Keeping Busy (With Adele Pictures!)

On January 21st I handed my "Student Teacher" badge to the secretary at Ripon High School and made the official transition from being a student to being . . . unemployed. I headed over to a bank to have my application for a teaching license notarized, went to Ripon College to hand in my paperwork, and presumably felt some kind of weight lift off my shoulders, except that I knew I was in for another six to eight-week wait while the Education Department at Ripon reviewed my paperwork, and the DPI reviewed my request for a license.

Instead of doing anything productive like applying for substitute teaching jobs, I spent the first day of the rest of my life driving to Indiana to celebrate my niece's second birthday. (I couldn't actually apply for substitute teaching jobs anyway, because in the current economy schools are only hiring actual certified teachers to sub, and I was waiting for a letter from the Ed Department stating that my license application was pending at the DPI and that Ripon College would vouch for me if an employer was willing to take their word for it.)

Eventually the letter arrived, but I'd already gotten busy with Buechner Tax Prep, which has managed to keep my head above water for the last three years. (It is a little bit annoying to work for your dad though - my last three paid jobs have put me under the direct supervision of my immediate family, which probably looks strange on job applications. As much as I don't mind doing taxes, and enjoyed working as a kindergarten assistant, it sure would be nice if someone not related to me would hire me for a change!)

In addition to trying to supplement my family's income, I've been having fun with new cookbooks. Yay for wedding gifts!

Good Food?

Here are some of the things I've made:


Chicken dinner - with a pasture-raised chicken from Jordanal Farms, real mashed potatoes, and my first try at making the gravy I grew up on.


Blueberry cream scones, which might make it unnecessary for me to ever visit another coffee shop again . . .
Michael and I had some friends over for steak from the local "chop shop" which, unfortunately, sells only commercially raised, corn-fed beef. I think this was probably the first time I'd ever made steak at all, and it turned out pretty good, except that the wild rice I wanted to try burned to a crisp. (I followed the instructions very carefully, including the mandate not to open the lid during the 50 minutes of simmering, and almost lost my good pan in the process. The next time I made the rice, I checked on it frequently, cut the cooking time in half, and managed to serve it for dinner, but still wasn't particularly wild about the results.)

Good Books

In addition to enjoying my kitchen, I have been doing a lot of reading. (Surprise, surprise.) I joined a book club at a local book store, and so far have read four books I would probably never have picked up otherwise. (Ella Minnow Pea, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The Help, and Water for Elephants.) A member of that book club mentioned a different book club - at the library - so I read The Gurnsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, which I'd been hearing about - and which was also really good. I also re-read several of my old favorite Jane Austen novels, and after finding a long-lost box of favorite books from my childhood in a bedroom closet at my parents' house, I am on my way to re-reading all of the Anne of Green Gables books, and have already completed the Emily books by L.M. Montgomery. They're still good. Which is good, because I already sent a boxed set to Adele.

Good Food and Books

Over winter break, instead of spending my entire week-long vacation picking up nuggets of wisdom such as "being courageous is a high-quality fixation" from sophomore essays defining abstract terms, or pulling my hair out because seniors still can't figure out how to support their ideas about Edgar Allen Poe with quotations from the text, I read In Defense of Food by Michael Pollan - which I had been wanting to read since last summer, when I read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver, especially since there was a controversy in Madison about whether Michael Pollan's revolutionary book about what constitutes "food" should have been distributed, free of charge, on the UW campus. I couldn't put the book down, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about food since then. Goodbye vanilla yogurt. Goodbye cereal. Goodbye cream of mushroom soup. Eventually I'll have to say goodbye to Jiff peanut butter, but we tend to stock up on that, so I still have a few jars of both creamy and crunchy. Some things are not so difficult to say goodbye to - for instance, growing up on my grandma's freezer jam, I've never been a big fan of store-bought jams and jellies. (No, I don't know what's in sure-jell, but I think it might pass Pollan's "great-grandmother" test.)

Intermission

Last week, I thought it would be a great time to go to Indiana to see the world's cutest tw0-year old. (The best thing about this eighth wonder of the world is that admission is totally free to aunts and grandmothers, as long as we're willing to put up with the seven-hour drive and the in-law.)
Showing "Untal Mital" that she loves fruit snacks as much as he does!
Walking Tuh-Tee with Aunt Dee-Dee and MeMaw.
Adele is very good at playing I-Spy, and loves to show off her yellow daffodil.

She's less good at choosing appropriate clothing for the weather - we had trouble convincing her that it was too cold for short sleeves! (At least we got rid of the light purple pants "matched" with the red-and-white striped shirt.)
In spite of my recipe for excellent scones, I still love coffee-shop lattes - and I think it is really cute to take Adele to Starbucks. (I'll have to enjoy it while it lasts. I'm pretty sure I won't be shopping at Starbucks for much longer.) I like to say "ahh" after a sip of coffee, and Adele has been imitating this habit for several months now. This "ahh" was purely for the camera, though. She's a little ham!

Super Why is apparently one of Adele's favorite shows (but we didn't watch it with her so I know nothing about it). MeMaw fashioned a Super Why cape out of Adele's bumpy blankie and a clothespin.
Adele has a huge imagination. She got a Barbie tent for her birthday, but she realized that she could also make a tent out of a blanket and a chair. She called that her "chair tent." Then she took the blanket off of the chair, to find more places to build a tent. Too cute!
"No, No, Dee-Dee." The bumps go on the inside of the blanket. Good thing MeMaw was there to comfort Adele after I mistakenly covered her up the wrong way when she was trying to wake up from a long nap!
More "Ah-Busss" after the bookshop on Saturday, before MeMaw and Aunt DeeDee headed out. This time Adele picked "to-tat milt" instead of strawberry.

Preaching

Of course, by necessity, I missed two few and far-between opportunities for substitute teaching jobs while in Indiana, and delayed the processing of my application to substitute teach in Portage by a week, but the trip was worthwhile. In addition to playing with Adele for four days, we watched Food, Inc. My mom (who has been reading my ever-growing stack of books about the slow food movement) and I were pretty interested. Oddly, I'd picked up a library book for the trip, and since there is a long waiting list for the library's 53 copies of The Omnivore's Dilemma I picked up Eric Schlosser's Chew on This as a substitute.(And I packed Wisconsin cheese and sausage to eat in the car.) Food, Inc. was my first introduction to Eric Schlosser, and I though it was very good luck that I happened to have his book handy. I read it in less than 24 hours after watching Food, Inc. (Yay long naps!) Then, on Saturday, the girls ventured out to Mudsocks, a fun independent bookstore near Adele's house, and I picked up my very own copy of The Omnivore's Dilemma. Since I also picked up some Sandra Boynton books for the little kids I love, I decided to skip Food Rules for now. (The Omnivore's Dilemma is a much bigger book, so it promised to be more satisfying. Four days later, I'm still not finished (but I only got to read about five pages yesterday).

The Shopper's Dilemma

In Animal, Vegetable, Miracle Kingsolver essentially says that sometimes it is better not to buy organic food. For on thing, some people are organic farmers, but because of bureaucratic red tape they can't get the official label. For another thing, organic food - even sustainably grown organic food - may have been shipped thousands of miles to make it to my grocery store. So I had been feeling pretty decent about spending a few more cents to buy the Kemps milk - which says it is from Wisconsin - instead of the store brand. I didn't think it was worth checking out the organic milk options. Plus, I heard Michael Pollan say, on a radio program last week, that he tries to stay away from ultra-pasteurized milk products, even if they are organic. So yesterday I stood in the dairy section of our small-chain grocery store contemplating the options. I could buy IGA milk but wouldn't, because it probably came from California. (At least even that milk claimed to be rBGH free.) I could buy the Kemp's, knowing that the milk was rBGH free, and it was from Wisconsin cows. But then I looked at the organic milk because what I really wanted to drink was cow milk, not corn-milk. I was looking for grass-fed dairy cows. Pierce's had three different brands of organic milk. I wasn't planning to blog about it, so I didn't take any extensive notes on the brand names, prices, or product descriptions, but two of them looked kind of fishy to me. All three were ultra-pasteurized, so if I decided to go organic, I guess I'd have to compromise on the amount of processing that had gone into the finished product. (As I write, the a Wisconsin State Assembly committee is voting on a bill that would allow raw milk sales for a certain amount of time, under some serious restrictions - I am keeping my fingers crossed for this one!) Two of the cartons said nothing about the life of the cow, but promised to come from "family farms." This is what Michael Pollan calls the literary genre of "supermarket pastoral." (I think I may try to add this genre to my English curriculum.) When customers see phrases like "family farm" they think of a happy place where cows do what cows are supposed to do - much happily on hay and clover, with lots of lush green pastures surrounding a neat red farmhouse. In reality, this could be a place where cows are tethered to milking machines, fed a liquid diet of organic corn supplemented with organic animal fat. The third carton claims to come from grass-fed cows. The package is mostly green and contains what appears to be a photograph of cows in a pasture of short green grass. Their website is listed on the carton - www.grasspoint.com, and it has some information about their farming practices, but I'm starting to think that in order for farmers to raise animals and vegetables sustainably, there can't be a distributor in the middle. Grass Point can't say exactly which retailers sell their products, because that is at the discretion of the distributor. Maybe if this little bill working its way through the Wisconsin legislature becomes a law, I can head to the farm buy the milk directly from Chad at Grass Point. (Until then, pending Michael's taste test, I'll probably keep getting Grass Point milk from Pierce's.)
I also had to buy eggs for Easter, and ended up with Phil's cage-free eggs. (The accompanying Supermarket Pastoral text claims that these eggs were laid in nests. I'm more interested in what the hens are being fed . . .)
Before . . .
(we didn't have any Kemp's milk left in the fridge)
After . . .

For a while last fall I was buying Amish eggs, because I drove through Amish country every day. I always found it a little bit awkward to do business with the egg lady, because I wasn't sure just how such things were supposed to be done. The first time I stopped, there was another car taking up the entire driveway - and then a buggy had to get between my car and the other shopper's. The next time I actually asked the lady where their customers usually parked - she said around back, but I couldn't really tell what she was talking about. The next time, I parked behind another car, and a tiny little kid brought me my eggs. But then I discovered a faster way to get home, and stopped driving past this particular farm, even on nights when I left school before dark.

Choices

Open on my computer, in tabs next to Blogger, are sign-up forms for two CSAs. Michael and I will probably join a CSA this year. There are two relatively nearby which I am interested in. Their selection is smaller, one is not certified organic (but that doesn't bother me, because both offer opportunities to tour the farms and see how my food is being grown). There is a third option, a much larger CSA, which has its own farms, but also gets produce from around the world (or wherever they grow kiwi, pineapple, and guava) for their separate "fruit share." The reason I'm considering this CSA, in addition to the fact that some of our friends use this CSA, is that they also have coffee and cheese shares. The cheese is probably local. The coffee, of course, is not, although it is roasted in Wisconsin, the day before it is shipped.

As I continue to enlighten myself through about food, I feel a big civic and environmental responsibility in deciding where to buy my vegetables and meat this spring and summer. I could go to the farm market that will pop up sometime this spring in the Culver's parking lot. I like the man who mans the cash register. I could drive to local farmers' markets on various days of the week - but I don't always trust them. I could join a local CSA or I could join the large one that ships all the way to Minneapolis. (It is funny to think about food this way - it is very easy for Michael and me to go to Minneapolis for the weekend - it isn't all that far, but it certainly isn't local.) If I join a local CSA, I'll have the advantage of being able to walk around the farm and see how they grow their crops. But I'll never know what's coming in my weekly 0r bi-weekly box (choices, choices) and what if I can't figure out a good way to cook kohlrabi? And which one should I pick? Should I base my decision on cost? High or low? Proximity? I could get over my shyness of the Amish and drive to their farms this summer . . . but would I really be able to commit to that? Or would I find myself driving to the grocery store to pick up garlic or onions or tomatoes or basil because I "need" it to make tonight's dinner?

So many things to think about . . .

In addition to thinking too much about food [yesterday my mom and I headed to a local shop to check out their cheese, veggies, and meat - on our way out the door my dad called, "Katie won't be able to find anything to eat there" and he was pretty much right. Okay, so my mom bought me some "vegetarian" "Amish" chicken legs (I'm not sure this is all that great for the chickens, since they eat bugs and grubs and stuff . . .) and some blue cheese that looks promising, and some plums (from Chile), and I shared their Peruvian asparagus for lunch . . . but I'm not sure anything in the store could have withstood Michael Pollan's critical eye] I've been trying to do a little scrapbooking between tax returns.

Scrapbooking

My mom whips up pages of Adele in seconds (and in about an hour yesterday whipped up a substantial portion of a baby quilt for Anna Kate) but making my wedding scrapbook has become quite the process. (More overthinking, probably.) Should I put in, for example, the receipt from the Tux rental place? The business card of our minister? Or should I stick to pictures? Can I even find all the pictures I know were taken? I've glued down four pages, and have about four more "in the works" right now . . .

Picture of a scrapbook page with pictures of making place cards . . . and my scrapbooking mess!

Almost-finished Goody Bags page
Making the programs page, and more of my scrapbooking mess!


I'm trying to make a comparison between Cinderella's magical pumpkin carriage, my Princess day, and our limo . . . I thought this pumpkin paper was perfect, but the page still needs a little bibbity-bobbity-boo.