long time away

Life and events have lifted over this glorious fall Thanksgiving weekend so I am once again able to set fingers to keys and think a bit.

The weather has released its bracing fall coolness into the world and the leaves graciously responded. Vibrant yellows and deep reds excite the air. On a stretch around my circle, a small orchard of maple trees line the street. The leaves they discard and scatter around their base form a thick sea-foam of brilliant yellow, not yet brittled or dried. It was like walking along a beach of leaves, with an ocean of grass beyond.

Thanksgiving itself was unseasonably warm in the morning, so that all the neighborhood pick-up football games - including my son's alumni high school game - was well-attended and thoroughly enjoyed by players and spectators alike.

The afternoon grew cooler and windier and threatened to rain (we should only have been so lucky).

The thanksgiving tradition in my home is to celebrate the night before, erev Thanksgiving, Wednesday night, with a large homemade meal, including a home-made tofurkey (or as my mother has come to call it, faux turkey). This year was the biggest and best ever. Family - old and new, and friends - old and new, came. The living room was filled with chatter and camaradarie and love. Inspired by the CSA, I baked squash bread (with yeast, so it tastes something like a rye or sour-dough bread, with a slight yellow-tinge). It was delicious. I made it into loaves, as well as rolls that we scooped out and served home-made vegetable soup in.

Stuffed acorn squash also made an appearance for the first time. Stuffed with tri-color cous cous sauteed with onion, raisins and dried cranberries. A little molasses for a deeper taste and eggs to hold it all together. Quite yummy. And quite satisfying, both gustatorially and spiritually.

But the day is past and the weekend is over and the frenzy of gift buying is upon us. Time is no doubt a scarce commodity for many, but wouldn't home-made presents, simple though they are, be greatly appreciated? and kept longer, placed in old trunks or suitcases, or stashed away in closets, to be remembered or bumped into weathered years from now?

The faces of shoppers who dragged themselves out to the stores at ungodly hours, all pumped up when the doors were unlocked, desperate to make a killing at the bargain tables, haunt me. Is this love? What are they doing? and why?

From Cosmos to Kitchen II

CSAs are Community Supported Agriculture - that is, a kind vegetable coop you buy set shares in. So every week, you get a set amount of vegetables (and some fruits) depending on the produce grown on the farm you associate with.

They are wonderful in many ways, but the biggest challenge, and the second most powerful lesson I learned from mine, is the burden of abundance. It is almost embarrassing, and certainly guilt-inducing, to even have to admit it.

But, after all, how much watermelon can one eat, some of our members uncomfortably mumbled? How many squash can you prepare before exhausting both your ideas, and your appetite?

After a while, your friends begin to run when they see you coming with a bulging canvas bag. You may be able to dump your excess on them once, but after that, they get wise to you.

I am particularly happy scheduling meetings at my home now - in part just so that I can entice my visitors to take some of the excess produce home!

I give some to the women who clean my house; to the guys who came to repair my oven. I'd give it to my mailman, if I ever saw him. I am thinking of leaving some outside for the oil man to find when he hangs the delivery receipt on the front door handle! Or maybe I'll just wrap them in bunting and leave them on my neighbors' doorsteps with a note pinned to them that says: Eat me!

Inevitably, we cannot eat all of it fast enough, and so sometimes some of it goes into the compost heap.

This brush with abundance, and the waste it causes, makes me appreciate the necessity of two elements of food 'technology':

-- the art of preserving food
-- the creation of a successful transportation and distribution system.

In days gone by, preserving, or "putting up" foods, was a time-honored tradition. It was an all-consuming household ritual that is all but lost to us today. Late in the season, households would prepare for the intense, concentrated cooking, jarring, baking, sealing that would go on possibly for days. All available hands were recruited. Water-hauling, pot-stirring, fuel-tending, who knows what else; the tasks were endless. But it was necessary if the "excess" harvest, the harvest that could not be eaten before it went bad, was not to be wasted. It was this food that would get the families through the winter.

In the face of such excess, I began to appreciate the physical and spiritual elements of preserving.

With almost a dozen squash - acorn and butternut and another one that looks like baby, striped footballs with flattened ends - I had to figure out how to use them all. There was just so much ratatouille and casseroles that I could make. And truth be told, they don't freeze particularly well.

I was lucky enough to find a squash yeast bread in The Enchanted Broccoli Forest - a trusted cookbook if ever there was one.

So while I had my doubts, I followed Molly Katzen's lead and discovered that I could use up three acorn squash making three loaves of delicious squash bread. And these freeze beautifully.

But the amount of time I devoted to mixing and kneading and waiting for the bread to rise reinforced in me a great appreciation for the work, wisdom, talents and dedication of our mothers, who were taught by their mothers how to take the 'excess' of the season and store it away for the lean days of winter.

And say what we will about the benefits of local foods, it is essential to create a distribution system that gets the local foods to the local mouths.

I know that ours is not the only household in our CSA that 'complains' about too much food. I know that ours is not the only household that has thrown away food on occasion. This waste - small though it be - reinforces the awareness that producer and consumer do not always live in close proximity, or in related orbits. Growing the food is the first challenge; getting it to the ones who need it is the second. Even as we laud eating locally, we still need to work on proper distribution.

So it makes me wonder if farms have excess food too that they are unable to sell and distribute - and does that food go to waste when nearby families go to bed hungry?

Is there a way our community can arrange to buy that excess food and distribute it, with accompanying cooking classes and recipes and potluck dinners, to those in need?

I heard a stunning comment on a report of fresh foods, or the lack thereof, in an inner city. A woman who just started a community garden said: It is easier to get guns and drugs in this neighorhood than to get a tomato.

CSAs are wonderful. I gained so much more than the healthy, local food I ate.

What do I now do with these insights, blessings and guilt?

From Cosmos to Kitchen I

On October 24, the Comet 17P/Holmes, an otherwise well-mannered, highly ignorable comet, erupted in light. While this didn't make the press, the stargazing world is abuzz with excitement. My son - the astronomer - called us at 11:30 at night to tell us to go out and look up and see this amazing phenomenon. Indeed, there where no star usually is seen, was a messy blob of light.

What follows is a quote from astronomy.org/starwatch website I found that explains this phenomenon.


" What happened to dinky Holmes, to transform it into a fuzz ball visible... in center city Allentown? It is thought that a sinkhole collapsed on the tiny one-to-two mile diameter nucleus which triggered an explosive amount of outgassing caused by the sun’s heat. The gasses pushed out huge quantities of dust which were sprayed like a turning garden hose as the nucleus rotated. The result has been a circular halo of debris now over one million miles in diameter, scattering sunlight back to us and creating the fluffy blob of light near the bright star Mirfak in Perseus the Hero. Why the media hasn’t picked up on this is anyone’s guess, but it is the top story if you’re an astronomer. Comet 17P/Holmes won’t be around forever. Its expanding coma will eventually get so huge that it will simply disappear against the sky background."

We live in an exciting neighborhood!

And while we are on the subject of the sky: the annual Leonid meteor shower is coming up.

Meteor showers - when you can possibly see a dozen or so shooting stars an hour! - occur throughout the year.



The Leonids are so called for they appear in the constellation of Leo.

This is what upcoming.yahoo.com tells us about this year's Leonids:

"Because Leo does not start coming fully into view until the after midnight hours, that would be the best time to concentrate on looking for the Leonid meteors.

The Leonid meteors are debris shed into space by the Tempel-Tuttle comet, which swings through the inner solar system at intervals of 33 years. With each visit the comet leaves behind a trail of dust in its wake."

That site also gives you a lot more stargazing information in user-friendly (non-technical) language.

http://stardate.org/nightsky/meteors is also a good popular and understandable site. This is their explanation of meteor showers:

What are meteor showers?

An increase in the number of meteors at a particular time of year is called a meteor shower.

Comets shed the debris that becomes most meteor showers. As comets orbit the Sun, they shed an icy, dusty debris stream along the comet's orbit. If Earth travels through this stream, we will see a meteor shower. Depending on where Earth and the stream meet, meteors appear to fall from a particular place in the sky, maybe within the neighborhood of a constellation.

Meteor showers are named by the constellation from which meteors appear to fall, a spot in the sky astronomers call the radiant. For instance, the radiant for the Leonid meteor shower is located in the constellation Leo. The Perseid meteor shower is so named because meteors appear to fall from a point in the constellation Perseus.

You can also find a full list of the eight major meteor showers and the best dates for viewing them at this site.

So much for the cosmos.

To the kitchen:

My foray into the CSA world (Community Supported Agriculture) has taught me many things. Two of which are this:

That we as modern privileged westerners generally tend to consume according to our desires. If we want a nectarine in February - no problem. Fresh strawberries in November - just run to the store. We may pay a bit more, but otherwise we generally don't think much about it.

Yet I can remember not so long ago a series of commercials that promoted something called "summer fruit." Pictures of luscious peaches and mounds of berries would be draped across the tv set, telling us these fruits that we have waited for are once again available. Because they were not available all year round back then - at least not at any prices that normal folk could afford. It is hard to imagine these days that something we craved to eat was beyond our reach simply because it was cold outside.

Our cheap fuel and impressive transportation and refrigeration systems have enabled us over the past 20 years to make it summertime all year round in our supermarkets. And while that is great for our appetites, it might not be so great for the planet.

For one thing, today, freighters and tankers that move cheap food and products around the world contribute more to greenhouse gas emissions than does the aviation industry. That is a relatively new development.

In addition, the fields that are cleared to feed our summertime desires in the midst of our winter, and the "cheap" products that are made (for example) in China are, in fact, quite costly. They take their toll on the earth and on the health of the workers (occupational safety as we know is not well regulated in China). Additionally, as you probably know, China has now surpassed the US in the amount of CO2 emissions it spews into the air largely from the coal-fired power plants it is building now (using outdated 1980's technology) that run the factories that give us our cheap merchandise.

It all begins with our appetites.

The CSA has taught me what I knew but did not yet feel: that the earth has its cycles and that we live within them. Even more, that there is a grace and humility and joy that comes with living within those cycles. Which is not to say that agriculture and manufacturing cannot be pushed to bring the earth to its fullest potential. Humanity is charged with bringing both ourselves and our earth to our greatest level of dignity and productivity. But not by sacrificing the long-term health of the workers, the land, the water or the air.

So bending my appetite to the cycles of the earth instead of bending the yield of the earth to my appetite is a lesson I take away as this CSA season ends.

I will talk about the response to (some would say oppression of) abundance in the next post.