Monthly Archives: January 2008

Knitting as Antidote for Frantic Busy-ness

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I’m about to go log in to my job at the Big Corporation, the job that I’m hoping will see me through whatever impending financial doom is rising on the horizon, the job that isn’t my dream job, but which I like nonetheless. As much as I’d love to be able to write full time, it’s good to have a real job, especially for a writer — it keeps me engaged with the world outside my little circle of writers and artists and handymen and hunters and ranchers trying to make a go of it selling milk and eggs and wool. There was a piece in the NY Times a couple of weeks ago about telecommuters fighting off loneliness that I found interesting because it’s not really a problem I run into — for one thing, I’m weirdly happy to spend enormous amounts of time alone, and for another, I work with a group of people spread out between San Jose, Miami, Galway Ireland, Seattle and here in Montana. We’re all so electronically connected to one another at my job, that I don’t really feel like I’m alone all day. Between our group instant messaging program, email, and web-based meetings it’s hard to feel disconnected. In fact, when it gets as busy as it’s been the past few weeks, it’s amazing how fried and frazzled and pecked-at a girl can wind up feeling after another 10 hour day in her own front room.

And so, I’ve taken up my long-neglected knitting project again. Knitting and Netflix — a couple of hours working on the sweater that I’ve knit, pulled out, and knit again so many times now (it’s taken me a long time to figure out how to count stitches and rows, what I really like is knitting the big swatches of body parts, not the v-neck or sleeves where you have to pay attention). After a long day of emails and fires that need to be put out and very long technical documents that need to be edited in too little time there’s something essentially calming about putting in a movie, something that’s going to run continuously for an hour and a half or two hours without the interruption of commercials, and knitting. It gives you something to do with your hands. It keeps a girl from surfing the internet aimlessly. It makes you concentrate a little — not as much as working, but just enough to smooth out those jangly places that are left from the day’s work.

And who knows? This time, I might actually get this sweater finished. Considering it’s been ten below for days now, a nice, warm, raspberry-colored sweater would be a good thing.

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The Cows are Tired …

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So, I’ve been buying raw milk from a local rancher since last fall — she shows up every Tuesday with a glass gallon pickle jar full of milk, with a nice layer of cream on the top. The cream has been getting thicker the past couple of weeks — I used to skim about a pint of cream and now I’m well up to nearly a quart.

My milk lady left me a note this week stating that she’s going to have to suspend delivery after the 28th until sometime in April after the cows calve. It’s been a hard winter, her note said. They need a nice long rest.

Not to sound too fey about it all, but I found it charming to learn that the cows need some time off. Talk about seasonality. Late winter and early spring is, in traditional cultures, a time of fasting — largely because food gets scarce. While I’m not taking on a draconian Lenten fast, there’s something interesting about knowing that the cows need a break.

The New York Times had an odd article in the food section yesterday, Chefs’ New Goal: Looking Dinner in the Eye. While the article ostensibly covered the movement among chefs to know not only the source of their meat, but to re-examine and in some cases, participate in the slaughter of the animals — there was a snarkiness to the tone that implied that all the interest is merely a stunt.

Now, granted, there is a shock factor to Jamie Oliver gassing male chicks on television, but is that shock greater than learning that this is how chicken farmers cope with excess male chicks? Seems to me the movement, as such, stems from the effort by industrial agriculture and the corporate grocery industry to distance ordinary people from any knowledge that their food comes from actual plants and animals. The boneless skinless chicken breast (symbol of all that is evil with modern meat) did not, no matter how they try to convince you otherwise, spring fully formed into existence in that styrofoam tray. It did actually grow on a chicken, probably a chicken raised in very unpleasant conditions, by farmers who are being squeezed by corporate interests, and then slaughtered and packaged by illegal immigrants working under inhumane conditions against which they cannot complain for fear of deportation. Yum.

So if chefs, and ordinary eaters like me, would rather buy raw milk from an actual person, or buy a whole animal to put up for winter, can you blame us? If we want to actually see what’s happening with our food, perhaps it’s not a stunt, perhaps its a protest against an industrial system that devalues all life — human and animal alike.

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Coolest Book Ever …

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I saw this in a garden catalog and had to have it: Preserving Food without Freezing or Canning: Traditional Techniques Using Salt, Oil, Sugar, Alcohol, Vinegar, Drying, Cold Storage, and Lactic Fermentation By The Gardeners and Farmers of Centre Terre Vivante

The Centre Terre Vivante is an “ecological research and education center” locate in Southeastern France. They publish a magazine, Les Quatre Saisons du jardin bio and apparently, this book resulted when they asked their readership to send in recipes and techniques for traditional food preservation. There are intros by Deborah Madison and Eliot Coleman, and I can’t wait to try some of these methods. I see a big stoneware pickling crock in my future and I’m particularly interested in some of the lactobacilic preserving techniques for various root vegetables. The section on root cellaring is fabulous and has given me a bunch of ideas for what to do next year. Carrots for example, growing your own carrots will ruin you for store carrots, and I’ve had trouble preserving them in the past. There’s a method that involves packing them in damp sand that I might try next year … There are instructions for drying various fruits and vegetables, as well as a fascinating method of preserving apples in dried elderberry flowers! Apparently it makes them taste like pineapple? It sounds so romantic that I might just have to try it …

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Tomatoes in my Basement

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The big news around here is that I’ve been invited on board at Ethicurean as a regular contributor — and amongst ourselves, we’ve been having a lively discussion about how sustainability, seasonality, and locality (how food miles play into the whole SOLE food equation).

For those of us who don’t live in California, or even, I’d argue the whole west coast (my stepmother gets some pretty gorgeous local produce in Seattle even in the dead of winter), the question of eating local in the winter is a vexed one. I manage to source most of my food pretty locally — I put up a lot of greens and veggies in my freezer this summer. I’ve got all those jars of cherries and plums from my garden. I’ve got a refrigerator drawer full of apples, from my neighbors’ yard actually, that have kept remarkably well. The spuds are organic and local, and when I want something fresh, there are some folks growing greens locally.

But I do buy some fresh produce that’s not local — oranges, for example. I really really want an orange with my breakfast in the winter. And so I try to buy as carefully as I can — I draw the line on food miles at North America — I’m not buying an orange that came from Australia. It just seems wrong to me on any number of levels. My other fresh produce item I can’t live without are green onions. I try to find ones from California, but often, the only ones available are from Mexico.

I also have an advantage which is that I don’t really like salad. Especially in the winter. Too cold. Too crunchy. Ick. Cooked greens, I’m all over those, but I dont’ want a salad in the winter, and keeping a garden has kind of ruined me for lettuce that’s been on a truck anyhow. Where did it come from? How many people have touched it? And don’t even get me started on those bags of organic salad leaves — if those bags are so great why does the salad always smell, in the words of my dear brother, like silage? So, for me, the no-fresh-produce-in-the-winter thing isn’t such a big deal. I don’t like salad, and I have plenty of broccoli rabe, endive, chickory, and chard from my own garden that I put up.

Tomatoes are the thing a lot of people seem to get stuck on — again, having a garden has ruined me for store tomatoes. Why bother? They don’t even taste like a tomato. I’d rather use good organic canned tomatoes than one of those bouncy things from the store. And then last weekend I remembered that I’d put up a bunch of tomatoes in October — I wrapped the last of the garden tomatoes in newspaper, and put them in the basement to get ripe. I pulled out a couple of bundles, and although some of them had gone off and had to be thrown out — there was a nice handful of little tiny Principe Borghese tomatoes, just waiting to be cut up into a nice little tomato salad with some of that basil puree I have in the freezer — it was delicious on a tartine for lunch with some leftover lamb and a little cheese (I’ve been all about tartines this winter — open face grilled sandwiches).

I realize that everyone doesn’t have the option of keeping a garden, and a lot of people don’t have room for a freezer, and it is a problem finding local produce in the north in the winter. (And no, I don’t think Alice Water’s blithe exhortation that we all just have “little hoop houses” is going to work either.) But with a little forethought, and by demanding local produce from our food co-ops and Whole Foods and even regular grocery stores, we’ll build a market, and start to have access to better local produce.

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“I’d Rather Do It Myself”

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The SF Chronicle business section profiled the owner of a small French bakery last week, and I was particularly struck by this quote:

“I don’t depend on anyone else. I don’t depend on bankers. I don’t extend myself financially. I have the good things in life. I don’t need much more.”

As he slides the St. Honore cake into the case, he says, “Let’s face it. I’m a dinosaur. I do most everything from scratch.

“I don’t hire other people to do what I can do. I’d rather do it myself.”

I think in many ways this is the appeal of cooking, and the siren call of the small food business for so many of us (like our dream of a pig business). You do it yourself. There’s a certain clarity to making something edible, and selling it to someone else. Unlike the jobs at which so many of us make our livings, jobs like mine at the Big Corporation, where you’re so often at the mercy of schedules set by other people, and co-workers who may or may not rise to the occasion, and all sorts of other murky circumstances like the economy or the stock price over which we have no control, I think it’s the clarity expressed by this baker that makes small food businesses so appealing to many of us. You make something beautiful. You sell it to someone. And then you make another one.

Now I was in the book business long enough to know that this simplicity is a dream, not a reality, but as a certain presidential candidate keeps telling us, there is nothing false in our dreams of creating a better world for ourselves, our families and our communities. The Jeffersonian ideal of a nation of smallholders, whether farmers or tradesmen, has an ongoing appeal … even to those of us currently shackled by the “golden handcuffs” of 401ks and stock options (and jobs we don’t hate, we just don’t always love).

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