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I know all my posts lately have been about food. Obviously, there is a lot more to wellness and feeling good than what you eat, but it is a pretty big part of optimal health. It might sound corny, but the old adage "you get what you give" rings no more true than in regards to what we nourish our bodies with.
It is Wednesday morning. So far today, I have melted a dehydrator, blown up a canning jar, and possibly contaminated my newly-made cheese with bizarre insects. It's been a challenge.
With Fall swiftly approaching, I have felt an urgency to preserve, freeze, can, dry, harvest, pick, and save as much food as possible. Every year I try to become a little more efficient at living my life and eating alongside the seasons. During the glut of the summer when fresh fruit and veggies are bountiful, with ample sunshine to fuel me, I work hard until the first killing frost as I manage our garden and take charge of all the food prep and preserving. I was doing pretty good, I thought, as I watched our canning shelves in the basement fill up with sweet corn, potatoes, carrots, salsa, peppers, and even roast beef and onions.
This morning I felt a little discouraged, and like an amateur again, as I moved from one small kitchen disaster to the next.
What is so easy to forget is that these types of things take practice, and I am reminded of that as I watch a close friend of mine make her first discoveries about food. Her and her husband are making tiny transitions to move from a mostly pre-packaged lifestyle towards an active, healthier, fresh and home-made lifestyle and diet. I am reminded of my first-year garden and the failures that made me feel like this whole 'urban homesteading' crap was out of my league, and how hard I worked to only find plants that died and vegetables that tasted or looked terrible. But along with the failures came tiny victories, too, and those kept me inspired to start over. Today will be no exception to the constant learning curve of being self-sufficient: I will toss the ruined dehydrator parts and salvage the canned tomatoes, saving what I can that is still usable. The cheese will get a new wrapping, and a better covering to keep flies away, and we'll see in a few days what happens. If I get discouraged, I'll just go downstairs and look at my gleaming rows of canned foods that are waiting patiently for the winter to nourish us, and read my Ball Blue Book of Canning to get inspiration.
Pancakes are probably my favorite breakfast food. Today, my husband and I had pancakes at 11:30, so I suppose they are a decent lunch food, too, although that time slot is occupied by many other favorite, more traditional lunch foods, and pancakes have a lot more competition if consumed after 10am. Either way, I have invented a version of pancakes that will knock your socks off, and aren't all that bad in the health department, either.
Last weekend my husband and I purchased 2 lbs of fresh, shell-on shrimp from a local vendor at the Meridian Farmer's Market. The same vendor had for sale an interesting gadget for deveining the shrimp, and although I simply use method to stand in where a new-fangled gadget would otherwise expedite this process, I was still interested in an unknown procedure that might make my life easier when I was up to my elbows in shrimp shells.
One of the best things about summer in Michigan is tomatoes, and the long waiting period we suffer through to get to that magical, late-summer era where they become abundant. Despite the bizarre heat-waves, the intense water-stress, and a few late-night pilfering sessions, my tomatoes have finally entered the Realm of Plenty, which means only one thing: Salsa!!
I picked blueberries this morning out in a quiet, mostly abandoned field. Off in the distance there were a few cows lowing, and the neighbor's chickens occasionally gave out a burst of hen-like attitude, but for the most part it was me, some crickets, and some overgrown blueberry bushes.
My breath caught in my chest when I saw it. I almost couldn't believe it, and when I picked it up and examined it, it revealed no blemish, no mutation, no scarring. I quickly examined an assortment of its contents, also revealing themselves to be wholly intact and sound. I turned to Jake, my husband, and thrust the book into his face with gusto, full of self-satisfaction. Despite his lack-luster reaction, I knew inside that I had located the home cook's Holy Grail amidst piles of junk and Rummage Sale detritus. I had found, in a pile of used romance novels and outdated magazines, a copy of 'The Joy of Cooking'.
These days, in our fast-paced, fast-food lives, most of the corn we eat is genetically modified. What the hell is 'genetically modified,' you ask? Pretty scary is the answer.
As a kid, I knew my mom was experimenting in our kitchen when I'd come home from school and ask,"what's for dinner?" She'd slyly reply, "Food." We had all types of weird, experimental dishes involving off-the-beaten path ingredients, including eggplant, which I never cared for. As an adult I considered eggplant, in all of its gorgeous purples and mauves and speckles, to be one of the most beautiful vegetables, but its preparation continued to mystify me.
