Stormy Summer

Much has happened. Our community garden is having a strange year... Rob and I made a stellar bean teepee which was covered in romano beans until we had a stellar wind/thunderstorm and 500 stellar lightning strikes a minute, (true!) at which point our stellar teepee hit the dirt, crushing my super chili and eggplant along the way. Super sad true story. Boo hoo.

We're probably going to try to prop it back up but all the bamboo poles are broken so we might not succeed. While we were there, mourning our bad luck, I pulled most of our soybean plants. Rob stuffed them into a panier bag and we rode home looking like farmers from another continent, soybean plants waving in the wind. We ate edamame until we had eaten enough, for the first time in my life. They were fantastic, slathered in olive oil and sea salt. The rest, I froze.

I grew okra for the first time this year, on the promise of a hot summer. Not hot enough, I'm afraid; the nights have been too cool and the okra responds by dropping leaves and blossoms. We get a few pods every few days. Meh. Weirdly, I'm already tired of it being added into other vegetable dishes. The blossoms, however, are fantastically beautiful; large and butter yellow with maroon throats.

The eggplants were doing alright until the romanos fell on them. They were supposed to be white and egg-shaped but are instead long, white streaked with mauve. Lovely and delicious.

In other news, I have been accepted to chef school and will start on the 6th of September! I'm excited about it. One day while feeling at a bit of a loss, I was talking to an employment counselor and mentioned that I love to cook and am really interested in food, nutrition, foraging, etc. He said, basically, "You know about the chef school a few blocks from your house, right?" and some doors opened up.

Also, I've been doing some foraging of note. Lately, red clover blossoms are everywhere and I've been gathering them for infusions. Herbalists say that red clover, while closely related to soy, is superior in every way, super rich in bio-available phytoestrogens, calcium, and other good things. I've been rotating infusions of clover, stinging nettle and oatstraw and I must say that I think I notice some benefits. Menopause is a terrible disease and I need all the help I can get in my valiant battle against it.

The black walnuts are beginning to fall and I've picked up a few. As I write this, Hurricane Irene is bludgeoning the eastern seaboard and we might get the tail end of it sometime next week, in which case, there may be lots of walnuts down. I'm wanting to make black walnut fudge, using maple sugar. If I sell any of it, I will have to charge a thousand dollars a pound.

But it will be worth it.

Hot Water Dough

Lately I don't write here.
Part of the problem is photographs. Or rather, lack of photographs. I need to start taking pictures because this blog needs photos and it's really hard to illustrate the present with photos of the past.

Irony: Right after I wrote that last sentence, Rob came in and asked me to bring him a camera. He wanted a photo of his bike, all covered in slush from his ride to the St. Jacobs market. I am not in the habit of using "the camera". I probably need to get a cell phone, like everyone else. I could barely remember how to turn it on.

Yesterday, I made potstickers from scratch, for the first time. The revelation here was hot water dough. Hot water mixed with flour makes the most incredibly soft, silky dough. Like a baby's earlobe,it was. My method with the actual potstickers was awkward and they looked pretty sloppy when they were done but they are delicious. We are taking them to a party tonight, a Thai-inspired party for Rob's birthday and the birthday of another friend. I know the food will be great and the people are wonderful; it is bound to be a nice evening. So I need to adjust my attitude and get ready to go. But the dough for potstickers! I want to make it again, just to feel it's beautiful texture!

In fact, I want to wrap myself in a blanket of it and live there.
I do need to work on the filling and the folding, so I think potstickers are going to be on the menu again soon.

Great little sayings

Time's a wasting!

Cut me some slack.

Pipe up!

Think I'll hit the sack.

So long.

Stick around.

Fuck off.

What is it with Purebreds?

While walking my dogs, I often run into people who admire my dogs. "What beautiful dogs!" they say, "They're so well-behaved! What kind are they?"

I'm always proud to say that they are mutts. I'm partial to mutts and don't mind saying so. Mutts are known to carry the strongest characteristics of whatever breeds they are composed of; they are therefore healthier and more balanced than the average purebred of any breed. The whole idea of *purebred* dogs has always smacked of racism to me; left to their own devices, dogs don't seek out others like themselves to mate with. Research indicates that mammals (yes, us too...) are attracted to the pheromones most different from our own. We instinctively seek diversity, so that our offspring will be strong. And the idea of people manipulating dogs and deliberately mating them to others to create a certain look has always seemed... well, kind of pervy to me.

But anyway. People often express disappointment that they are not some specific breed. The funny thing, to me, is that my dogs are about as different from each other as dogs can be. There is an old Warner Bros. cartoon about a coyote and a sheepdog who go to work together and punch a clock. The coyote tries to catch the sheep and the sheepdog tries to protect them. I believe their names are Sam and Ralph. Well, those are my dogs. Yes, they are about the same size and they sometimes walk side by side but it has been many generations since they shared anything like a common ancestor. Yet people are forever asking me if they are siblings. Sometimes it cracks me up.

So, MOSTLY my dogs are really good. Really well-behaved and obedient. And when people ask me how I achieved this, I say, "Diet and exercise" which is ironically, my answer to many other questions as well. But it's true. If dogs get adequate exercise, (which, I'm sorry to say, only working dogs get; most need many hours a day) they will be well-behaved. UNLESS you feed them dog food, which for the most part is garbage filled with poisonous chemicals and allergens. But my point is, that it's not that they belong to some magical BREED that makes them act wonderfully. People seem to be always looking for that; Oh, we wanted a dog that would be good with our kids, so we got a Golden.

As an aside, I've seen a Golden so out of control that her owner had to muzzle her on walks. That dog never got off leash because she would viciously attack other dogs. And they got her as a puppy. Explain that, purebred enthusiasts.

It's not the breed. It's what YOU do with the dog. Dogs need lots of exercise. Dogs need nutritious food.

I don't have a flock of sheep to occupy my dogs, nor do I have the inclination to spend all day preparing fresh food for them, so despite my strong opinions on this topic, my dogs too get less than they need to be perfect. But when they do something "wrong" at least I recognize that the fault usually lies with me. Dogs really do want to please us but first their basic needs have to be met. And I have yet to meet a purebred more eager to please than my two mutts.

And then I planted garlic!

Yesterday, for the first time, I planted garlic. I have always wanted to grow garlic but for some reason it never really panned out and this year I thought it wouldn't either; I have a community garden plot that gets rototilled every spring, so it just didn't seem to make sense. Garlic must be planted in the fall if it is to do well and between the spring tilling and the fall freezing, garlic just didn't seem to be in the cards.

But then, a few things magically conspired to make it work for me. First of all, the woman who runs the community garden told me that they had decided NOT to till next spring but instead to use the tilling rental cash to put beams between the plots. (I'm new to the garden and at first I thought she said "beans" which simultaneously excited and confused me, but anyway, I digress...)

Then, I was working a coffee gig at the market and I went early to admire the produce. Some folks had bags of local organic garlic for $6.00/lb which is about the going rate here and it was beautiful garlic with tight, fat cloves and a mauve skin. I asked about it and the woman told me that the variety is called "Music". Then, without prompting, she mentioned that I could plant it if I wanted to. I've read that Music does very well in Ontario, so I bought a bag thinking I could eat it all if I didn't plant it. (I like to slow roast whole heads of garlic with olive oil and salt and eat them, smeared on toast.)

Finally, my sister Karen boasted on Facebook that she had planted 300 cloves of garlic in her big garden and I became consumed by envy. I wanted a garlic garden too! I even had some garlic to plant! But those in the know say that root crops should always be planted under a waning moon and time was running out. I was in Toronto for a few days and when I got home it was the last day before the new moon. In Chinatown I found bags of shallots, 2 for a dollar. Why not? I said to myself.

So when I got home, I flew into action. First, I walked the dogs, then I threw garlic, shallots, stakes and red string into a bag with my gardening gloves and hurried off to the garden. I dug and cursed and planted and cursed and marked the plot with red string, then mulched it lovingly with yellow leaves. I only planted 30 garlic cloves and perhaps 8 shallots but I left feeling totally smug.

I won't have a whole lot of garlic but I'll have some and maybe even some shallots, too.

A Moment of Peace

I wonder if I'm not finally learning how to relax. I also wonder how much of the stress and tension in my life is caused by hormones. Really.
I suspect that hormones essentially run the planet, (along with fungi) and that we have no actual control over either of these things.
Tonight I was cutting up vegetables in the kitchen and listening to the radio and I had the sudden realization that I was happy. Just happy in the moment, listening to the radio and having a glass of red wine and dicing a chunk of rutabaga. The dogs were lying around watching because I am cooking a beef stew, which is a rare occasion at my house. I gave them some tidbits of beef and wondered, as they licked my fingers clean, why I felt so good.

Part of it is definitely feeling some sense of order in the universe. Cooking usually does that for me; the order implicit in cutting things up and adding them to the pot, the sensibility of seasonings. Imposing order on the chaos. No doubt I find the familiar voices on CBC radio soothing and the smells of food cooking comforting. Wine always makes me happy. The presence of my calm, attentive dogs pleases and comforts me.

But mainly I think that my hormones are taking a break from their nearly constant driving mission to fuck with my mind. What a relief! How pleasant to just enjoy the sights and smells of cooking a beef stew, slowly in the oven, while listening to the radio and enjoying the quiet company of two old dogs. How restful to sip a glass of red wine and listen to Johnny Cash singing "One", in his gravelly old man's voice or Kiri Te Kanawa belting out a Puccini aria, without breaking into tears and wishing I was dead! A blessed moment of peace in a turmoily universe!

How lucky I feel at this moment.

Things that Suck

Some Things that Suck:

- Waking up with a sore throat.
- Monsanto
- BP
- Buying the "bale" of 20 bus tickets in order to *save money* then only using 2 of them.
- Trying to sell them to your friends, who don't want them.
- Discovering you're the only person in your circle who takes the bus to Toronto.
- Lying in bed, coughing.
- Then spitting.
- War
- Pesticides
- Vomiting
- Colony Collapse Disorder
- Sad dogs
- Feeling too crappy to fix yourself a can of soup.