Buy Local in the New Year!

“Buy Local” is becoming a bit of a buzz term. Still, given the state of the economy, climate change and related energy issues, and food safety concerns connected to our globalized, industrial food system, it does make economic sense, in my view, to spend the majority of your dollars with your neighbours.

I’m very lucky. Besides what I manage to grow, my community in Atlantic Canada has a farmer’s market in the summer/fall, and within walking and biking distance I have farmers from whom I can buy locally produced meat, fruit, vegetables. Then, there is the mom and pop shop where I can get the fish caught off our coast; within a couple miles, bread bakers, jam-makers, and juice-producers, and those making sweets and pickles galore.

But are they staying in business from what I and others are paying them for these wonderful wares? Which brings us to the discussion topic of “cheap food policy” and some buy local research...to be taken up another day....

a blizzard threatens, and more firewood, perhaps, should be carried in.....

But, first: Happy New Year. Indeed! Hallelujah!

A new President in the White House in the U.S. of A, on January 20th; a Coalition Government, perhaps, in Canada, if the Conservatives forget again that they’re in a Minority situation. More and more people realizing the ecological and economical connections of food, farming, and frugality....but much still to be done to help those in need on the planet, especially in Zimbabwe, the Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Gaza, elsewhere. Happy New Year.

Peace/Paix,
Deborah

Limestone Mountain....

When contemplating your plate, consider how long it takes to grow/produce what's on your plate. (Lettuce? 25 days. Pumpkin Pie? 110 days growing, and many hours of labour in the kitchen if you make your own crust from your own rendered lard, cook and strain your own pumpkin....)

Would you have the patience to bring about the miracle that farming is?

Here's the farm that my grandfather bought in the late 1940s. This photo is a scanned restored instant photo taken at the time of purchase, according to my Aunt Tag. My father bought the farm from him in the late 1970s (by arrangement with his siblings) and my sister and I each bought half of the farm in 2003 (brother Michael and sister-in-law Lori have six acres of the original acreage, too).

Food-Farm-Frugal-Frivolity!

Happy Boxing Day!

If you’re in Canada or from one of those other “Commonwealth” post-colonial places on the planet that celebrate it.....It’s somewhat offensive if one is unrepentantly class-conscious and wanting social justice in a Bolshie kind of way (offended by the idea of giving to the poor and lower classes to mitigate class prejudices, instead of working in some real fashion to end poverty and inequality), but lovely in the sense of trying to do what you can to help others, to deal with what’s real in the here and now, and....well...to have, as we do here in Canada, essentially a four and a half day weekend break....that’s so wonderful!

And so, in between the gratuitous feasting on (about 95% locally-produced) foods, and my son and I hauling in firewood on this gorgeous sunny crisp winter’s day, this Feast of St. Stephen Day, I’m catching up with this online journal, and the promised recipe for muffins.




Uses for Leftover Oatmeal/Wheat/Multi-Grain Hot Cereals

Yes, we all want to be virtuous, and eat, in the winter, a bowl of steaming hot grain-based cereal. But....after a (small) bowl, I’m usually full up....and what to do with the leftovers? And, trying to get kids to eat this stuff is tough. What I used to do, when my son Ed was little, was mix applesauce, brown sugar and cinnamon, or maple syrup and brown sugar, into old-fashioned oats. This usually worked to get him to even eat a bit...and he loved those quick little ready-paks of “instant oatmeal,” so what I was doing was creating homemade versions of his favourite flavours of these little industrialized paks of god-knows-what...which even inspired a poem about what I was saving money on, avoiding the purchase of which (please, please, big corporations, don’t sue me for this!)

technological possibilities

these apples could be onions

they crunch like onions
they have no taste, though
they could be anything
they could be chopped grass
or dandelion stems
or fried pork skin
but since they're in this instant cereal
they're probably just
fake apples
(this poem is part of my manuscript, still unpublished, known as burninghouse; poem was first published in The Writing Space Journal 9.1 (Spring 2002):17. [This journal is reviewed in a reputable Canadian ‘zine, Broken Pencil, at: http://www.brokenpencil.com/reviews/reviews.php?reviewid=984]

FRUGALITY IN MUFFINS

I love Speerville Flour Mill’s [http://www.speervilleflourmill.ca] 12-grain cereal, which is available throughout most of Atlantic Canada, I believe. But again because of the virtue/anti-virtue factor, I always end up with extra cooked. I came up with a couple muffin recipes to use the excess, both of which are my vegan-friendly and adaptations of the recipe, “Muffin Madness,” from Moosewood Restaurant Cooks at Home (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994) 54-55. For information online about Moosewood, check out: http://www.moosewoodrestaurant.com...

Speerville Mill’s 12 grain cereal muffins

To ¼ cup vegan-acceptable oil, add 1 ½ cup of leftover 12 grain porridge (or, whatever you have, and add water to make approx. 1 ½ cup of mixture/goop). Add ¾ - 1 cup brown sugar (you can make part honey if not feeding to strict vegans) and 1 t. real (organic if you can!) vanilla. Mix all these wet ingredients together well in a large bowl, and preheat over to 350 degrees. Put muffin papers into a 12 cup muffin tin or equiv. (I use these papers because I can compost them, and it saves the hassle of lots of scrubbing; however, if you can’t compost them easily or don’t have them, just grease muffin tins well on bottom and halfway up the sides with a vegan-acceptable fat.)

In small bowl or sifter, add two cups of flour (I use a mix of Speerville’s whole white and whole wheat, buckwheat from West Virginia, and white), 1 ½ teaspoon baking powder, ½ teaspoon salt. Sift through/mix and add along with a couple handfuls of whole flaxseed, to wet ingredients, just till combined. DO NOT OVERMIX. Spoon into muffin cups and back 10-20 minutes, depending on size of muffin cups (knife inserted into a muffin should come out clean).


Speerville Mill’s cereal “pumpkin” muffins

I prefer using leftover Japanese kuri squash or butternut squash to using pumpkin, but use what you have.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees and line muffin tins with papers if desired (or grease).

1 ½ cups cooked 12-grain OR St. John River cereal
1- 1- ½ cups cooked squash or pumpkin
1 t. cinnamon
¼ - ½ t. ginger
¼ t. nutmeg (best if from grated whole)
pinch allspice, cloves
may substitute half honey for sugar, if not making for strict vegans...

Mix the above and add 2 T. oil (vegan friendly) and ¾ cup brown sugar (adjust to taste if using some honey), and ½ t. vanilla.

Add 2 cups of flours you want, 1 ½ t. baking powder, ½ t. salt. DO NOT OVERMIX. Spoon into cups and bake 10-20 minutes depending on cup size.


Saving Time & Money

Climate change being what it is in Atlantic Canada, I decided to take advantage of the snow we had this Christmas Eve (and were set to lose, through rain, by evening) and ski to the farm that had raised our holiday turkey.

It took an hour to get there by way of the Station Road (it’s only a couple miles; perhaps no more than 5-6 k?); the snow/snain began to make my non-wax skis pick up snow, refuse to glide. I took the Spencer Cross Road back, wishing (a) that Frank and Marguerite’s turkeys had not grown so well (15 lbs. was the smallest they had), and (b) that I’d bought waxed skis a long time ago, as mine picked up so much snow I was tempted to leave them by the side of the road several times during the 2 hours it took me to come back over the hill. Still, the landscape was stunning: everything, every hill, every tree, blanketed in white; on the breast of the hill, the tallest of blueberry plant growth, that cranberry red, showing above the whipped cream blanket; the greys and blacks of birch and other tree trunks and of the river running between the snow-covered banks. While I contemplated leaving the turkey in a tree somewhere, and coming back with a vehicle of some sort to reclaim it, I nixed that idea with the thought that here, the animals are thrifty and I’d likely have some coyote or other handy carnivore figuring out how to haul it down before I got back....I often give (by tossing into the woods behind my house) little gifts in winter, of steak bones or pork fat or boiled poultry carcasses; and they are always cleaned up and dealt with tidily by the carnivores living in/near the village. Well, I was selfish enough about this lovely fresh turkey that I kept going, despite the weight of the snow on my skis, the bruising of my shoulder from the bag holding the 15 pound turkey and a surfeit of giblets given me by the family, which make the best broth for stuffing/dressing, gravy, turkey rice soup base, etc etc...once I got onto Scrabble Hill Road, there was a bit of compressed snow from the passage of the plow, and I was able to actually ski down the hill to the house, so I was grateful that I’d not ditched my skis, either, along the way. Kept hoping somebody would come along and stop, though, and take that turkey down the hill for me....


Oh, but it was worth it. Today, enjoying the leftovers, and preparing to freeze some for giving away later, I recall the giving of thanks at the table yesterday—not to God, but to nature, the turkey, the farmers, the producers of bread/pickles/all else (my own efforts minutely represented in the mix, at this meal) who had provided this bounty. We should all be this fortunate. And, while I think that perhaps some would argue it would have been better to use that time to catch up on my writing, or correspondence, or wood-hauling, or whatever, in my view I was getting much needed exercise while bringing home the holiday turkey while feasting on the landscape of the Cobequid Hills....


Even just putting a bit more thought into the process of selecting one’s food is a step forward.

This morning, I gulp a bit of a blueberry juice bottled over the hill, just on the border of Cumberland/Colchester Counties, Nova Scotia; and I am so so thankful that the acid soil in the Northeast provides the environment needed for this giant of anti-oxidant power berry....and that a few folks in the region have begun to bottle it for those who don’t always want to eat the real McCoy....while the fibre is good for one, too....but sometimes it’s just nice to have the essence, the juice. And I’ve also found that my system seems to do better on cranberry, apple, and blueberry juices, rather than what was the norm, orange or grapefruit juice. And, too, I noticed that if I only had orange juice on that rare occasion that someone else in someone else’s house offered it to me, all of a sudden a whole range of flavours were dancing on my tongue as I tasted it. In a word, orange juice became SPECIAL. I can only equate the feeling to those stories we’ve all heard, about how our grandparents/great –grandparents enjoyed the Christmas time orange in the stocking, because that was the only time they saw an orange....

There’s an interesting look at how trucking played a role in getting us all (even us in the “North”) taking oranges for granted, by the mid-20th century. I’ve not yet read the book, but read an early article based on the Ph.D. dissertation of Shane Hamilton, whom I met at a conference (or rather, if memory serves me, on the shared shuttle ride back to an airport from a conference we had both attended). I found Hamilton’s analysis useful in understanding some of the forces at work in rural 20th century America.
Here’s a link to the website for the university press who has published Professor Hamilton’s book:
http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8740.html


While an economic and personal crisis was what got me started thinking about the connections between food, farming, and frugality, my professional and personal life are intertwined in this struggling to understand what has happened, what has changed, how, and why (and how to write more intelligently about all this). Of course, food is what connects us all. But if we can begin to see how the act of producing food—and likewise the practices of frugal living—are connected to this basic premise, food, then perhaps we’re on the way to making better sense of our world, writ large...and banishing the unhealthy economics of unfettered global capitalism, while embracing, in healthy and helpful ways, our global as well as local community.

For those wanting to find organic producers in the Atlantic region to buy food from, or to get information on organic agriculture, you can go to: http://www.acornorganic.org/ and the link to the database where you can do searches to find markets, producers, etc., near you, is at http://www.acornorganic.org/acorn/databaseregional.html.

For those in Maine, check out: http://www.mofga.org/ and the link to “Find Local Food” is http://www.mofga.org/Resources/FindLocalFoods/tabid/221/Default.aspx


Happy New Year....with hope having won south of the border, let us keep hope in our hearts and work to get local food in everyone’s bellies following Solstice, Chanukah, Eid-al-Adha, Christmas, Kwanzaa.....

toujours,
Deborah

the 96 k way

When I had what I now refer to as “the Nightmare of 2007” and had to rein in all unnecessary spending (and even some necessary), I didn’t, of course, stop eating.

I did, though, re-orient my spending where it concerned food.

I grew things to eat, for even though I didn’t get back to Atlantic Canada until late June from “the Nightmare” it was still time enough to put some seed into the ground that I had already bought. Janet Wallace’s Japanese kuri squash, which had cost all of 60 cents or less at a Seedy Saturday event, kept me healthy all winter....13 huge beautiful, Vitamin A and anti-oxidant-rich beauties in the upstairs closet. I grew a few other things, potatoes, small patches of lettuce and spinach, and then sought to supplement whatever I couldn’t produce and preserve myself with what I could get locally.

While the focus has been on the “100 mile diet”[ http://100milediet.org/ ], I called mine the 96k diet because that’s as far as I could go on my bicycle in one day. For that was the other thing I did to recover from the Nightmare....I took off in cut-off jean shorts and t-shirt, a few clothes and a journal, and cycled a bit of Prince Edward Island (http://www.tourismpei.com). This journey, and the farmers and other residents from “The Gentle Island” whom I met, were so kind to me when I was so fragile. They helped me get back to myself again. The forced simplicity of only carrying what one can fit in two bike saddlebags also made me committed to scaling down my life to manageable proportions, and trying just to eat what I could produce myself or what my neighbours produced: to try and keep to mostly local, certainly regional, a select exclusions list of items fair traded from away, and the like. Over the coming winter months I’ll be explaining this journey.

So...when I got back from that cycling trip, I filled up the freezer with what I grew or my neighbours had grown, got a few home-canned things from the farmers’market, placed in the space between the cellar steps and the wall a sack of turnips...and, after provisioning thusly and in other ways for the winter, basically stopped buying all but the occasional dairy product (which, courtesy of Canada’s supply managed dairy sector, meant that I was buying something produced and processed within my province).

The first to go was fat.


More on that next time....and the promised recipe for muffins!

toujours,
Deborah

Food - Farm - Frugal: More Steps on to Le Pays

Food

Loving Leftovers

Although I’m sure many others have put it many other ways, I can credit Joel Salatin, of Salad Bar Beef and Pastured Poultry Profits fame[http://www.polyfacefarms.com], with making the phrase stick with me (and I may be paraphrasing here): “The best way to make money is not to spend it.”

Begin with the fridge. Use up what you have before you buy more.

Most people I know have a fridge chock-full to the point that things become blue (and I’m not talking Roquefort here) and unrecognizable long before thrown out. And that’s the thing....the fridge should not get to that point. Things should be used up, not thrown out. But, because the fridge is so full, people don’t know what they have.

If you’re disciplined, date things as they go into the fridge. If you’re like me (and a poet for God’s sake) just set aside a bit of time on Sunday morning or whenever and go through and inventory what’s “IN THERE” and do some meal planning around that.

Make it into a challenge for those in your household: who can come up with the most interesting meal out of what’s “IN THERE?” The idea is to do as our ancestors did, and MAKE IT, MAKE DO, OR DO WITHOUT.


(A wonderful book that I often use in my Rural History course is Mary Neth’s Preserving the Family Farm, published by Johns Hopkins Press. The late Mary Neth wrote a stellar book, drawing upon prior scholarship by David Danbom and a host of others, to show how farm families and agriculture were transformed into ‘agri-business’ in ways that used gender stereotyping and other not-so-nice-behaviours to undercut patterns of rural community and household self-sufficiency.)


USES FOR LEFTOVERS


Leftover porridge/oatmeal/hot cereal:

Use as base for muffins or bread or pancakes(see next entry for sample recipe)

Leftover french fries (even if you forget and leave the pan in the oven over night!!!): French Fry Frittata (recipe here)

French Fry Frittata

Saute gently some chopped onion and sweet peppers in a skillet (cast iron is best, for you’ll want to put it under the broiler at the last). Chop up some tomatoes if they’re in season, or a few chunks of frozen or canned tomato if not. Other veggies you could add, if desired: summer squash, zucchini, eggplant, hot peppers. You could go Hungarian with wax peppers and appropriate sausage, or go the Mexican route with some salsa. But if this is for kids or hungover people, I’d keep it simple. Once the veggies have all softened a bit, add the french fries, and enough beaten egg mixture to cover the mixture well (about 1/4 inch or so above the veggie layer). Lower heat and cover. This is not an omelet, so high heat is not what you want. Cook until eggs have pretty well solidified; add desired herbs, salt and pepper (never add salt til end of cooking eggs, or they are tough) and then cheeses, and broil for a couple minutes so that you’ve got the top well done and the frittata attractive. Slice and serve after it's cooled a bit.

Farm

Farmers are, at heart, mostly producers. However, the current economic system for North American farmers (and here I’m assuming that I’m talking to people with no background in farming, so recognize this is a simplistic rendering of a complex system) is one that is demanding more and more that farmers be big, be commodity oriented, OR be able to direct market successfully. And, many of them are....but the current way that both the direct market and “commodity” agriculture realities are organized, policy wise, means that farmers are bearing the economic weight while the consumer gets high quality food for a song.


How we think about and navigate our world of taking from and giving to the land gets us to basic realities and ideas of le pays, which inform the concept of local food and terroir.
(And that is T-E-R-R-O-I-R, NOT terror. The former is a French term that doesn’t translate successfully into terrain, for it means the soil, the land, the eco-system, the topography, the customs and traditions that go into producing specific foods in specific places on the globe...think Champagne, or Idaho spuds for baking...or, where I am, the specific loveliness of Bay of Fundy clams OR the more stocky, more muscular delights of Prince Edward Island ones.....terroir, not terror, the latter being a word that entered the North American lexicon under such strange and awful circumstances that it clouds and confounds everything, even something so innocuous as local food).

If we think about what the land around us is worth, how do we picture that worth? I thought a lot about this one day, while listening to heartbroken farmers having to pick up and move their dairy herd because the land they’d leased was being sold to a Pennsylvania developer.....a developer who was going to profit from not from supporting local agricultural enterprises, but through building cookie-cutter houses with more floor space than anybody truly needs and selling them to people so disconnected to their work and lives that their best shot at happiness was truly that big house and a huge entertainment system...how sad, I thought. And how were they going to eat, I wondered, if this pattern kept going, where farmers could 'sell out' if they got tired of the battle against those who did not understand farming and were making it impossible to make a decent living from the land.... And yet the irony is, the more immediate question was how were the farmers and those cows going to be moved and survive.



Frugal

Frugal living: there’s some help out on the web. Here’s one method (envelope system). It doesn’t work for me, but perhaps for others?

http://frugalliving.about.com/od/moneymanagement/ht/Envelope_System.htm


Navigate this site for additional helps and ideas – the key is to find what works for you, and to jump off the consumer train that’s going to debtsville...and perhaps, a bit, get onto the producer train going to self-sufficiency village.

I've been taking a break from end-of-semester marking (in American lingo: grading papers and exams) through this blog. Time to get back at it. Till next time, Deborah

why two languages/pouquoi deux langues

Mais, pouquoi French, le pays?

Because je suis canadienne, even if I speak and write la langue so poorly, and we do have two official languages. Sometimes it’s not possible to express what needs to be expressed in English (or French, but it’s what I’m choosing as a fall-back). Too, I like the arrangement of le pays, as those unilinguals who only speak English will say in their heads “pays” and that economic free association gets me to where I want part of this blog to go to, the matters linking the land and food with economy (economy in all senses of the word).


Why food/farm/frugal?


It begins with the land.

The expanse and immediacy of what is beneath us as the planet comes into view, becomes most real, when we open our mouths and take in nourishment in the form of food. We can deny that relationship – in fact, in the days before Michael Pollan, the Slow Food movement and the wondering about (and making fun of) such industrialized food fare as orange breakfast drink crystals or bricks of processed cheese food (and HEY! I like these things, but don’t want to get sued for mentioning them by brand name) most of us had a pretty strained and strange relationship with food. But that is changing. And, the economy, globally, is changing (how’s that for understatement). And farming is, in some respects, changing or has changed. And they’re linked, in some pretty important ways, although I’ve not seen much in the way of discussion about the connections. This is what I’m hoping to get to, in the winter weeks to come...though, as I say this, I know that although I said “last harvest” of spinach, that bed of green is still persisting in the 60 km winds we’re having, along with 15 degrees C rainy weather again today....the Bay of Fundy was an angry red, and...trust me: that mud can be a calm red, too.

And I should get to posting some recipes, though—for now—I will start with a couple of little frugal tips. Eventually, I’ll put them all together, but too much information at one time can be overwhelming...

Kitchen:

Save the wrappers that butter comes in (or margerine, if you’re vegan) in the fridge. When you need to grease pans for cakes/cookies, etc., you can use these and use that last bit of fat for the purpose before discarding/burning/recycling (depends on what they’re made of...sigh...)

Bath & Kitchen:

Avoid those liquid soaps that have any kind of antibiotic substance or detergent based. Make your own by saving a dispenser (I buy the recyclable Kiss-My-Face organic olive oil based moisturizers, and then re-use the pump dispenser for this purpose), then taking any little bits of leftover soap, chop/put into little pieces into the dispenser container, then adding hot (not boiling) water and shaking. Washing hands with soap, when used with plenty of hot water, is the best way to fight infections in the winter, or so the experts tell us...but doing battle with bacteria with antibiotic is just upping the ante, in my view, for superbugs and excessively dry skin, that in turn facilitates attack of the microbes......keeping to good old-fashioned soap, which is doing its job by getting the bad bacteria down the drain and off your hands, is in my humble opinion the way to go (and though my historical research is in the area of home remedies and all else, let me put a disclaimer here: I’m just offering opinions and saying what works for me...my Ph.D. in history doesn’t qualify me to do aught else!!!
until next time,
Deborah

Farming & Frugality: the Consumer Conundrum

The icy rain today had me longing--everyone longing--for the sun and promise of spring and summer - le printemps ici, at my not-quite-working-yet farm. I also harvested, in that cold rain, some more spinach...a brief post today, and on to a salad of that spinach, purple cabbage, carrots, and poppy seed dressing.

First frugal thoughts: un-think the consumer imperative. The economy's making many do this already, though the "wisdom" of the supposed experts seems mired in the discourse of trying to get everyone spending again....Perhaps the economy, like many a waistline in North America (including mine), needs to contract?

Think: every time the wallet/purse comes out: do I need this, or want it? Can I get by without? Can I make do? I will say that, although I've never been someone who enjoys shopping, when, in 2007, I had to HALT all but necessary consumption to be sure I could hold onto this land I love so much, I realized that, even for someone not self-identifying as a consumer I was surely attached to the thoughtless spending habit....more on this later. On to leftovers and some of that lovely spinach---which is not taken for granted, given that it's December, and I have made the commitment of, as much as possible, a 96 k diet that is seasonally organized... I do not buy such things at the store, in other words....until tomorrow,

Deborah

Allons-Y! Le Pays!

It begins with the land.

Organic farmers stress that it all begins with the soil. And this is true--it's not about feeding the plant, but rather enriching the soil so that it is grateful and able to give you its extra, in the form of food/plants (or animals fed plants), through garden or the larger-scale version of same, the farm. But I would argue that a further-back origins point is le pays---the land--the ideas that we as humans have about how we navigate the planet, and eat to live (live to eat!), stay alive both in the physical sense but also the psychical sense.

This blog is an exploration of ideas around food, farming and nature, and the frugality (frugalité/simplement) underpinning the approaches to these matters of concern. They're all connected --I mean, honestly, we all eat, so even if you live in downtown TO or DC or Paris you've still got that connection of soil, of land-ideas, to your tongue; there’s still space, it seems, for some more conversation on the inter-connection of these issues...and so this is why I decided to begin this blog.

I have struggled for some weeks what to call this ‘thing’....and why, even, there was a need to write such a forum/in such a form. Those who know me know I’m a 19th century person – though (wearing my historian hat), most 19th century people would have had a greater knowledge of electricity than I do, and of the basic technologies that most take for granted now. What this means, though, is that while as a poet and writer I’m tremendously complex and convoluted I try to live simply, and locally, but with a sensibility expressed in a love of travel, love of foods from all over the globe, and struggles to farm a bit, where I live and also (long story; later) in a country other than the one I live in.

This evening, about 16:30 Atlantic time, I went out to the garden. The foot or so of snow that had bedded it down--or so I thought--for the winter, had now been melted away by the above normal temperatures (12 degrees C today) that keep reminding us of the phrase climate change. In the gloom of rain and wind and pensive skies, however, what had been exposed were not only the embarrassingly naked patches of insufficiently mulched garden, but also the spinach bed, planted August first: and so, on December 10, 2008, what will likely be the last harvest of spinach was taken. What had fed me, and helped dress the salads of one community dinner, had emerged flattened but undaunted from the early November snows that had me cross country skiing the earliest ever.

I was too exhausted, before the snow came, to place a window frame (old window, with glass intact) over this square of wood—an old picture frame—and thereby create a ‘cold frame’ in which the spinach could grow for as long as the winter would let it. Spinach and kale and a few other things, gardeners know, can live even when it’s below freezing, if they have a bit of protection. But I made the decision not to go about framing the bed of spinach, even though this weird weather had given me an opportunity. I was too tired tonight. But I would eat again a harvest salad of spinach, already harvested and stored in the fridge carrots and purple cabbage, and be grateful.

Before heading back into the house to mark (grade, in the lingo of American professors) student papers, I went to the very end of the plot and harvested a handful of kale, the final cut from a bed planted just as the previous winter’s snows were retreating last April. Tomorrow, or soon (as I’m sure some markets are still featuring kale, fresh kale from better stewards than I) will post a recipe for a bean/kale/potato soup that uses the leftover rinds of gouda (or parmesan) cheese to flavour it. And talk about the FFF talents, skills and joys of making, making do, or doing without. And other things connecting food, farm, and frugality.

toujours---
Deborah