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In my sister's 1955 Girl Scout handbook are nine proficiency badges listed under Agriculture -- Animal Raiser, Beekeeper, Dairying, Farmer, Fruit Raiser, Home Gardener, Landscaper, Poultry Raiser, and Truck Gardener. With the rise of backyard chicken coops, knowing how to candle an egg is regaining importance. But knowing the difference, in females, between a calf, a heifer, and a cow, and the quantity and type of feed for each? Not so much. I haven't seen many backyard Bessie's.
As in the general society, Girl Scouts are returning to the land. One of the new badges is Locavore. Girls will become knowledgeable on everything from the business of food to what’s in season in their area. Eating local and in season tends to be cheaper and better for the environment. If the produce is trucked in from a farm three counties away rather than a country in the other hemisphere, you'll save money because you won't be paying for all the various modes of transportation between farm and table. Less transportation means less pollution. It's a win-win. Even better would be just walking out your back door and harvesting your own turnips. But back to the Girl Scouts...
To earn the Locavore badge, five steps are required:
1. Explore the benefits and challenges of going local
2. Find your local food sources
3. Cook a simple dish showcasing local ingredients
4. Make a recipe with local ingredients
5. Try a local cooking challenge.
Each of the steps includes specific challenges such as interviewing chefs who specialize in locally grown foods, taking a favorite recipe and making it local, or, for the local cooking challenge, preparing a three-course meal based on local ingredients.
The Girl Scouts are returning to our roots. Think it's easy? I challenge YOU to the five badge requirements. I'll participate as well and report back with my progress. Can YOU earn the Girl Scouts Locavore badge?
My girl card is about to be taken away. To me, a date on the calendar to celebrate love (February 14) or mothers (the second Sunday in May) or birthdays (for me, August 6) is not necessarily an excuse to shower me with presents. My family knows me so well.
Since today is Mother's Day, as with most holidays, we have a family traditional breakfast. Mr. Gaelic and the girls prepare eggs Benedict, hash browns, fruit salad, LeConte sunrise, and coffee. No gifts, no cards, only verbal wishes for a Happy Mother's Day. Except this year Deirdre, who has trouble saying things to me sometimes, gave me a card that expressed her appreciation for all I have done for her.
The rest of the day was picture perfect. An hour or so of working in my vegetable garden was followed by an extended manicure. Coffee, naptime, and a trip to the dog park with Baby, all with Mr. G, felt luxurious on a lovely spring day. When I retired to my boudoir with my laptop for some alone time, what was delivered to my room outdid everything else.
About to text message Mr. G to see what he was up to, his footsteps were heard on the stairs. Looking up as he opened the door, I noticed that he didn't have a load of laundry under his arm or a look of consternation on his brow from dealing with the kids alone. Instead he carried an antique martini glass by the stem. One bleu cheese-stuffed olive sat at the bottom of the clear liquid. His gift of making me a dirty martini was almost too much. My face lit up into the biggest smile possible and my profuse thanks delighted him.
A perfect way to end a perfect day.
*Mama said click here.
There are five senses. Yet there are only four here so far in my non-Bucket List list. There have been sight, sound, smell, and taste. Have you ever realised that most of your senses are located in the head region? The only one that covers more than just the head region is touch.
What is on my want-to-feel-before-I-die list? This:
- The Dead Sea keeping me afloat
- My grandbaby's soft skin
- The wind from a tornado as I chase the storm (with a professional, of course)
- Spray from the ocean on my face while sailing in the Greek Isles
- The silkiness of my daughters' wedding dresses
- Sheets made of silk
- Weightlessness
- Cool dirt while digging for truffles
- Spongy trails as the elevation increases on Denali
- My wedding rings on my left ring finger (they were cut off when I shattered the bone in my finger and won't be repaired until there is no more swelling in my finger)
That's also an update on my finger. The pins are beginning to hurt under the skin. They'll need to come out at some point. When I make a fist, my finger still sticks out at an odd angle. But physical therapy is continuing and small progress is made each week. As the professionals tell me, it may take a year before my finger is stabilized. And it may never be back to normal -- in size or in how straight it is.
Perhaps Number 11 on the list should be "a day without pain in the finger." But whining doesn't feel so good either. So we'll stop at Ten.
A couple of weeks ago I kvetched about missing the deadline for the last meat co-op delivery. You can't keep a good woman meatless. Incensed about forgetting to hit the checkout button on my order, I emailed the farmer's wife to ask if there were any way to buy from a different delivery location. However, driving all the way to the farm, about two hours away, was not my preferred pick-up destination.
If you've kept up with the organic, non-GMO, local, free-range debate in books and movies over the past few years, you would know the farmer. The products he sells -- beef, pork, chicken, turkey, eggs, and sometimes rabbit, lamb, duck, and duck eggs -- are all free-range. After seeing the farmer prominently in one of the food debate movies and discovering just how close the farm is, my research turned up several co-op delivery sites in my neck of the woods.
Meat products are as seasonal as vegetables and fruit. Chicken lay more eggs when there's more sunlight in the summer before slacking off to almost none in the winter. Cows and pigs and sheep give birth in the spring in the northern hemisphere. If you want to have suckling pig or a leg of lamb for a spring holiday and expect to buy it a week before the holiday, chances are it's from Australia or New Zealand where it would be autumn and the piglet or lamb would be big enough for slaughter. If you want local piglet or lamb, you'll need to freeze it until the spring.
The farmer's wife wrote back allowing me to pick up at a different delivery site. Joy! Elation! And the delivery date isn't until the second week of December! That means that the freezer will have been emptied a bit more with all the Thanksgiving dishes having been eaten yesterday.
Good thing. Since this is the absolute last delivery until late spring next year, I'll need to stock up. My order included:
1/4 cow (approximately 110 lbs. of meat)
1/2 pig (approximately 100 lbs. of meat)
plus,
2 Filet mignons
5 Delmonico steaks
10 lbs. ground beef
That 1/4 cow and 1/2 pig means a quarter of the cow and a half of the pig. You can order a whole animal if you want, but we don't have that much freezer space.
My only regret is that the cuts won't include a standing rib roast for Christmas or a ham shank for New Year's. He didn't have any lamb available either. Maybe the other farmer who shows up at the farmers' market has a leg of lamb to stick in the freezer for Easter.
The one thing about holidays from my childhood home that I never liked was back-to-back meals. Mama served turkey for Thanksgiving and again for Christmas, and ham for New Year's Day and again for Easter. In my house, the now tradition is turkey and dressing for Thanksgiving, beef rib roast and Yorkshire pudding for Christmas, ham, collards, and black-eyed peas for New Year's Day, and lamb and asparagus for Easter. Oh, and pancakes on Shrove Tuesday which needs bacon or sausage as an accompaniment.
Darn it! I didn't order any bacon or sausage. Back to the order form!
Is next weekend really October? It can't be! It's still summer, isn't it? Around my neck of the woods, it certainly feels like summer. Not Indian summer but a continuation of summer with no reprieve. Our fair city broke records last week for temperature highs, and lows (the highest lows at night for this time of the year).
My figs are still ripening but there isn't enough to make another batch of fig preserves. I pulled up my tomato plants two weeks ago thinking fall and frost would be on the way. Those green tomatoes could have ripened on the vine. And my cool weather veggies were all burned to a withered crisp which means no late crop of collards, broccoli, or spinach.
This at a time when the dearth of veggies in the American diet has been everywhere recently. Health professionals have been trying to push the 5-a-day program for eating more fruits and veggies. In news reports in recent weeks have been stories about a campaign for baby carrots taking on junk food. In yesterday's New York Times was an article about how we Americans have (sort of) listened. We've turned to French fries to up our veggie intake. The article has a photo of a baby carrot vending machine next to a junk food vending machine. The baby carrot vending machines were even lampooned in last night's Weekend Update on Saturday Night Live (too recent for a video link).
So let's see if I can fit more fruits and vegetables into my family's menu this week.
- Monday
- Breakfast: bagels with cream cheese
- Supper: potluck (Maeve's ballet, Deirdre's Girl Scout press event, Mr. Gaelic's weather delay from work [rain in the forecast means no motorcycle ride to work which means public transportation])
- Tuesday
- Breakfast: cereal
- Supper: whole baked cabbage (cabbage left over from last week's borscht)
- Wednesday
- Breakfast: grapefruit halves, toast
- Supper: baked mac & cheese, fried okra, honeyed carrots
- Thursday
- Breakfast: toast, fig preserves
- Supper: cheese soufflé, asparagus
- Friday
- Breakfast: oatmeal
- Supper: shrimp étouffée, rice, salad
- Saturday
- Breakfast: muffins, muffins, and more muffins (Muffins and Mugs [BYOM - bring your own mug] breakfast party we're throwing before our neighborhood arts festival)
- Supper: pizza for girls, dinner our for adults (fundraiser for new grand piano at our church)
- Sunday
- Breakfast: bacon, eggs, grits, toast
- Dinner: pot roast, roast potatoes, sugar peas
Wow! Even for a foodie like me, it's damn hard fitting in all those fruits and veggies every day. Lunch and snacks will have to help make up the deficit. And maybe the installation of a baby carrot vending machine by the back door?
The veggies from my garden this year included cabbage, onions, carrot, and beets. There were also strawberries, raspberries, figs, tomatoes, peppers, pumpkins, and lettuce. Of the first group one can make a delicious soup. Although Maeve called it a stew.
Don’t laugh, but I’m beginning to become Русско. (That’s Russian for Russki.) For longtime readers, you’ll remember my trek across country two years ago. My birthday on that trip found us in Chicago where we stumbled upon a wonderful Russian restaurant. I would remember how to say Happy Birthday in Russian as the waitress said it to me except for the flight of vodka that accompanied my dinner.
So, what do you get when you add cabbage and onions and carrots and beets? Throw in some chunks of beef and a dollop of sour cream on top. Serve it up with warm-from-the-oven black bread. You get a hearty supper of borscht and bread. The only thing missing was the Belvedere. But my potato crop didn't take this year. My Irish roots are still very strong.
Oops! Sometimes my best laid plans go awry. Take last week for instance. All those yummy meals that were planned, not all of them came to fruition. Why? Scheduling difficulty. I forgot to plan for the Back-to-School night and the late ballet class for Maeve and the nights that Mr. Gaelic either worked late or had client dinners.
So this week's menu selection will be repeating some of those suppers that didn't get made last week. The ingredients are all on hand and need to be used up before they go bad.
- Monday
- Breakfast: choice of cereal
- Supper: borscht, homemade hearty bread (from last week's menu)
- Tuesday
- Breakfast: cinnamon toast, fruit salad
- Supper: pinto beans, risotto, orange beets (the garden overproduced beets)
- Wednesday
- Breakfast: cream of wheat
- Supper: stewed tomatoes, creamed spinach, corn pudding
- Thursday
- Breakfast: homemade cinnamon-raisin bread
- Supper: potluck (see what's left in fridge)
- Friday
- Breakfast: English muffins, fig preserves (just put up last Saturday)
- Supper: salmon patties, French fries
- Saturday
- Breakfast: omelet, bacon, toast
- Supper: Welsh rabbit, baked kale
- Sunday
- Breakfast: buttermilk biscuits, sausage gravy
- Dinner: roast chicken, sweet potatoes, green beans
Maybe this week will be calmer than last week in terms of evening commitments. One can always hope.
It’s been a rough seven days. Late last week, an extreme storm with a 70+ mph wind microburst knocked down enough trees in its path to leave us without power for 48 hours. After wearing a bright green shirt to the gym on Monday, my armpits still have a green tint. While trying to mow the yard, the mower ran over a rock or something and bent the blade so that they won’t rotate. My driveway looks good but the grass in the back is tall enough to lose my dog in.
I gave up after the mower incident and raided the liquor cabinet. Three different single malts, top shelf vodka, and run-of-the-mill vermouth. And no olives. Except the Kalamata olives that my kids snack on. Grocery store or liquor store?
One friend suggested going to both. Grocery store for olives and liquor store for gin. “For a proper martini.” But I'm not a "proper martini" kind of girl. I like my martinis dirty. Like I like my men. Yum, olives stuffed with bleu cheese, a splash of olive brine, a whisper of vermouth, lots of gin. Stirred, not shaken. You don’t want to bruise the gin. Too bad the liquor store closed before I could get there. I’ll think about that tomorrow. After all, tomorrow is another weekend.
There's an experiment going on in my backyard. It's called a vegetable garden.
When I was growing up, my farm-owning grandfather let all of his city-living kids have two or three rows in his garden to raise whatever they wanted as long as they did all the work. Weekends were spent hoeing and pulling weeds. The payoff was long-lived with vegetables that graced our table fresh from the stalk as well as stocked in our pantry in jars that my mama put up.
Although I helped with the garden duties, I'm not sure how much of their knowledge got osmosed.
My garden is growing. Although it's a bit unwieldy. Cabbage, carrots, strawberries, tomatoes, peppers, beets, onions, and corn have been harvested. There's also a fig "tree" against my house. It would have been a tree if it hadn't split as a young thing making it a bush instead. A twelve foot round bush.
Today's to-do list includes making fig preserves. Even if I didn't learn all the gardening skills I could have at my father's knee, I certainly learned all the canning skills I needed at my mother's and grandmother's apron strings.
‘Tis better to have fallen and recovered than to never have fallen at all. That’s not right. ‘Tis better to not fall in the first place. At least if you’re on the downside of 40.
It all began with noticing just how dry the yard is. So after mowing, a quick dousing with the sprinkler should do the trick. I positioned the sprinkler to point down the side yard next to the driveway. After thirty minutes, it was time to reposition the sprinkler.
Not wanting to get wet, I decided to do an end-run around the spray of water as the sprinkler was pointing in the opposite direction. So I took off running in an arc toward the outside of the driveway.
You know how everyone says that when something bad happens it happens in slow motion? Well, that didn’t happen for me. My feet hit a slick spot on the rocks of the driveway and down I went, landing on all fours on the rocks. About that time, the sprinkler wooshed back around and soaked my entire side head to toe as I tried to erect myself quickly enough to avoid the water.
Mixed with the water dripping down my leg and arm, it looked like there was a cup of blood spurting from my knee and the heel of my palm. ‘Tis a good thing kneeling isn’t a required activity of my daily life.
Seriously. How hard is it to keep plants alive? You water them when they're dry. Fertilize them every so often. Make sure they have the required amount of sunlight. The cactus that a neighbor passed my way last year has proven my undoing. How many people can claim to have killed a cactus? But last night, after inspecting the surrounding plants, there lay it's corpse. A shrivelled, deflated shell of a plant. Was it overwatered? Underwatered? Too much light? Not enough light? Having grown up in the lushness of the American Southeast, cacti are an exotic breed for which I, apparently, am ill-suited to grow.Hmm... Guess I'll stick to things I know and cover our house and trees and telephone poles with kudzu.
There was a vine in the middle of our fence.The prettiest vine, it was lush and green.Well, the vine on the fenceAnd the green leaves grew all around and around.Without a bloom to be found.Now that you have the tune stuck in your head, about that vine....It's supposedly a wisteria. It's been growing on our front fence since before we bought the house eighteen years ago. In the summer, it gets so full of leaves that it blocks our view of the sidewalk and the street. Which, depending on my mood and my love-hate relationship with the city, ain't a bad thing.But in all the years that we've lived here, that wisteria has only bloomed once. And then with only four blossoms. I tried everything - fertilizing it, not fertilizing it, cutting it back, not cutting it at all, just giving it a little shaping. The year it bloomed was a fluke. I didn't do anything to it that year. In fact, I'd given up on ever having blossoms on the vine. That attitude hasn't had the same effect twice.As my eldest daughter and I were walking near our church yesterday, we walked under a purple canopy of wisteria blossoms on one of the oldest blocks in town near the river. After pointing out what wisteria blossoms look like, she commented that perhaps ours is a male vine. I rebutted that it has bloomed once so it can't be a male, maybe it's androgynous. To which she corrected me. "No, Mom, our wisteria is a hermaphrodite."Everyone now...And the green leaves grew all around and around,And the green leaves grew all around.
My parents grew up on farms and moved to town after they got married. They kept a garden on my grandfather's farm every year when I was young. My mother would weed the rows while I would pick up stones. We'd bring home all sorts of fresh vegetables. Very few dishes on our table came from the grocery store. In past years I've planted tomatoes and peppers. One year I tried okra and eggplant. But for a backyard gardener with younger children, giving up too much of their playing area of the lawn wasn't a real option. But this year?This year I'm going to try something more ambitious. There are eight packets of seeds waiting to be put in either a starter system for planting after the last frost or the ground when the soil is warm enough. My goal is three-fold.First, growing some of our own vegetables will cut down on our grocery bill. Second, we'll be eating healthier by eating fresher. Third, it'll be good for the environment by not depending on foods that are shipped miles and miles to our table.I'm not quite ready for turning over my entire yard to a modern-day Victory Garden. But in the meantime, I'll be stretching my atrophied gardening muscles, especially the one between my ears.
