February | 2008 | LivingSmall

It happens every year about this time. We start getting a little more daylight and suddenly things I put up months ago, and had no interest in, start appealing to me again.

I have tons of mint in my garden, and all through the growing season (which is long for mint, it’s both hardy and invasive) I usually go out and grab a big handfull to stuff in my morning pot of tea. By the time fall comes around, and the mint gets weedy and starts to die back, I lose interest in mint in my tea. But every year around this time, I’m glad I dried so much, because as the sun begins to come back, I find myself craving a handful of my own mint in my morning tea again. It’s not nearly so good dried as it is fresh, but at this point, it’s all I’ve got.

The same thing seems to happen with pickles. I put up several quarts of pickles — ten or twelve maybe? I just kind of do them all summer as the cucumbers get ripe — I’ll pick for a week or so then do a batch of pickles. It’s never until after Christmas that I’m even remotely interested in eating them, and like clockwork it’s happened again this year. Suddenly those jars of pickles look good — a nice dilly pickle with my lunch sandwich. Yum.

I also made a weird side dish last night from various veggies I had in the freezer — a couple of weeks ago I did a nice dish of sautéed/braised savoy cabbage, carrots, turnips cut in little cubes, and onions. Last night I took a frozen “hockey puck” of chard, and some of the January tomatoes that I’d cooked down in a very slow oven (they weren’t fabulous tomatoes because I’d picked them green in October — they were kind of like my own home-grown winter grocery store tomatoes but without the food miles, pesticides, etc), and some of the leftover cabbage mixture and heated them all together. It was like a hot salad — and it was really yummy — with a little antelope and “Chinese sauce” (equal parts light soy sauce, Siracha, black vinegar, ketchup and sesame oil mixed together in a little jar) over rice it was a nice dinner.
I’ve gone through a lot of the plums and cherries I put up last year, but because I can’t bear to let good fruit go to waste, I also froze several bags of both when I got worn out by canning. I made a delicious sort of Asian pork with plums the other day — pork shoulder browned then braised with lots of onions, garlic, chiles, ginger, plums, soy sauce and about a pint of tomato sauce thrown in late. It’s kind of Asian, kind of barbecue-y, and in chunks over some rice with green onions, cilantro, some sesame oil and a little of the Siracha sauce in the jar (not the squeeze bottle one that’s smooth, the other one that is a little chunky) it was great. Hot and sweet and warm on a cold winter night.

Because it’s still the dead of winter here. We’re getting more sunlight, which is terrific, but it’s cold and snowy and we’re having the first real winter in years. Which makes me doubly glad for the food I put up last summer. When the wind is blowing 40 miles per hour (which it does here a lot) knowing I can just shop my freezer is really fabulous.

I was doing laundry yesterday, and while channel surfing in search of something non-football-related to watch, I stumbled upon the UCLA rally. I missed Caroline Kennedy and Oprah, but lucked out and switched to CSPAN just as Michelle Obama began to speak.

She was amazing — funny and smart and fierce — to those who say there’s no there there but empty rhetoric, all I can say is that’s the family I want in the White House — people my age, who just paid off their student loans (which Michelle Obama pointed out had only happened because Barak wrote two best-selling books, and then she wryly mentioned that “this is not a viable financial plan”). Most important though, I want these two people who continue to say that it’s not about them, it’s about us. That it’s about building an America where we all feel that we have a stake, and a chance, and where we’re not each in it alone, but we’re all in it together. She had a lovely bit at the beginning of her speech about how we’re so isolated, that we’ve lost sight of the fact that we all have the same problems — aging parents, health insurance, our kids’ schools, finding decent work, building a life and weathering the storms. That we’re all more alike than we are different.

But the thought also occurred to me as I watched this smart woman my age, a woman who reminded me of all the smart women I work with at the Big Corporation, a woman who has had no onus on her to prove her wifely bona fides — that in some ways it’s because Hillary Clinton took the heat 15 years ago for being a wife with a career and an independent identity that Michelle Obama’s credentials and jobs now seem entirely normal. No one makes any fuss over the fact that she’s always had a job, a good job — or that she has degrees from Princeton and Harvard. We’ve come that far at least.

And I think to an extent, Oprah is right — that we’re at a point where we have a black man and a white woman running neck and neck for the Democratic nomination shows that we have won many battles.

Myself, I am not torn by the sort of identity politics issues that Rebecca Traister writes about this morning in Salon — my problems with Hillary stem as much from generational gripes as from anything else. I’m tired of the 1968 generation, and part of me can’t help thinking that the Clintons had their chance and they blew it. I’m tired of finger-wagging candidates who keep telling us they know what’s best more than we do. I’m tired of Democrats who so want to be right that they can’t reach out to people who don’t agree with them. I’m tired of litmus tests and playing defense and internicine squabbles about which one of us is the true progressive, liberal, Democrat.

I want new life, new energy and a new way of thinking that takes into account the possibility that we can all be a little bit better than we’ve been told we can be. I want leadership — not just competence.

I want someone who keeps me standing in my basement after the clothes are folded, riveted by a speech that dares me to believe.

LivingSmall

Life, Literature, and the Subversive Power of Living Small

Monthly Archives: February 2008

Spring Cravings …

Michelle Obama, a Woman I want in the White House