Blooming in a monsoon

When times get tough, the tough get going - or so the saying goes. Originally intended (I'm relatively sure) to mean that in difficult circumstances people dig in, steel themselves and work harder. Does this apply to plants in the garden too?

This summer my garden - trying very hard to bloom where I planted it - has been buffeted by monsoons, heat waves and winds. I have given up on plants that should have been fine - they were healthy when planted and hearty. They were tough and ready to get going. But they couldn't. So I've yanked them from the beds and put them on the weed heap - not even good for compost as they were beset by bugs and in a completely chemical free garden, there is a limit to what can be done. As a result I don't have the harvest I thought I would. This is both disappointing and scary. What if I completely depended on my garden to eat. Silly you say? Maybe, but not really. There are bigger crop failures  - Russian wheat for example. Food will be more expensive as fossil fuels increase if crops/products continue to be transported great distances. Others in my little part of the country are saying what a bad year it has been for typically easy-to-grow crops as well.

Maybe when the going gets tough now, it's too tough for even the hardiest among us. Then what?

What's in the pantry?

I've been thinking about cooking even more with what I have rather than what I want so tonight I made dinner with what I found. I do this a lot, but I want to do it even more. Needs are very different than wants and I plan to focus on meeting my needs for a while.

I pulled some salmon out of the freezer and some barley and mushrooms I'd dried out of the pantry. Then I grabbed some green beans from the fridge. It was a meal. I cooked the barley with a bit of onion that was left in the fridge and the dried mushroom. I cooked it in chicken broth from the pantry rather than water. I roasted the green beans with pepper and some onion sugar (great stuff if you can find it!) and baked the salmon with a sauce of lemon juice, honey and some ground ginger and cinnamon. It was tasty. It was good for me in many ways.

Unfortunately when eating a green bean I also knocked off one of the brackets from my braces and so now I'm waiting to hear from the orthodontist's office whether I can wait til my regular appointment or if I have to make a special trip in to get it fixed. Rats... nothing is easy....

A meaningful choice

(The following was posted in very similar form in another blog of mine earlier this fall....)

When the agricultural revolution that began after WWII incorporated chemical fertilizers, industrialized agriculture and the use of all things corn in our food products, (the beginning of raising food that was not so labor intensive and thus "expensive") we started down the road to cheap food. Cheap by the world's standards - Americans spend less of their income on food than people in other countries. At the same time, we started down the road to cheap food of another definition - food that was less nutritious and as we've come to see, made with ingredients that have caused us to become a fat nation.

And while we were speeding up the growing, processing and shipping of food from all over the world to satisfy our hunger, we were losing connection to the seasons and the understanding of where food comes from. Starting about 40 years ago, large numbers of women (mostly women) walked out of the kitchen and into the workplace and they stopped cooking the way their mothers had. Individuals and families began relying on fast food or prepared food for many if not all meals. Yes, I know not everyone does this, but so many do...a common refrain among those who are trying to promote healthy eating is "nobody cooks!"

We tacitly assume that we don't need to plan meals. We decide what we want to eat on the way home. Rather than thinking through menus, working with leftovers and sometimes, eating what we have, rather than what we want, we assume the amazing choice of foods that we've come to expect will always be there. "Spontaneous shoppers" - those people who are driven by what they are hungry for or what's quick to fix - don't always eat well. Neither do those who can't afford fresh food and have to rely on fast food with lots of carbs, fat and sugar.

So here we are. A nation beginning (maybe?) to realize that we really don't have the control over the contents of our food that we used to. And although we do have control over at least part of our time, we've been trading eating well for other things. When I hear that someone doesn't have the time to cook, that's a signal to me that I may be in the gravitational pull of a bajiggity life. Everyone has all the time there is; what are the priorities that order the use of one's time? That's the question!

I wonder: what would happen if one day each month everyone in the country sat down to a home cooked dinner, made with fresh ingredients (dare I say locally grown/produced?) that was planned in advance and eaten with family and friends? It seems like one small step toward reclaiming a real, meaningful choice about how we live.