Sunrise over tomatoes

I think this has become one of my favorite sights: the sunlight in the eastern window, just barely illuminating a row of jars of new food.

Tomatoes in the dark.

Yesterday, N-son and I spent 4 hours "putting up" tomatoes.   We canned 28 quarts of tomatoes and 4 more quarts of tomato juice. And this morning I rose to test the lids, and discovered happily that all-but-one of the jars sealed properly. 

There's a word -- liminal -- that I've kind of fallen in love with.  It means, "relating to a transitional or initial stage of a process; occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold".   Sunrise over canning jars is a liminal moment: a threshold between yesterday's hot, messy work and the comfort of having summer tomatoes in my winter basement.  And canning jars full of tomatoes, when backlit by the rising sun, are beautiful.

At a pre-semester gathering last week, a colleague of mine picked my brain about trash. (That happens a lot nowadays).  She, like many other people, lamented the recent changes in recycling rules and said she wants to produce less trash, but "I'd have to totally change how I shop".   She buys bulk food at Costco, because that's how she manages to afford organic food for her family.   But apples come packaged in plastic containers that are almost like egg cartons, keeping each piece of fruit isolated from the others.  So much plastic, she frets, and now she can't dump that container in her green recycling bin.  But what choices are there?

Of course, she's right that if she wants to do it differently, she'd have to totally change how she shops.  For me, this change came over the course of many years, and by now the idea of buying apples out of season seems like a bizarre, almost alien, practice.   Of course I buy apples from an orchard in October and then can applesauce.  (Cherries in June; peaches in August).   I have fresh fruit in the summer, or when scavenged from catered events my college holds, and the rest of the time I eat fruit from the basement or not at all.  This is such a different way of thinking, of living in the world.

As an example of a different way of thinking, here are some "notes to self" that I'm gathering as the sun rises over my tomatoes.   Other people make shopping lists for their next trip to the grocery store, but I'm making lists for next August:

• Canning tomatoes and not tomato sauce goes a lot faster.  Continue this practice?  
• I got two buckets of Roma tomatoes.  This last year, though, we ran out of jars of tomato stuff in May; next summer should I get three buckets?  Or with N-son moving out to go to school, will two still be enough?  Not sure.
• We spent two hours actively chopping, and about a half-hour cleaning; the other hour-and-half was just processing time. 
• When I let N-son pick the music we listen to, he picks Reba McIntyre, same as last year.  Apparently, she writes good canning music.
• If I get more tomatoes next year, especially if N-son isn't around, I'll need to budget more than 4 hours for canning. 

This is a hugely different kind of thinking than my colleague does, and for a very small difference in trash output.   (In fact, metal tomato cans and glass jars are still recycle-able in our area, so this is really just a difference in how much we'd recycle).  And I don't know if it's a huge difference in cost -- our 32 quarts of tomato stuff cost $24, plus gas/energy expenses.  

My colleague gets the convenience of not having to spend a day each summer devoted to tomatoes, and another day in the fall devoted to apples.   For me, I get the convenience of not needing to grocery shop weekly during the cold and paper-work-intense winter months.   Not a better life necessarily, but certainly a different one.

But seeing the sun rise over my tomatoes . . . well, that's a moment to enjoy.

When you can't see the kale for the pickles

When I was growing up, everyone in my family took turns at making dinner.  My mom actually had me -- the artistic one, apparently-- design a KP chart*, so we knew who was cooking dinner, who was washing dishes, and who was vacuuming and sweeping each day.  (Okay, we "only" vacuumed and swept the house 3 days per week, one day per daughter, but the KP chart said which one of us did it which day).

*KP is an army abbreviation for "Kitchen Police",

or in my mom's lingo, a Girl Scout abbreviation 

for "Kitchen Patrol".  My mom was organized and strict!

It was sort of an ongoing joke that my mom's meals consisted of leftovers.  In fact, she'd pull a chair up in front of the fridge and pull out pyrex container after corningware container.  She'd reheat those containers in the oven or the microwave, and that would be our meal for the evening.  My sisters and I grumbled a lot about the fact that we and our dad had to cook, but my mom got to reheat.

But the scavengers have a place in the ecosystem, too.  And every once in a while, when I clean out my own refrigerator, I'm glad for the chance to have a "grandmother meal", which makes the most of former meals before they go bad, and also allows me to see what fresh foods still exist in between the bowls and and plates and pots of stuff.

Problem is, my refrigerator is usually in the state where there's "no food, only ingredients".  My love of canning jars and all that goes in them means that we tend to accumulate lots of jars of something-or-other waiting to be made into dinner somehow.  Just last Friday, in fact, we'd reached a stage where I knew I had a head of kale in there somewhere, but I couldn't see it for all the mis-matched jars of olives, diced carrots, sliced turnips, and other potentially yummy vegetables that had yet to find their way into a meal.  Not to mention, we had lots of partially filled jars of sauces cluttering up the refrigerator door.  Some people can't see the forest for the trees, but I couldn't see the kale for the pickles.

Where, oh where, is the kale?

So I pulled a Miser Mom version of my Mama.  I emptied the shelves of the refrigerator onto the kitchen counter, and I concocted a recipe made of . . . well, of ingredients.   I gathered all the root vegetables and tossed them into a hot cast-iron skillet with oil, garlic, and salt.  I consolidated as much as I could of four bottles of barbecue sauce into one bottle.  The remaining three bottles, I added a bit of water to, shook for all I was worth, and tossed the liquid in with the root vegetables (thereby simultaneously rinsing those bottles before recycling them).  I added a jar of sliced mizuna stems and a bunch of arugula.  I added pretty much everything I thought my husband or son wouldn't want to cook with, and I returned to the fridge the few remaining jars or bowls of things my guys might actually use -- the tomatoes and (yes) the kale.

I love it that the recipe was accidentally awesome.  I made it just for me because I figured no one else would like it.  But when my husband and son got home later that evening, they snarfed it all down and there was none left for me to take to school for lunch the next day.  Huzzah for serendipitous recipes!

But I also continue to appreciate the magic of canning, so that I can store the bulk of my food on non-refrigerated shelves.  On  shelves,  I can see all of my stored food easily.  Finding food in the basement is so much easier than finding it in the fridge or the freezer.  So here's a shout-out to my daughter and her best friend, who came over later in the week (long after the danger of being served Hot Barbecue Root Vegetable Medley), and who helped me cut up apples and can 24 quarts and a dozen smaller jars of applesauce. 

Twirly apples are one of the most enjoyable things about
spending 4 hours canning applesauce.

Even after we canned all those jars up, I had a few more bags of apples left for eating.  Fortunately, I'd cleared out space in the fridge for the remaining apples; they go right next to the kale.

Sunrise over canning jars

I woke up to this view this morning.

Sunrise over canning jars. 

Yesterday we had a huge canning session, wrestling our way through two bushels of tomatoes and 24 peppers. In this round of canning, I was ably assisted by N-son.  He's been a bit of domestic whiz this week.  He moved bedrooms, and he used his Senior Year Photo proofs (complete with the word "proof" emblazoned across them) to decorate his new bedroom door.  I love it.

N-son's door.  He's not usually so linear;
I love the attention to detail here.

When I asked for help with the many, many tomatoes I'd brought home, I was fearing I'd wind up with a tale of the "Little Red Hen".

Who will help me can these tomatoes?
"Not I", said the big yellow dog.

But instead, I got the "Little Engine That Could".  N-son actually asked me if he could help, instead of me asking him. When I agreed, he grabbed his favorite ceramic knife, put on one of his favorite musical CDs (Reba McEntire's Greatest Hits, in case you were wondering), and got down to chopping.

(I do not know how many people who decorate their bedroom doors with homemade "Black Lives Matter" signs count Reba McEntire as one of their favorite singers.  That right there is an interesting juxtaposition, I have to say).

N-son washed and cut up so many tomatoes that he joked to K-daughter that his hands were getting wrinkled "like old man hands". We also worked our way through a round of pickled peppers, which is one of N-son's favorite foods.  And then I'd had enough, and we all went to bed.

This morning, I woke up to my ready-for-winter food congregating in my window shelf, waiting to take the ride together in their cardboard box bus down into the basement, where they'll bide their time before coming back upstairs, one by one, to remind me week-by-week of the sun that rose over these physical manifestations of a day well-spent.

Vegetable torture

The zucchini and the summer squash from our CSA were trying to invade my kitchen and take over all our counters and shelf space.  So I put them on the rack.

Dehydrating squash.

My homemade drying rack, that is. Made (from the ground up) of

• a little red wagon, 
• a wide base made of a few fence boards, 
• some trash-picked framing boards to hold the screen, 
• a discarded window screen,
• more trash-picked framing boards screwed to a plexiglass storm window.

After just two days in the sun (not to mention an overnight under the moon), a half-a dozen zucchini will dry up enough that they can fit almost into a single quart-sized canning jar.  They're not quite like potato chips, but they are much more snack-like than before dehydrating. And this way, I can also save them for winter-time soups. Ymmmmm . . . 

So much of converting plants into food --- that is, so much of dealing with our massive abundance of fresh vegetables that seems to overwhelm us this time of year --- sounds like torture.  I wield my knife with abandon.  I rub salt into the wounds. I throw acid (vinegar) over everything.  I dump boiling oil -- or at least, oil -- on the poor, unsuspecting victim.

And the vegetable torture usually yields the desired results.  In fact, there are a couple of recipes I make and leave on the kitchen counter, knowing that they'll disappear even before dinner time.  All three of the recipes below involve both good cop/bad cop methods of interrogation.

Tomato salad:

• bad cop torture:  wield the knife to slice the tomatoes, then do the oil, salt, vinegar treatment.
• good cop additions: basil (fresh if you're lucky enough to have it) and chopped walnuts.  Tonight I added chopped peaches, too, since they've been lurking on the scene.

Swiss Chard salad:

• bad cop torture:  wield the knife to slice the chard as fine as you can, then do the oil, salt, vinegar treatment.  
• More bad cop: add chopped hot peppers.
• good cop additions: garlic, parmesan cheese.  Oh, lordy, this is good!

Beet salad:

• bad cop torture:  wield the knife (cuisinart) to dice the beets like coleslaw, then do the oil, salt, vinegar treatment.
• more bad cop torture:  bring in zucchini or carrots for similar treatment.  Also, hot peppers.
• good cop additions: garlic, black pepper.  

There's something about slicing vegetables finely that makes such a difference -- perhaps it's merely increasing the surface-area-to-volume ratio, so the dressing has more effect. But it's also truly wonderful to have bite-sized morsels of fresh vegetables so ready at hand (or at mouth).  

Tomorrow we're taking on the peach tree.  

Using recipes, and not.

My husband follows recipes, pretty much to the letter.  I mostly make up recipes out of my head as I go along, although occasionally I remember a recipe I read/developed long ago (hello, waffles!)  But aside from those remembered recipes, I basically throw stuff in a pot and cook it.  This means that I get to make up fun names for my meals . . . and I get to keep making up names, because I almost never remember what ingredients I actually used in previous meals.  Our family still fondly remembers inviting a friend over to dinner who remarked with surprise, "I've never had Pittsburgh Pasta before!  I can't believe I haven't tried this!"   All we remember of the recipe is that there were artichokes and chopped-up, leftover lasagna noodles.  Plus other "stuff".  "Stuff" is my favorite ingredient.

Possibly for this reason, I have only two cookbooks.  One is a well-loved copy of Joy of Cooking, which I've had forever. (By the way, if you ever want to read a really wonderful history that looks at kitchens, cooking, society, and also a riveting story of an old-fashioned mom with her hippie daughter, check out Stand facing the stove : the story of the women who gave America the Joy of cooking, by Anne Mendelson).   I love how my The Joy of Cooking describes the basics of preparing food, starting from scratch as well as doing stuff that's fairly sophisticated -- and if you're curious about why this book does it better than others, Mendleson's history explained how the cookbook developed to do just that.

The second cookbook is the More With Less Cookbook by Doris Janzen Longacre, which describes lots of different ways to make substitutions, and, as promised, offers many ways to make hearty meals starting with humble ingredients.  Longacre was a Mennonite woman who believed that every action tied in some way to promoting (or not) justice.  I love the philosophical preamble to the book as much as I love the pragmatic and helpful guides/recipes that follow.

(Oh, I just realized that I also have a third cookbook -- the Winnie the Pooh Cookbook.  I got it as a child, and I keep it for sentimental reasons.  Yeah).

Having said all that, here's a big hug for K-daughter, who decided to solve the "problem" of having lots of cauliflower from our CSA.  (The "problem" was that the cauliflower was sitting in the fridge and not getting eaten, because it looked like plants and not like food).  And her solution involved hunting for recipes in the modern way (on-line), combined with being willing to take a bit of advice from her mom on how to make substitutions so that using cauliflower didn't mean going to the store to buy even more ingredients.   Huzzah!

Here's the blow-by-blow, via text messages.

K: How does a new recipe for tonight sound? Cauliflower casserole? We dont have sour cream, can i substitute it for the plain yogurt we have in the fridge? Would you mind?

M: Sounds AWESOME! add a tsp or so of vinegar to the yogurt and it'll be more like sour cream. http://allrecipes.com/recipe/215240/homemade-sour-cream/

K:  Sweet! Thank you!!!

M:  You're welcome!

K:  I get out of the child watch at 6:30, i dont think it will take too long to make this if i prep for it now. So we can have dinner by 730 ish?

M:  Sounds fine by me. Thanks for cooking!

K: Totallyi just hope itll taste ok! Haha
It calls for corn flake crumbs.... Can i ise grape nuts instead?!  this may be a dumb question

M: Or regular bread crumbs -- I have a bunch in the freezer. Grape nuts would probably be too crunchy.

K: Awesome. Thanks!

****** after awesome dinner . . .  ********

M:  So where did you find that recipe???

K: I just googled online cauliflower recipes and it popped up with cauliflower casserole, and that sounded really yummy! would you like it?!

M:  Ypppers!!!

K: http://www.food.com/recipe/cauliflower-casserole-30444

Getting into a pickle (juice)

Vegetable season is upon us.  Our CSA shares have started rolling in again.  Huzzah!

Of course, together with an abundance of vegetables comes an abundance of vegetable preparation.  I've said before that I've become a fan of trying to chop and store the veggies right away so that (a) they don't wilt before we get to them and (b) they look like snacks or dinner or lunch, instead of like potted plants taking up space in the fridge.

Here's one of my fave helpers these past few weeks:  two jars of pickle juice, left over from purchased pickles my husband and sons like.



The reason that one jar of juice looks red is because it held radishes for a while (and then we ate the radishes).

Pickle brine is wonderful for a few reasons.  One reason is that the combination of vinegar and salt (mostly the vinegar) serves as a preservative, keeping the food from going bad.  The traditional use of pickling is to preserve summer food long into winter, but it also works for preserving Tuesday food well into the weekend.  At any rate, my radishes never got soggy or wilty, even though I left them in the jar on the counter for several days before we actually got around to taste-testing them.  (In fact, leaving them out on the counter is better for pickling them than sticking them in the fridge).

The other big reason that pickle brine is wonderful is that pickle brine adds taste, making veggies even more yummy.  People love acidic foods (soft drinks being a prime example of this preference gone bad), and salt is so danged good it's become a Biblical metaphor for awesomeness.  Plus, there are a few other sugars and spices in the commercial pickles that just add to the overall flavor. I don't think that any of my kids or husband would have looked at a bowl of sliced radishes and thought, Yum!  Snack!  But pickled radishes are actually quite munch-able.

If you're a pickle neophyte, you'll be happy to hear that learning to pickle foods is like learning checkers: the basic rules are so easy anyone can start playing, but if you're super serious, you can get more complicated.  The basic rules of pickling are these:

1. wash and cut up the vegetables
2. put them in the brine.

That's it.  As you learn more about pickling you learn things like, the flavor deepens if you wait a few days; you can speed-up or enhance the process by heating the brine properly (one recipe I saw suggested leaving the jar on a sunny window sill for the first day); you can muck around with spices; etc.  But since all I want to do is to have my CSA vegetables wind up in people's tummies instead of on the compost heap by the end of the week, steps 1 and 2 are just perfect for us.   I'm not going to go all radichal with my radishes.

As easy as apple . . . sauce!

My friend June made her annual stop at a nearby orchard and brought me a bushel of apples for $16.  This time of year, local apples are abundant and inexpensive (not to mention delicious!).

Applesauce might very well be a sort of a gateway drug for future canners, because applesauce is so easy.  First of all, the ingredients of applesauce are minimal:  apples, plus a tiny bit of water.  Second of all, all the cooking that goes with applesauce happens when the weather is cool, so (unlike in August when the tomatoes and peaches are steaming up my kitchen) heating up a pot of hot apples makes the house feel better, not worse.  And finally, the actual making of the apple sauce is surprisingly simple, especially if you like including the peels in the applesauce (like I do).

The steps of making apple sauce are basic: chop them, heat them, and mash them.  To cut them up, I've used an apple peeler corer in the past, but this year decided just to cut each apple into eighths and then remove the core (triangled wedge).  N-son, with his growing confidence because of his culinary arts training, started on this even before I got home from church, and we worked happily on this together while listening to Chris Thile make his debut as the host of Prairie Home Companion.

We tossed the cut-up pieces into a pot with a small amount of water (about a half-inch, enough to prevent scorching the apples), and then heated up the apples until they got soft.  I used a potato masher, followed by a stick blender that I scored at one of our annual Bad Gift Exchange parties.

At that point, the applesauce was done!  To summarize, all you do is chop them, heat them, and mash them.  No extra ingredients (aside from a bit of water) needed, no special thermometers.  So it's a really quick and easy food to make.

To can the applesauce, you put the applesauce in jars and then boil the jars for 20 minutes (if they're quart jars) or 15 minutes (if they're pint jars).  You'll need actual canning jars and jar grabbers, but that's the only special equipment you need -- you could use a spaghetti pot for canning, if it's deep enough that the jars can be completely underwater.

For us, this past weekend, canning 19 quarts of applesauce took three-and-a-half hours: that's the time from opening up the bags to putting away the freshly-washed pots.  If you start with fewer apples, of course this will take you less time, and there's no reason you need to do so many at once -- you could can just one pint of applesauce if you wanted.

My favorite step-by-step site for canning directions is here.

***
Canning apples was so easy, that I decided to try my hand at making my own apple cider vinegar as well -- this will be my first attempt.  Basically, I just put the apple scraps (cores) in glass jars with water and a bit of sugar, and I'll wait a month or so and vinegar will magically appear.  Or something.  I'm mostly following the directions from the PrairieHomestead site (no relation to Chris Thile, as far as I can tell).  Advice is welcome.  

Fall chores keep falling on my head, la la la

Here are some random autumn thoughts, to go with the random autumn chores that come along with the thoughts.



 The apple tree in front of our house is heavy with apples.  It's calling to me, reminding me to set aside a weekend for canning applesauce.  That weekend ain't gonna be real soon (we've got a birthday coming up this weekend), but the tree is reminding me I can't wait too long.  Gotta clear out space in the calendar, not to mention the kitchen.





A second sign of fall: the leaf tarps and the rakes have come out of the garage.  Huzzah for dirty old tarps that we can rake leaves onto, and then drag to where we dump the leaves for pick-up!  It's much easier raking a few leaves onto a nearby tarp, which we can slide across the grass, than raking a lawn-full of leaves all the way across the yard!



And the tomato plants in the back garden are starting to wither up, with the last few tomatoes trying valiantly (and mostly unsuccessfully) to turn red.  Time for green tomato chutney, I think!

But I realized as I was pulling my tomato cages out of the ground, that other people might be doing the same, so that now would be a perfect time to go "shopping" for additional tomato cages.  I shot a quick query out to Freecycle, and sure enough, I snagged a half-dozen cages from a neighbor about 2 miles from my home. I biked on over there and brought them home, and they'll be ready and waiting for me and my canning-jar-started tomato seedlings next May.

"My Mom ate my homework"

Here we are, barely two weeks into school, and I get a call from N-son's new high school guidance counsellor.  Oh, no . . . not already in trouble! I worry. And in fact, I am right -- he's not in trouble!  Whoop!  Even better, the counsellor tells me that the reason for this call is that a spot has opened up in the culinary internship program.

So from now on, N-son is going to spend the first half of each school day at our County's career training center (CTC), learning about things like how to sharpen knives and how to become OSHA certified (two things that probably have some bearing on each other, you think?), and the second half of each day back in the high school muscling his way through things like chemistry and algebra and communication arts.

Yesterday, he brought home his science homework:  a list of vocabulary words at the top ("theory", "model", "hypothesis", "independent variable"), with a bunch of definitions at the bottom.   He was supposed to match them up:  he got exactly one of the thirteen definitions right. Ooog.  Well, at least we caught this early and can re-do his work before he turns it in.

But he also brings home schoolwork from CTC.  Here's a picture of him holding his schoolwork.

I'm bummed that I didn't get him with his puffy black chef's hat that
comes with his uniform, because that's adorable.
I'll have to take that picture of him soon.

Here's a closer glimpse of the schoolwork:  cherry tomatoes and mozzarella balls with basil, in an Italian sauce.  The container isn't as full as when he brought it home because, well . . . yeah.

I get the feeling homework time is going to be a lot more fun this year!

Surprising watermelon run

Something strange happened in my yard this last month. The something strange looks like this: a weird green rock rose up out of the earth.  A sort of stripe-y rock.

Looking closer, it seems that the green rock might actually be a watermelon.  

How could that have happened?  Every year, I bury a bunch of watermelon seeds in the ground where they can return to the dust from which they came, and where they provide useful nutrients for the various nearby weeds that I end up growing.  But this year, instead of decomposing gracefully beneath the ground, the seeds shot up curly leaves that took over their patch of the yard, and then a watermelon-like object  appeared.

But was it actually  a watermelon?  And if so, was it ready to eat?  I had no idea, but I decided to find out, and I enlisted the help of my running buddies.  After our weekly Saturday 10K run -- this week a stunningly hot week at 90 degrees -- we gathered to cut this rock open and see what it looked like on the inside. 

Lo-and-behold, it was delicious!  And there was enough to go around for runners and grandchildren and passers by, too.  Yes, the weather has gotten hot again . . . but after the run, we rocked it with watermelon!

Cooking, Exercising, and possibly Gender

Y pulls food out of the fridge while
N-son makes hamburger patties using canning rings.
Miser Dog is *always* ready to help
with the cooking!

School starts up soon again, and in the way that one thing leads to another, cooking meals is becoming a thing-to-reckon-with.  I've long believed in teaching my kids to cook, and I've had intermittent success at actually enforcing a cooking rotation for dinner duties.  Both of my sons have got some serious culinary skills now.

But, man, is it an effort to keep that rotation going!  It seems like any little bump in the road of our daily schedules knocks the dinner-rotation-train off its tracks, and I wind up taking over the main part of the cooking again.  Even this past year, with my husband retired (so that in theory he could take on the majority of dinner-time duties), I've ended up preparing meals about three nights a week, which is more than any other person in the home does.

Part of this is because -- I admit -- I'm a bit of a control freak about some things.  I rescue food from the soup kitchen where I work so that it doesn't get tossed in the trash, and so I make pizza-bagels for dinner that night.  Or we have a family special dinner about once a month, and preparations for those events are Mine-All-Mine, baby.  Or there are vegetables coming out of our ears because of our CSA and our garden, and I feel morally obligated to get those green things onto the table and into our bellies before they turn into something only the compost pile would accept.

So at any rate, I know the dinner-on-me thing is partly a matter of my own bossy and controlling tendencies.

But there's more going on that dictates dinner management, and I think it's a sports thing -- maybe even a gendered sports thing.  I think that athletics conspires to make moms (and not sons or husbands) do the dinner cooking.  Am I crazy to think so?

My female friends and I love running together.   We all, in our various ways, schedule our running early in the morning, to minimize family disruption.  With my friend June, I run about 4k every Monday, Wednesday, and Thursday at 6 a.m.  We get home by 6:30, wake our kids to get them ready for school, and then get ourselves ready for work.  My long-distance friends run together on Saturdays at the "late" hour of 7 a.m., which means our kids can sleep in until we get home.

My husband and his (mostly male) buddies, on the other hand, have a daily bike ride that starts at 4:00 p.m. and lasts until 6 or 6:30 -- which is right when the kids are getting out of school and starting homework.  My sons similarly have late afternoon/early evening sports.  J-son doesn't get home from boxing until 7:15.  N-son has after-school squash, plus evening drums and voice rehearsals.  So the men-folk in my household are not around to prepare dinner, at least not unless we wait until 8 p.m. to eat.  If our friends are any indication, the same pattern holds in many households across our city.


With the school year starting up again -- and with my committee load kicking into high gear this year -- I've been keeping an eye on our dinner scheduling.  We've recently pulled out the old "Family Meal Planning White Board" (with the days of the week in permanent marker, and the chef of the day in dry erase marker).  There are five us us at home (that includes our host daughter, Y, who takes a meal a week), so there are plenty of chefs to go around.  With a bit of careful work, we can coordinate with sports and musical schedules.

Sometimes, the hard part about making dinner is figuring out what to make. But for our family lately, it's almost as tricky to figure out who is making it.  Wish us luck!

Throw-it-together and give it a name

This weekend, two of my family's favorite racers won big events.  (When I say "my family", I specifically mean "N-son and my husband", because they're the big race fans; J-son is spending the week visiting his former foster mom, and I am not a race fan and mostly just get to hear loud cheering and/or groans.)   Some dude named Hamilton won some automobile race, and some other dude named Sagan won a stage of the Tour de France.  There has been much jubilation among the men-folk in the Miser Mom household.

I made dinner in much the usual way:  scavenge the fridge for random material, throw it in a pot, and add salt and oil.  This is a surprisingly effective technique for generating an amazing variety of yummy dinners as well as for using up good food that might otherwise go bad.  Adding a name to the dish makes it taste even better (my church group says, "I've never had Tyrolean Vegetable Medley before; it's fabulous!"  Heh-heh!  Neither have I!).

And really, even unlikely pairings of vegetables seem to go well together.  So here, for your gustatory pleasure,  is the recipe for

Hamilton-Sagan Stew.

Heat a skillet with bit of oil in it.  Add a quart-sized canning jar of sliced onions (because we're so happy we could cry) and also some finely sliced beets (because our heroes can't be beat).   Total bonus coolness: the beets turn the onions red.

Then dice up the stalk of celery that is still good but is too limp for your husband, who normally loves celery, and add those diced pieces, leaves and all, to the pot.  Because, our racer heroes are going to have an even bigger take-home celery if they keep winning.  And then dice some leftover sausage (because I never saw-such great racing?) and toss that in, too.  And add some salt because these racer are worth their . . . um . . . salt.

Good enough that everyone asked for seconds.  Even though the whole point of the meal was a pair of firsts!

N-son shows what's left.  He says that holding the lid like this,
he looks like Captain America!

[Here's a thank-you to my friends for your condolences on the last show of my favorite radio guy.  I'm recovering from my intense sadness.  A bit.]

The vegetables are taking over

We're throwing ourselves this week into helping out at GAiN, boxing up gazillions of clothes to send overseas.  (I did this last summer, too, and I wrote about the process of sorting them all).  It's a bit overwhelming.

Speaking of overwhelming, the vegetables from my CSA are taking over my life again.  It's a nice problem to have.

We have a kohlrabi greens centerpiece on the table.

These greens won't fit in the fridge right now, because it's already full of other green food.

And four sliced zucchini are sitting out on the counter, again because of lack of fridge space.

When we get home from GAiN today, we'll have a big hunger and a lot of good food to chow down on.  Yay, summer!

You are what you . . . drink?

"A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems."
--Alfréd Rényi

(Rényi actually said "device", not "machine", but this little saying of his has become part of the folk-wisdom of mathematics, and like many sayings, it has various forms; the version above is the version I "grew up" with, mathematically speaking).

I started drinking coffee the summer I was working on my doctoral dissertation.  My thesis advisor had gone to Oxford for a whole year, and I scraped together money to follow him there for just one summer.  "Summer" is a relative term in Oxford, especially in June, when it rained every day but one. The heat in the buildings was off (because, y'know, "summer"), but the outside June temperatures never rose above 60-some degrees.  I was miserably cold a lot of the time, and I turned to warm drinks to try to help me feel better.  British tea was an acquired taste that I couldn't manage to acquire, so I took up coffee.

Fortunately for me, July and August warmed up (AND I figured out the Sobolev inequality that helped me nail that compactness argument that I needed to finish my thesis--whoop!), but the rainy, cold June had made its mark on me:  by the time I left Old England to return to New England I was hooked both on mathematical theorem proving and on coffee.

Coffee, coffee, coffee . . .  I love it.  There are so many ways it has permeated my life.  Like Bach, I have sung (or rather, said) its praises: in our family game of "I like", my third or fourth offering has  often been, "I like . . . drinking coffee."

I've designed my bags so that they can carry my favorite insulated bottle (perfect for getting coffee on the go).

And I have come to love the coffee-making ritual in our marriage: my husband grinds the coffee beans at night, and I press the "start" button in the morning.  I make coffee and transfer it to a thermos for low-cost warmth preservation.

Coffee has been a part of my mathematical identity; it's been a part of my marriage; it's shaped the physical possessions that I own and the way I model gratitude with my children.

Can you sense there's a change coming?

There have been downsides to drinking coffee.  The expense . . . well, since we mostly brew coffee at home, coffee has been an affordable luxury, even to a Miser like me.  Even so, there's no getting around the fact that coffee is one of the more expensive ongoing pantry purchases we make in our home.  A larger downside is that I've been so addicted for so long, that even when I don't *want* to shape my life around coffee, I sort of *have* to.  In particular, when I'm traveling, locating early morning coffee (trash-free, where possible) has loomed large in my travel arrangements.

I've toyed around with the idea of giving up coffee for a while. I held back in part because it would be just another way to freak out my husband, who already thinks I live a life of hair-shirt-self-sacrifice, and worries about being dragged into the same. But then I came down with a health scare that turned out to be persistent heart burn (it's how I learned I'm beautiful on the inside).  And after taking mondo piles of medication day after day, I finally decided to say good-bye to . . . well, to a big part of my life.

Sigh-yay.  (!/?)

And so I've gone over to the herbal tea side of the world.  (Note: herbal teas -- cheaper than coffee and not addictive).  I get them from market (canning jars, no trash).  And just so I can inject a little of the happy side of me in here, I'll note that canning jar lids make great mug covers to keep the tea warm, and small canning jars are a great place to drop your tea ball when you take it out of the mug.

Spending $915 on mathematics

Phew!  My computer is back.  I (well, my awesome Tech-Sters) managed to save almost everything, with the exception of random sets of photos.  So I'm going to quickly blitz through the post I wanted to put up last week.

The first week of May, I went to a kick-butt math workshop in San Jose.  I didn't snag funding to go, but I was fairly sure that the workshop would be good enough for me that I decided to pay out of pocket for this six-day trip.

doubles as a suitcase;
I left the milk/egg containers at home.

Not surprisingly, the biggest expense was cross-country airfare, to the tune of $565. I got to leave my discarded yard-sale books in Atlanta, Seattle, Denver, and Chicago (but I wasn't done with books in the other three cities I spent time on the ground in); being willing to take multiple legs brings the airfare down somewhat.  I also packed everything for the week into my Market backpack, avoiding luggage fees.

Speaking of transportation, using the IRS rate, we spent another $50 on mileage to and from my home airport; also I spent another $25 on a four-mile taxi trip from the airport in San Jose to my lodgings.   Once I was in San Jose, I walked the 2 miles to and from the workshop daily.  (One mathematician said, rather wide-eyed, "but that will take 40 minutes!", and I didn't quite know how to respond.  "Um, yes, but it's actually good to spend that much time walking each day?").

Lodging was the next biggest expense.  San Jose is wickedly costly -- the nearby Holiday Inn was offering rates of $257 per night.  Clearly, I was not going to spend 5 nights at that price.  I tried hard to find friends in the area who might be happy to put me up, but when that proved unsuccessful (no local friends with guest rooms), one of my former students suggested AirBnB.  And so I spent $334 for the week -- plus, my host drove me back to the airport, saving me another $25 cab fare.  Awesome!

A former student (now mathematician)
and me, at a reception.  Yay food!

Another frugal win was spending only $16 on food.  I got lucky in that the workshop offered all participants (even me, who wasn't officially funded by them) a continental breakfast, lunch, and a late-afternoon reception.  So most days, I didn't eat any "dinner" but was still more than well-fed.  I bought $3 coffee in the airport, once each direction (can't take it through security, so that was the only way to get it), and on the way home I broke down and bought a $11 sandwich, because my trail mix and chickpeas had run out.

And the chickpeas -- that's what I really wanted to post about.  Because I've been bringing trail mix with me on many trips, and I *love* that I can eat it without standing in lines/generating trash/paying wads of money.  But it's dry, and sometimes I also want something with a chewier (meatier?) texture.
So, I don't have pictures (dang computer crash), but I just want to say:  roasted parmesan chickpeas!!!!  Here is a recipe from Michael Pollan.  Also, garlic and paprika roasted chickpeas!  Yum.

frugality vs. convenience

My friend Beth confided, a bit sheepishly, the difficulty she has living a low-trash life in this modern world.  She told me she sort of admires me from afar, but has a lot of trouble figuring out how she might reduce garbage in her own life.  She said, "I'd really like to make less trash, but it all comes down to convenience.  It's just, you go to the store, and there are so many other things you have to be doing, and . . . convenience wins".  She sounded kind of embarrassed about admitting this, like it's some kind of guilty secret.

But what she's saying, I understand: grabbing a single box of cereal (with its lovely plastic liner bag) and a carton of milk (whose carton goes into the recycling bin) seems a lot easier than wandering many aisles and buying the many ingredients that come with making your own breakfast in a low-trash way -- not to mention that you still have to actually spend time making breakfast.  How could frugality trump convenience?

To me, all of this "convenience" has a lot of hassle built in that has become invisible to most people.  Beth (and most other normal people I know) assume that going to grocery stores over and over again is convenient.  How do you give that up for frugal DIY-ness?  But for me, the more I get into my weird lifestyle, the more I see massive inconvenience of the grocery-store kind of life.  The parking lots of grocery stores are unkind expanses of asphalt and obstacles.  The stores themselves are full of glaring lights, insipid music, and advertisements.  The sheer quantity and variety of items for sale (do we really need 87 varieties of potato chips?) means that finding the few things you do actually want is slow and inefficient.   (Seriously, grocery store aisles are almost as bad as TSA lines in airports, as far as I'm concerned).  And the checkout lines can vary in speed so much that the comedian Emo Philips uses them as a metaphor for "eternity".

Here's a different version of "convenience".  Last year, I only went to a grocery store (the kind that Beth means) a dozen times, and four of those times were while I was traveling and used a grocery store instead of a restaurant.  So, in 2015 I only made eight trips from home to a grocery store.

Instead, I go about three times a year to Miller's Amish market,

Trash from my last trip to Miller's, several months ago,
next to a canning jar solar light (not trash).

each time stocking up: about 50 pounds of flour, 25 pounds of oats, sugar, dried beans, nuts, some dried fruit.  I buy giant blocks of local, organic cheese for half the price of industrial grocery store cheese.  All of these food things come either in plastic bags (which I reuse for other food storage) or in large brown paper bags, which I recycle with cardboard or use as garden liners; I store the dry goods in large cat litter bins or glass jars to protect them from bugs and moisture.  I cut the cheese (heh heh) into pound size blocks, wrap the blocks individually, and freeze them.  That way, when I want baking supplies in between my trips to Miller's, I go "shopping in the basement" on "in the chest freezer".

My market backpack, with the containers
I'll return to get refills.

I also do a weekly trip to our local farmer's market to get yogurt, eggs, and milk (all in reusable containers, so the only trash is the plastic seal on the yogurt lid and the milk lid).  Compared to the grocery store, our farmer's market is an amazingly human experience, and it's also faster:  from the time I take my bike down off the hook at home to the time I hang it back up again with my groceries in my backpack, is a half hour.  (I've discovered to my surprise that biking is even faster than driving, sitting in traffic, parking, etc).

And when I'm at home, how do I make breakfast quickly?  I've written elsewhere about making waffles and muffins quickly for our weekend breakfasts.  On weekdays, I tend to have homemade granola mixed with yogurt.  I make my granola in large batches (one to two gallons at a time), so the cooking part of that comes only about once a month, usually while I'm making something else.  A gallon jar of granola compared to a wimpy little box of cereal?  To me, the granola scores big on the convenience scale.

Granola is super easy to make.  The more I make it, the more I realize the main ingredients are oats and oil.  Powdered milk, cinnamon or ginger, and sugar add flavor and/or sweetness, but they're totally secondary.  (I get oil and powdered milk at the grocery store, but I'm hoping someday to find bulk versions elsewhere.   Cinnamon and ginger are MUCH cheaper at market than at the grocery store; plus you can bring your own container and refill it there instead of doing trash).

Great Jars of Granola!

The basic idea behind this kind of shopping comes from Amy Dacyzyn's "Pantry Principle"-- keeping a well-stocked pantry that allows me to make a variety of foods (bread/pretzels/granola/muffins/waffles/etc) can be cheaper and faster than choosing the menu first and the ingredients second.

The point of all this description isn't to say that Beth is wrong and I'm right:  I'm sure that Beth would find my version of shopping incredibly inconvenient if she tried to start it up right now.  "Convenience" is a psychological thing; it's much more convenient to rely on habit and routine than to keep trying new things.  I used to go the grocery store weekly or more, and back then I thought that side trips to our farmer's market were a painful extra excursion.  Reorganizing my life took a long time, a lot of experimenting (not always successful).  Now that I'm used to this new way of living, I realize that it has become easy for me (and, in fact, easier than my former habits).  I'm not saying it'd be the kind of life that everyone would like.

But it *is* a life that, now that I'm used to it, means that frugality and low-trash-ity has become *more* convenient, not *less* convenient, than buying packaged and processed food from the grocery store.

What she bought: candy, baking supplies, and tradition

A friend of mine asked me, ". . . but . . . you must go shopping sometimes; you must buy some stuff, right?" And so I figured it might be fun to start documenting actual purchases I make.

Here's the reason for last week's big shopping trip.  Just before Christmas, I realized that I hadn't actually saved up a bunch of hard candy from the previous year.  So my husband and I had a "date", going to the grocery store together, spending a whopping $30.61.  Y'know, if you've got to go to the grocery store in the rain, it's nice to hold hands with a good-looking guy while you do it.

Not pictured here are the eggs ($4.19 for 18 of them) or flour ($2.29).  The remainder of  the money was all completely unhealthy junk:  frosting and candy. It's hard to buy candy without trash attached.  M&Ms are possible from the bulk aisle, but candy canes and smarties?  Haven't figured those out yet.

Why did I need so much candy? Because we are in our second of year of moving gingerbread, eggnog, and cider into the center spotlight of our family Christmas gathering (and thereby gently sliding present exchanges off to a more minor side show).

. . . seven ice-ers icing, six geeks a-playing,
five cooo-old drinks . . . la la la . . .

This year, instead of building houses, we decorated cookies.  Decorating is even more fun than eating:  see how deeply N-son is concentrating?

L-daughter made smiley faces (near plate below).  K-daughter managed to make vertical monstrous master-pieces by stacking candy high-high-high like legos and by planting candy cane forests in a glade of gingerbread soil (far plate).

I-daughter went for variety.

J-son created his own masterpieces, too; but Baby A, my granddaughter, decided she was really into deconstructionism.

And now we still have lots of eggs and flour left that we can use for dinner and breakfast, and we even have a few jars of candy remaining that will be ready and waiting for Christmas 2016.  So that's a shopping trip I won't have to make.   Phew.

Holding Fast

This is a story of how my son's Bible class wrecked my marriage (except that it didn't really . . . read on).

At my son's Quaker Local School, one of the required classes is on religion and the Bible.  I've been impressed my how much these classes have delved into non-Quaker religions.   (Okay, the school isn't actually technically "Quaker" -- that's a pseudonym I gave the place.  But it is a school that is run by a religious denomination that promotes pacifism, service to those who have less, and a commitment to respecting the diversity of the world's people.  So, sort of like a Quaker, but not actually).  At any rate, the boys have come home with study sheets on lots of different world religions, including but not only "quakerism".

This semester, the students in J-son's class were each encouraged to take on a large, experiential project.  From the list of many choices, J-son chose to undertake a two-day fast.  He and his dad talked about it all semester long.  His dad (my husband) has done fasts in the past with his men's group, and my guy offered to join in, to support J-son.

And so it was that last Saturday night, about a week ago, the men-folk in my home chowed down in a serious way, preparing themselves for a Sunday and Monday with no food.

I've done two, maybe three, 24-hour fasts in my life, long ago.  I don't remember much about those, except that I learned to carry over the idea of dealing with being hungry to non-fasting days.  About a month after one of my earlier fasts, I happened to be at a math conference where the organizers had just sort of . . . forgotten . . . that all the dining halls would be closed during the first morning.  Almost all of the mathematicians there were as irritable and angry as could be:  "how could they not feed us!!!"  And while I could totally understand how miserable they felt, I was surprised that I could feel hunger but not be miserable about it.  It was a rather happy and encouraging revelation.

So, Sunday morning, I decided, "What the heck?  I'll join the fast."

Not surprisingly, J-son was a wreck.  This kid -- who almost never eats breakfast, even when I beg him to -- woke up declaring he was ravenous.  We went to church, and came home, and he let us all know just how much all he wanted to do was eat.  Instead, we read books and then he called a friend, and went to that friend's home for distraction.  It turns out J-son's 48-hour fast ended up lasting 15 hours, the first 8 of which he was asleep. So.  So there was a lesson learned; perhaps not the same one the teacher intended, but nonetheless new knowledge about hunger and food and limits of endurance.

For my husband, the agony lasted longer; and "agony" was, to his surprise, the right word for the fast this time around.  My guy learned late about the early end to J-son's fast, and the moment he heard, he headed for the kitchen himself.   Twenty hours without food is not easy.

I say that, and I think about people --- some of whom I know --- who go hungry regularly for reasons that have nothing to do with choice.  There are school children in my city who dread the holidays because it means that school lunches stop for a week or more.  There are students at my college who feel guilty about having three meals a day, knowing their families back home can't do the same.  A child we had tried to adopt, X-son down in Haiti, survived the 2010 earthquake in a bizarre twist of fate when his school principal declared there was only enough food in the building for small children.  The principal shooed away the older kids to scavenge, and X-son was sad and dismayed, because he was so hungry and wished he'd been allowed to stay and eat.  That day at lunch, the earthquake killed everyone left in his school.  X-son fled into the hills and has since survived typhoid, beatings, and much more hunger.  Fasting seems like a personal torture, and yet I also worry that it is somehow demeaning, like I'm playing at a game that is all too real for far too many people.

But anyway -- or maybe, "so, therefore" -- I continued.  I decided not to go for a full 48 hours, mostly because I had a mind-numbing, soul-sucking committee call scheduled for noon on Monday, and I figured having a brain would be more important than proving I was a 48-hour brand of toughness.  I went to sleep Sunday night with weird dreams of nestled spoons and nesting children running through my brain.  I woke Monday morning and did my usual morning run with my friend June.  I decided I didn't have enough brain left for a blog post, but I did email and even do a little math.  And then at 9 a.m., I ate breakfast.

The rest of the day Monday, not surprisingly, I ate more and caught up on work and I also slept a lot.

And then Tuesday I divorced my husband because he left me with the dishes.

Okay, actually, I didn't really divorce him, but I wanted to.  In fact, here's the email that I wrote him that afternoon:

[Something about taking N-son to speech therapy] 

Also, I washed the rice pot, and J-son's brownie pan, and filled up the dishwasher, and cleaned the mess off the stove. 

My head is really not in a good space today, so I'm not going to say any more.

Which, if you read between the lines (and my husband did read between the lines) said, "She's furious!".   Now that I look back at this, I think it's pretty amazing that he can understand me so well, which is part of saying that we truly do have an awesome marriage.  And of course, while waking up to a pile of dirty dishes is no fun, I was totally out of my skull to react so severely that I was thinking that the kitchen was a reason that I ought to leave home.  At least I had the brains to shut up and not go publicly berserk, and give myself time to get my head all better again.

And by Wednesday and Thursday, I was back to normal, but also watching my head carefully just to see if other crazy stuff had lodged there during my 36-hour vacation from food.  I think I'm okay again now.

So I learned something about hunger and food and limits of endurance, too.   Good.

It's that time again: Pickle Juice for Dinner!

I love my giant Thanksgiving list. I pull it out about this time every year, and I spend four or five days living by its wise guidelines. The first page is the massive shopping list; the next four pages are a day-by-day (at points, even minute-by-minute) guide to getting ready for Thanksgiving. I update it slightly year-by-year, but the bulk of it has been the same since I put it together six years ago.

The guide begins with a Monday cleansing:

Make space in fridge by emptying out gross moldy things.

Tuesday, the real preparation begins:

Grocery shop.
Make cranberry relish:
grind together in the blender 4 cups cranberries, 1 orange, and then 2 cups sugar. place in refrigerator.
Make dressing:
mix 1/4 c walnut oil, 1/2 c vegetable oil, 3 tbs cider vinegar, 1 tsp mustard, 1 Tbsp honey, salt, pepper, and 2 tbs chives.

The list ends Friday with directions for making shepherd's pie and canning turkey stock from the leftovers (20 minutes for pints, 25 minutes for quarts).

Right now, we're at the clean out the fridge stage.  My fridge has accumulated a lot of jars. 

And this year, a heck of a lot of those jars come from pickles.  We like pickles so much, we save the brine to make more pickles.

We have the brine from store-bought pickled cucumbers (actually, not bought by us: we scavenged them from a school picnic); we also have jars with whatever is left of pickled okra, pickled carrots, pickled radishes, pickled kale stems . . . you name it.

But since it's November, we're low on veggies and rich in brine right now.  (I think I counted six jars of brine, with a few briny but lonely vegetables floating here and there).  So last night, we  had pickles for dinner.  Pickles, and Cream-of-Leftover Soup.  Yum.  And a few other leftovers as side dishes.








But, in the "mission accomplished" realm, the fridge stands ready for the next infusion of food.

And, to my intense delight, the fridge clean-out resulted in zero trash:  the waste involved was one recycled pickle jar, a few hand-washed plastic bags (not yet trash, as I can use them again a few times), and a heck of a lot of canning jars getting ready for the dishwasher.  (Miser Dog, by the way, was very happy to help dispose of the food of questionable longevity, so there wasn't even anything to compost).

We are so fortunate to have this much food just sitting here waiting for us to eat it.  It's strange to make this fridge clean-out almost into a game.  I can't help but think that.

And I also think:  canning jars, yay!  Because later today, they'll hold homemade salad dressing and cranberry relish, and it's about time, because Thanksgiving is coming soon.