I woke early and have been listening to boomers roll across the area. There is a severe thunderstorm watch according to the National Weather Service. Rain is expected to continue until around 10 a.m. It will be another good morning to spend in the kitchen.
There has been so much rain I haven’t unrolled the hose to water the garden for two weeks. That is a good thing on several levels. All the greenery has taken off, including plants I put in the ground and weeds. Indeterminate tomato vines are reaching more than eight feet long. When the rain slows down, I need to get under them and see if any tomatoes are ready. I planted the main rows four feet apart, yet the vines in all the rows reach up and touch each other. We like rain.
Thunderstorms are a characteristic of Iowa summer.
While picking green beans on Monday it was so hot and humid I pushed my physical limits. I was drenched in sweat and felt dizzy a couple of times, yet worked to finish picking mature beans. Sorting and cleaning them was a chore yet I got that done in the kitchen before dinner. We did not eat green beans for dinner, having broccoli from the garden instead.
Green bean harvest on July 28, 2025.
Lately I’ve been thinking about my decision to retire during the coronavirus pandemic. The combination of the lock down, becoming eligible for full retirement on Social Security, and the health risks of working in a retail environment brought the decision together. I’m having second thoughts about being retired. It was evident before, although is clearer today, that if the Congress does not address the shortfall in Social Security in 2032-2034, we will need more income than we have. Changing course to engineer a life that produces more income than our pensions produce is in the near future. That will give me something to think about while I work in the kitchen this morning. In the meanwhile, it is peak Iowa summer and we should enjoy it.
Sunday morning I picked green beans because they were ready. About 20 minutes into the task I was drenched in sweat. With a forecast high of 89 degrees it became clear it would be another indoors day. Once again, I escaped into my two favorite spots in the house: my writing table and the kitchen.
After finishing chores I sat at the desktop and finished my post for yesterday. I also exchanged emails with a friend with whom I am doing this event.
We met in person on Friday and have the idea of talking about why we write books at the end of the time. We are curious about how attendees get information about complex topics. Do they read books to do so? Should be a good conversation.
I am into the second volume of my autobiography and she is into her third, so that’s the origin of that. She sent along a quote about why we write from Nairobi Williese Barnes that said, “(we write) to shift the conversation, challenge harmful narratives, and encourage accountability in the ways we support and uplift one another.” I don’t disagree with that sentiment.
She quoted me back from my own writing from posts on this blog:
So we write, partly to clarify our thinking, and partly to satisfy our need to reach out to others and express the value of our lives, one life among the billions of people walking on the planet. Whether anyone reads or understands our writing is not the point, although we hope they do.
Why am I writing here, in public? Part of it is self-expression, a basic human need. Part is using language to understand complex social behavior. …. Defining a broader moral lesson is the challenge as the memoir progresses.
There are few finer things on this jumping green sphere than writing about writing, especially with a friend.
I made it to the kitchen at about noon and endeavored to get busy. I started with doing the dishes. More accurately, I started with the laundry. On the last Sunday of each month I launder my bed sheets and catch up on other laundry that accumulated. This took a bit of time out of kitchen work as I did five loads. I managed to make what I call “minced salad.” That is summer vegetables suitable for eating raw diced into one eighth inch cubes and mixed together with extra virgin olive oil and apple cider vinegar. I season with salt yet the seasoning possibilities are endless. It came out well.
The garden is about finished with zucchini. I modified my zucchini bread recipe, substituting applesauce for the oil, and by wringing the water out of the zucchini with a towel. It is to set for 2-3 hours before cutting so I haven’t tasted it. It appears to have had the desired effect which was to decrease the moisture in the loaf and reduce cooking time. It should be good.
Zucchini bread baked on July 27, 2025.
The benefit of these activities is I can shut out the rest of the world and focus on our family. We need more time doing that. It is a way to go on living in turbulent times.
Zestar! apples in the sink before making applesauce.
Saturday cooking is one of the great pleasures of life. I use it to set aside worries and concentrate on preserving and making food for our family with an emphasis on taste and using the garden abundance. Rain was forecast all morning so I spent Saturday in the kitchen. This post is a slice of that life.
The day began with breakfast of cottage cheese and some cherry juice left from the recent visit of our child. Next I did the dishes to make space to get everything clean before making a new mess. Then I went through the refrigerator, which is packed to the doors. I pulled out everything that could go into a new batch of vegetable broth and laid the items on the counter. I also went through the cucumber drawer to make sure decaying vegetables were either used up or composted.
Cucumbers take the most management because there are so many of them when they come in and their shelf life is short. I noted the quart jar of pickles was almost gone, so I reused the brine, fortifying it with some new vinegar and seasonings, and refilled the jar. There are already three or four quarts of refrigerator dill pickles tucked away in the back but we have to make them while cucumbers are in season.
While cleaning the fridge, I made a cut vegetable tray for snacking. Celery, zucchini, cucumber, and bell peppers cut and ready to eat if I need a break from the action. This is for sharing, yet sometimes I am the only one who eats this convenience food. I typically like some kind of salad dressing with them.
Vegetable broth is an easy use of vegetables nearing the end of their life. I make it with standard mirepoix, bay leaves, and the oldest bag or two of leafy green vegetables from the freezer. This day, I used up a couple of bags of last year’s celery leaves to make way for new. One of the last gifts Mother gave me was a large All-Clad multipurpose stainless steel stock pot. If I’m working a full shift in the kitchen, I usually put a pot of broth on and water bath can it. I made six more quarts. At 42 quart jars in the pantry, I am good for most of the rest of this year into spring 2026.
This may seem like a lot yet it was preparatory of making apple sauce.
One of the few surviving photographs of our family in Appalachia is of Granny Reed at Stella’s funeral. Reed’s given name was Josephine, yet I only discovered that from searching the U.S. Census a few years ago. She was always called Granny Reed. She is our child’s great, great, great grandmother.
Granny Reed, along with other female family members worked at a canning plant where they put up apples. When I am picking, sorting, peeling and coring home grown apples for use, I inevitably think about those Virginia women. When in 1983 I visited the home places in Virginia, my Uncle Gene talked about apples.
Next, we went to Norton, another of the places Grandma and Grandpa lived. Uncle Gene talked about apples, how Grandma used to work on peeling and coring apples for one of the big companies. At one time, then, there were large orchards. But now, there is only the coal companies. They used to eat fried apples for breakfast. Later Aunt Carrie told us how to make them. Slice apples into wedges, fry in a little water, sprinkled with sugar. (An Iowa Life by Paul Deaton).
Uncle Gene talked at breakneck speed and I tried to get it all down.
Something that goes through everything is the presence of apples. Grandma worked in an apple cannery, had orchards. There is an apple tree on the old home place, Aunt Carrie served fresh applesauce for us, she said a day hasn’t gone by when she hasn’t had apples. Uncle Gene talked a lot about the apples and how he and the boys helped with them. And everywhere we ate them, the apples were good, the trees bearing fruit. The apple trees bearing lots, even the ones abandoned for years. Eat them green, cooked, fried, in applesauce. (An Iowa Life by Paul Deaton).
As Gene said, “That Granny Reed was always a smart one.”
My entry into Zestar! apples had me eating them fresh and making apple sauce. Before now, I had only every made applesauce from Red Delicious and Earliblaze apples. It turned out on Saturday the flavor profile of Zestar! apple applesauce was delicious (no pun intended). I am so glad that tree is now a part of our home orchard.
I was dog tired at the end of my six-hour kitchen shift. It was an inexpensive escape from the internet and everything on it. A time to live in the past with my forebears, if only for a few hours.
In July, we are in the thick of harvest season. There has been adequate rain, and growing conditions are almost ideal. 2025 will be one of my best gardening years ever. Among the benefits of a productive garden is frequent donations to area food pantries.
Zestar! apples July 21, 2025
One measure of abundance is Zestar! apples. It was the first large harvest from a tree I planted a few years ago. The taste is sensational: juicy and tart. They will make great applesauce. This year I decided to can applesauce in pint jars instead of quarts. One main use is as a binding agent in my Iowa vegan cornbread and the pint is more likely to be used up before it goes bad.
Use of apples goes way back on my father’s side of the family. Stories survive of family working in the apple canning plant in Appalachia in the early 20th Century. I am happy to have four varieties of apples growing in our back yard. Calling it my heritage is not wrong. I don’t spray, so they are not perfect. Boy howdy! Do I use them up!
Harvest on July 21, 2025.
When the garden is going gangbusters, the challenge is to use up or preserve as much as possible, as soon as possible. Two of the crates in the photo above have celery in them. Celery gets processed into four different things: I keep “hearts” of celery for cooking fresh, ending up with ten of them this year. The various outer stalks are separated from the leaves. The stalks with some size to them are chopped into small bits and frozen to add to soup. All the very small pieces of stalk and stem are roughly cut, bagged and frozen for use in making vegetable broth. Finally, the leaves are rough chopped, bagged and frozen to add to soup. I use the whole plant. All of this takes a bit of work, yet the flavor makes it worth the effort.
Another big project ahead is using garlic scapes before the garlic harvest. I have a good crop of basil, so I expect I will make garlic scape pesto. I already have plenty of half pint jars of pesto in the freezer, so I don’t need many more. Will see how far along with that I get.
Growing a large garden ties a person to home. There is so much to do in July, if we don’t pace ourselves, we may be tuckered out for the August tomato season. Can’t let that happen.
My intent was not to become a food blogger. Best intentions aside, I have written hundreds of posts about food — growing it, shopping for it, preparing and preserving it. I have a sense of keeping recipes and techniques on these pages, yet most of that information resides within me, or the little red book in which I write frequently used and locally developed recipes. I took the step of defining the term “kitchen garden.” What of all this food bloggery? I don’t know from where the urge to write about food came yet I persist.
When the garden produces eggplant, there is a lot of it. I picked half a dozen small to medium fruit and cut them into one half-inch slices. I diced the scraps into quarter-inch cubes and placed them in a freezer bag for later use. After brushing the slabs with extra virgin olive oil, and seasoning with salt, I baked them at 400 degrees Fahrenheit for 25 minutes, flipping them halfway. From here, I serve on a plate, spoon some pasta sauce to cover, and sprinkle on grated Parmesan cheese. Any leftover slices of eggplant get frozen for a quick, tasty future meal. Eggplants are a lesson in how to use abundance.
Food writing is a creative outlet. The photograph and text are products of a creative life which represents more than survival. We live in a culture that denigrates the different, that seeks to remove social differences the way politicians seek to erase transgender citizens. Food writing is a way to express a life that falls outside social norms. It is a safe harbor to consider how we might live differently. That seems true whether we write about family food traditions or about a simple eggplant supper served from an abundant garden. We need types of expression that assert our uniqueness without fear of repercussions, without persecution. Food writing can be that. Most readers seem unlikely to recognize it as such.
I meant to write about how four Galine Eggplant seedlings produced so much abundance. This post turned into more than that, about affirmation and the freedom to be different. While my brief recipe for an eggplant dish is not unique, this moment, with these words I became as unique as I might ever be. That has value in a society with low tolerance for anything that is different.
It looks to be a bountiful year in our kitchen garden. The refrigerator is jammed. I rearrange the freezer a couple of times each week to fit in more food. I make two or three donations to local community food pantries each week. It’s one of the reasons we garden.
There is a skill in shopping at the full-service grocery store. For the best fruit and vegetables, early Friday morning is when to shop. Between 6 and 7 a.m. on Fridays, there has been a good selection of organic fruit. Taste does matter. Freshness does matter, especially when buying from a large-scale grocer. By being aware of shelf-stocking procedures, one can shop when the best produce is available and in doing so, live better.
I’ve written about the flavor of home-grown celery. There is nothing like it. I harvested three bunches yesterday and processed them for use. It created three cores to be used fresh in cooking, three bags of celery leaves for seasoning soup, a bag of stalks chopped for soup, and a bag of bits and pieces to be used in making vegetable broth. I will use all of this.
Freshly Picked Celery
Cabbage heads are getting big, and the crop looks great. Conditions are right for cruciferous vegetables and the whole plot is doing well. Farao Cabbage is the variety doing the best this year. Cabbage keeps a long time in the refrigerator, yet if there’s no room left, some of it will go to the food pantry.
Cucumbers, squash and zucchini could slow down and I wouldn’t miss them. There has been too much to use. A crate of cucumbers will go to the food pantry this morning.
With abundant rain, everything is growing, including wildflowers in the state park. This has been a summer to remember. We currently are at its peak.
2025 is turning into an alcohol-free year. I didn’t even purchase my normal case of bottled beer for the summer. Some days, I don’t know who I am.
I drove across the lakes to the North Liberty Community Food Pantry and donated the day’s harvest of yellow squash and cucumbers. It was the third food bank donation this week. I like having an outlet when I grow too much of something. It enables me to pick the best produce for the kitchen yet find a home for all of it. Patrons of the food pantry truly need what donors provide.
On the way home I stopped at the convenience store to gamble $2 on the lottery. I noticed the display of many types of shots of liquor between the two cash registers and asked,
"Do you sell a lot of these?" "We do," replied the cashier. "I imagine you sell a lot on Friday nights," I said. "Actually, mornings are the biggest sales. You'd be surprised how many people need a shot to start their work day."
I went to the orchard where I worked eight seasons and bought Michigan cherries. A family member grows them and they are some of the best I have ever tasted. Expensive? Yes. Worth it? Also yes. It is a summer tradition worth continuing as long as I can afford it. In the sales display with the cherries they had bags of Lodi apples. This signifies the apple harvest has begun its long season continuing into late October.
The first crop of Zestar! apples will soon ripen in my garden. I picked one today and while the sugars are beginning to form, they are not yet ripe. It won’t be long, though, maybe a week or two.
The work of planting is mostly finished. From here, the work changes to weeding, harvesting, cooking, and leveraging other growers for what I don’t produce myself. It is all part of the circle of life when you grow food. I feel a part of something bigger than myself on days like this.
Donation to community food pantry on July 7, 2025.
The gutter clogged during a Saturday afternoon rainstorm. I looked at the forecast and rain was expected, on and off, for the next six hours. I decided to get the extension ladder and climb on the roof to clear the blockage so water wouldn’t overflow into the lower level of the house. I waited until the driveway showed signs of drying and went outside. Even though a misty-feeling drizzle hit my face, I persisted. From the time I got the ladder down until I returned it to its rack was less than 15 minutes. At 73 years, I should limit my time on the roof, yet the problem was immediate, the consequences of doing nothing were unacceptable. The situation wants a permanent solution.
I had a fitful night’s sleep the evening of July 4. Community fireworks were scheduled for July 5, so that didn’t keep me awake. News of the administration’s budget reconciliation was likely at the heart of my restlessness. That, with the courts enabling parts of their agenda. It’s as if every good public work I have done since graduating high school is being undone. It’s intentional, so my restlessness is not without reason.
Today there will be a decent harvest for the food pantry. Yellow squash, cucumbers, and leafy green vegetables, for sure. When the sun rises, I’ll take my daily walk on the state park trail and get into the garden. With the rain, the garden is really producing, to the benefit of our household and some who are food insecure.
Rain has consequences, both challenging and positive. A summer rainstorm provides opportunities to improve our lives, if we are open to seeing them.
Fennel, Pac Choi, and kale donated to the local food pantry on June 30, 2025.
I like to have more than one thing to do when I drive the two miles to town. The more I multi-task my trips to the City of Solon, the more value I find in it. It began with gambling.
Almost always, I buy a Powerball ticket. The social aspect of walking into a convenience store and saying to the clerk, “I’d like the usual,” resonates from when I lived in Europe. It is a closely knit relationship even if we don’t know each other except for this recurring transaction. It is something positive in what can be a difficult world.
On Mondays I harvest the garden and split the best-looking produce into separate crates for the food pantry. I delay picking greens until Monday so there is usually a good amount for our kitchen and to share. Yesterday it was Pac Choi, a bulb of fennel with the fronds attached, and two kinds of kale. I enjoy putting together a pleasing display and then pack the car and speak with the receiver until the produce is transferred to the food pantry shelves. Today’s weight was five pounds, which doesn’t seem like much. The value of the transaction is the good it does. My sense is food pantry patrons could use more fresh produce.
I had reserved a book at the library early in the morning. I decided since I was in town, why make a trip later to get it. I walked into the library, found our librarian, and told her I decided to just stop by and pick it up myself rather than go through the reserve process. She was kind enough to find the book on the shelf and process me without delay. Now I won’t run out of reading material over the Independence Day holiday… not that that is a possibility in our house. Having relationships with a local library and the people who work there is the stuff of which society is made.
When I was working for an employer these social interactions pretty well stopped. I don’t know why, but there are better possibilities for a well lived life simply by living one. It can be hard, yet we must learn to deal with the concerns in society and go on living. Part of that means going to town on a Monday morning and spend time with my usuals.
We are at the place in summer where every day some new plant stands out along the state park trail. The flowers are particularly familiar. They provide assurance there is a world outside human endeavor that persists and blooms.
It is another hot Sunday afternoon as I write, with the heat index approaching 100 degrees Fahrenheit. To play it safe, I did outdoors work this morning then headed inside. It never really cooled off overnight and the ambient temperature was in the 80s by 9 a.m. For a change, I got through my digital and physical inboxes and accomplished a few non-garden related tasks.
The news from Washington, D.C. is grim. It looks like the U.S. Senate will pass their version of the reconciliation bill later on Monday. There is no way to describe it other than a theft from the less well off to benefit the wealthiest in their gilded enclaves. The absurd budget cuts being made, combined with running up the national debt, could transform the United States into something unrecognizable.
I am aware nothing is permanent in politics. I am also aware of the 1890s Gilded Age and the comparison with what’s going on today. I don’t see anyone like Theodore Roosevelt coming along with a square deal for all of us. The absence of moral courage among so many is what makes today so grim.
I haven’t given up hope. I continue to do what I can to make the world a better place, beginning with a garden harvest today, some of which will go to the local food pantry. We must be brilliant like the wild bergamot that yesterday made its first appearance of the year on the trail. Reaching for the sky we display our color unabashedly. Belying the many uses to which we can be put once our blooms finish.
It is a hard tonic to swallow that the wealthy are gathering up the produce of our lives. We shall, however, persevere… and return next year.
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