sharing my joy

Hey friends, just a short note to celebrate the first of my tomatoes to be turning red! Right now it's only a sort of yellowish orange tinted green(bottom photo), but I'm excited. Plus I finally pulled pics of the garden off the camera. Pretty soon I'm going to be busy making salsa!

exception proves the rule

Over the past year or two I've noticed a trend that when Brandon is out of town (which he fairly often is for his business) I halt all cooking and cleaning. I scrounge leftovers or eat out with friends, whatever dishes were left by the sink will stay there for days until perhaps I consider cleaning up before he gets home. I sort of revert into a college dorm mode.
Brandon is out of town for the next two nights plus I have a cold, so when he didn't take his turn with the dishes last night I fully expected them to be there awaiting his return on Thursday. However tonight we recieved a plentiful variety of CSA veggies including a quart sized baggie stuffed with basil which we decided should become a group batch of pesto. It would have been nice to get together and make it, but it didn't look like that was going to work this week so I offered to make it myself since I've done it several times and happened to have pine nuts in the fridge. I also found myself mentioning the fact that the broccoli stems no one wanted along with the carrot tops and any other scraps could be boiled to make veggie stock so I ended up taking those home too.
When I got home I still wasn't sure I had the ambition to clean up the kitchen and tackle these two tasks, but I needed to put the veggies away which meant some reorganization of the fridge and checking over the veggies from last week so I started throwing the wilted leaves, carrot tops, and various stems in a pot, added a couple cloves of garlic and an onion and put my 10 qt. pot on to boil. While that was cooking I made the pesto and started cleaning up the mess I'd already made. But then I remembered a conversation yesterday about granola with dried cherries and chocolate chips so I made that too. Now all is cleaned up, the broth is cooling and the granola is in the oven.
But this unusual night cooking home alone got me thinking about why I cook and clean or don't when no one is around. Cooking in particular is not something I do for myself. About the most I'd do on my own is boil water for macaroni and cheese. Even the things I made tonight I made with the idea of sharing in mind. A lot of the pesto will be brought to my CSA friends and probably the stock as well, and the granola is a new recipie chosen based on Brandon's comments about the one I've been using recently. Sure I'll enjoy some as I enjoy most of the foods I make, but without someone to share it with I don't really see a point in taking all that time. Plus there's somethings it's just impractical to make just for me, or even just me and Brandon. So I'm just waiting for someone to throw a little party so I can bring that broccoli salad with bacon and raisins in it that Megan reminded me of tonight. (What is that called?)
I'm convinced food is for sharing. Despite all the convenience we have today, a meal of quality that takes someone's skill and time is something I think (hope!) we all instinctively appreciate sharing with others. That's why we sit down at restaurants, throw dinner parties, and even invite over those piteous college students who we imagine are usually stuck with cafeteria food or ramen noodles. There is something about food and home and friends and family that makes us feel home. That's why I think Jesus clearly demonstrates his genius understanding of humanity when he shared bread and wine with his friends and asked them to remember him each time they gather. Our celebration of the Lord's Supper should be like coming home to Mom making your favorite meal after a long absence- a celebration of reconnection that you can smell, touch, and taste.

garden under attack?

For a couple weeks now I have been battling some sort of bug on my bell pepper plants. The first time I looked I was able to find some yucky little slug things, got Brandon to help me pick them off and sprayed the plants with (organic friendly) insecticidal soap. Since then have have continued to grow, but have also continued to develop holes on each new leaf with no sign of the culprits (at least that's evident to me). None-the-less the had begun to develop some little peppers, until this weekend when two of the three peppers were stolen by the squirrels. I know it was them because I found one of the chewed peppers laying on the ground next to the plants.
But that's not all! Today, horror of horrors I found a huge ugly moth on my tomato plants which I learned lays eggs that grow into tomato hornworm caterpillars which apparently can devastate a tomato plant in a night or two!
This means war! or does it. One of the tenets of organic gardening is supposed to be to cultivate the "good bugs" and deter the bad ones, my insecticidal soap being the last resort because it doesn't discriminate. So there's part of me that is a little hesitant to just got nuts with the stuff. But according to all the organic gardening websites I keep an eye on the first line of defense is bug hunting by hand. The idea of picking them off individually grosses me out, but spraying indiscriminately doesn't seem right either. For now I'm considering a concoction of 3 parts water to 1 part hot pepper sauce which should deter bug and squirrel munching, but it's going to require some diligence as a caterpiller scout. If you have any advice let me know - I'm a gardening novice.

a walk in the garden

Today I picked my first zucchini and jalepeno from my own garden which got me thinking about why I love walking through it everyday, sometimes several times a day. The main part of my veggie garden is set up with a small pathway between two giant heirloom tomato plants through which I can enter and stand in the middle of my garden. I can never resist climbing in there and peeking beneath the leaves of the plants. You can actually see the plants, and especially their fruits grow! The peas appear like magic -yesterday I couldn't see any, today there are a handful ready to pick- the tomatoes and zucchini grow steadily each day, the onions and carrots are like a present wrapped in the dirt at which you can only guess. Everytime I investigate the little plot of dirt there is something new (today it was a flower on my melon vines) and I am amazed. I know I'm not the one causing the growth, all I do is watch it! Maybe I add water after a couple of days without rain or pull a couple weeds, but mulching with grass clippings has made that a minor duty. The only difference between these plants and the random assortment of junk along the back fence is my relationship to them and mindfulness of them. It is because I watch them everyday that I discover each new fruit as a blessing. I wonder what would happen if I were this mindful of other parts of my life...

CSA abundance

This week two of the three people we share our CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) share with are out of town, so we have an extra abundance of veggies in our fridge- spilling out into the counter in fact because I couldn't resist still going to the farmers market for eggs, cherries, blueberries, peppers (which we haven't started getting from our share yet), and strawberry tomatoes (sort of like cherry ones, but they are actually strawberry shaped!). Here's a peek at our middle of July share: beets, turnips, purple carrots(!), kale and rainbow chard, greenonions, thyme, basil, a huge head of chinese cabbage, lettuce, arugula, purslane, our first cucumber, and we get to go pick a 1/2 lb. of peas at the farm. Plus my garden is ready to give up its first zucchini!!

All this food has me excited (excited enough to finally start this blog!). Last night I used the beets turnips and thyme, roasting them in the oven with 1 baking potato and 1 sweet potato and a little olive oil. We ate them with some pork chops from Creswick Farms, a local grassfed farm whose meat I buy through westmichigancoop.com. (So far Brandon and I have agreed grass fed pork and chicken are amazing!) Today I made pesto and I am in the midst of some foccacia bread and I'm thinking zucchini, tomato, and pesto pizza with a salad for dinner tonight.

Perhaps this is enough babbling about my beautiful food for this post, but just a warning: I expect this blog to contain lots of reports on dinner making and bread baking so if you don't care what we're eating, sorry. This is really a place for me to collect my thoughts, ideas, recipies, and work out some of my theology of food.

I believe my passion about food is not just about eating what tastes good (though it is that), but I believe there is a deep connection between us and the dirt from which our food grows - a connection that is lost when we grow up thinking food comes from the grocery store. My adventures in buying local, gardening and cooking have begun to point me back to the fact that it is God who provides for us all we need and as I enjoy gathering, preparing, and sharing food with friends I rejoice in the one who created both me and these strawberry tomatoes from the dust of the earth.