Tag: Kitchen Garden

Categories
Home Life

Thistle Removal

First tomatoes of the season.

This year thistles grew near the east side of the house. While planting the garden, I let them grow. Now came the time to remove them and start a brush pile.

After morning reading, writing, and cooking, I took an old sweatshirt from the closet and put it on. Over that I wore coveralls. Socks, garden shoes, a ball cap, and heavy leather gloves completed the ensemble. The idea was to prevent the thistles from puncturing my skin. For the most part that was accomplished. Ensemble is a pretty fancy word for my attire. We don’t do much stylin’ around here.

These jobs seldom take as long as I plan. The idea is to do them well and do them once. While I had the lopper out, I cut back low-hanging branches I’ve been dodging all year while mowing. I cut back a total of five trees. By the time I pile up all the brush, it will be a decent stack. After I add the brush stored in a fallow garden plot, and conditions are good, I’ll burn it. I put the brush pile over the stump of a locust tree, having heard the fire will remove the stump. We shall see.

The first tomatoes ripened. Orange cherry tomatoes as is usually the case. The garden is a bit of a mess yet it is producing like crazy. The refrigerator is at capacity and there is no shortage of ingredients to prepare a meal. This abundance is complicated by the fact my spouse has been helping her sister for three weeks. I’m doing my best to prepare meals without leftovers, although that is hard to do dining alone.

When J.D. Vance was selected as the Republican vice presidential candidate I pulled down my copy of Hillbilly Elegy and read it. It hasn’t been a priority until now. The ivy league lawyer who grew up in poverty has a story to tell, yet, he makes generalizations that don’t ring true. I’ve known more than a few people, mostly family or kin, who are poor and live in Appalachia. To a person, the word hillbilly was never used to describe themselves. From there the book went downhill as having any broader application than his personal life. Vance’s story is engaging, yet it seems written to support his conservative point of view. When I went to Goodreads to declare I finished the book, the software wouldn’t let me rate the book. I got a message that said,

Do you suppose people are dunking on Vance now that he is running for high office?

Each summer I make iced tea a couple of times. I heat up the water and brew three black tea bags in a teapot purchased for our child’s long ago school project. I buy the cheapest black tea available and it serves. I drink it over ice, no sugar. It is one of the pleasures of summer. On a Saturday afternoon, there is little else more satisfying to a septuagenarian pensioner.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

When Dinner Is Obvious

Fresh lettuce from the garden.

I harvested the rest of the first round of lettuce before it bolted. The last few years, I’ve been growing lettuce under row cover and it has fewer bugs and better growth than when I exposed it directly to the elements. A gardener does what works and this does.

That afternoon I separated leaves and cleaned them in the sink. I lay them out on a large bath towel to dry before putting them away. As the afternoon progressed, it became obvious some of the lettuce should be part of dinner in the form of a big salad. So that is what we did.

Lettuce forms the base, and whatever vegetables and other items are available goes in. For protein we usually use beans, or in this case, we had leftover baked tofu. The mix of textures and flavors is hard to beat for a summer supper. We eat only lettuce that I’ve grown, when it is in season. The rest of the year we do without. There aren’t many dinners that are obvious yet this is one of them.

Categories
Living in Society

For Want of an Ocean

Field Corn at the End of the Street

A characteristic of the state where I live is there is no ocean. That may be the dominant feature of the Hawkeye State. Sure, we have an immense drainage system that leads to the Gulf of Mexico, where we send farmland soil and chemicals at an astounding and deleterious rate. Want of an ocean changes how we grow up, learn, and live.

I grew up in a city near the Mississippi River with a population of 75,000 at the time of my birth. The Grant Wood farm scapes of note were nothing to me in my first two decades. Life consisted of family, church, school studies, commerce, and learning how to work. Farming, like that in Iowa, had little to do with it.

My great aunt Marie lived with her family on a local farm. I remember visiting them a couple of times for large family gatherings. It was a form of exoticism that made Aunt Marie approachable and harked back to when she was born on a Minnesota farm with her brother and many sisters. Farming as I knew it was a form of nostalgia. Aunt Marie was able to attend the wedding reception Mother hosted for us at her home, along with a couple of her sisters. It seemed at the time just something people did in a city.

The connection of the Mississippi River with the ocean was understood. In my early years I spend time by the river bank. I looked past the refuse of crumpled paper cups, abandoned fishing tackle, spent condoms, and such scattered on the shoreline. I looked across the one mile of water toward Rock Island. While Father’s family emigrated from Florida to Rock Island after World War II, that city seemed exotic, not unlike the way Aunt Marie’s farm did. I preferred the city where I was raised.

We took a childhood family trip to Florida and swam in the ocean. I tasted the water to see if it truly was salty and found it was. The ocean was an exotic place of its own. A place for special trips and limited, controlled experiences. This exoticism prevented understanding of much that was written about living near the ocean. It was as if a whole set of literary metaphors had been removed from the intellectual environment and was inaccessible to me. It made some verse and stories incomprehensible and there seemed to be no good alternative.

With high school friends I visited Assateague Island in the Atlantic Ocean. We were visiting classmates at Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. and wanted to escape the city. It wasn’t the city. I don’t know what it represented other than youthful ambition to connect with nature. Most of the memories I brought home from that trip have nothing to do with the ocean.

We live in Big Grove Township where most of the big groves of trees were cut down and made into lumber. From the time Black Hawk ceded land after the Black Hawk War, settlers ripped up the prairie for farmland at a rapid pace. Today there is very little public land in Iowa and comparatively few state parks. There is almost no remaining prairie, just bits and pieces here and there. Instead we have fence row to fence row corn and soybeans throughout the state. People refer to Iowa fields as an ocean of corn, yet the description falls flat when compared to an actual ocean. Instead, we are a sleepy place having nothing to do with any ocean. We are the worse for want of a nearby ocean.

We adjust to other metaphors while lacking an ocean. The trap has been to consider industrial farm scapes as something valuable, some kind of alternative. They don’t reflect who we are as a people. They reflect the wealth of land owners. In the long run of a life, who indeed cares about that?

John Haines poem, “Whatever is here is native” is pinned on a bulletin board in the garage. Haines found inspiration in the peaks of the Alaskan range he could see from the cabin he built himself, in the butterfly he held in his hands, in the moose he shot and butchered. He told of stones waiting for God to remember their names, according to his obituary. Such may be our life for want of an ocean. We must accept what is here as who we are.

Categories
Writing

Weekly Journal 2024-06-16

Organizing stakes to fence the tomato patch.

This week was one of existential errands: meeting a technician at home for washing machine repairs, getting the automobile oil changed, a planning meeting for our upcoming high school class reunion, grocery shopping at the wholesale club, and chauffeuring my spouse to an appointment. It is the stuff that keeps our operation going.

I spent time in the garden to finish the tomato patch. There are squash and cucumber blossoms in rows I planted. What I managed to plant seems to be taking as expected. Nothing very exciting happened this week in the garden or elsewhere in my life.

Working with My Cohort

Two meetings remain for the planning committee of our 50th-ish high school class reunion. The six people on our regular video call are no-malarkey do-gooders committed to bringing this thing in on time and on budget. I’ve known them all since high school which ended in 1970. Our long, if intermittent acquaintance makes working together easy and enjoyable. Among the topics I raised:

  • Polish fathers of the bride counting dinner plates and instructing reception attendees to use the same plate for seconds.
  • The craziness of feeding 78 billion farm animals but not being able to feed 7.8 billion humans.
  • Explaining how vegetarians seek to be identified as people versus adherents to a cult.
  • Part of aging in America is sorting these things out. Then you just have to tell someone!

The reunion happens in a month.

Gardening Reached Apogee

This year I couldn’t get caught up with the garden. A few days remain before summer begins, and at least two plots will lie fallow this year. That’s not all bad, yet I envision a future with a much smaller garden. It’s complicated, yet it’s not. We simply don’t eat as much food as I can grow. I made a very large plot by combining two of the older plots. It has been impossible to keep critters who enjoy the garden as much as I do out of that growing space.

Once I clear out the greenhouse, I will prepare the two plots to lie fallow the rest of this year. Last year’s garden is likely as good as it gets and an apogee in the arc of a gardener’s life.

Quick Bean Soup

I made a “quick bean” soup for dinner of all organic ingredients. That means I used canned beans — a prepared 3-bean mix plus canellini — medium dice of carrot, celery and Vidalia onion, bay leaf, Herbes de Provence, salt, and sliced pac choi, stem and all. For liquid I used home made vegetable broth. When the vegetables were tender, I blitzed about a third with a stick blender, stirred, and there was supper.

I’ve been feeling kind of punk the last few days. My blood pressure has been elevated above normal and I’m having trouble sleeping. I spent much of Saturday in bed. I’m reading Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario which is likely contributing to difficulties in sleeping. I have been free of headaches, chest pain and difficulty breathing, so I’ll ride it out for a few more days and hope for the best. If I didn’t take my blood pressure at home, I may not have noticed anything different. Information can be both a blessing and a curse. (Update: My blood pressure returned to normal range by Monday morning. The spell passed).

And that was my week. Cheers!

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Pac Choi Ramen

Pac Choi Ramen with tofu and spring onions.

The building blocks of our kitchen came into play at dinner time Monday. Canned home made vegetable broth, tofu from Iowa City, brown rice flour ramen and white miso paste from China, organic carrots from California, and spring onions, garlic, and pac choi from the garden. This is the American vegetarian kitchen garden at work.

It’s not really local food, is it? The ramen was suitable for vegans, and the flavor of the pac choi really came through. No wheat in this dish, and it is the first time in a while I used tofu for something other than stir fry. It is unlikely 20-year-old me would have prepared something like this.

I reserved some of the pac choi leaves, yet in retrospect should have added them all. The dish didn’t suffer from lack of greens yet there is no sense being frugal about leafy green vegetables. The world is full of them and in general Americans don’t eat enough of them.

There is no recipe for this dish. It was a product of that moment, my experience as a cook, and available ingredients. Mainly, I had to do something with the abundance of pac choi from the garden. We should cook like this more often.

Cooking carrots first in my saucier.

The ramen was satisfying on multiple levels.

This was the first use of my new saucier, and I was happy cooking with it. At three quarts it is of a size to make dinner for four. I hope there will be many more uses of the pan.

It is easy to get behind using leafy green vegetables. The garden produces so many, and certain ones, like pac choi, are best used fresh. One more giant pac choi in the refrigerator then on to the smaller ones.

I’ve written about making vegetable broth before. Baked tofu has become our standard preparation. What set this dish apart was flavoring. Salt and white miso, highlighted the flavor of the pac choi. Likewise, there was enough garlic, but not so much to be overpowering. Making food that tastes good can be done. It is not as simple as it may seem.

Would I make this dish again. Probably something like it in the never ending meal that comes from a kitchen garden.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Goal Posts Moved in 2024

Pac choi under a covered row.

Instead of getting the garden in by Memorial Day, I moved the date to June 20 when summer begins. I have five plots laid out, plan to skip one this year, and may skip part or all of another. Large amounts of rain kept me out of the spring garden. The shelves in the greenhouse are slowly emptying, and soon initial planting will be finished.

We’ve been cleaning to make room for technicians to repair our washing machine. It generated a code which I couldn’t resolve, so I made an appointment. The service company telephoned and said I should contact Maytag about covering the repair under warranty. I did and they will. The code first appeared at almost exactly at the end of the initial warranty period.

It is surprising how much a modern household depends upon getting laundry done. I can’t imagine what it would be like to return to laundromats. The one in our small city closed years ago, so it would be a big to-do of traveling to the county seat or further to launder clothes. There is only so much time in a life. The less spent on laundry the better.

I opened the covered row and an abundance of pac choi, lettuce, and basil was ready. I brought the haul indoors, cleaned it, and put it away in the refrigerator. I made a sandwich with a generous amount of fresh lettuce for lunch. I don’t often buy lettuce at the grocer, so when I have it in the garden, I make the most of it.

There will be pac choi ramen. In January I bought a 24-pack of Maruchan ramen. When I make it, I throw out the flavor packet that comes with it and make my own broth. This time, I’ll make a vegetable broth using white miso, then saute onions, garlic and pac choi, mix them together, and cook the noodles in the resulting liquid. The abundance of fresh leafy greens is wonderful.

Also in the kitchen garden mix is pasta sauce using last year’s tomato sauce, onions, fresh basil and garlic. This first of the season sauce is also a chance to try out my new saucier. Basil doesn’t keep long, so by the time this posts, I may already have made it.

There is one head of romaine lettuce which I’ll roughly chop for a salad. Not sure what to do for dressing, but it will inevitably use extra virgin olive oil and home made apple cider vinegar. I can’t wait.

While I had to move the goal posts for finishing planting the garden, the harvest already begins. These are the good days for which we live during the long winter. It’s life, as good as it gets.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Getting a Saucier

Made In three-quart, stainless steel saucier. Photo credit – Made In website.

I came into some extra money from my writing and ordered a Made In, five-ply stainless steel clad, three quart saucier. I saw the device on Olivia Tiedemann’s Instagram channel where she recommended it for sauces, grain cooking, one-pot dishes, and more. It is her go-to pan, she said. Tiedemann is a private chef with more than 4 million Instagram followers. She makes short cooking videos, curses a lot, and flips the bird at the camera at least once during each episode. The saucier sold out on the Made In website shortly after I ordered mine.

I am very excited to be receiving this saucier, tracking the shipment a couple times a day. As I type, it is at a warehouse in Iowa City awaiting delivery, presumably today.

Buying a saucier is a poor man’s extravagance. Did I need a special pan to make sauces? I was getting along just fine. Do I want to be like Tiedemann? Maybe, except she is definitely oriented toward using all the meat and dairy products, unlike what goes on in our household. Once one eliminates meat, fish, dairy, butter, eggs and the like from meal preparation, cooking becomes something else. I’m hoping the saucier will help me down a path of developing sauces and dishes for our hybrid vegetarian-vegan cuisine. If I had real money, I’d dine at a favorite restaurant multiple times a week. I don’t, therefore, saucier.

Will the saucier change my life? I hope so. I hope to be a better cook in my kitchen garden. Imagination and a special pan may be the way to distinguish what I do here. The anticipatory excitement is well worth the money spent on the saucier.

Categories
Writing

Hummingbird Dreams

Mottled shadows of grasses against a piece of cloth.

I hung a piece of cloth over the lower level windows across from my writing table. As the sun rises, shadows dance on it: insects, long blades of grass, and lately, a hummingbird suspended in air as they are while searching for food. It feels I’m living in Plato’s allegory of the cave and I’m fine with that. It is a reminder the world in which we live is not a lie. I’m not chained in place. I’m free to go outdoors, see the hummingbird, and not be blinded by the sun.

I bought mini-blinds to put on that window, like the others in the lower level of the house, yet am glad I didn’t install them. There is a constant show on the window covering for dreaming. We humans need dreams.

The garden ground is too wet to work this morning. It seems unlikely to dry by noon. If the lawn dries sufficiently I’ll mow. There is plenty of indoors work to do if it doesn’t.

Our go-to, easy-to-prepare dinner is tacos. I made them last night, based on the recipe I wrote a few years ago. Instead of yellow onions, I used spring onions. Instead of garlic, I used garlic scapes. Instead of frozen kale, I used a mixture of fresh Pac Choi and collards from the garden. Such seasonal variations make tacos one of our favorite meals. They always taste a little different, in this case, fresher than normal. We prepare the dish often.

This week, Major League Baseball added the Negro League statistics to the record book. It changed some of the rankings. Josh Gibson beat Ty Cobb in highest career batting record. Gibson beat Babe Ruth, Ted Williams and Hugh Duffy in other categories as well. When I was a kid I didn’t have a baseball card of Josh Gibson and was not aware the Negro League existed. For me, Babe Ruth was it. Until this year, we found he wasn’t. Here’s a link to the Washington Post story.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Local Food Reconsidered

First big kale harvest, Spring 2020

I began following Buffalo Ridge Orchard in Central City this year. In part, that means I am divorcing myself from a local farm where I worked for seven seasons. In truth, Wilson’s Orchard and Farm hired one of the best chefs available to prepare dishes made from local foods and gave him his own venue. They appear to have successfully transitioned from a mostly apple crop to add flowers, strawberries, and other common, locally sustainable produce. They went big into hard apple cider, long the mainstay and chief reason pioneers grew apple orchards on their farms. They continue to experiment and expand. What’s not to be happy about?

I seek a different relationship with local food. I will continue to buy select varieties of apples from Wilson’s as well as in-season sweet apple cider. As a consumer, that has been most of what I bought there through the years. I am more interested in a collaborative approach, like the one on display at Saturday’s pop-up market at Buffalo Ridge Orchard.

Early Saturday morning I received an email notification of the pop-up market that day. Products of nine different farms were available. I know three of those farms very well. While I didn’t make it over for the sale, partly because our pantry is already full of spring goods, it is more attractive than pursuing a basket of strawberries on a large, crowded operation when strawberries are in season.

I grow a large garden and we eat fresh from it from March to November. When I seek outside produce, it’s because I’m not having a good year or choose not to grow certain items. For example, my aging and soon to be goner Red Delicious apple tree produces every other year and I need to source apples somewhere every year. The ones at the grocer are usually not the best quality. Too, I can’t imaging buying someone else’s garlic. I have had a steady, year-around crop since I began planting it ten or so years ago. A certain level of independence is assumed when a person operates a kitchen garden.

Another consideration is our mostly vegetarian household cuisine. We don’t eat meat or consume much dairy in the form of fluid milk, butter and eggs. For the most part, I buy dairy at the wholesale club because their buying power makes it much cheaper than local. Expense does matter, especially with commodities. Maybe I should give up dairy. That’s a conversation for another post.

One day I plan to return to the Iowa City or Cedar Rapids farmers market. I don’t need to shop there, yet I enjoyed the atmosphere when I did and brought home items we used. For years I bartered for a Community Supported Agriculture share at a local farm, although when I increased the size of my garden, the need for that produce diminished. A kitchen garden has been a natural evolution toward independence from the very local growers who inspired me. Some farmers told me such independence is a positive thing, rather than an infringement on their business.

Over the years this blog has posted a number of opinions about local food. What I learned was the idea of local food is constantly evolving. I continue to purchase groceries from a large, retail establishment on a weekly basis. That doesn’t make me any less interested in available local foods. Am I a purist? No, I am not. Nor need I be. It is challenging enough to keep track of what local food is available and where. I leverage it when it makes sense.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

The Plot Continues

Garlic crop on May 18, 2024

Plot #3 needs another row of non cruciferous vegetables yet I don’t know what that is for the moment. While considering it, I plan to move over to Plot #1 and install the covered row next to the garlic. The garlic is standing more than 18 inches tall so it looks to be a great crop. I mowed that strip yesterday, so the garlic really stands out.

Ambient temperatures are expected to reach toward 90 degrees Fahrenheit this afternoon, so as soon as the sun rises, I’ll be back outdoors, taking advantage of early morning coolness. It is already 60 degrees at 5 a.m.

The tomatoes are toughening up in the greenhouse and should soon be ready to plant. I have a batch of tomato seeds I planted late to diversify the crop. They need to move from the starter tray into soil blocks today. There are also bell peppers needing transfer to blocks. After that, the indoors starting operation slows considerably.

I noticed more over wintering collards in one of the patches and today I expect to harvest them. There has been no shortage of leafy green vegetables this spring.

Working a five-hour shift on Friday wore me out. Partly it was ambient temperatures rising into the low eighties. Partly is was still an early foray into the garden when I am not conditioned to it. It’s going to be hot again today as the plot continues.