In the pipeline...

I got hired a year ago Saturday which is pretty exciting for me to think about. Work is generally great, but boy does it ever drain me. Wouldn't you know it, having a 9 to 5 job--or in my case more like 9:30 to 6, leaves less time in the day to write here? On a happier note, our office moved 6 weeks ago, cutting my commute by more than half. I've taken advantage of the extra hour I stole back from my daily subway time to focus on self-improvement projects. Lately that has meant going to the gym. (Oh, that's right, I used to exercise! Ha!)

I have several other personal goal-projects going on in my newly recovered free time, one of which is capturing and fleshing out my thoughts on the issues that interest me most, namely the interconnectedness of individual personal actions and the world around us, or what I mean when I call myself an urban ruralist. I look forward to exploring and sharing a bit of that here very soon.

The most pressing project, though, is crafting our Halloween costumes for Saturday! Last year we attended a Harry Potter themed party and pulled together some incredible dragon costumes in just a few days (dragons from the Tri-Wizard Tournament in Year 4 at Hogwarts: The Goblet of Fire, of course). With the excitement of Where the Wild Things Are all about us, Jeff and I got to thinking about the phrase "where the wild things are," which can be loosely interpreted as "wild things," "wild," "things," or my personal favorite: "where." Our "where" is the sea and I will soon be posting some gloriously unattractive progress photos.
I am so happy to have regained a bit of time for silly things like buying fabric, scoring cardboard and wondering where to put the eyes.

On Not Eating Fast Food

Sally Sampson, mother of a perpetually hungry 15-year old son, wrote a wonderful piece for the Washington Post called "Dude, It Adds Up" detailing her quest to see if she could make better versions of typical fast food staples for less than it costs to buy one at the drive-thru.

As you can see from her chart below, she succeeded. While I ultimately agree with Ms. Sampson that cooking--even cooking these less-than-healthy items--is nearly always a better bet than purchasing the same items at a restaurant, I think she has left out a number of relevant costs. She has some strange logic about associated costs in the paragraph below:

Restaurant fast food is rarely as convenient as you expect. There are hidden costs everywhere. True, when you cook at home you use electricity, soap, water and so on, but when you buy fast food, really all you get is imagined speed: You still have to get there, wait in line and wait for your food. And what you get is second-rate.

First, fast food does live up to its name in that the time involved to procure a hamburger from McDonald's is far shorter than the time it takes to pick up ingredients and prep them oneself. You have to decide far in advance that you would like to buy the ingredients to make a burger, get them, and then put them together properly. For those of us in cities where decent grocery stores are few and far between, it takes about 3 hours to make a hamburger. The opportunity cost of time spent procuring groceries and cooking is certainly a relevant factor.

Secondly, one of the major points that Ms. Sampson implies but does not state outright is that repeatedly eating fast food has hidden costs. Her opening sentence implies the connection between long-term fast food consumption and obesity, and she also mentions that her son feels sluggish or has a "McHangover" after eating poor-quality fast food. Yet, she chooses not to make the case here that surrendering control of the ingredients in our food to chain eateries has far-ranging consequences for our health. The immediate effect of bombarding our digestive systems with densely caloric, fatty, salty, often chemical-ridden foods is having all our blood cells cease non-essential functions like thought in order to break down this glut of food into useable energy. The long term effects are obesity and weight-related difficulties like plantar fasciitis, knee and back pain; diabetes; and plaque build-up in arteries leading to increased incidence of heart attacks.

Since I enjoy going to the grocery store, absolutely love cooking and have no desire to resemble this creature, the choice of how to source my savory indulgences is an easy one--I'm making them at home.

If you read nothing else, read The Cleanest Line blog

"In the end it is a very old thing we are doing, walking vast distances along the surface of the earth,
drinking from streams, and laying under a pine tree on thick duff.
What could be better than this simple life?"

- Adam Bradley, Patagonia's The Cleanest Line blog

As the weather has gotten a bit chillier here in New York and reminded me that fall is on its way, I started scoping the market for a decent fleece. I have two very thin ones that each work well for summer nights on trail or crisp days in September. Unfortunately, they do not--even combined--keep me all that warm on September mountain evenings, let alone on late fall and winter hikes.

One of the major gear deficiencies I experienced on the long trip Jeff and I took last summer was insulation. I didn't think it would be a big issue since our trip was after all in the summer, but we experienced true winter conditions in Yellowstone in June. As we made dinner one night in the Lamar Valley area of the park, I had to layer myself in my two thin fleeces, Jeff's down sweater, a fleece hat, my shell, long underwear and rain pants. I also made the ever-fashionable hair scarf, pulling my hair forward around my neck and bunching it around my face. I was still cold, getting pale and starting to have involuntary convulsions like a magnified shiver. I left Jeff with the chili-encrusted pot to bear bag and booked it into the tent to climb into my sleeping bag, pulling Jeff's over me like a blanket and rubbing my torso to warm up. It took 20 minutes before the last situp-like spasm went away.

Needless to say, this first sign of cold in the Northeast and the promise of some good fall hiking ahead have got me in the market for a solid insulating layer. I think Patagonia makes the finest fleeces available*--soft, warm, some windproof, built to last, recyclable if you do wear them out. However, they are pricey.

[*ArcTeryx also is a purveyor of most excellent goods, though they too are accordingly expensive.]

In any case, shopping for a fleece got me poking around the Patagonia site for the first time in many moons. They have a little news feed which linked to a really fantastic interview with Adam Bradley, a Patagonia customer service rep who set a new record time for completing the Pacific Crest Trail unsupported a few weeks ago. I highly recommend reading it if you like hiking at all. Even if you don't, there are some fun gems of wisdom like "if I knew a killer meal was available or new shoes and socks were waiting for me, I would be pretty amped," that can apply to a variety of situations, and his thoughts on the merits of hiking at the end of the interview could convert the staunchest outdoor-holdouts.

While it is true that hiking and other outdoor sports are wonderful ways to see beautiful scenery, the reports from people like Adam Bradley about long trips show that the most incredible parts of these activities are the mental and emotional revelations that bubble up and surprise you. Reading this interview (and subsequently a bunch of other amazing posts on Patagonia's The Cleanest Line blog) made me positively itch to get outside, get moving, and get away from the city's distracting conveniences.

CSA Week 10

One of the special delivery CSA weeks occured while Jeff and I were in Hawaii. As our farmers let me know that they just started offering a cheese I've been aching to try, I asked my friend Anna of the cherry-picking adventure if she might pick it up for me in exchange for the week's produce. Happily, she agreed. The week was a particularly bountiful one, so all parties were quite satisfied!

Contents:

1 Basil

1 Lettuce*

1.5 lbs assorted potatoes*

1 frying pepper

5 ears corn*

2 cucumbers*

3 white onions

Tomatoes: one purple, 2 red, 8 baby yellow*

1 voracious celery

3 lbs peaches

also one curious kitten inspection.

*already eaten/partially eaten

Hope you're having the best time!

xox

Anna

CSA Weeks 7, 8, 9

Lordy, August really got the best of me. It feels like that month slipped by me and took the rest of summer with it. Two things teamed up to help August sneak past: we had houseguests for a week, and then Jeff and I went back to Hawaii for vacation for 10 days. Life back home is obviously vastly different from the daily grind here in New York. That fact, coupled with mindbogglingly, legcrampingly long flights, makes trips to Hawaii seem like strange ruptures in time. Once again settled into a pretty dull work routine in New York, I can hardly believe that I was hiking along gorgeous ridgelines in the middle of the Pacific less than three weeks ago. My body voiced its unhappiness by promptly getting sick upon its return to the East Coast. The one factor about life in New York that brought me hope of sanity was our lovely CSA. With glowing produce like this, I might just make it.

Week 7

I worked another shift this week, so got a little bit of excess loot at the end. I really do love this CSA setup.

Green Beans, Potatoes, and Apricots... Oh My!

I think the best way to eat green beans is just barely blanched or steamed so that they are a slightly brighter green, retaining a shocking amount of crunch, and then dabbed with good butter and sprinkled with salt. We ate them in precisely this fashion.

The potatoes also enjoyed simple preparations. I boiled them all, but picked out the little guys for more skillet smashed potatoes--this time spiced up with a healthy amount of Old Bay (see comment #1 from yours truly). The larger tubers went with the just barely visible chard into (Modified) Kale Olive Oil Mashed Potatoes. We made this dish, realized we were late for a surprise party, packed it up into some tupperware and brought it with us on the train! Despite the fact that people find it strange when you bring your own food, the other partygoers were quite jealous. For good reason: this recipe is killer.

Chard, close relative of bok choi, red romaine, two cucumbers,

two heads fresh garlic, five onions, two cabbages

The best way to tackle the monstrous amount of produce we get from our CSA is to eat the dainty things first, and let the hardy root vegetables, alliums and cruciferous delights wait until I can figure out what to do with them. Thus, we ate a quick salad of red romaine and vinaigrette on pickup night and let the cukes and cabbages sit around a bit.

I don't know what this pretty thing is called, but it's like a slightly tougher, more bitter-in-a-healthy-tasting-way bok choi. I sliced the stalks into thin rounds to avoid an unpleasantly fibrous meal and chiffonaded (French for "ribbonate," to make into ribbons) the leaves. Steamed with a little bit of oyster sauce, it was very tasty.

We ate about half of the apricots straight up and then I churned the rest into apricot sorbet which was, in a word, delightful. In three words, distillation of summer.

Week 8

Two more cucumbers, three ears corn, Chinese cabbage, kale, green leaf lettuce,

two zucchinis, long eggplant, peaches, and tomatoes

Terribly unflattering light in my kitchen free of charge.

Of course, we had a light salad with the soft buttery green leaf lettuce. The Chinese cabbage augmented the ever-popular, oft-requested fried rice. Cucumbers... um sat around again.

I like to eat, eat, eat peaches and tomatoes

We made zucchini-corn fritters. They were fun and tasty, if a little crumbly. FYI, do not attempt to make fritters the size of dinner plates. These are frankly unflippable.

With just three tomatoes in our share this week (Jeff had already eaten his little golden tomato when this photo was taken), we wanted to savor every bit of tomatoeyness we could. So rather than muddy them in a cooked presentation, we sliced them up, drizzled a tiny bit of good olive oil over them, and gave them a pinch of gray sea salt. That was just the ticket.

Week 9

wax beans, more onions, gargantuan broccoli, more peaches, basil, kale, lettuce, cucumbers (!), garlic

We had two days to eat or store this produce before our trip to Hawaii. I took 2/3 of the peaches to a dinner party to give away and/or slice into absurdly strong peach martinis. Wax beans got sauteed with garlic slices and immediately devoured. The night before our flight, we had a salad with the lettuce, made kale chips, and cooked the almost forgotten cabbages from two weeks prior into "coco cabbage." I frantically froze the cooked cabbage, hoping that a short life in the freezer would mean that it would not be disgusting and slimy when I reheated it. I also steamed the broccoli trees and Jeff packed them into tupperware. We brought them on the plane along with our two tomatoes, a log of New York state goat cheese, a half roll of ritz crackers and approximately 7 peaches. We ate all this during our layover in Houston and got stares usually reserved for the deranged. That may have had something to do with me standing in line to board the plane cradling my tomato and having Jeff goad "eat it. yeah. tomato, eat it."

Trip Review: Cherry Picking

Whoops, this post is about 5 weeks late...

Big ole farm in Princeton, New Jersey!

Cherry Picking Trip Review

Background: I think it's safe to say that I love to pick my own fruit. After a ridiculously long and cold spring, the prospect of getting some fresh strawberries from a nearby farm was really exciting to me. Unfortunately, once I had done some decent research I found out that the peak of strawberry season had passed, and most of the good ones would be picked already though there would surely be more berries around. I also found out that the very brief cherry picking season would open the following weekend. This was very exciting for Jeff since he prefers cherries. I enlisted our good friends Chris and Anna who happen to have a car. On the last Saturday in June, we drove down through scenic New Jersey to Princeton.

I did my research with Pick Your Own, a very informative website with the two downsides that the font used is Comic Sans, and that farm listings for each state are organized by county rather than clickable map. The latter probably is not an issue for most people, but I grew up in a state with 5 counties, and they were groups of islands, so I could easily tell which county I was in. I found Terhune Orchards through them, and I'm glad I did!

So many cherries. The temptation to be gluttonous is overwhelming.

Terhune has 185 acres with many different crops available for pick-your-own activities: strawberries, cherries, blueberries, raspberries, blackberries, apples and pumpkins. They grow a bunch of other stuff commercially too, and some of these can be bought in their farm store.

The day we were there cherries were getting picked (rapidly) and the blueberry patches just opened to the public. A decently good bluegrass band was playing. There was a bustling market scene where you could get potted herbs and veggies, fresh pulled pork sandwiches, apple cider slushies, and corn on the cob. The sun was out for the first (and last) time for many weeks. It was a pretty great day.

Chris overheard a worker telling someone they couldn't taste any of the cherries until after
they were weighed and paid for. Anna scoffed. We all were sampling the wares.
Apparently, this is ok and to be expected. (note is halfway down that page)

Approximately 3 seconds after this picture was taken there was a cherry in my mouth.

Chris and Anna picked a modest 2.5 pounds.
Chris made a snazzy cherry holster with his carabiner for the rest of our farm adventure.

Jeff and I picked a whopping 11 pounds of cherries. For reference, this would fill a small plastic trashcan like those found in dorm rooms and offices about 2/3 of the way, or it would fill a chico tote bag very nicely. My parents again worried about our relationship due to colonic activity, but there were no blowouts--gastrointestinal or emotional--from our enormous amount of cherries. How we enjoyed them is coming up in the next post.

CSA Week 6

Last week was a special week at the CSA. It was one of the few times we could have extra goodies delivered, and I also worked a shift. Working the closing shift meant picking up a few surplus items at the end which conveniently balanced out the fact that I stood in a downpour for two hours explaining what vegetables people were allotted.

Above, clockwise from left: giant scallions, cucumbers, beets with greens, peaches, romaine, farm fresh eggs, duck,
2 cheeses--Consider Bardwell's Pawlett, and 3 Corner Field Farm's Shushan Snow mini wheel of sheep's milk brie,
one heirloom tomato, chinese cabbage, white onions, and cilantro plants.

We were happy even to get one tomato what with all of this crazy late blight and thunderstorms in the northeast. We honored its delicious tomatoey flavor by slicing it and eating it for breakfrast with scrambled fresh eggs.

One of the onions and the whole bunch of beets with their greens got cubed, and saute-steamed--a fun process like sauteeing, but involving a total crowding and mild overflowing of the pan so that steam is trapped by food particles and ends up doing the cooking. We love to eat this with polenta. Inspired by this recipe, we've cut down on meat intake (aside from the duck we got this week) and left out the pancetta and made the whole meal into a two step process.

We ate the Chinese cabbage steamed with hoisin. I rarely feel in touch with my Chinese side, but man, when I ate this I felt so Asian and so right.

Cucumbers have been a real challenge since they're not a vegetable I'm particularly fond of and I can't cream braise them. Alas! We didn't eat either of them this week, but they are still holding up well in the fridge and I have grand plans for them and their newer brethren.

Delightful flowers! This is one fourth of a leftover flower share. A bunch of flowers four times this size every week would be too much for our household, but I forget how nice it is to have colorful things around sometimes.

We ate the peaches on their own and also in rose sangria. Some of them were the peaches of dreams, and some were mealy and flavorless. I should have stuck the mealy ones in some more booze to liven them up. You win some, you lose some.

The Shushan Snow Sheep's milk brie was rapidly consumed on a park bench with more of the sourdough onion rye bread I baked. Dappled sun, sitting, bread and cheese--life is made for these sweet moments.

Learning how to cut up a duck from the Joy of Cooking's excellent diagrams

We bought a duck because last summer I read Judith Jones's The Tenth Muse, and she describes buying a duck for herself and how she cooked and ate the different parts for her meals. It sounded lovely and delicious.

After cutting up this duck, we had:

• very fatty skin, which we cooked slowly to make cracklins and rendered duck fat (AMAZING, and possibly worth getting a duck for)
• a neck, two bony wings and a skeleton, which we made into stock
• a liver, a heart, and a gizzard, which got fried and put on a salad.
  
• two large breast pieces, which we broiled and served with chinese cabbage and orange chipotle sauce
• two legs with love handles attached, which got pan-braised with scallions
  

I had no qualms about cutting up this duck. I've always been freaked out by the plastic bag of gizzards that comes in a turkey, so I was very confused about my lack of nausea with duck bits. It was a similar to when I went skydiving with my friends after we graduated from high school; I was expecting a funny feeling in my tummy, but just felt inexplicably calm and peaceful the whole time. Maybe I felt okay with it because I had read the reassuring words of Ms. Jones so many times, "I consider the best cook's treats the packet of giblets one finds tucked into a roasting bird--and if you don't find it, complain loudly and never buy from that source again." These were very flavorful, not gross at all, and tasted amazing on a salad of fresh romaine. I doubt I'll seek out giblets to cook up, but when I do get another bird I'll be sure to make this recipe again.

Cracklins and rendered duck fat, however, I will crave for the rest of my life. Oh the sumptuous ducky flavor! Oh the smooth, barely solid lipid! Truly foods to make one feel richly fed.

The stock we have not consumed yet. I froze it in little labeled sandwich bags so that I can have a decent portion of stock to use rather than a whole pot-ful frozen altogether. I tasted an errant drop, and I am sure this stock will have the Midas touch on any food I cook with it.

With all of these parts so delicous, one would expect the meat to also be heavenly. It wasn't. I'm not sure why, but both times we cooked the duck (breast and leg) the meat was exceptionally tough. The preparation and cooking methods were vastly different from each other, but yielded the same disappointingly chewy result. Maybe next time we buy a duck we won't get such a vigorously exercised one.