Quote of the Day: Jessica Prentice
When you don’t grow up with a memory of something tasting wonderful, you sometimes have to work a little bit to learn to love it. There’s always a chance that you’ll never learn to like a thing, but you don’t know that until you really try.
Jessica Prentice – Full Moon Feast: Food and the Hunger for Connection
This is such a great quote, it rings true in my life. Thankfully I grew up with a very broad palate of things I tasted. Mostly do to the fact that I grew up in another country. We learned to eat thing like beef tongue, liver, yucca and all sorts of things many people would consider unpalatable.
As a result, I’m very adventurous when it comes to trying new things. In general, I have like almost everything I’ve ever tried, there are very few things that I don’t really like. Well, except for frosting (aka icing). Crazy, I know, someone who doesn’t like frosting. Even as a kid, I’d scape my icing off my cake and give it to my brother, who loved it.
Cooked greens used to be the one thing that I had trouble eating. I kept making them, we kept eating them, and eventually we learned to love them. They went from being not very appetizing to being enjoyed. Sometimes it takes trying things multiple times, cooked in different ways to find a place on your plate.
Do you have any foods that you want to learn to love?
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Quote of the Day: Joe Eck & Wayne Winterrowd
Americans are fondest of the foods of summer. Peas, beans, corn, and tomatoes are most people’s first choices among vegetables, regardless of the season. Modern agriculture, modern trucking, and the freezer allow us to have them even in the depths of winter–beets, carrots, parsnips, turnip, cabbage and winter squash–were popular then because they kept with little trouble in the cellar all winter long without much loss of flavor; and they were, in any case, sustenance when nothing else was available.
Joe Eck & Wayne Winterrowd in Living Seasonally: The Kitchen Garden and the Table at North Hill
Personally I much prefer the flavors of most of the other seasonal vegetables above the typical summer ones. Perhaps it comes from a childhood of eating canned green beans, frozen corn and applesauce all winter long. Perhaps I’m just older and learning to appreciate a wider variety of vegetables for the many flavors and textures that they bring to my table. Or perhaps, I just love being able to garden over a longer season because of these vegetables.
This winter I’m looking forward to my root cellar full of potatoes, sweet potatoes, carrots, beets, turnips and celeriac. In the coming years I hope to add chicories and other brassicas to my stores.
What’s your favorite non-summer vegetable?
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Quote of the Day: Melissa Coleman
Fall arrived with its honey light and cool evenings, and the maple leaves brightened to match the reds and yellow of ripe apples. It was time to put away the bounty of the warm months for fortitude during the cold ones, as humans had done for centuries.
Melissa Coleman (This Life Is in Your Hands: One Dream, Sixty Acres, and a Family Undone)
I don’t do a lot of canning, but I do love to ferment things. Over the coming weeks I’ll be making batches of fermented cucumber pickles, sauerkraut, kimchi and other fermented goodies.
These will help augment the root vegetables in the cellar and the bitter winter greens from under the hoop house in the garden throughout the winter. The full-sour dill pickles are probably my favorite fermented food, we gobble them up quickly, eating them at every meal if we have them.
What’s your favorite kind of pickled food?
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Quote of the Day: Robyn Griggs Lawrence
“I know we’d be nuts to patently give up the machines that permeate our homes and make our lives so much easier. But what if, everyone in a while – especially when the world around us seems crazy and uncontrollable – we submerge our hands into warm, soapy water and hand a towel to our significant other. Or we take ten minutes to sweep the floor, focusing all our attention on that simple task with its ancient symbolic reference to sweeping away the bad spirits and the stale energy that may be lurking in the corners. What if?”
Robyn Griggs Lawrence (The Wabi-Sabi House: The Japanese Art of Imperfect Beauty)
My dishwasher died many years ago and I’ve been washing dishes by hand ever since. It forces me to slow down and enjoy the moment, to think about what I see outside my window, to appreciate the things I have, to cultivate simplicity. Sometimes doing our chores the old fashioned way helps us cultivate mindfulness and it can help us appreciate what we have.
What is one chore you like to do by hand?
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Quote of the Day: Manny Howard
The Farm will remove me from the consumer loop. The locavore’s dilemma is that, for all this thoughtful action, he’s still a consumer. The Farm will put me one step deeper, make me the producer. Once food is tied to work and not money, even -worst case- its scarcity will teach the family something.
Manny Howard from My Empire of Dirt: How One Man Turned His Big-City Backyard into a Farm
Yesterday was the day for a few of our broiler chickens to become food. It could certainly be easier and cheaper to buy chickens from a local farmer already processed and ready for the oven, but we choose to do this for ourselves. We also slaughter them ourselves, right here. It would only cost me a few dollars to have a local processor do this task for me, but then I’d have to drive the birds to their location. I also wouldn’t be able to retain the feathers, blood and some of the offal. It also gives me the ability to know exactly how the animal lives and dies, if I’m going to eat meat, I want to make sure it’s raised responsibly.
We also like to raise and slaughter them ourselves because we can use the entire animal. While they’re growing they mow our grass and provide valuable manure for our soil. When slaughtered, the feathers get composted as do some of the entrails. The blood also makes a great addition to the compost pile, or you can dilute it and water plants with it as it’s full of nitrogen.
Our neighbor brought up his old rooster for us to process as well, he wanted someone to get some use out him. He will sustain the resident Chiots for a few days.
Another reason we do things like this for ourselves is because it teaches us what’s involved in making our food. It’s very true that the more you have to work for your food, the less of it you will waste and the more you appreciate your food. Not a feather from these birds will go to waste.
Has growing your own food made you appreciate more and waste less?
