Local Food Round-Up
January. Time to start eating out of our stores, in earnest. Don’t want to come to spring and discover some cache of forgotten and uneaten beets. Here’s what’s in our black freezer: a few roasts and steaks, hamburger, pork and turkey sausage, a whole chicken, turkey parts, and a lot of chopped red peppers. In the white freezer: big bags of tomatoes, strawberry jam, strawberries, frozen pear and applesauce cubes for school lunches, homemade ketchup, raspberries. In the fridge freezer: dill, parsley, basil cubes, more pearsauce cubes, poultry gizzards and livers, cookie dough, peas, bread. In the cold cellar: two butternut squash, loads of potatoes (storing well in their paper sacs), garlic (also storing well, loose on wire shelves), one pumpkin, four cabbages, a handful of yams. In another cupboard upstairs: what’s left of the onions (note: my pantyhose storage method in our over-warm basement was a recipe for rotting onions suspended in nylon. Not pretty. A few survived to tell the tale and be made into onion soup). In jars: grape juice, pearsauce, grape jelly, and tomatoes. Plus we’ve got lots of local oats, flour, cornmeal, honey, maple syrup, and vinegar. We also have lots of local canola oil, but I find the taste too strong, overwhelming even in baking, and am unlikely to use it up.
The challenge: To eat as exclusively as possible from these stores till it’s all gone.
The method: Thaw at least one big meat item per week and plan at least one meal around that. Remind myself about the potatoes … to that end, look up some hearty winter recipes. Sunday evening advance planning.
Today’s Recipe of the Week: Tomato Sauce. Saute chopped onions and garlic in olive oil till soft, add some chopped red peppers if desired (frozen fine). Toss in a bag of frozen tomatoes (3.7 litre capacity). Add a can of tomato paste. Season with frozen basil cubes, parsley, 1 to 2 teaspoons salt, 1 teaspoon each of thyme and oregano. Pepper to taste. When cooked down to desired consistency, stir in a dollop of vinegar.
Suggested uses: We ate this for supper, as is, over spaghetti with parmesan and feta, and a cabbage salad on the side. Tomorrow it might be resurrected with fried hamburger and some cumin and ground coriander over brown rice. Leftovers might also find their way on to homemade pizzas later in the week.
This week’s meat: smoked turkey sausage, currently thawing in our fridge. I’d planned to use it in a split pea soup, but just noticed there are no potatoes on this week’s menu, which makes me think … smoked sausage baked over potatoes and yams? Suddenly, I’m yearning for a little after-dinner nap. Full disclosure: I prefer vegetarian fare, but beans and legumes are hard to come by, locally. Meat, however, is everywhere.
Most surprising storage discovery: The red peppers are amazing. I’d run out patience by the time I put them up, so literally chopped and seeded them and chucked them into yogurt containers. But they’re easy to remove piece by piece, the flavour is amazing, and the kids eat them like popsicles.
One last note: For anyone missing Nina’s buying club, I’ve tried out and can recommend Oakridge Acres (http://www.oakridgeacres.ca/), a farm family from near Ayr who raise Black Angus cattle, and also source and sell a variety of local products, including cheeses, and who deliver to the Waterloo region.
Ahh, The Warm Glow of Self-Improvement
Haven’t stopped thinking about the New Year, and inevitably that means self-improvement. Right? It’s funny how at the stroke of midnight on the 365th day of the year, we pretend collectively that the slate has been wiped clean and we can Be Better. Except we’re just ourselves. Except that shouldn’t be an except or a just, because we’ve earned all of that grime and all of those scratches, and who would want to be wiped clean, really? That would be a recipe for unchecked narcisism.
Some thoughts on our family’s carbon footprint. Last year we went down to one vehicle, I started hanging laundry even off-season, did some canning, and attempted to source and eat local food. We also managed to lower our water consumption, but that was probably the new efficient toilets. Our electricity bill continues to climb; we moved in five and a half years ago, and every year we’ve consumed more electricity, not less. We have added family members during that time, but it’s no excuse. So this year, I’d like to do an energy audit, figure out where we’re leaking electricity and staunch the flow, train the kids to turn out the lights every time they leave a room, and continue to do many of the things we’ve started: walk as much as possible; hang the laundry; do more canning and preserving this coming summer; continue to buy local and cook from scratch. There must be other actions we could take, too, that I’m not thinking of right this second.
To add to that, here is a fantasy goal: I’d love to rid my cupboards of any prepared food that I could actually make myself. ie. no more boxed cereal, only homemade granola. Crackers? Bread, of course. Cookies, yes. Butter? Not unless we source our milk off-grid. Will it happen? Unlikely. But it’s a dream.
Some other random things I’ve been contemplating doing …
Smugness, begone! (Have I become a “Smug Married”? This thought has plagued me, slightly, over the holidays. All the things we consume, how full our house is of comfortable objects, how satiated we are. How much I don’t want to give up these comfortable things …).
Childcare … I’ve been thinking that I might enjoy caring for other people’s children during the day, or exchanging childcare. This is less fully-formed-thought than persistent notion. It would also be a good goal to have one day per week with nothing extra in it, one day just to hang out at home, read, play, nap, bake (with children, I mean). On the other hand, accepting that there is no Normal, that the day is bound to be broken in many ways by many unexpected occurrences, is really good for the sanity. You can’t have a household of six people and expect even one day to run according to Plan. So–flexibility. Going with the flow.
Embracing cliches.
Continuing to write. Think about how to get back to Nicaragua again–and for how long? Maintain and nurture the good things we’ve got going, but stay critical. Not complacent.
And next post, tell a good story rather than preach.
Collective Joy
Thinking New Year. Thinking about how, when I’m doing something that I really love, I’m almost out of body, there’s a feeling of transcendence. Yet that out of body thing seems to take me away, too, from the conscious reality of Life. Played piano for an hour yesterday while CJ napped and the other kids played road hockey. It took me far far away, into music’s private space, feeling the meaning of the notes take character and shape, speaking emotion with my fingers on the keys. But then, I wasn’t with my kids and that made me feel vaguely guilty. What does it mean, to be “with” people? That is something I’m struggling with as I try to live life as presently as possible–with presence, with gratitude. The paradox is that often when I’m most present within an activity, deeply focussed, I’m taken away from the everyday-ness, away from the chaos going on around me. Away from them.
We did something funny yesterday morning (pre-road-hockey). The kids were going wild with boredom and CJ was extremely fussy, so I popped him in the sling and paced the living-room while narrating our lives operatically. Everyone found this hugely entertaining (“Get off your sister!” sung in slightly out-of-range soprano with serious vibrato beats plain old “Get off your sister,” any day). The best part was that they joined in. That’s the kind of transcendence I crave–collective transcendence.
There was a program on collective joy, recently, on CBC Radio’s Tapestry. It’s a concept I’d never considered, but instantly understood–that amazing experience of feeling connected to and part of something larger than oneself. It’s even more amazing when the experience is being collectively invented, when everyone is a participant. Think: sports. Think: camp. Think: orchestra, theatre, choir. (Think other things I haven’t thought of or mentioned; and tell me about them, please!). Speaking of which, last night I watched the finale of a deeply moving documentary called “The Choir: Boys Don’t Sing.” It’s a BBC production and may actually be a series, in which a young British choirmaster goes into hard-knock schools and starts a choral program. In this case, Gareth went to an all-boys school and in nine months built an amazing 150-voice choir that included a group of beat-boxers. To watch their performance at the Royal Albert Hall was truly to witness an experience of collective joy. Look up this series if you have even the slightest interest in choral music (and even if you think you don’t).
On that note, I must continue preparing for our low-key New Year’s celebration this evening. These are my New Year’s hopes (forget resolutions): great creative energy, imaginative problem solving, vats of patience, presence, gratitude, calm, reflection, and bursts of collective joy.
Christmas Day
Early Christmas
First, there are a few photos from our first Christmas celebration on the parallel blog; link at right. Second, the photos fail to show all the illness that abounded amidst our crew, but do catch the overall happy and relaxed vibe. It was nice to be sick and have nothing else to do. No cooking. No laundry. No nothing. We checked into the hotel with the rest of the Cairns family and nobody seemed bothered by all the nothing we were doing, together.
Grandma Alice and I took the two older children to the National Ballet’s Nutcracker at the new Opera House in Toronto. Amazing. I was moved to tears at one point by the sheer beauty and grace of the scene before us. All that intense work and effort and artistry to create something that can’t be held in the hand, or consumed, or made into anything else. It made me feel that art really matters, that it feeds the spirit and the soul in ways that can’t be explained. Afterwards, I asked Albus what he thought of the show, and he replied, dead serious, “I didn’t really like the dancing.” Well. That doesn’t leave much left over at a ballet! But he liked the soldiers and fighting scenes (of course). Apple-Apple would comment of a particular costume or dancer during the performance, “She’s soooo beautiful,” and then tune out moments later. Lots of wriggling. We were in the cheap seats and it seemed an extra-excited wriggle might send one plunging miles downward to one’s death. Apple-Apple assured me she’d land on the people directly below us instead.
Other highlights: CJ practicing standing all over the place. He’s really found his core balance and wants to be upright and unsupported. No steps yet. Kevin and I taking a nap with CJ while the big kids hung out in Grandma Alice’s room. Eating really really good food. Santa in the hotel lobby. Lunch with an old friend. The big kids reading chapter books, everywhere: at the restaurant, before bed, in the middle of the morning. Children running freely between our room and Grandma Alice’s room. Watching the older children’s independence bloom. Fireworks out our hotel window on the longest night of the year. Safe driving despite “Snowmaggedon.” Family.
Kids’ highlights: Albus: Present-opening. Reading. Apple-Apple: Yah! Reading. Fooey: Presents.