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."