Knitting

Lately, I've been knitting. It's something I've been doing on and off in phases throughout my life. I like the mindfulness it generates. It's something I can do in the car when I'm not driving. Currently, I'm working on a really simple light green sweater for the little one.

I was thinking about the environmental impact of knitting. In theory, the less you'd rely on industrialized methods to generate what you need, the less you should impact, and the fewer resources you should need. But what about the logistics of shipping extremely small batches of wool to a store for me to buy, having someone work there to sell it to me, etc? Perhaps, on a per sweater basis, it uses fewer resources to have them mass produced in China and shipped in giant batches to Old Navy and and Baby Gap.

I guess unless you order your wool directly from one of these small outfits that raise the sheep, shear them, spin and dye the wool, and then ship it to you using the regular mail, it's going to be very hard to be sure. Anybody know a good source?

Alas, in the meanwhile I'll just enjoy sitting down at the end of a day for a few rows and a cup of tea with the hubby.

Buddha's Hand

Friends gave us a Buddha's Hand Citron today, a fruit I had never heard of. It is an ancient citrus variety that is not grown for its flesh (it has none), but for its aroma, and for the zest. It looks spectacular, like a gnarly old lemon hand (apparently there are "closed" hand fruit that resemble hands folded for a buddhist prayer. They are used as religious offerings. Ours was an "open" handed fruit, and more resembled a lemon Medusa).

The aroma from this fruit is unbelievable. Imagine lemon scent, but more intense, and with a more flowery and perfume like fragrance. I am cutting it up and making candied Buddha's Hand from it. I will also keep the syrup to use for baking instead of sugar. I can't wait to feed some of it back to our friends!


This is one of the things I love best about growing my own food (however little part of it). What is surplus to me, and might end up going bad on the compost, is treasured by our friends. And it starts a circle of giving. My friends give me a lemon, I will invite them back over for fruit cake that I've made using the fruit... the next time, I will give them some zucchini flowers (they are ridiculously enthusiastic about zucchini flowers), and they will fill them and feed them back to everybody. It goes on and on.

Meat

I read about a study yesterday that investigated the eating habits of over half a million people over a number of years. This number of people gives you the ability to come up with some darn high power data, so the findings should be a bit more reliable than your latest diet fad (FLAXSEED OIL FOUND TO CURE CANCER!!!!).

What they found confirmed something we already kind of knew: white meat is healthier than red meat, processed meat is a no-no. What shocked me was the strength of the effect that was observed. Essentially, people were grouped into five groups according to how much of each kind of meat they consumed. The groups were then analyzed for differences in the overall chance of death, as well as the chance of death from cancer, and cardiovascular disease. Turns out that the ones that were in the highest group for red meat consumption had a roughly 30 % higher likelihood of dying during the observation period than those in the lowest group. 30 %! That's crazy. People who ate more white meat were actually LESS likely to die than those who ate less (bad news for vegetarians, I guess), but the effect was not as shockingly high.

So I went ahead and calculated from the numbers that those groups ate what would actually be the healthiest amount of meat to eat. Because "eat more white meat, less red meat" could mean a lot of things, depending on where you started. Here came the second surprise. According to the data in the study, my life expectancy will be highest if I eat about a pound of white meat per week, less than a quarter of a pound of red meat per week, and a whooping 156 g of processed meat PER YEAR. That's less than six ounces of processed meat PER YEAR. Bye bye bacon.

Oh, and guess which group I'm in at the moment...?

Whatever. Lentils for dinner today.

Anybody have a good recipe?

How much?

We have been thinking about the people in Haiti this last week. Each day that went by, thousands died, trapped under debris, who could have been saved if help had been there. The waste of all these lives, all these people, makes me feel helpless and angry. So the obvious thing was to make a donation, to a hospital which is still operating in Port-au-Prince. At this point, where there is little hope of finding a lot more survivors under the rubble, we figured that this was a direct way to help save lives (surgery for infected wounds, and clean drinking water, are probably going to save the most lives at this point).

But how much to give? On the one hand, my compassion tells me to immediately wire the content of my bank account to Haiti. It is indisputable that they need it more than I do. On the other hand, I'm not exactly what you'd call affluent. So the number I was thinking made my husband swallow hard.

In the end, we decided to give the amount that we would normally spend on eating out in one month. There will be no restaurant dinners in February, no visits to the coffee shop for a latte, and all workday lunches will be packed. It adds up. And while eating out (even) less has been on my agenda for a long time (for physical and financial well being), I find that the thought of the money doing some real good instead gives me a resolve that I have never known before.

Circle of life

While seeding my old country cabbages last week, I ran out of potting mix. So I finally had to face the somewhat gruesome task of turning the compost. Turning aerates compost and makes it rot faster and more uniformly. So in principle, it is a good thing. The more often you turn, the better. I hear the Prince of Wales has the compost heaps in his organic gardens turned every week, which gives him mature compost in three months. The key is, though, he doesn’t do it by himself. He has someone else do it for him. So I’m more a fan of the three heap method, where you fill one compost heap, let one rot undisturbed, and have one mature heap which you deplete. The problem is, three decent sized compost heaps would take up about one tenth of my entire growing space. So rather than give up that much space, I chose to just have one pile. I fill it with whatever organic materials come out of the garden, plus our kitchen scraps, and the occasional bag of coffee grounds from our friendly neighborhood coffee shop. Whenever I need new potting mix, or whenever I really really can’t squeeze any more in, I simply take off the top layers until I reach the stuff that’s decomposed, take that out, mix the remaining material, and refill the compost with it. It’s not pretty. Unless you have a morbid fascination with invertebrates and funghi, the circle of life is one of those things that are best left to themselves.

Rainy weekend

This was a slow weekend, with rainy weather. Not so nice outside, but perfect for making jam. I had three little sweet pumpkins that I had harvested from our „three sisters plot“, and for the longest time, I didn´t know what to do with them. They seemed too precious to just carve up as Jack o´lanterns for halloween, and I´m not such a big fan of pumpkin pie. Finally, I came across two recipes for pumpkin preserve, and my three little guys met the knife at last. One recipe is pumpkin orange jam (I used blood oranges, for dramatic effect), and the other is a savory pumpkin spread with chili and ginger. I have not tried them yet, but they sure look very nice in their little glasses.

We also had some friends over for brunch which included, among other dishes, squash soup made from our own squash. Due to my friend’s garlic aversion I couldn’t do my favorite butternut and roasted garlic standard. Instead, I tried a recipe with onion, cream, honey and balsmic vinegar. I don’t know. It sounded good on paper, and our guests claimed to like it, but I’m not so sure about the vinegar. Maybe it would have been convincing with a more savory type of winter squash, like Hokkaido squash, or Muscat de Provence pumpkin. I have some seeds for both and am planning to plant them this year for the first time. Can’t wait for summer!

Meanwhile, the garden looks totally soaked and the grass in the paths is higher than the plants in my (raised) beds. I weeded just one path on saturday, before deciding that it was too wet. Interestingly, this path now has puddles of rainwater standing on it, whereas all the other paths are wet (and weedy), but the water is not standing on them. The ground must have been totally compacted by me simply standing on it for a few minutes! I guess it is true then that you should never ever step on or work your ground when it’s wet. Hmmm. Guess I had to try that one out for myself.

Wirsing cabbage

My third German cabbage is called Wirsing, and I haven’t come across an english word for it. It has very crinkly leaves that form a compact head, and it’s just one of those cabbages that you can eat slow cooked. With a few shallots (I like to puree them before adding, while they are still raw), nutmeg, salt, pepper, and sweet cream, it’s one of the more elegant versions of winter cabbage that I personally know. If cabbage can be called elegant at all. I guess it can, if you are willing to include such beauties as romanesco cauliflower in the cabbage family. I have a few of those little guys overwintering in one of my beds. It took growing my own cauliflower to convince me that this actually is a tasty vegetable. Before, I knew only the huge white Supermarket variety, which basically tastes like nothing much, except, well, cauliflower. Yikes.
Then, we ate the first of our own. They were comparatively tiny white, yellowish green, and purple heads that I had picked in the cold just a few hours before steaming them in a bamboo steamer for about four or five minutes. I browned a few almond slivers in butter, poured everything on top of the cauliflower heads, and there was dinner. Boy, were we in for a surprise. They did not taste like „cauliflower“ at all. They were sweet. They had a subtle, complex, nutty aroma that was different in each of the three varieties we were eating. Togehter with the butter and the slivered almonds, it was a simple and unbelievably tasty meal. If I had to make a list of veggies that are the most different from supermarket standard when they are home grown, cauliflower would be way up there alongside tomatoes. Once you’ve tasted your own, there’s basically no going back to supermarket. Even farmers’ market doesn’t come close. Go ahead, call me a food snob.

White cabbage

My second German cabbage is white cabbage (Weisskohl), which is either eaten fresh or used to make Sauerkraut. Now. I have never gone to the extreme of making Sauerkraut myself. Essentially, the cabbage is cut up very finely, spiced, salted, and packed tightly under pressure to exclude air. Anaerobic fermentation then produces lactic acid, which is sour. It gives Sauerkraut it’s obvious taste and name, and prevents food spoiling bacteria from taking over (they don’t like low pH). From what I remember from my Grandmother´s cold room, it’s a bit of a smelly affair. Apparently, my great grandparents, who had a big farm in northern Germany and many mouths to feed, used a whole dedicated basement room to make sauerkraut. At harvest, they would fill the entire room with successive layers of cabbage, salt, and spices, and people would walk around on it (clean shoes, I hope) to compact it and drive out the air. Then, once the fermentation process was done, they would eat it all winter until the room was empty.
I haven’t decided yet whether I’m actually going to venture out and make my own. It’s kind of... out there, and I definitely don’t want the smell in my kitchen. But I do crave it, once or twice a year, and it’s not like you can just go to the supermarket here and simply buy a can or two of decent Sauerkraut... there’s always the garage, I guess.

Happy new year!

Happy new year everyone! After a well deserved winter break, mus is back. I love the holidays, because even though they are busy in many ways, they are the only time of the year when you can go away and your garden will be totally fine when you come back a few weeks later. Allright, maybe a few more weeds in our neck of the woods, but that´s highly acceptable in exchange for the renewed motivation to go out there and pull them. So today, I have done my first gardening act of the year (ecxept harvesting a few rutabagas and picking a bagful of greens last weekend). I have started a flat of my first vegetable seedlings for the new year. In addition to some oldies goldies (onions, green onions, leeks, various kinds of greens, and my favorite Lacinato (aka tuscan or dinosaur) kale, I have seeded a few varieties of cabbages and brassica that I brought home from the old country. My favorite is the green kale (Grünkohl), which used to be a northern German winter staple in the times before 8000 mile Chilean midwinter raspberries. It is slow cooked together with a little onion, cured meats, and sausages (some people even add goose lard). It is then eaten either by itself or as part of the chistmas dinner, along with potatoes, red cabbage, and apple-stuffed goose. If this sounds heavy, that´s cause it is. But on a cold winter day, combined with a Jever beer and a Korn (schnaps) for those who like it, it is unapologetically satisfying.