Sunday Night Suppers-- September

Polenta with tomatoes and zuchinni

Pasta with green beans, mushrooms, and sliced tomato

Pasta with the tail end of the tomatoes and olives

Green beans, new potatoes baked  with tomatoes

Bold type is locally grown...

Sliding Towards Fall...

1. The dining room is the frying room—figs, nuts, laundry, tomato seeds…
2. Wild western winds.
3. All 90 pounds of potatoes are in.
4. The zucchini vines have succumbed to powdery mildew.
5. Trail grass is golden.
6. The fields at Finely are burned for weed control.
7. The grass in the yard is turning green.
8. The chicken coop is on the garden beds.
9. The cats are looking for laps.
10. We’ve had our first morning fire on Sunday.
11. OSU students are back and bellowing.
12. The asters are blooming.
13. The wool blanket is on the bed.
14. Cider!
15. Dinner from the oven sounds good.
16. The Harvest moon has risen over Chip Ross park.

Tomato and Potato casserole

This is one of those very simple recipes where the sum total is outstanding and you wonder—why is this soooo good?

New potatoes, sliced in rounds and boiled until just done.

A handful or two of ripe cherry tomatoes.

Basil leaves, chopped coarsely.

Mozzarella cheese, sliced.

Salt and pepper.

Layer in a casserole dish—potatoes, tomatoes, basil, cheese, salt and pepper. Repeat. Bake in 350 oven until bubbly. Eat with steamed green beans on the side. Repeat.

Voluntary Complexity

     

      Anyone who believes that we live lives of Voluntary Simplicity because we have a couple of hens in the backyard, some locally grown tomatoes on the shelf and one car in the driveway has not seen my schedule book lately. I am beginning to feel like an Honors Junior angling towards Stanford. They have colored coded planners, fifteen things happening in a day, and no time for the common cold, never mind a weekend off. Me, too. We are all  practicing Voluntary Complexity, not Voluntary Simplicity.

            I once lived a very simple life. My last year in college, I had a two room apartment with the bathroom down the hall. I shared the second floor of an old house with three dirty old men, literally. The front room held my bed, a bookshelf, rocking chair, chest of drawers, and record collection. There was a small open space where I could sit on the floor and spread out my notecards before beginning to write a paper. The kitchen held my other bookshelf, which functioned as the prep counter, a small table, tiny fridge, and my big desk with manual typewriter. I went to the Laundromat and grocery store every Saturday morning, baked my own bread, learned how to make soup, and decided meat was, really, too expensive for what you got. I spent my evenings reading eighteenth century fiction and New England history, my days working in the archives, attending classes, and hanging out with friends at lunch. I did not have a car, a cat, or a boyfriend. I agreed with May Sarton, who said that one could live well alone at twenty and again at fifty, and with Adrienne Rich, who talked about the need to choose how to live, alone or with a partner.  It was a good time in my life.

            Life now is far more complicated. As all teachers know—and the people who make decisions at least pretend to deny—any time you add a life to your own, it adds complication. Seeing 163 students every other day (and all of them on Friday) requires more tracking and more effort than seeing 81 of them every day for one semester, followed by 82 every day for the next. Just look at the pile of summer reading projects on my counter, waiting for Monday morning.  Over the fifteen years we have lived in this little house, I have added many lives to my own, starting with a “housebound” partner and two cats and moving outward from there. Every relationship adds complexity. Every volunteer action, every group, every meeting I attend, every student I stay in touch with years later, adds complexity. Sometimes, like at the beginning of the school year when everything converges at once, it is not a good thing. Sometimes I remember that little apartment fondly.

            But Voluntary Complexity has a positive side, beyond stress. Every connection we make strengthens our lives as well. We are tangled in a web and it provides a springboard and a safety net. Before school began, my friend Julia—the high school art teacher-- and I organized an Art Retreat for our colleagues and summer hiking partners. It was simple. Bring art supplies and picnic food, gather at my house for carpooling, and head to Alsea Falls. We found a spot with two tables, spread the excellent food on one, art supplies on the other, listened to Julia explain a little bit about watercolors, and dispersed.   Some people went for walks in the woods. Some settled in with a plate of food and notebook at the table. Some headed for the river to draw. I sat by the water, wrestling, as always, with perspective, then stopped. Amy sat in front of me, her feet in the stream, staring into space. I could hear seven year old Layne telling someone a story behind me, her voice mingling with the river. Another friend settled in nearby. Other families came and went. The breeze rustled in the dry August leaves. Back at the picnic table, I knew, were other members of my web, talking, patting the dog, and strengthening ties for the coming school year. As the day began to fade, we came together once more, ate, and packed up to leave. The evening was pale pink as we pulled out of the park. Doug firs sketched against the sky. The road a dark tunnel through the trees until we broke into the valley and headed north, towards home. Mary’s Peak, our home mountain, on the left, the Willamette River beyond the fields on the right. 

Drying Fruit for Winter Eating

One of the actions that lends complexity to my life in September is the desire to be Fruit Independent all winter. Over the years, we’ve learned that local, often scavenged, totally ripe fruit is infinitely better than fruit picked green and shipped across the world. I have a small food drier that I bought for thirty dollars at Bi-Mart and it works just fine. No need for fancy equipment.

drying plums

Keys to successful drying:

• Thin slices—apples, pears, peaches
• Spread it out a bit to expose more surface—plums, cherries, figs.
• Dry it whole—blueberries and raisins.
• Have patience—all of it. It takes longer than I once thought.
• Go for really dry. If the fruit is dry, you can put it in a quart jar, seal it with last year’s canning lid, and store it on the shelf with the canned tomatoes and pickles.  If you want fleshy fruit, make a compote.

            

Sunday Night Suppers-- August

Steamed Veg, herbed cottage cheese

Annie's Mac and Cheese, green beans-- car camping food!

Baked potato (just dug), caponata

Bread and cheese with peacevine tomatoes, MacIntosh apples

Bold indicates locally raised.

Caponata-- serve with a creamy pasta for heavenly comfort food.

1 large eggplant

1 medium zucchini

1 large onion

3-4 cloves of garlic

a handful of olives

several tablespoons of capers

2 half pint jars of roasted tomatoes

salt, pepper, crushed red pepper

Chop all of the veg and saute in olive oil. Add olives, capers and tomatoes. Cook until lovely and stewy.

Serve with pasta or  flatbread and perhaps a salad. Peach pie is nice, too.

Fall Arrived Monday

     

      Fall arrived on Monday, around noon.

            We were driving to the coast to hike Cascade Head. The sky was cloudy, the air cool and damp. As we rounded the corner to Otis, and the Otis Café, alder leaves skittered across the road, soft gold against black. “Looks like fall,” the driver observed and we all agreed. But it was still August, so not yet!

            After lunch in the café, we headed up the hill. Cascade Head is one of the most beautiful hikes on the coast. It begins in coastal forest, deep with ferns, foxglove, fir trees. It climbs steadily up the headland, passes a misty grey alder grove, and breaks out onto the headland. On a clear day, you can see for miles down the coast and into the estuary at the base of the hill. Each step, from there on, brings on more breathtaking views. The panorama lures you on; the hill is steep. In the spring, wildflowers cover the grasslands and we have seen elk grazing on the point. On Monday, as we broke through, clouds moved in. “It smells like it could rain,” we observed. A few steps further on, we felt raindrops and the clouds looked more serious. Rain. We headed back under cover. Half an hour later, back at the car, rain  settled in.

 And with that, the summer ended. 

Cabbage and Apples: We ate cabbage and apples for dinner Monday night. I wasn’t quite ready to admit that it was cabbage season yet—I still want tomatoes and eggplants!—but that’s what there was. And, with some barley on the side, it was pretty darn tasty.

1 medium cabbage, cut finely

1 small onion, chopped

1 medium apple, chopped

Sautee the cabbage and onion with salt and pepper until almost done. Add the apple and cook for a few more moments. Add two or three tablespoons on good apple cider vinegar and stir. 

Gardener? Or Urban Farmer?

   

1. You find dried bean seeds in your pockets in December.
2. There is hay in the car.
3. You turn to binder twine and five gallon buckets rather than organic hemp twine and a trug.
4. You talk compost with strangers.
5. You indulge in “one more season” hose repair.
6. You spend more time thinking about fencing than the White Flower Farm flower catalog.
7. You realize, half way through a professional meeting, that you have dirt somewhere. Fingernails? Hand cracks? Knees?  No, not all three!
8. You worry more about the crop of leeks and not one plant.
9. Your crops come in pounds.
10. You use your van as a ladder.
11. You realize that it is, really, all about the soil, not the new, cool varieties in the front of the seed catalogs.

Old School Canned Grape Juice

We use the seedy, dark grapes that run up into the backyard trees for this juice. The darker, the better. This is an old recipe from my partner’s mom. It is best chilled and poured from an old glass pitcher, preferably pink.

Per Quart—endlessly flexible

1 cup of grapes pulled off the vine

¼ to 1/3 cup of sugar

Boiling water to half an inch of the top

Cap and process in steam canner for ten minutes. Allow to age for a month or so before drinking.

Planning for Preserving

1. Survey what you already eat. Sounds obvious, but it is essential. If you can, save grocery receipts for six months to a year so that you have a real strong feel what you do—and do not—eat. This eliminates the 60 jars of jam on the shelf phenomena. Yeah, jam is easy and tasty and yeah, those blackberries are free for the picking—and may  be you are even saving the Pacific Northwest from being totally overrun by their vines by harvesting, but still, if you eat four jars of jam a year now, you are not going to suddenly eat thirty just because you made them yourself. I know—I had to stop making jam for four years to eat down the surplus. And no, you shouldn’t bring them to the potluck on Saturday night, either, as three other people are already bringing blackberry crisps. You know it’s true. 
2. Don’t Horde.  This is the opposite problem of making too many jars of jam. You make just three pints of pickled plums because it is the first year, and, because you are waiting for a special occasion, you never eat them all winter. A more extreme case—I went camping with a friend. We both brought along our half pint jars of tomato chutney that had been a Christmas present from a co-worker. We laughed. At the end of the two week trip, we both still had the chutney. Seriously, after all that work, EAT!
3. Preserve the surplus. If there is a lot of something, save it for winter, even if it was not on your list. Many fruit trees, especially the wild ones in alley, produce heavily every other year. Take advantage of the surplus on a good year, just in case the source is gone the next. I’ve made three types of cucumber pickles this year because Sunbow had a surplus of big cucumbers. (It is the year of gigantism, after all.)  If I do not horde—see above—we should discover some new favorite snacks this winter.  The corollary of this rule is: Distribute the surplus. If you have too much, pass it on. It is good garden karma.
4. Invest in two good preserving books.  You need one book for basic, don’t try and can in the compost pile, information. I really like Putting Food By. It feels like it was written by women from the mid-west, simple, practical, and solid. It is not fancy, but it is clear. The Ball Canning jar people have also put out a basic canning book. My other favorites are The Joy of Pickling and The Joy of Jams, Jellies, and Other Sweet Preserves. Maybe it is because the author lives about thirty miles from here, but she has recipes for all of the produce that appears on my table. Too many plums…let’s see what the Joy has to say about that….jam? leather? pickled? all three?
5. Buy basic equipment—keep it simple.  I use my tongs and funnel all the time, even when not preserving. I have a couple of solid potholders and cutting boards, which also double as trivets under hot pans. The most important piece of equipment I own is my steam canner.  I spotted it in the Territorial seed catalog one day over lunch.  I called Cottage Grove. The women who answer the phones at Territorial are great;  one assured me that she had been using one all season and it cut way down on processing time. Imagine no longer waiting for the big pot of water to boil! Or dumping out said hot pot when you are done or when a jar breaks during processing!  Electricity savings! Small batch canning! Rather than making pickles, grape juice, and 12 quarts of peaches in one day, I can run one batch of salsa and call it good.  The steam canner works for anything you would put through a water bath, but not for low-acid foods that need a pressure canning (ie. green beans). Best investment ever.

Remember—now it the time to plan to eat locally all year.

Roasted Tomatoes. We eat sixty half pints of these every year!

Slice sauce tomatoes in half or in thirds, aiming for about a half inch thick slices. Lay face down on a sheet pan—no oil needed. Place in 350 degree oven for about forty minutes, until  seriously relaxed. A little charring is ok. Scoop into half pint jars and process in steam canner for 30 minutes. Use on pizzas, as pasta sauce, in soups, etc. all winter long.