Tag: Kitchen Garden

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Greenhouse is Up!

Greenhouse on May 4, 2025

Over the weekend I assembled the greenhouse, moved trays of seedlings from inside the house, and transplanted tomato starts from channel trays into full-sized blocks. I feel I am way behind on the garden, yet things are moving.

The first day outside is always dicey for the seedlings. It is plenty warm, but the direct sunlight can be strong on them. Lettuce is wilting a bit. I make sure the trays are well watered and cross my fingers, hoping they will recover overnight. I’ll have a better idea how everything went at sunrise this morning after ambient overnight temperatures were in the 40s.

The tray of cruciferous vegetables, kale and collards, is ready to go into the ground. The plot is cleared so I just need to turn it over, fertilize, till the ground, lay down sheets of garden cloth and plant. “Just” is doing a lot of work in this paragraph.

While I enjoy watching seeds grow into vegetables and fruit, I have been less enthusiastic about the garden this year. I plan to cut back by two plots, leaving five. When time allows, the plot by the compost bins will be converted into some kind of storage. In time, I may put up a shed for garden tools. I plan to take better care of the plots that are in production.

I am hoping to get a crop, yet also cut back on the number of varieties. I grow what I can use in the kitchen-garden rather than production of the most produce possible for its own sake. It has me looking at things differently. Any more, I put up tomato sauce and pickles in canning jars and freeze leafy green vegetables to use until the following season. If I have a big garlic or basil crop, I make pesto and freeze pureed garlic and olive oil.

I had a pain in my left hip for the last couple of weeks. Today, I relented and took two ibuprofen after breakfast. It worked. I was able to get through a four-hour shift of loading the greenhouse. I don’t like taking pain medication, but after today’s experience, I might do so again. I find it is a gardener’s friend.

Categories
Writing

Writer’s Weekend

Trail walking on Saturday at dawn.

I got out to the garden on Good Friday. In years past, I would plant potatoes that day as part of remembrance of my grandmother’s gardening folklore. Potatoes are an inexpensive food, readily available at the grocer, year-around: a simple carbohydrate in a life when I need to reduce my number of carbs. I enjoyed having home grown potatoes, yet skipped it in favor of other uses for the home made potato-growing containers.

Most garden work lies ahead. The weather forecast this week seems dicey for outdoors work. Such uncertainty is caused by our unpredictable, changing climate. Garden plants are resilient, however. If I protect against the last frost, chances are good there will be a crop.

I managed to move some brush around on Good Friday.

Celebrating Easter weekend is no longer a thing for me. While I was coming along as a grader, my grandmother was a driving force in celebrating Easter weekend and noting the resurrection. In studying the history of her community of Polish immigrants in Minnesota, I found her desire to don special clothing, attend Mass, and take posed photographs of everyone to note the day has its roots there. They lived an impoverished but good life in the late 19th Century. They also shared a vibrant cultural life surrounding the church. Parts of that cultural heritage found its way through grandmother to me, even if it didn’t stick.

I’ve been working on the part of my autobiography that describes the time our child started school while we lived in Indiana from 1988 until 1993. I kept written journals and re-reading them has been life changing. During the 30+ years since then, I have forgotten a lot of my own history. The current writing includes broader historical perspective I couldn’t get while living a life in real time. The end result is an appreciation for things I did do to help our child be the best they could be.

A main concern was how to spend more time with family. In February 1991, I put a pencil to it and found I was spending no more than 60-90 minutes per weekday plus time on weekends with our child. That seemed not enough. There are dozens of snippets of journal entries about our lives together. The challenge is how to weave those into a meaningful narrative, yet maintain the idea they are only a part of our lives together. This is perhaps the most interesting writing challenge thus far in the autobiography.

I didn’t make much progress on the book this weekend, although there was no shortage of things about which to think and remember. Some days, that’s what a writer needs.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Tomatoes in Big Grove

Planting cherry tomatoes.

On a cool Saturday morning I planted 20 varieties of tomatoes on my bench in the garage. There has been a home-garden tomato crop at almost every place we lived since we married in 1982. I am a couple days late getting seeds into channel trays compared to last year. If all goes well, there will be plenty of tomatoes, beginning in August. I know how to produce a crop.

After noon I watched the BlueSky hashtag #handsoff. Users posted images of Hands Off! demonstrations from all over the country. It was a decent showing of people opposed to the administration, more protesters than usually turn out for nation-wide protests. There is a lot about which to be upset. I did not attend one of several events within half an hour drive of home. I decided an hour’s driving could be better spent.

Instead, I had a 50-minute phone call about unions during the Reagan years. I forwarded a chapter of my memoir in progress to a friend who was a member of the United Auto Workers union during that time. It was a good conversation about things we don’t usually discuss.

After getting his masters, my friend got a job as a teacher in the Saint Louis area. He rose to become president of the National Education Association local. He told me his Sheryl Crow story. Crow had worked as a music teacher for the district and wanted to cash in her pension to head out west. There was a recommendation she leave it in place in case she needed to start over. Of course, she didn’t need that. His Sheryl Crow story is better than mine, which is I heard her play at the Senator Tom Harkin annual steak fry on Sept. 19, 2004.

I had a restless night Friday. The U.S. Senate protected the billionaire class and left the rest of us behind, voting in favor of the reconciliation bill early Saturday morning. Next the bill goes to the House. Its future there is uncertain. The Republican majority is so thin that Texas Governor Abbott is postponing a special election in Houston to replace U.S. Rep. Sylvester Turner who died in March. His action takes one Democratic vote off the table. We are in the hard ball league with our politics, where nothing matters except for the income of the owners. We are not the owners.

Cool ambient temperatures kept me out of the garden again. Soon, though, I’ll get out there and dig this year’s plots. Probably, there will be tomatoes. One never knows, yet we plant the seeds.

Categories
Living in Society

Korean Grocery

Bulletin board at H Mart in Niles, Ill. On April 2, 2025.

Someone shared a photo of the interior of a Korean grocery store in Niles, Illinois in a social media post. I had to visit the next time I was in the area, so this week, I did. The experience was a bit surreal.

For the first time in a long time, I entered a grocery store and left without buying anything. It was the H Mart in Niles, an Asian Grocer larger than the American grocer I frequent near home. They had aisles and aisles of foodstuffs with Korean lettering on the packages. Two of us walked from end to end to see what was on offer. It was a lot. It would be easy to drop $500 in one visit and not scratch the surface of what was available.

There was a food court near the entryway. It was well past the lunch hour when we arrived, and two hours until supper time. I would have thought someone would be eating, yet few were. Every person behind the counters was not doing anything, just standing or sitting, I suppose waiting for a customer. The store was almost empty of customers on a Wednesday afternoon.

At the other end of the store near the exit was a row of other kinds of merchants, such as the nail salon that stood out. In between were well-stocked, well-faced shelves. There were a couple of stockers, who each had a single box of a product to refill a shelf. This is unlike our grocer in that here, the stock person fills a large flatbed cart with dozens of items which are wheeled to the floor and parked while the entire aisle is re-stocked. Maybe it’s a cultural difference, although I’m struggling to figure out why.

There was a lot of seafood, reminding me that marine life everywhere on Earth is under pressure from over fishing. There were many kinds of pickled products, including kimchi and daikon radishes. I wouldn’t know how to choose one type of pickled product for a meal among so many options. There were small shelves of U.S. company products. Notable was a wide set of shelves of Spam products, actually multiple sets in different locations in the store.

South Koreans eat lots of Spam, according to National Public Radio. It is the second-largest consumer of Spam in the world, eating roughly half as much as the United States, which has six times as many residents. U.S. soldiers introduced Spam to Korea during the Korean War. Dishes such as Kimchi Spam Musubi, Bibimbap bowl with Spam, and others are considered to be delicacies. When my uncle was stationed in Persia during World War II he ate so much Spam in his rations he never ate it again after military service. To each their own, I suppose.

The reality of H Mart did not measure up to the internet posting. In person, it seemed a vast, well-stocked warehouse for people with a specific culinary interest. How does one decide which pancake mix to choose when there are so many? Maybe there are too many varieties. Inside H Mart it is a world of its own.

They even had boxes of Aunt Jemima pancake mix, with the iconic figure on the box, from before Pepsico took a step into the future of racial equality and removed her. Quaker Oats, a subsidiary of Pepsico, may have felt it was doing the right thing by removing the aunt’s image. In the bright neon lights of the store there was consumer comfort in seeing her image persist. Maybe they got the message about DEI and put Aunt Jemima back in her place.

I found the visit fun, the most fun I’ve had in a while. I don’t get out much. Since I didn’t buy anything, it was cheap fun. I don’t know if the internet ruined me for experiences like this. I would never have seen the inside of H Mart without that social media post. It is one more bit of reality incorporated into my online world view. I just need to develop a taste for kimchi and I’ll be set.

Categories
Reviews

Book Review: Food for Thought

My reaction to Food for Thought: Essays & Ruminations by Alton Brown is it fills gaps in my personal culinary history. Brown occupied space after the formative experience I had in South Georgia in 1997 and 1998. While working on a logistics project at a clay mine and processor, after a 14-hour shift at the plant I retired to a motel room in nearby Thomasville. There I was exposed to Food TV Network, Emeril Lagasse, Mario Batali, Susan Feniger, Mary Sue Milliken, Julia Child, and others. It was a formative experience yet Brown came along after that period, airing his first episode of Good Eats on July 7, 1999.

During that work assignment I escaped into the T.V. During thirty minute segments I could forget extreme poverty and plain family restaurants that served a meat and three sides in rural Georgia, and engage in celebrity chefs who enjoyed what they were doing as locals did not. I had no kitchen at the motel so the interest was intellectual. My later involvement in the local food movement has its origins in the contrast between that poor, uninviting place in South Georgia and my nightly food escape. I learned a lot from Brown’s television programs when he later came on the cable channel and I watched them back in Iowa.

I didn’t know if I would enjoy his book. As I read, I liked it more with each turn of a page. For the kind of local food enthusiast I have become it is essential reading because of Brown’s unique role in televised, public cooking. Hearing his personal history, especially beginning with the premature and unexpected death of his father, informed the personality I remember from Good Eats.

After Good Eats ran its course, I fell off the Alton Brown bandwagon. I did not care for the stadium-style Iron Chef cooking competitions where he was a commentator. I also missed his coronavirus pandemic home cooking show on YouTube. By the pandemic, I had developed my own concept of a kitchen garden and no longer needed a recipe writer as Brown describes himself in Food for Thought.

The book is a miscellany of stories in the form of a memoir. As such one can both enjoy and not enjoy the writing, chapter by chapter. It was somewhat disappointing to read of Brown’s tobacco use and over-indulgence in alcohol. At the same time, the “Meals that Made Me” series is engaging and insightful. In all, the positives outweigh the negatives which is what I seek in a memoir.

If a person works in a modern, American kitchen, Food for Thought is well worth the time it takes to read.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Sloppy Joe Sandwich

Sloppy Joe sandwich with coleslaw. Photo Credit – Wikimedia Commons

During a recent trip to the grocer we got talking about Sloppy Joe sandwiches. Early in our marriage we would buy a can of Sloppy Joe sauce and mix it with MorningStar Farms Recipe Crumbles to make a sandwich filling. It was the basis for many a quick, tasty meal. We discussed adding it back into our meal rotation for “something different.” We read the ingredients on the name brand and store brand cans of sauce and decided to make our own.

What distinguishes a Sloppy Joe from a Maid-Rite (a.k.a. loose meat sandwich) is the tomato sauce. Following is the recipe I put together from an online recipe modified to match our preferences and what we have on hand in our pantry.

Sloppy Joe Sandwich

Ingredients:

  • One small onion – diced
  • One medium bell pepper – diced
  • Two cloves fresh garlic – finely chopped
  • Salt and pepper to taste
  • Half teaspoon chili powder
  • Teaspoon paprika
  • 1/3 cup ketchup
  • 1/4 cup water
  • 1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
  • 1 tablespoon brown sugar
  • 1 tablespoon vegetarian Worcestershire sauce
  • One 15 ounce can of prepared tomato sauce
  • One 12 ounce package of MorningStar Farms Recipe Crumbles
  • Sandwich rolls.

Mix the dried spices, ketchup, Worcestershire sauce, water, mustard, and brown sugar in a small dish and set aside.

Sauté the onion, bell pepper and garlic until soft over medium high heat in a tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil.

Add the spice mixture and stir to incorporate. Add the Recipe Crumbles and incorporate. Finally add the can of tomato sauce and stir until incorporated.

Turn the heat down to a simmer and cook until the sauce thickens and extra water evaporates.

Serve on a toasted bun with any desired condiments and toppings.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Garden Walk

Moon setting on Friday, March 14, 2025.

Ambient temperatures were in the high 70s on Friday. I walked out to the garden and had a look. After dumping the compost bucket into the bin, I turned over a spade full of soil in this year’s garlic bed. The moisture level is about right for planting. I thought I’d give it the rest of the day’s high temperatures to dry and plant garlic today. Last year was such a mess, I didn’t get garlic into the ground in November as usual. My farmer friends tell me with late planting, I will still get a crop.

Some parts of the garden have two years of clean up to do. Tearing down fencing, pulling up fence poles, recovering plastic sheeting for another use, and taking care of the vegetable stalks will require a multi-day project. I’m determined to get a garden in this year.

My views about the garden are changing. For example, the last year or so we have had something digging tunnels in the lawn just under the surface. I don’t know if the pest is eating the roots of grasses and other plants, or what it is doing. I’m inclined to not plant potatoes this season because they are cheap at the farmers’ market or grocer, and it will give the little animals one less food source. Potatoes have never been a main crop for me.

It was good to be out in the warm sunlight with a fresh breeze blowing against me. The soil felt good, the way it should feel after a mild winter. Once I get going, it should take me about 90-120 minutes to get the garlic in the ground.

After planting, it needs mulching. I plan to use last year’s tomato stalks and leaves and grasses mowed into a bag from the lawn. I have to watch this type of mulch more carefully so it doesn’t get matted and prevent the garlic shoots from getting to the light as they grow. With wheat straw you can just mulch it and forget it until harvest. I want to avoid this input cost.

Off and gardening we are. I expect I’ll need more time working the plots to get away from the national news. Respite, as good as it gets.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

2025 Garden Preview

Kale and collard seedlings planted Feb. 13, 2025. Pinkish hue from the grow light.

I delayed indoor kale planting for a week until Feb. 13. I will delay planting the other cruciferous vegetables and herbs by two weeks or more. Live and learn. It is an exciting time of the year with seeds going into soil. My heating pad and grow light held up for another year.

2024 was a marginal year for our garden. I couldn’t get the plots planted. Deer started jumping the fence and ate two successive plantings of cruciferous vegetables. Then, weeds grew everywhere. I couldn’t get some crops harvested when they matured. I got decent crops of garlic, tomatoes, cucumbers, lettuce, and collards. I hope to renew my efforts with vigor this spring. May gardening do better in 2025.

The main work is clearing the old plots, weeding, and pulling up the plastic sheeting in a way that preserves it to use again this year. This means a LOT of work. I tried making very large plots last year and the result was deer jumped the fence more often, as mentioned. The idea that plots should be smaller, leaving no landing zone for deer proved to be most effective. Given the Social Security Administration life expectancy table, I have 11 more gardens to plant. No more experimenting with plot size at this stage of life.

I bought two batches of seeds. There will be herbs, lettuce, Asian greens, cauliflower, green beans, and a lot more. The apple trees should produce this year. The Red Delicious tree planted in 1995 has been a work horse. Storms, including the 2020 derecho, have damaged it so it looks like half a tree. I will keep harvesting Red Delicious apples from it until the last windstorm takes its final toll.

Despite all the talk about inflation, food continues to be a smaller percentage of our household budget. Insurance is the killer, ironically. Car, home, life, an multiple health care policies add up. We garden because we control inputs, plus the produce tastes better than store-bought. Our garden will continue in this enduring culture of life again this year.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Apples Are Wrinkled

Gold Rush apples at Wilson’s Orchard and Farm Oct. 22, 2022.

During the eight years I worked with Paul Rasch at Wilson’s Orchard I learned a lot about apples. I was offered a chance to return after the coronavirus pandemic, yet I declined. Things had changed too much as they diversified their offerings. They moved from being mostly a seasonal apple orchard to being more of a year-around event destination with multiple big crops available for u-pick, musical entertainment, special dinners, and of course the rebuilt barn that could host a wedding or other special event. It would be difficult to recapture how I felt about my tenure in the earlier years by taking the job. I’m okay with everything.

When my apple trees fruit, I don’t hardly go to the orchard. I can get all the apples I need for a year from the five remaining trees. At the end of each season, regardless of whether I have apples, I buy Gold Rush apples from the orchard because they keep really well in the refrigerator. On Feb. 14, I’m still eating last season’s apples, even though they are getting wrinkled. They seem sweeter now than they did when they were just-picked.

When I have apples, I replenish my stores of applesauce, apple butter, apple cider vinegar, and dried apples. In the beginning, I would process every good apple I grew. A person only needs so much of processed goods. Today I make what I need to replenish the shelves and leave the rest for wildlife to eat fresh and over the winter. Invariably, every apple I leave in a backyard pile is gone by spring.

I’ve gotten to Henry David Thoreau’s view of apples:

Early apples begin to be ripe about the first of August; but I think that none of them are so good to eat as some to smell. One is worth more to scent your handkerchief with than any perfume they sell in the shops. The fragrance of some fruits is not to be forgotten, along with that of flowers. Some gnarly apple which I pick up in the road reminds me by its fragrance of all the wealth of Pomona, carrying me forward to those days when they will be collected in golden and ruddy heaps in the orchards and about the cider-mills.

Thoreau captures something I can’t. I think about this quote every time I take a wrinkled Gold Rush apple from the refrigerator drawer and inhale its perfume.

Categories
Kitchen Garden

Nutrition and Exercise While Aging

Cooking Eggplant

The secret to aging well is no secret: maintain an active lifestyle and improve our diets with nutrient-dense foods. Of course, that assumes there are no mitigating factors such as poverty, cardio-vascular disease, cancer, and lacking the proper function of at least some of our teeth. This post is a listicle of conversations I’ve had about nutrition and aging.

  • Seniors often don’t have enough money to go grocery shopping. Concurrently, they earn more money than the federal poverty level, so are not eligible for SNAP, the Seniors Farmers Market Nutritional Program, or the Commodity Supplemental Food Program.
  • Mobility can be a problem. Our culture assumes mobility either through mass transit, or by driving a personal vehicle. Many people age without being able to continue driving. Even if one can take the bus to the grocery store, carrying capacity for the return trip is limited. Grocers will deliver or have a service deliver. It adds what can be a substantial charge on top of the groceries.
  • Dining alone is not always fun. The absence of children, or a spouse being deceased or away, has us reverting to a primitive state of avoiding cooking or making simple meals that don’t have the best nutritional content.
  • There is increased production and use of leftovers. For example, a pan of lasagna can make six servings.
  • If we are not heating up leftovers, prepackaged meals can be tempting. They can be more expensive and often contain high levels of salt and additives with unpronounceable names.
  • Even with a full pantry a person doesn’t always cook. There is a possibility to open a can or packet of something and call it a meal.
  • Leaving home for exercise can be a challenge. If one lived in the same place for decades, the neighborhood may have changed, making it more risky. Likewise, one has to pay more attention when outdoors for things like cracks in the sidewalk, and high traffic areas.
  • Inclement weather can keep us indoors. I know when it was below zero all day Tuesday, I did not leave the house except to check the mailbox.
  • Aging means we may not have the stamina we once did. Some days it is a lot to muster the energy for a thirty-minute walk.
  • Our strength can be diminished. There is no need to go to a gym for strength training when dumb bells or stretchy bands can do. We also have to take it easier than we did a few decades ago: no more bench lifting.
  • Fear of falls is real. If we lose our balance while exercising at home, we could be injured, unable to get to a phone, and trapped.

That’s what I am hearing about aging well. If you like, leave a comment you heard about the challenges of good nutrition and exercise while aging.