Oh the times, they are a-changing

It has been brought to my attention that I haven't updated my blog in a while. Since June. Like I didn't know that . . .

Here's what happened. While I was waiting for strawberry jam to seal on the counter, I composed several new blog posts. If I remember correctly, I was having some trouble getting Blogger to load my pictures in the correct order. Blogger was not the only source of trouble that day. Only two of my 13 or so half pint jars of jam sealed. The jam was a mess - the recipe I'd been using said to stir the jam till it "sheeted" off the back of a wooden spoon. I cooked the heck out of those berries and sugar, and it never sheeted. Eventually I just poured it into hot jars, figuring enough was enough.

So much for giving out strawberry jam to friends and family members as Christmas gifts. The jam, I have learned, is excellent for making Giant's Thumbprint cookies - I think I have used up about 3 jars of jam on 5 or 6 batches of cookies since making the jam. But that is all it is good for. It is almost impossible to spread at all, even on something as hard as one of Krista's Kitchen's sturdy "Best Crackers Ever." I pawned a few jars off on my immediate family, and the rest is waiting to be made into cookies, possibly for Christmas.

This summer my dad and I grew a decent garden, although I did not freeze much food at all - just a few batches of chicken stock made with garden ingredients and stuff from the farmers' markets and lots and lots of zucchini bread, zucchini muffins, and zucchini cookies. I didn't make it to as many farmers' markets as I would have liked, either. We did have a steady source of produce from our CSA (we just ate a salad out of the last box) but this was not a great summer for eating real food.

I spent most of the summer applying and interviewing for jobs, and doing some traveling. Michael and I took Amtrak out to Reno, Nevada for a Scrabble Tournament. We had quite the adventure getting there and back again. Not as much of an adventure as old Bilbo Baggins in The Hobbit, but almost. I had a job interview the second day of the train ride out West. By the time we go to Reno, the train was something like 18 hours delayed, which got us to Nevada mere hours before the tournament started, instead of a full day. On the way home we were another 10 or so hours late, so we had to spend the night in Chicago before catching a bus back to Madison. That was going to be a blog post, but it never materialized. In general it was fine with us that the train was delayed - we got to see some beautiful sights in daylight instead of missing them in the dark.

Here are some pictures in reverse order:

The Rocky mountains, from pretty far away.

I don't really remember where this was but it was before we got to the Rockies.
Foothills of the Rockies?
That is a CAFO. This was in Nebraska. It was the first thing we took pictures of on the trip. Once I saw the cows, I had to dig the camera out. Apparently (I later learned) it is illegal to take pictures of these places. We'll see what happens.
More CAFO. Some women sitting in front of us wondered what kind of ranch this was. I told them that if they've ever eaten a McDonald's hamburger, or bought ground beef at the grocery store, the animals probably spent some of their lives in a place like this. This picture cannot capture how vast this place was, or how many cows were there.

Michael came in second in his division at the tournament. I did not.

We arrived home to Madison in time for me to go to the Art Fair on the Square with my mom, which has been a tradition for several years now. Then it was back to the grind - searching for jobs to apply for, writing applications, hoping for interviews, going to interviews, and then waiting to hear about jobs.

We also went to three weddings this summer, which were fun. Congratulations Krista and Nate, Mark and Pondie, and Charlie and Tricia!

By mid-August I had been offered two jobs, and ended up taking a full time job teaching both English and History in Pardeeville, where I taught half-time last semester. So far I am enjoying teaching, but it has significantly impaired my ability to garden, cook, and can. (It has interfered with my ability to clean, too, but I'm not complaining about that.)

In spite of getting a job shortly before school started, my dad and I made two batches of Barbara Kingsolver's spaghetti sauce in late August, and my mom and I made three canner loads (plus some!) of applesauce in October.

On the first day of school, Michael and I met at the bank at 4:00 to get preapproval for a home loan. Working with a realtor who we have known for many years through Scrabble Club, we started looking at houses. We weren't sure how house-hunting was going to go, as Michael wanted a new house and I wanted an old house. I was partial to two-story houses, and we really wanted to stay in our current neighborhood, even though it is not in the best school district in Portage. Two weeks ago, we accepted a counter-offer on an 11 year old house about a mile from where we currently live. It is also two blocks away from the best elementary school in town.

We will miss the river, the sandhill cranes who got into our engagement pictures and seem to return to the sandbar every spring (we saw them taking a goodbye-for-winter stroll along the edge of the sandbar tonight), and our wonderful neighbors. We will miss being a block and a half from the levy path that runs along the river. We will miss panoramic views of the changing seasons. We will not miss mowing the huge yard or only having one bathroom. I will not miss being a renter, although I am somewhat scared about the new responsibilities that will come with home ownership.

I'm planning a small garden at our new house (yay, even less yard to mow), and Michael has grand plans for the large unfinished basement, which will be his "man cave." (He has promised to let me set up a little corner of the basement for my 'reading nook' though.)

We'll be moving into the house during the month of December. It will be a happy, exciting, sad, fun time of change.

In the meantime, I'm keeping a day or two ahead of my US Studies students, trying to motivate my 6 Media Analysis students to participate, and feeling grateful that I have 18 students who, after about three weeks of school, finally learned to participate in American Literature.

It is the tail end of a 4.5-day weekend, three days of which I spent in Chicago spending too much money with my sisters. It was nice to kick back with my sisters, get pampered (mani-pedis on Friday), read (Snow Flower and the Secret Fan), eat, and shop. We stayed at the Inn of Chicago - the same place Michael and I spent the night after getting in to Chicago at 2 a.m., long after our bus had left.

Now it is time to get back to work, re-learning US Studies, creating an assignment sheet for Media Analysis, and reviewing The Crucible for American Literature. I like being a teacher. It is a lot of work, but it is work that I generally enjoy.

I don't promise to blog more frequently in the next few months, but here's hoping I have a garden next year, and that after my freezer is depleted this winter, I stock it back up next summer.

Other Peoples' Food and Indy Pictures

On Thursday, my first day at my newest job, I ate alone in the little kitchen downstairs. I'm not sure where everyone else spent the meal. I wasn't really concerned with them. I was more worried about how much I'd forgotten over the past few years and whether I could remember enough about law to do a halfway decent job as a clerk.

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.