Today was a day of fall chores: sweeping out the garage, tidying it and getting it ready to store the table and chairs for the winter, raking leaves from the back yard, and pulling in all of the “tender” bulbs (voodoo lily and calla lily) that I had planted in pots on the deck and porch. They’ll slumber in peat in a bin in my basement – cool and dark – until it is time for them to grow again in the spring.
Nice to feel I’m ready for the change of season.
You might think I’m reaching the dregs in the gratitude barrel, but no, this is actually one of the things for which I’m actually, sincerely, really-really grateful.
I’m not someone who stockpiles; I’m an under-buyer. Normally, I tend to run out and go run an errand to refill my supply of (important item here). But, along with piles of books, I stockpile kitchen towels. There are few things better or more satisfying to me than a stack of freshly laundered kitchen towels.
I haven’t actually bought many of them – several were gifts from my mom, others from friends with various wedding (yes, 8 years ago) presents, my husband’s grandmother wove some of what I use, my mother-in-law likes giving tea towels as gifts – so I can use the excuse that I didn’t intentionally acquire the set I have now. I blundered into my stockpile of dish towels. And they give me a disproportionate happiness. Yes, dishtowels.
There’s just something abundant in the waiting stack. I like having a stack because in a weekend of a lot of cooking, say my canning fun, I can keep on tossing dirty and sodden dishtowels down into the basement (our staircase is our laundry chute) and reload the oven handle with another clean, dry towel. So, after my weekend of canning, I’d exhausted my stack of towels and needed to launder the set. There was something abundant about that too. Felt like an accomplishment.
I use one to line underneath the bins that hold the potatoes, onions, and garlic. One is always looped over the handle of the oven, for drying washed hands or wiping up the counter. When we’re cooking, one of us has a dishtowel jauntily tossed over one shoulder, at the ready for drying a hand-washed dish or grabbing a pot handle. I suppose they’re some kind of tangible reminder of the joy we take in our kitchen, in cooking with and for friends.
So, want to make my day? Give me a dish towel.
It’s that time of year, the Ann Arbor Farmer’s Market is a study in abundance, and my summer reading, Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life, has inspired me to can. 
So, I took a perfectly good Saturday and Sunday and made two trips to the Farmer’s Market, a trip to the hardware store, two trips to a grocery store, burned many BTUs of gas on our gas stove, and taught myself to can following the Ball Blue Book of Preserving and an article on canning in the October 2008 Bon Appetit.
This was my discovery:
makes about six pint jars of fresh tomato sauce, something which when purchased would have cost many dollars less than what I spent. Yet, I didn’t burn myself, had some fun cooking and learning, have some lovely jars of pinky-red tomatoes lighting up the shelves of my basement, and I have stored a bit of this lovely summer sunshine for later.
I realized that canning is kind of like knitting a sweater. It’s not that I saved any money, it’s that I got to enjoy the process and engaging with something concrete – beautiful yarn in the case of a sweater, beautiful produce in the case of canning. That level of absorbtion and attention is almost intoxicating, while my hands were slicing the 50th tomato, my mind was wondering at the variety of shape and color and detail in the box of romas. Plus, I experienced a distinct sense of abundance when processing a big pile of tomatoes- their weight, their texture, their color, bounty. So, after I finished the tomatoes on Saturday, I was up for another round on Sunday. With dinner guests arriving at 6PM, I carefully planned my day of cornbread-baking, coleslaw-making, peach cobbler-baking, and my husband’s slow cooking of the spare ribs with more canning. I discovered that
makes six 1/2-pint jars of drunken fig jam. It’s tasty, though I’ll have to arrange to get myself invited to sophisticated dinner or wine tasting parties where I can bring this as an addition to a cheese plate…Dear reader, let me know if you’re hosting such an event. I have the housewarming gift ready to go!
I loved it, I’d do it again, and I realized just how much I love my dishwasher, which I think ran about 6 times this weekend, no fooling, and that’s even after I hand-washed all of the pots.
So, today I got a 1/4 peck of peaches at the Ann Arbor Farmers Market. I wanted to make something with them, wasn’t sure what. A year or so ago, my brother-in-law put a tiny bottle of bourbon into my husband’s Christmas stocking, and it’s been sitting in our liquor cabinet ever since. I decided to make a bourbon peach cobbler. The dish (and I) received accolades from my husband. Eating it was fun. Also fun was prepping the peaches for the cobbler. I don’t think I’ve ever seen inside a peach pit before, but one of them opened in my hand. Reminded me of my more botanical days – Prunus persica, has a drupe or stone fruit. Pretty cool.
So, I had a 1-4PM meeting today turn into a 1-6:30PM one with an hourlong trip on each side, and although it was a great meeting, I’m an introvert and was sorely in need of downtime afterwards. So, when I got home at 7:45, I was hungry and tired and would have very happily reached for some comfort food from the freezer or a local restaurant (chinese food? pizza?). But, I have this farm share from a local organic farm, and my fridge is filled with kale, beets, beet greens, green beans, onions, and the like.
I even considered heating up frozen veggies, just because I didn’t think I could muster anything beyond tossing something into a bowl and punching 4 buttons on the microwave. Then I realized that was completely pathetic, and I couldn’t possibly. I imagined each bean and each beet staring at me, balefully as they wilted, while I feasted on non-organic and less vitamin rich frozen food because it was marginally more convenient.
And then I recognized the awesome power of the farm share to improve my life. Yes, the veggies were organic and local, yes they were chock full of vegetabley-goodness like vitamins and minerals, but their real power was elsewhere. Yup, those veggies in the fridge could make me eat healthier just by their very presence. I’d already committed to them, several times, by signing up for the CSA share from Tantre Farm last fall, by picking them up this week, by giving them space in my fridge. After all that, how I could waste them? The frozen food would keep. I had to wash and slice and maybe even boil before I’d get my meal.
I started with the beets. I scrubbed them and cut them into even blocks for a quick boil. But then, because I was crazed with hunger, I tentatively put one in my mouth and bit down. Raw beet was perfectly fine, tasty in fact. I turned off the water, chopped the beets more finely, tossed on a splash of fancy Zingerman’s balsamic vinegar and moved on to the next course. I prepped some kale, rinsing and chopping, and blanched it quickly. Nice.
In probably 5 minutes, I had two very tasty dishes out of my organic veggie stockpile. Because the healthy food had guilted me out of it, I had protected myself from poor eating. By stocking the fridge with healthy food, I actually ate healthy food. And it was quick to prepare. Imagine, fresh fruit and veggies really are nature’s original fast food.
So, I’ve been contemplating doing some landscape work on the backyard. The grass is dying (grubs, I think), the deck is too small for the table and the grill we have on it, and the random plantings (my fault) and the bi-level deck and backyard (inherited from the previous owners) feels like there’s too much going on in a small space. I’ve had it.
So, I called in the professionals. I am getting quotes from a couple of different landscape architecture firms to redesign our backyard. A representative of one came out today, and we discussed several things. I got excited. Finally, the backyard of my dreams was about to hatch. However, translating this to my skeptical and more financially responsible husband didn’t go so well tonight. So, I felt a bit bruised and sulky, but the two of us went to our backyard and wandered around our small downtown yard, trying to think about next steps.
I was fretting over this and that, weeding here and there, and then Dave said “is that a real moth?”. There was a huge Cecropia silkmoth, Hyalophora cecropia, just hanging out on our bee balm. It gripped the bee balm stem delicately in its full regalia -fuzzy striped russet, black, and white body, gigantic russet, brown, grey, and white wings, glorious feathered black antennae. And of course, the engineer saw it, not the biologist, cause the biologist was all bent out of shape. And it was sitting there, with grace and beauty, quietly yet quite firmly directly refuting my assertion that my backyard wasn’t terrific.
I still have a few ideas about improving the yard, but the moth drove the sulkiness away. Hard to complain about the garden when it is pulling in such lovely fans.