independence days

i'm joining in on sharon's challenge to create our own Independence Days by doing something every week from her seven categories:
1. plant something
2. harvest something
3. preserve something
4. prep something
5. cook something
6. manage your reserves
7. work on local food systems

i think key categories that appeal to me are the plant something, harvest something, preserve something, and prep something categories. i generally do cook a lot, trying new recipes and concoctions (though it gets a bit grueling in the summer with the kitchen heat... maybe i'll "prep" a solar oven for myself this year? thinking big ;) ).

i hope to check in here with my updates. kick me if i don't! (i know i've been avoiding blogger lately)

goin' on a midnight train to... ohio?

heading out for ohio this afternoon via amtrak. i packed a tote bag to bring with me, and most of it is either food or games/entertainment for the 24 hours of train trip that will take place tonight and monday. i hear the forecast is snooooowwwwww! maybe we can build a snowman :D

one local supper

thanks to a comment on my potatoes post for the idea here.

ingredients:
1 jar of lacto-fermented sauerkraut from hawthorne valley farms
1 package of sweet italian sausage from herondale farm
the rest of our potatoes from the csa (golden earthworm farm)
butter from ronnybrook farm
salt (non-local)
nutritional yeast (non-local... we had no parmesan cheese for topping)

step one: make large pot of mashed potatoes (peel potatoes, boil, drain, add salt and butter, mash, taste, add more salt and butter)

step two: remove casing from sausage and cook in skillet

step three: open sauerkraut jar

step four: layer in a casserole dish sauerkraut, then sausage, then mashed potatoes

step five: bake at 350 for roughly 35 minutes or until potatoes look mighty tasty

step six: sprinkle with nutritional yeast or parmesan cheese and dig in!

mmmmmmm... can't wait for leftovers for lunch today :)

i took my bread dough out to lunch this week (or, what sundays are for)

the purpose of a sunday is to get me ready for the coming week. i make sure i have enough clean clothes to keep me presentable. i make my kitchen look good enough to keep me from wincing when i turn the light on over the sink monday morning. i bake bread to see myself fed in the mornings.

yesterday we had plans for lunch. i did laundry early (presentably clothed - check) and started the bread. the problem with baking bread is that while it only takes a total of maybe an hour of "doing something", i have to be present for the whole five hours of the process of bread-creation because something needs to be done at least once an hour. so i brought my dough with us in the car out to lunch... seatbelted into the back seat ("it smells yeasty in here," says erin. "is that you in the back seat?"). i only had to leave the table once, to punch down the dough halfway through the rising. well done.

tome-ay-toes!

planted in quart-sized yogurt containers!

date: march 11, 2008
variety: big boy (from the mix of seeds we got for free from craigslist)
planted in: mixture of potting soil from last year plus miracle gro organic potting soil

package says 7-14 days to germination. we set them on the west-facing windowsill in our bedroom.

po-tay-toes

sharon's post yesterday about living the staple diet got me thinking about potatoes, since they'd likely be a staple food where i live. she had lots of ideas for ways to eat potatoes, and i think if i had enough potatoes to make it through the winter without them going musty-smelling, maybe i could do it? hmm... here's some potato-brainstorming:

- mashed with milk and butter and salt
- mashed potato cakes
- shepherd's pie (topped with mashed potatoes)
- mashed with cheese/garlic/horseradish/onions/herbs (clearly not all at once)
- colcannon (aka mashed with kale/spinach/chard/other green goodness)
- boiled with parsley and butter
- baked with toppings (cheese, broccoli, butter, herbs, yogurt, etc.)
- au gratin (is scalloped the same as au gratin?)
- fried breakfast potatoes with onions or onions and peppers
- roasted potatoes with rosemary and herbs
- roasted potatoes with other root vegetables
- soups: potato and leek/onion, chicken vegetable soup
- stews: potato lentil indian-style-stew-thing, winter vegetable stew, meat and veg stew

any other ideas out there? perhaps i'll consult allrecipes.com and the fatfreevegan.com

indoor laundry

back before it got cold, i was contemplating on a theorhetical level the idea of drying our clothes indoors. i wanted to put up a line of some sort.

fast forward to now, when i deal with drying our clothes indoors every week because it's bitter cold outside (half the time) and the clothes don't dry as quickly in the cold. we had one clothes drying rack already that we had gotten at target last year. over the summer we used it for socks and underwear outside (cuts down on the number of clothespins we needed). now we use it for clothes, mostly t-shirts. the shirts, pants, and underwear that doesn't fit on the rack are generally hung on hangers in the bedroom, wherever there seems to be space to hang them. generally, several items go on the pole in my closet, a few go on the hooks in another closet, and some hang on things that weren't meant for hangers to be attached to. socks get hung on a metal shoe-rack we found by the side of the street on trash day. it works :) i still look forward to sunny warmish days to hang laundry on the line again. they'll come soon enough, i'm sure.

sweet sweet love

my lady is terrible at keeping secrets and surprises. she gets very excited about it and it is very cute. so when she gave nothing away about valentine's day plans, i was completely unprepared for her to show up at my work with tissue-paper flowers to take me out to a lovely valentine's day lunch (at an all-organic restaurant: gustorganics.com). she loves me :) there were chocolates and a hand-made card, and a very special i-fixed-the-ring-you-wear-and-had-it-engraved. it was very very nice.

then in the evening, i tried to go low-impact by having a pleasant dinner at home. i moved the furniture to the sides of the living room, set up a table for two covered in red tablecloth (that was actually a pair of red pillowcases my dad had wrapped christmas presents in), put on the fireplace dvd (no really. we have a fireplace dvd), and cooked a nice dinner including a vegan pasta recipe that involved artichoke HEARTS and HEARTS of palm (get the theme?). we had some bubbly peach-flavored grape juice, and ate dinner by candlelight.

best v-day yet <3

on spring fever and sap rising

my sap is rising. i can feel spring in my bones. i sorted our seed packets this past weekend and bought some storage tubs to make into self-watering containers. someone linked to a plan to make a garden out of a wading pool, which is really awesome because we've had this wading pool in our backyard waiting to be trashed for the last year or two, haha. now we can make it into something beautiful and useful! erin suggested we make it an herb garden. i like that idea :)

speaking of herbs, our rosemary is still alive, and so is our sage. nice. i love perennials.

i ordered 5 lb of wheat and 5 lb of barley seed to do a little greening of some abandoned land i walk past on my way home. first step is to clean up the garbage in the plots, which might happen as soon as it stops being 15F out there. brrrrrr. we saw some snow flurries yesterday, which was Very Exciting, but it didn't lie on the ground more than an hour or so (making it rather Less Exciting).

my goal in 2008 is for me not to get bored with the gardening, and for me to start biking anywhere that i go alone.

riotous thanksgiving plans

we're travelling this thanksgiving, which isn't riotous in itself, but we're doing it by bus and rail.

tonight we leave new york by greyhound through cleveland to ashtabula. friday we'll spend the day hanging out with friends and family there and connect with jake. then the three of us will catch a train out of cleveland and down to florida, where erin's folks (and friends) live. we'll be staying with family, who may be in danger of desperately spoiling jake because he's their first grandchild experience ;)

erin's mom, judi, has been incited to try for a mostly local thanksgiving dinner *jumping for joy* with a turkey from a guy they know, and we'll hit the local farmer's markets and stores that sell local produce. i'll be bringing jersey cranberries with us cos i don't think they grow down there.

we'll be renting a car while we're there :( but we did get the smallest available car.