Thursday night was the last farmers' market of the year in my little town. I didn't stop by. I knew I was going out of town for the weekend, and still hadn't used the tomatoes or beets I'd picked up the week before. I should have gone to talk to the guy about the turkey, but I secured a different turkey from Jordandal Farms in Madison after my last post. My (approximately) 15 lb Thanksgiving turkey will be ready for me - fresh - on the Tuesday before Thanksgiving. That's excellent news because I don't really have room for a fifteen pound bird in my freezer right now. And I won't have to worry about thawing time!
We spent the weekend in Indianapolis with my sister, for my niece's baptism. On Saturday we went to the Children's Museum, where my husband had gone with his grandparents as a child.
The water clock was not working - which was a bummer, because it was the only part of the museum Michael remembered.
Adele was a dinosaur sitting on eggs in the Dinosphere.
Then she was a polar bear.
And and Adelie Penguin!
We went swimming at the hotel pool with Grandma and Grandpa. Adele loves her ballerina tutu swimming suit.
Anna is just an all-around content baby (very different from her sister at this age!) although she didn't like dipping her feet in the pool.
Adele did! But she didn't fuss at all when it was time to go home. What a big girl!
Anna was all dolled up twice on Halloween - once in her baptismal dress, then again as Raggedy Ann for trick-or-treating (although I couldn't stick around for that).
Adele wore her new purple dress to church, and got to sit between her Grandma and her Memaw - what a lucky little girl!We went out for a fancy dinner on Saturday night - and not just by a two-year-old's definition. I looked at the menu and pondered my choices. Not just because they all looked yummy. On the surface, they did all look yummy. I really wanted the chicken Marsala. My sister found the restaurant's menu online so we'd perused the options before actually arriving at the restaurant. One of the evening's specials, some kind of beef medallions, also sounded good. I kind of thought I should get the beef, since I have been disappointed by mediocre chicken Marsala at other times. But I didn't really want the beef either, because it made me think of feedlots.
I don't cook a lot of beef at home. In fact, I don't really cook all that much meat. I spent several years of my life as a vegetarian - for a number of reasons (all my friends were doing it, it was the environmental thing to do, my uncle raised cows and it made me sad to think about slaughtering animals) but have started eating meat again.
Saturday night I wanted to find a vegetarian option on the menu, because as I tried to make up my mind between chicken Marsala and beef medallions, all I could think about were CAFOs and the inhumane conditions these poor animals endured, just so that they could end up as a cheap commodity on the way to my overpriced plate. As far as I could tell, there were no vegetarian entree options. I could have ordered a salad without meat, but that would have been one heck of an expensive plate of California iceberg lettuce.
I went with the beef. I'm not sure why. Maybe because I have not read of cows having their tails cut off like pigs, or their beaks (okay, noses) snipped off like chickens. Not that the life of a feedlot cow (or steer) is anything to write home about. While we waited for the entrees to come, I seriously contemplated returning to a vegetarian lifestyle.
But I like meat. I especially like meat that has been raised in a humane and environmentally responsible manner. I think I can have a better impact on the world by choosing to eat GOOD meat than by avoiding meat and dairy products altogether. By giving my business to farmers who put the interests of the land and the animals before the almighty dollar, I can make a statement about how I think our resources should be used.
(By the way, I am reading a really good book right now - The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan, about the Dust Bowl and how the American government had encouraged people to farm the Great Plains, providing incentives for farmers to cut down the native grasses and plant commodity crops - corn and wheat - that could not hold the soil in place when the drought came and the winds whipped the earth clear across the continent - which is interesting companion reading to what Michael Pollan and Eric Schlosser and Barbara Kingsolver, among others, have to say about conventional farming methods today. And speaking of books, I requested a copy of Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon at my library today.)
After the baptism, we enjoyed lunch at my sister's house - chopped California vegetables, barbeque sandwiches made with plenty of high fructose corn syrup, preservatives, and artificial flavorings, and my mom's famous cheese dip (which I had made for the first time just after midnight, after we picked my younger sister up at the airport) made with a blend of two different processed cheese products and some spices. My brother-in-law's parents made a "homemade" pumpkin cake - which was good, but had been made with canned pumpkin.
My nieces' paternal grandparents always make beautifully decorated cakes for special events like baptisms, but before this year I had not put a lot of thought into the word "homemade." A year and a half ago, before Animal, Vegetable, Miracle caught my eye in a small local bookstore, I would have considered canned pumpkin to be a perfectly legitimate ingredient in fall recipes. And since there was no box of cake mix involved in this cross-shaped novelty, I would have thought it was really something special.
All I could think of when my mom asked if I'd tried a piece of the "real, homemade pumpkin cake" was "That's not real food. It's made from a can of hubbard squash labeled as pumpkin because consumers don't know the difference." This was probably not a very kind thought. It's the kind of snobby "foodie" thought that gives the real food movement a bad name. But I don't really care. I'm not going to buy any canned pumpkin for my holiday cooking. I'd rather be labeled a snob than buy into (literally and figuratively) the conventional food system in the US. I still have two pumpkins from my garden and one pumpkin from the CSA in my kitchen, waiting to be roasted and pureed, and turned into something yummy. Something real. My sister had tried to explain my beliefs about food to her mother-in-law earlier in the weekend, because three consecutive cooking shows came on her public television channel as we vegged out while the little girls napped. The America's Test Kitchen show made some kind of pasta with several tomato ingredients that come out of tin cans sold in ounces that do not correspond to the size of Ball Canning Jars. (Gee, do you think they do that on purpose?) My sister must have seen me roll my eyes at the third can of tomato product the chef poured into the bowl. But there was no sneer in her voice when she tried to explain my crazy liberal food ideas to her mother-in-law, bless her heart.
I wasn't even going to bother. My beliefs about food are kind of complicated, and, in case you haven't figured this out yet, I can be a little long-winded at times. (My boss is going to realize this out as soon as he glances at the memo I wrote him this afternoon.) I often don't go into them with people because I don't even know where to start.
My mother-in-law has many inherent real-food beliefs, and if I could just form my wildly swirling food thoughts into a coherent paragraph or two we could probably have a discussion about why making chicken soup from scratch from pastured chickens is important . . . if only I could move beyond "the cornfields. They're too big. They're unnatural. They're destroying our country. Corn is the enemy. It's in everything" she and I could probably have a really interesting conversation. Since I can't seem to summarize the evils of corn in one or two sentences in order to move along in our dialogue about real food, I just loaned my mother-in-law Michael Pollan's Food Rules. She read it, but we didn't have a chance to talk much about it. I think I should have loaned her In Defense of Food first, but it's a bigger book and it doesn't fit in my purse.
At work today, I heated a container of homemade chicken and wild rice soup for lunch. The soup was old - from the batch I made last week - but it was still good. I had an apple and a homemade roll to eat with it but I saved them for an afternoon snack. My boss was eating a grilled cheese sandwich when I arrived in the kitchen. His daughter heated up a package of rice-a-roni macaroni and cheese to share with her dad, who also had a container of peach yogurt. One of the support staff ladies had a chicken and broccoli hot pocket for her lunch. Another support staff lady (I'm still trying to figure out exactly what everyone does around there) ate an apple and a bowl of Kraft easy mac.
We had a discussion about the hot pocket. My coworker was eating it because she had bought them for her daughter, who, as it turns out, doesn't like them. My boss noted that none of our lunches were particularly appetizing, with the exception of my homemade chicken soup, which made him a little bit jealous. I was glad he recognized the superiority of my soup.
What he probably didn't know about my soup is that, except for the celery which came in a Dole bag from California, my soup was actually a political statement in the guise of a yummy meal. My soup stands for the proposition that the best food comes from real people, who only take cash or checks, not credit. With the exception of the celery, which is more of a personal shortcoming, my soup stands for the notion that food should not travel on interstate highways or railroads. The roll that I saved for a snack embodies the philosophy that food tastes better if you have to roll up your sleeves, work hard, and be patient before you can eat.
At the grocery store on my way home (I ran out of flour making rolls last week . . . literally ran out, while trying to knead dough that was too sticky) I picked up some heavy cream and cheese, thinking I could make some real macaroni and cheese for dinner this week. I've never made it before, and didn't know what ingredients I would need, but I figured cream would be good. My Betty Crocker recipe doesn't call for it, but I might sneak some in anyway.
I've been thinking a lot about food recently, but something that is starting to worry me is the upcoming winter. I have a few quart jars of applesauce, a couple of quart jars each of spaghetti sauce and tomatoes, and a couple of pint jars of pickles left, along with frozen soup, frozen veggies, and a few frozen berries. I am probably going to have to start relying more on the grocery store for my meals. I know there is an indoor farmers' market in Madison for most of the fall/winter, and our CSA has an online store where we can order produce to pick up on Sundays, but the hardest part about eating "locally" for me has been finding times to go to these relatively far-away pick-up points. I clipped an article from the paper recently about local organic meat that can be ordered online, and I know I can still get eggs from my CSA farmer.
But the opening of the Portage Farmers' Market in May of 2011 is a long way away.
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