It has taken time and I am not sure I fully realize what it means. One thing is certain, I’m not who I was.

This July hiatus is a chance to figure part of that out.

Not certain when it happened, my driving social-style is in remission. It may be gone completely. I no longer need to be in charge. I’m happy to follow the lead of others if they are competent. I take time for things I would not have had the patience. I did not see that coming.

Lake Macbride State Park Trail, July 8, 2019.

With a form of financial security through a pension, the press of bills due without funds to pay them is also in remission (Thanks FDR for Social Security). Our consumer debt is going down: we gained almost $12,500 in net worth since my pension payments began and debt servicing picked up. Once the pressure of nose to the grindstone was relieved new possibilities opened up and there is more than financial improvement.

The biggest change is feeling comfortable staying home and working. I let one of my farmer friends know I would not likely be returning next year. At some point I’ll leave the home, farm and auto supply store to spend even more time at home. There is work here in the form of household repairs, reading, writing, gardening, cooking and such, to fill more time than I have left on this blue-green sphere.

In addition to the work, there’s the occasional chance to buy ice cream and become lost in the wetlands on my way home. I’m learning to see where I live again.

Categories
Environment

Trail Walking

Grass

The garden was muddy making it difficult to plant… so I waited.

For exercise I took a walk on the state park trail, 20 minutes out and 20 minutes back… with stops for photos.

Wildflower

Although the pace was slow, I could feel the benefit of the walk. It energized me to install the deer fence around the tomatoes and perform a few garden chores before an afternoon thunder storm.

I picked turnips and sugar snap peas from the garden. The first Japanese beetles have arrived. The six-foot stakes worked well to protect the tomato plot from deer who eat the top shoots if they can get to them. It makes a significant difference in yield. Almost everything looks good.

With season’s end of soil blocking tomorrow comes blank space to fill… or not. I’ll do something but let go of filling every moment with intentional action a while back.

One of the most profound things I studied in art history was horror vacui, or fear of the empty. We looked at photos of Greek vases where every space of the surface had images on it. The human tendency is to fill everything the way a person gets a tattoo or two and ends up with a full sleeve. Fear of the empty. It is more creative and more difficult to leave spaces blank. Letting go the obsession to engage every chance to express ourselves frees us to produce better work.

A gardener gets time to think about things like this… and watch the arrival of Japanese beetles, and vegetables planted with one’s own hands grow in sunlight, and devise unique solutions like my deer fence.

Some days we have to stand back and look at what we’ve built:

Garden Photo June 24, 2019.

Categories
Environment

Hiking the Deer Path

Deer Tracks, June 18, 2019

I walked due east from the garden along the utility easement to access a 25-acre stand of woods at the point where deer enter.

Deer are a constant presence in the neighborhood, especially during apple season, and I try to live in harmony with them by understanding what they will and won’t eat, and by using fences on the garden.

After dining, deer run across the same open space I walked to the wood line.

Based on the condition of the undergrowth, few humans visit the woods except around the edges. The main pathways are those made by deer and the brush is so thick I’m not sure how they get through. In 25 years of living here, there has been little interest in using the woods and I’ve hiked them less than half a dozen times.

Unnamed Creek, June 18, 2019.

I walked a deer path on the west bank of an unnamed creek up hill to the pond created by a now forgotten farmer. It was sweaty work and good exercise. I’ve studied the woods on maps for years and there was never a sense of being lost despite the claustrophobic feeling the thick undergrowth created.

The county planning and zoning commission requires our development to maintain a certain amount of open space so the woods can’t be developed with housing. If our association members had an interest in using the woods more, the deer paths could be upgraded to walking paths and mapped out. There has been little interest so it has become a habitat for wildlife.

If we were to develop the woods as a recreational area, there would be little money for it, so the work would be by volunteers. There would be a lot of work to do. Numerous native species of plants exist there, and identification and preservation seems important. The canopy is relatively thick and consideration should be given to long-term forest health. That might mean thinning some mature trees so younger saplings can grow. There are a lot of fallen branches which could be chipped into mulch to pave pathways. It could turn into a really big project. As busy as everyone is, I’m not sure who would volunteer and I know almost everyone in the association.

Native Fern, June 18, 2019.

Suffice it to spend an hour or so hiking the woods once in a while. It takes effort to forget the manicured lawns and gardens to focus on what is in front of us in the woods. By the time I reached the top of the hill, I had forgotten whatever seemed important when I left the garden to focus on finding my way, and then my way home.

It occurred to me that even though the association owns the woods, that ownership is only loosely so. I mean the woods will continue to develop as it has, enabling brief and specific glimpses into what used to be when Iowa was mostly tallgrass prairie. We are visitors on Earth, and that for a short while. Ownership is a cultural concept unknown to the plants and animals that live in the woods. No one truly owns the woods despite legal documents so indicating.

If I want to understand my relationship with wildlife better, I need to spend more time in those woods. Maybe during another hike in the near future.

Categories
Home Life

Under a Spell

Not that kind of spell

During the last couple of years I periodically went under a spell.

I don’t mean something another human (or animal) cast on me, but a time of uneasy dizziness and disorientation when I wake.

After a discussion with my physician, he said not to worry. Okay…

It happened again this morning and I did this: Remedy 1: go back to bed. Remedy 2: eat breakfast. Remedy 3: go outside and harvest garlic scapes, radishes and sugar snap peas for dinner. Remedy 4: take a nap. Remedy 5: Read about the impact of infectious disease on pre-Columbian societies. Remedy 6: eat a bowl of soup. Remedy 7: find a recipe for garlic scape pesto.

By 2:30 p.m. I was feeling more normal. Normal enough to turn on my desktop and maintain some files, deposit a check from a writing gig, and open up WordPress. Normal for a sixty-something is different from when I was a thirty-something. Once I’m done I may go outside to breathe fresh air again and feel a breeze. That seems the most impactful and I could use the exercise. The garden was too wet from last night’s rain to accomplish much there, even if I felt up to it.

I’m trying to keep my blood sugar level within a reasonable range to prevent type two diabetes and that may have prompted today’s episode. According to the Mayo Clinic, a healthy range of daily carbohydrate intake should be between 225 and 325 grams. My estimated average has been 202 since I began the project May 25, ten percent lower than the bottom of the range. In addition I’ve lost 17 pounds since then. I feel better, at least when I’m not under a spell.

The biggest change has been my stomach growls when it is ready for a meal. That hasn’t happened for a very long time. When I hear the sound now, I get a snack if it’s not meal time, or fix a meal if it is. Being mostly retired is the only way this kind of tracking and growl response can work as there are too many distractions in a regular life.

There are always free snacks in the break room of the home, farm and auto supply store to tempt one to give up tracking carbs to enjoy some sweet or salty snacks or baked goods. A recent study of 5,222 employees across the U.S. found we consume an average of 1,300 additional calories per week made up of food at the office, according to Shape.com. Working only two days a week makes a difference for me as the will power struggle is absent when I’m not working at the retail outlet.

This carb counting process continues until August when I get a new blood test and see my practitioner again. We’ll see what we see. According to my ophthalmologist the blood vessels in my eyes look fine and diabetes is absent. I suspect the spell was due to not eating enough before bedtime. I experienced glycogen burnout only once in my life, during a century bicycle ride, and this isn’t it.

I don’t like losing the whole morning and part of the afternoon. But as I finish this post, I’m feeling back to normal: sustaining a life in a turbulent world.

Categories
Home Life

Last Spring Weekend Telephony

Recent Kale Harvest

I don’t receive a lot of phone calls and am wary when one rings in. The breakout of inbound is something like 60 percent spam and unsolicited telemarketing, 20 percent political calls, and 20 percent humans with whom I need to have a conversation.

The political calls are getting more frequent and I’m picking them up from familiar area codes… for now. I don’t know how they get my number.

The telephone app is one of the least used on my mobile device.

While I lived in Germany, a fellow officer brought his family with him. He couldn’t stand to be away from his spouse who had to stay in touch with close family back in Alabama. The phone bills almost ruined them. I don’t recall how they resolved it, other than she returned to Alabama early, he moved into the BOQ (bachelor officers quarters) and they had to stretch the $11,000 annual officer’s pay a lot further than it was designed to go. I had a telephone from the local German company but rarely used it. It was too expensive  to phone home even though there was a clicker on it that informed me in real time how much I used. The clicker went really fast when I was on line with Mother.

I had two phone calls this week from the Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg campaigns inviting me to events in the county seat. With the remaining garden and yard work I don’t see that I can afford time to attend either. I do have the Warren office opening on my calendar for Thursday after work at the home, farm and auto supply store. For the summer, I’m sticking to political events closer to home because when I make the half-hour trip to the county seat or to Iowa’s second largest city it takes prime time out of a day I should be spending working at home. I’m usually spent afterward, even if the event itself is short.

Not only do I not like using a telephone, I like driving even less.

I plan to leave my mobile device in the kitchen and work outside until it begins to rain. I have voicemail, which I may access when I come indoors, or may not.