The Ankle Biter @ Quibbling.net

We got our first week of vegetables from the farm this week. We’re pretty excited about it, partially because we’re working hard to increase the amount of cooking we’re doing, and the quality of the ingredients we’re doing it with. So we’ve been going to the farmer’s market each week, and in addition to our usual vegetables and fruit, we’ve been getting bison meat and milk, and when our friends Don and Susan started getting more eggs than they could eat from their egg share, we discovered how much better fresh eggs from the farm are. (That was seriously the best omelette I’ve ever made.)

So yesterday, Tom I met up with Lisa and visited the farmer’s market, where we got tomatoes, mozzarella, some milk and cream, and raspberries. After catching some breakfast at Four Courts, we stashed our perishables at Lisa’s place and headed out to the farm to pick up our share.

We’re splitting a full share with Lisa this year, and the share comes with a u-pick allowance, so we got to get on the hay wagon and ride out the strawberry fields and pick 6 pints beyond the couple of pints that come with the share.

From there, we had a quick ice cream break, and then headed to Wegman’s to get some extra ingredients to go with everything. And this morning, Lisa picked up the cow share she’s splitting with John, but since he’s out of town this week, we liberated his raw milk and cream, and had Lisa pick us up some farm eggs.

So last night we made stamp pot, which is basically mashed potatoes with kale and sausage. We had never had kale before, but found that we really liked it in the potatoes, and have found plenty of recipes for it in our various cookbooks. We’ve got raspberry ice cream made with raw cream, farmer’s market milk, farm eggs, and farmer’s market raspberries in the freezer right now.

I’ve also got to say… writing a check for a few hundred dollars sucked in January, but with the way grocery prices are going, I’m really pleased to have 20 weeks of pre-paid groceries coming to us. We probably could eat a full share’s worth of vegetables if we were home more, but that’s a whole lot of kale every week until it goes out of season, so half is just enough.

My brother is in town this week for business, and flew out a night early to spend Memorial Day with us.  I invited my parents to come down too, that they might enjoy some both-kids-in-the-same-city time, and Tom and I threw a big ol’ grilling party. Yay, fun stuff! Mom and Dad came over a few hours ahead of time so we could all hang out together in the quiet, and Tom and I had been particularly diligent and finished almost all the cleaning and prep ahead of time so we could relax along with them.  My dad helped me taste-test the potato salad he taught me to make years ago.

Of course, our quiet and relaxing afternoon was interrupted when Macro brought a little friend home to play. Those of you who follow Tom or me on Twitter know that Macro has gotten particularly adept at hunting, and we finally had to put a bell on him after he brought us three animals in 5 hours last weekend- the bell is annoying, but less annoying than cleaning bird guts up off the floor.  The bell slowed down the hunting, but did not stop it, as he brought us a live chipmunk again! After a few minutes of chasing Macro, Macro dropping the chipmunk, the chipmunk running away, Macro chasing the chipmunk, etc… the chipmunk eventually ended up behind some bookshelves in our back room, and we had to slide the bookshelves out far enough to let Macro get behind them, and then Tom poked at the chipmunk with an unbent wire hanger to get it to run basically into the cat’s mouth.  At which point Macro and the chipmunk took off for the bathroom, where Tom cornered them and eventually captured the chipmunk to take it outside.

Fun for the whole family!

(Apparently Macro brought us a bird overnight and another live chipmunk- or perhaps the same stupid one- this morning. He doesn’t need a bell; he needs an air raid siren.)

But then it was just about party time, and may I just say that we have excellent friends. People started arriving shortly after 4, and our last guests left at 11:30-ish. Our backyard hasn’t been this crowded since last year around this time.  Just you wait for sangria season, y’all.

So, my birthday is Saturday. come for breakfast! you know you want to!

I get an occasional newsletter about eating locally-grown, organic food.  Nina Planck, who writes the newsletter, is perhaps more excited about the idea of raw milk and raw milk cheese than I am, but I generally find her commentary interesting and it gives me a lot to think about.  One of the things I appreciate about her is that she makes an effort to understand the science behind many of the conventional wisdom about food, so her opinions about whether or not industrial meat is better or worse for you are at least informed by something.

However, since an email newsletter is not really the ideal format for going into that level of detail, I treat her assertions as the point from which I start Googling.  So when she said that industrially-produced chicken has so much E. coli in it that they have to treat it with chlorine, I immediately ran to the interwebs to verify.

I found hundreds of references to chlorine as a common poultry treatment, including this article about antimicrobial treatments in meat processing plants. 

OMG.  *barf*

As part of Amazon’s continuing efforts to sell me everything under the sun, they’ve recently been promoting their Grocery section, a collection of pantry staples and whatnot that are, to my very great joy, eligible for Amazon Prime shipping.

Let me just say, I love me some Amazon. When I was a broke college student, Amazon was often able to save me money over the college bookstore prices, even with shipping. When a friend tells me about a new book I simply must read, Amazon always has it, which is a lot more than I can say for my local library. When an artist I like has only released an album in Europe and I’m going to have to wait months for it here… Amazon comes through for me. When it’s time to do Christmas shopping and I hate going to the mall, Amazon has something for everyone on my list.  And since Tom and I essentially buy a year’s worth of free two-day shipping with Amazon Prime, we don’t have to stack our orders to save on shipping, and it’s a great way to dispatch a gift to a loved one quickly. (Amazon Prime isn’t a great deal for everyone, but it’s a great deal for the Bridge house.)

But I’m thinking that Amazon Grocery isn’t going to work for me most of the time.  Amazon has done a very smart thing for its business- it has picked out a bunch of non-perishable, light-weight products that it can afford to give away shipping on (Super Saver).  Since these products are mostly convenience foods- Easy Mac, soup mixes in cups or envelopes, Crystal Light To Go packets- they overlap heavily with the diet of the demographic of person who will want to buy their groceries through Amazon.

But they’re short on a lot of things that are ingredients.  I can get umpteen varieties of boxed black beans and rice dishes or black bean soup mixes, for example, but there’s not a plain can of black beans… only “Caribbean style.”  Since we’re trying to Eat Less Fake Shit, there’s not a ton that Amazon Grocery can offer us.  Even our beloved Peach Fresca, which is one item of Fake Shit that we’re just not willing to give up, isn’t available. 

And it makes sense- shipping companies charge by weight, so while it might make sense to make shipping cheap for me for a $25 book, it doesn’t make sense to make it cheap to ship me an 89cent can of beans.

So we’ll probably still put in the occasional order for Crystal Light or breakfast cereal through Amazon, but our grocery shopping will still be done primarily through Wegmans… and the shiny new Harris Teeter that just opened in our neighborhood.

Once all the gift-procurement starts coming out of the same bank account you share with the recipient, gift-giving starts to resemble “permission to spend money on something you wouldn’t necessarily have bought for yourself otherwise.”  In that spirit, my birthday gift to Tom this year was a nice new set of Wusthof knives, since we love the chef’s knife we received as a wedding gift so much.

When I told Tom what his gift was, he said, “I’m thinking we need a good bread knife.”

What I SAID was, “Then let’s go find you one, baby.”  What I THOUGHT was, “Bread knife? Really?!  What makes a person yearn for a bread knife of all possible knives?”

So off to Williams-Sonoma we went, to get a small knife-block and shiny new German knives to go in it. Including a bread knife.

This weekend, I used this bread knife on some ciabatta we had bought to go with the pasta e fagioli I made on Saturday.

Oh.

My.

Heavens.

WHY did no one ever tell me how wonderful a good bread knife is?!  I had no idea that slicing crusty bread could be so easy, so… so FUN.

The new knives?  They are The Sex.

For the third week in a row, Tom and I hit the farmer’s market in Courthouse as part of our program of eating more fresh, local produce.

We’ve decided to make this change (which is happening by degrees) for a few reasons.

First, we’re becoming increasingly convinced that industrially-produced food is just not as good for you, and buying more of our food at farmer’s markets is part of a larger effort to reduce our processed-food consumption. 

I have kind of mixed feelings about industrial food- on one hand, industrialization of food production is what has made food cheap and plentiful in this country.  American poverty does have severe nutritional issues associated with it, but poverty in America is generally not marked by starvation. Quite the contrary- obesity is most prevalent among people with lower incomes.  On the other hand, industrialized food production has made food that’s just BAD for you cheap and plentiful (think 14-cent packages of ramen noodles, trans fats, and high fructose corn syrup).  As a result, as the congresspeople participating in the Congressional Food Stamp Challenge discovered, families with low incomes often have to choose between eating to feel full and eating for nutrition.  On a macro level, if the people with the buying power start gravitating toward fresh and local and away from industrial food, then the market will produce more of it, and prices will come down.  I am a good capitalist.  On the micro and more immediate level, however, since I can afford to eat better food, I’m going to choose to do so.

Secondly, produce from the farmer’s market usually just tastes better than what you can get in the grocery store.  Varieties commonly available in grocery stores have been specifically bred and hybridized to look pretty, resist bruising, and hold up to shipping.  You will note that taste is not anywhere on that list.  Farms that make their money selling produce locally can afford to choose which varieties to grow based on taste, rather than fitness for shipping over long distances.  So you can have a particularly tasty peach, instead of a hard, tasteless one that had to endure a trip from South America before getting here.  In fact, I walked into the living room on Saturday morning to find Tom eating a peach he had bought from the local chain grocery.  He looked at me and said, “This peach is reminding me why we get up on Saturdays to go to the farmer’s market.”

As a corollary, I get to try all kinds of things from the market that I’d never be able to find in the grocery store.  Varieties of heirloom tomatoes, different textures of cucumber, particularly sweet corn, and salad greens I have never heard of.  Buying locally helps me broaden my gastronomical horizons.

Thirdly, there’s food safety.  With all the recent horror stories about food safety of imports from China, Tom and I started considering the implications of not knowing where our food comes from.  Food is what we fuel our bodies with, and is one of the most fundamental things that determines our health and well-being, but we tend to get it from chain stores run by executives we will never meet, who arrange for food to be imported from producers we will never meet, who have factories in countries we will likely never visit, which are regulated by governments we did not elect.  Meanwhile, there’s no country-of-origin labeling regulations, it’s easy to ship through a third country to obscure where an ingredient came from even if there were.

That’s all fine and good for my cell phone, but it seems like an overextended chain of trust for something as basic as nourishment, no?  This is also a reason to eat fewer processed foods- the less something has to be processed before you buy it, the less opportunity there is for someone to put melamine in your wheat gluten.

When you go to a farmer’s market, you can meet the people directly involved in the production of that ball of mozzarella.  Yes, you do have to extend trust to them that they aren’t slipping all kinds of nasty chemicals into it to make it whiter or squishier or whatever, but they’ve still got to look you in the eye to sell it to you.  And you know that they’re subject to food safety laws put in place by a government accountable to the public that you’re part of.

Fourth, there are our own eating habits to consider.  Tom and I are busy people, and it’s hard for us to reliably predict when we’ll be home in advance.  As a result, we haven’t kept a lot of fresh veg and stuff around the house, because when we’ve tried, the stuff has often gone bad.  So the balance of our diet has suffered as a result.  The farmer’s market has two advantages here- one, since the stuff is really fresh and didn’t spend a week on a boat getting here, it’ll often last quite a while if we refrigerate it.  Two, the stuff is so delicious, that dinner on Saturday and Sunday is often comprised almost entirely of produce from the market.  Last night, for example, we ate salad made of basil, feta, and tomato from the market and avocado, cucumber, and bell pepper from the store, plus some fresh corn, also from the market.  The night  before that was caprese and bread for dinner.  We’ve still got some corn, tomatoes, and zucchini to use up, as well as some blackberries, peaches, and nectarines, which will probably get consumed by Tuesday or Wednesday.  The stuff is so good that I’m eating a lot more fruit and veg- for a couple of days, we effectively become vegetarians each week. Even if it IS concentrated toward the beginning of the week, my eating habits have improved a great deal.  I don’t think it’s my imagination that I’m feeling a lot better in this last week- due to some work stress, I was feeling pretty wiped, but I’m feeling a lot more energetic lately.  I should start keeping notes about my subjectively-perceived energy level vs. what I’ve eaten in the last 24 hours.

Finally, I’ve been thinking more about the ethics of food production, particularly as relates to animal products.  The argument that factory farms, being more efficient, are better for conservation purposes because they reduce the human footprint required to feed people is a persuasive one.  On the other hand, if industrially-farmed cows produce meat and milk that is less nutritious (and indeed, probably overtly WORSE for you) than pastured cows, what have we really gained with that efficiency?  Meanwhile, while I have no particular moral objection to using animals for food, do we really have to make them miserable before sending them to the slaughterhouse?  Would it be more ethical to eat less meat to make room for the cows to be pastured?  It’s a complicated question, and one that I don’t pretend to have the answer to, but I do believe I have a responsibility to make the best choice available to me based on my understanding of the problem.  So if I reduce the amount of meat I consume and try to eat cage-free eggs and pastured beef while I figure it out… well, that’s not so bad.

My weekend was fantastic, but now I need a weekend from my weekend.  When I left work on Friday, I was mentally AND physically exhausted.  With all the goings-on this weekend, I find myself mentally rested, but just as physically in need of a nap as ever.

On Saturday, Tom and I went to the Courthouse Farmer’s Market, figuring we’d get just some tomatoes and mozzarella and whatnot for lunch.  But you see, Tom and I have been talking about trying to eat more locally-grown food, less meat from factory farms, that sort of thing.  Not as a necessarily political statement, but more as an investment in better quality nutrition, better-tasting food, and keeping more of our dollars in our local (or at least regional) communities.  I actually have a lot more to say on this topic, but I’ll save it for another time.

Anyway, the point is, we went in for caprese ingredients, and came out with something like $90 of produce.  It started when someone had a bag of peaches. I LOVE LOVE LOVE farmer’s market peaches.  And then we saw the berry farm’s stand.  And the blackberries were the biggest and most beautiful-looking I’ve ever seen.  And then as we were debating how many tomatoes to get, since there are just the two of us and we’re not home all the time, the farmer said, “These tomatoes will last 10 days.  If they don’t, I will replace them two-fold.”  That’s a strong statement.  We bought the extra tomatoes.  And zucchini.

But then we ended up with this giant sack of fruit, and the peaches were really ripe. We had to eat them over the sink, they were so juicy.  So of course we can’t expect them to last the week, and we had this huge flat of cherries, blueberries, and blackberries so we decided on the only natural course of action…

Sangria party.  But we couldn’t do it the same night because, of course, that was the night of my First Ever Professional Comedy Gig.  I got all dressed and made-up and whatnot, and Tom and I headed out to meet up with Dawn for a little pre-show dinner.  I had to duck out of dinner early because I had to work the door, so I headed into the room, where the guy who runs it suggested that I get up on the stage and get used to the light.  The lights are always directly in your eyes, but this venue is a long, narrow banquet room that doubles as a comedy club, so the stage is at one end, and a really bright spotlight is at the other, and it literally feels like an oncoming train.  So I was glad I acclimated myself to it.

But then, I stepped off the stage and headed toward the back of the room, eyes still adjusting to the darkness, when I noticed a couple of people sitting in the back. “Huh, that woman looks a lot like my mom…” and then the man with her lowered the menu from in front of his face.

My parents came down from Pittsburgh to surprise me and see the show!

Understand that this is a big deal- it’s a long-running joke in my family about how the Baxendell men hate to travel.  My dad in particular is just not into the road trip thing.  So it’s A Thing that he drove four hours to hear me do 7 minutes of comedy.

They hung out with us after the show, and then we took them out for brunch the next morning, which was really nice.  It’s nice to hang out with them in my ‘hood.

Once they were on their way home, Tom and I had to clean up the house for the sangria-consumption. So Tom chopped fruit while I tidied up in the front of the house, and then he cleaned up the kitchen and dining room while I worked on the back room and the bathroom, and by the time we were done, the house was solidly Good Friend Clean- the floors could use a good vacuuming and the shelves could be dusted, but things were put away, and the kitchen and bathroom were both very clean, which are the two key things that might skeeve people out if they aren’t.

Holding a dinner party is always a challenge to our priorities.  We have a lot of friends, and we love to have them over, but we’ve got a small place.  Our table seats 8 when extended, but extending it tends to make the place feel even smaller since it blocks the hallway access to the kitchen and bathroom. It’s not a problem when we’re throwing a big cookout like we did for our anniversary, but when it’s too hot to hang out outside and we want to have a sit-down meal, it’s a real issue. 

So as we’re cleaning the place up, we’re going over who we’ve invited, who we might like to invite, etc.  And we got to a point where the conversation went like this:  “Do we want to invite [so-and-so]?” “Well, we’ve already got 8.” “We do?”  “Yep [rattling off names].”  “Huh.  Well, we’ll have to invite so-and-so next time.”  “Yep.”

But I made lasagna (unfortunately mostly not from the farmer’s market, which is a shame because we get the BEST ricotta there), and we had that, and some shrimp some friends brought, and the zucchini, and salad, and of course the sangria… and then dessert. 

Dessert was grilled peaches with mascarpone cheese, berries with chocolate whipped cream, and vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce. 

Every time we cook for friends, I think we’ve had the best dinner ever.  I don’t know if it’s short memory or that we just get better every time.  But in any case, it was a good time, and we’re going to have to remember that sangria for the next party.

My sweetie turns 28 today, and we have had a weekend of Tom-apalooza.

Friday night we settled in to watch the season premiere of Battlestar Galactica. Okay, so I was pretty excited about that for myself. On Saturday, we spent the afternoon at the Shirlington Oktoberfest with our friends- good times, good beer (so I’m told), and good peeps. As you might guess, I was the designated driver.

Today was a quiet one, we mostly relaxed, but I cooked a sumptuous birthday feast for our celebratory purposes. I made herb-crusted leg of lamb (from The Silver Spoon, in case anyone is wondering) with mashed potatoes and green beans. We broke out the last bottle of our favorite wine, since we had been saving it for an occasion and a meal that would be worthy of it. Dinner was mmmmmtasty and we’re looking forward to leftovers this week.

For dessert, I made the cake that thwarted me two years ago, and this time it turned out beautifully. And was soooo yummy.

So now we’re sitting here, in our dinner/cake/wine/birthday/newlywed coma, and life is pretty good.

Happy Birthday sweetie. I love you lots.

Tom and I were standing at the Wegmans deli counter on Sunday, trying to decide what kind of cheese we wanted and listening to people order around us, when I was struck with the not-very-original observation that a supermarket is emblematic of the benefits of modern, developed-world life. 

I live in a time in which it is possible for me to develop a preference for one type of cheese over another.  More than that, it is possible for me to develop that preference to the point where I choose one type of cheese for a turkey sandwich, another for putting on my spaghetti, and still a third for serving on crackers. 

I can have fresh vegetables in the dead of winter, and popsicles in summer.  Seafood that’s flash-frozen on the boat allows me to have things people used to only get in Alaska.  I can buy mortadella imported from Italy and just a few aisles over get seaweed crackers from Japan and guava nectar from South America.

And yet there are people out there who actually grow up and go to college having never eaten more than 6 different meal menus in their lives.  Who are these people?  Why do they disrespect the embarrassment of riches available at even the smallest local market?

When we’re busy, Tom and I do tend to fall back on the recipes we’re comfortable with, but we have so much fun experimenting with new things.  I can’t wait to test ‘em out on y’all on our new dining table.