Dark Night

Obviously, if you haven't already guessed, this little eat-everything-local experiment has been put on hold. What ridiculous expectations I have of this world thinking that one person working full time and raising children can figure out how to eat everything locally. This is definitely where the road hits the wall in terms of individual action. I salute all you radical homemakers out there that have time to sew your own canvas bags for produce, make pizza from scratch on friday nights, and bargain shop at the farmer's market. You know what I want to spend my time doing these days? Sleeping! I'm frickin' exhausted trying to keep up with this silly American lifestyle of career woman, working mom, supportive wife, friend to all. Just getting a moment to weed the garden is a luxury these days. When I decided to expand my garden to grow all my own food - even enough to can for the whole winter - I guess I forgot that the last time I could garden all day was when I was on full-time maternity leave. Although on a positive note my tomatoes are doing smashing. Someone will have to come over and can them all when they are ripe - I won't have time.

Not to mention the cost. We are already living beyond our means - and buying local currently means expensive! Farmer's just hiked their prices a the market. It's almost unbearably expensive. I started looking at Sunflower and Smith's for deals. I will start working part time next month. It'll likely be bye-bye organic, not to mention local then.

It's 11:30 and my toddler just woke up crying for mommy and is now taking every book and toy off his shelf and piling them on the floor. Next he'll pace the floor talking about "grasshoppers coming!" My husband thinks I shouldn't go in there. I say tought doodie hubby. 2 minutes of cuddling and he'll be back to sleep rather than an hour of toddler silliness and crying.


I'm not impressed with the green food movement. We can do better. Makes me want to move back to the subsistence village in Panama where growing your own food actually is a viable option - as long as you like eating only rice for days at a time.

See ya'll later when we all stop trying to lead these crazy lifestyles - I certainly can't do it alone.

P.S. This doesn't mean I am giving up, just lowering my personal expectations - ALOT!

Framing the Cold

My tomatoes have gotten too large to keep on their indoor growing racks. They are starting to bend over to fit on their shelves. So I made a make-shift cold frame out of strawbales and recycled sunroom windows we picked up from the second hand pile behind Brother Sun window shop.

I actually decided this year to follow John Jeavons' (How to Grow More Vegetables on Less Land Than You Thought Possible - or something like that) advice and prick out my seedling plants twice. Once from the flats into small pots and the second time from their pots into the ground. The real test is still yet to come - putting them in the ground. But they are looking great so far. Next year I think I'll do a third round for the tomatoes from 2" pots to 4". They are ready now for that, but since the last frost date is only a week away, they'll have to bide their time just a little longer. The tomatoes that I didn't have pots for transplanting into remain small and spindly as all of my plants were last year. The transplanting makes a true difference.

Arriving Flavors

I love Mondays. I make a habit of saving Mondays from work and using them for weekend recovery. I stay home to catch up on life, sustainable living, and the joys of mothering my son Clayton. And I try to stay off the computer.

We had a fun and busy weekend. Saturday started with an essential trip to the farmer's market (now that we are officially locavores, we must not miss the market), then joined a political puppet parade and pageant for May Day, followed by a few moments in the sun pulling crab grass from the asparagus patch, chatted with a visiting friend from Colorado, and ended the evening with ceremony. Sunday morning we woke up late and rushed out the door for a cheesemaking workshop in Estancia, NM at Old Windmill Dairy, followed by a blessed hour on the couch doing nothing, and another attempt at dinner without a recipe to guide me in preparing the day's local fare.

One of the greatest things I have heard yet this year was when Sir Kennith Robertson asked the audience I was sitting in to consider for ourselves how we are creative rather than how creative are we.  Think into that for a moment, it is quite profound given western culture's view of creativity as exclusive to a gifted few.

I'm a recipe girl. I play my guitar by reading music, I sew using patterns, I do Yoga with an instructor, I follow directions when building things, I check my books often when gardening. My creativity does not flow from practical things until I have year's of experience at it that I can stop thinking about it. My more natural creativity comes from the universe, through the soft spot on my head, straight to my intellect. I create and manifest what is not tangible. I take a vision of the future and make it a reality. But not a practical reality - an educational, social, cultural, political, paradigmatic reality. This necessitates that I keep my hands in the dirt often, otherwise my head gets so heavy it knocks me over.

Cooking is not yet a successful creative experience for me. So, when cooking I prefer to follow a recipe or things turn out pretty bland. My joy in cooking comes when I follow the Joy of Cooking for great tasting meals. The stuff I make up on the fly usually doesn't inspire great complements or sparkling reactions from my pallet or my husband's.

This is turning out to be my greatest challenge so far in being a locavore. For years I really haven't done a whole lot of cooking. I'm only just getting to know how to cook meat after years of being a vegetarian. And while I was a vegetarian I mostly ate grilled cheese and lasagna. Seasonal recipe books for my agro eco-region are in short supply. Most American families don't really study the art of cooking I've noticed. I've thought about taking a cooking class at the college to give me more of a foundation to work with, but I haven't determine where that fits into my full-time working and mommying schedule. So, learning what goes together to conjure up flavorful inspirations without guidance from one of my many cookbooks is a big challenge for me.

As my pallet slowly adjusts to local, seasonal-only fare, I have begun to realize that with local food,  I can rely more on the natural flavor of things. Things that go from garden to plate in a matter of minutes don't need a lot of accoutrement of any kind. My experience with the first asparagus of the season from my garden clued me into that secret kept from me by my global-industrial-food system-adjusted pallet.

That said, local flavors in April are in a bit of short supply thus far in my experience. This Saturday I bought a pound of spinach, seven over-wintered potatoes, five overwintered apples, the first tiny beets and carrots of the season, white radishes, sunflower sprouts, arugula, salad greens, greenhouse-grown heirloom tomatoes, Nativo (all local ingredients) bread, bacon and some  beef.

All good stuff. But not great. Except for the radishes that did surprise me with their zesty spring-time bite. But as for the rest, I have to say I excitedly await July when the full flavor roles in and returns to these sorry step-cousins of the glorious summer time vegetables!

Don't get me wrong. I am grateful we even have a spring time farmer's market in Santa Fe. And I am especially grateful for the heroic efforts our local farmers are making to extend the growing season in this desert that makes being a locavore even a remote possibility. But I LOVE the summer farmer's market and its abundance of flavors. Nothing makes my taste buds ring like Gemini Farm's beets, or the short-lived onslaught of japanese turnips sliced and tossed with their own greens in homemade vinegrette. Yum! It makes being an untrained American home cook a lot easier.

In the meantime, I'll continue to be grateful for the peach colored carrots and the fact that we are still draining my cupboard of leftover non-local items that add a little extra something in a season of arriving but still scarce flavors.

On another note, chesses never cease to fail this time of year. Flavor may change slightly on some dairy farms in winter or mating season (I'll blog later about what I learned at the cheesemaking workshop about why that is). But the high buttermilk content of Ed and Micheal's nubian goats at Old Windmill makes for some delicious chesse varieties anytime of year. Especially the incredibly delicious blue cheese they make. At $20/pound it doesn't necessarily fit into my budget. But given all the challenges and costs of running a small local dairy farm, their seven year-old operation is not even turning a profit yet. The local consumer vs. local farmer buget is a conversation for another blog. Right now I'm happy to give my support and anty up for the flavor rockin' blue as long as I have the dollars in my pocket. It is every bit worth the price.

No Impact Man Southwest

Wow! I am watching No Impact Man. They just switched off the lights. Good for them. They are doing what I learned to do while living in Panama with the Peace Corps. And what my entire village is still doing. And what most of the world is doing right now while I sit here with two computers on - one playing the movie and one for late night work projects (or blogging in this case) - and a lamp and wood burning in the woodstove, refrigerator running, music playing in Clayton's room, little glowing lights everywhere charging mobile electronics and sucking phantom power, wireless internet blinking in the back room, mini-hot tub keeping itself warm on the porch, irrigation timers running on their batteries to water the garden, solar powered lights lighting the pathway from car to door. So all that energy is coming from the solar tracker in our yard, but still. American ways of living lightly are still on a whole other level than the rest of the world. I have grown soft since my return to the U.S.

I also watched a movie called End of Poverty? earlier tonight. (Getting my documentary fix). It's like Open Veins of Latin America on screen. If everyone in the world lived like Americans it would take 5 planets to support us. Okay, so I have heard that one before. But on the other end of the spectrum - if everyone lived like they do in Burkina Faso, we would need 1/10th of our planet. I hadn't heard that before. Measured by mass, there are more ants on the planet than humans.

I like that they did their No Impact project in phases. We're still eating up the non-local fare leftover in our cupboards and freezer. I have one can of pickled beets, half can of peaches, and a few jars of homemade jelly left in my cupboard from last year's garden harvest. Luckily the farmer's market is picking up and the co-op too. The co-op is trying with the 300 mile radius, but they aren't quite there yet. They're still selling stuff from Mexico. I guess that's better than New Zeland kiwi at WF. The co-op selection is improving with the season - more options in the produce section I should say. My peas actually came up! My tomatoes on the growing rack are looking much better than they did last year. I gave them a boost of fish emulsion recommended by farmer Romero for flats.

I'm having fun with this project. I'm very much looking foward to the summer adundance in the farmer's market. And I find myself still wanting to do more and have more time to do more. Who knows, if they economy keeps plummeting in NM I might have a lot of time on my hands. But learning to do this while working full-time is a great challenge too.

Sunday Dinner

Tonight for our locavore dinner we are eating lion's mane mushrooms ($24 for two large bags), asparagus ($4/bunch), fresh salad greens ($8 big bag), radish sprouts (holy cow they are spicy!) ($3) with overwintered carrots ($4) and goat cheese ($5) - all purchased at the Saturday Santa Fe Farmer's Market. Since we are still cleaning out of fridge and freezer the non-locavore fare included:  puerco adobado made by my friend and neighbor Tanya for a Community College Culinary Arts event last fall. It has been in my freezer since - yikes! Thanks T! Shitake Seseame salad dressing (CA), lemons, and olive oil (CA), balsamic vinegar (CT). The butter came from our raw milk butter supplier from Texas. We'll have the popcorn for desert. So dinner is about 90% local. Hmm...the condiments might be a challenge to find locally.

The lion's mane mushrooms is a gourmet treat grown by Desert Fungi. My husband thinks it taste like crab. I think they taste like gourmet mushrooms. We tried them a number of ways (all sauteed):
1) with olive oil only
2) with olive oil and balsimic vinegar
3) with butter and salt
4) with butter and balsamic
5) sauteed with olive oil then sprinkled with fresh lemon juice after out of the pan
6) with butter only

My favorite was butter and balsamic. My husband liked them with the lemon juice. Whatever you do remember Julia Child's advice when you cook them "don't crowd the mushrooms!"

Buen Provecho!

And So It Begins

And so the desert locavore adventure begins. Today we ate our first asaparagus dish of the season. Straight out of the ground, sauteed lightly in the pan with water only and then straight to the plate. No butter or garlic necessary. Delicious. I've never tasted something so fresh. (Especially after a long winter of wanna-be vegetables). I love spring!

Transplant

This locavore blog seems to be turning into a lot of gardening entries. But bare with me, it is that time of season. Spring! The weather outside is lovely, affording me full days of working outside. Getting my own garden plots going and helping neighbors with their ambitious efforts putting up greenhouses and such have kept me away from the Farmer's Markets and other locavore consumer havens. I'm still waiting for the asparagus to poke its little spikes up so I have an official marker to my locavore endeavor.

My next research project is to decide which local CSA to join. There is also this guy Sam who has a backyard garden operation over by the community college and my neighbor has organized a modified CSA with him as well. Last year we got a few bags of produce from him, it was pretty good. Stay tuned for more on local CSAs.

Both me and my plants are not from here. We are growing slowly accustomed to the desert landscape. But transplants take special care and special measures to make sure they survive and succeed.

A couple weeks ago my husband and I built a seedling growing shelf. They cost anywhere from $500 - $800 new. We built ours for about $120 - lights included - in about three hours. A bunch of 2x2s and screws are all it took really. It is great when you want to increase the amount of seedlings you are growing and don't have a greenhouse, sunroom, or otherwise. We found the design online and added a foot of width to support the size flats we are using. Two weeks later the plants are doing great.

This weekend (5 weeks before last frost date) I transplanted tomato, eggplant, and broccolli seedlings from the flats to small individual plots. The survived and are recovering from the move back on their shelves.

I also planted peas, a strawberry patch, and four bushes including Western Sandcherry, Currant, and a third edible bush I can't remember at the moment. (Too much sun I guess). I'm a little behind as last year I was successful in starting peas the first week of March. These were seeds saved from my 2008 garden. I hope they come up.

Back to the work week...onward.