Christmas Dinner

Our Christmas dinner was actually more local than the Thanksgiving one was. For Christmas dinner we had a tavern ham that came from Idaho Falls, mashed potatoes--some of which came from Buhl and some which were grown in the Nampa area, gravy made from the ham drippings (okay, so the gravy thickener came from Somewhere Else, USA), and asparagus--which I'd blanched and frozen last spring when it was in season) grown somewhere around here in the Treasure Valley. It was a simple meal, but it was nice, and it was easy to fix. I confess, the fresh garlic I put into the mashed potatoes wasn't from Idaho, but if the fence-spraying boy scout hadn't ruined my home-grown green onion and leeks, I'd have probably had some of that to use. All in all, it wasn't too bad a holiday dinner on the locavore front, and using one of the few containers of frozen asparagus for a special meal in the wintertime was pretty fun. It felt like a novelty, which of course it was, since prior to taking up the locavore mantle, we never used asparagus at all. Now it's a springtime mainstay and a wintertime indulgence.

I received a big glossy heirloom seed catalogue in the mail recently, and now I think I know what Barbara Kingsolver meant when she wrote about how much she likes to look through them when they arrive. This one, from Baker Seeds, is almost as big as a calendar albeit much thicker, and so full of beautiful full-color pictures of vegetables that it might as well be a coffee-table book in its own right. Sigh. Barring any more fence cleaning/staining issues, I think this book might just have the power to inspire me to try gardening again in 2009.

Rice and Beans

The budget is tight enough to warrent using lots of rice and beans--but rice doesn't grow in Idaho, and the last time I went to get long black grass seed "wild" rice, it was out of stock. So other than some imported rice and barley, we're eating a lot of mixed beans, as many local as I can buy. We have bean soup two to three times a week--sometimes for lunch and dinner. I'm still trying for locavore eating, but it's a real challenge during the winter, when the Huz is clamoring for "green veggies" like fresh spinach and lettuce, not green beans and spinach. Time to start preparing sprouts again. Still, I guess locavore eating for at least six to eight months out of the year is far better than zero months.

Turkey Economics

It was time to buy the turkey for Thanksgiving. Last year, a farmer not too far from us had organic free-range turkeys available for sale, and if you didn't reserve one, you could come on a certain date and choose one from the ones that hadn't been reserved or claimed. We got one that had been ever so slightly damaged (clean knife wound, probably sustained during the cleaning and plucking process) and were able to buy it at a small discount per pound. That worked out very well. But this year, the farmer did not raise any turkeys for sale. So I went to the local Co-Op on the date they'd said their organic turkeys would be in.

I had a choice of whether to buy a frozen organic free-range turkey from California at $3.09 per pound, or a frozen free-range turkey (not certified organic, but as good as) from a local source. The local turkeys I saw in the freezer box looked wonderful, large and well-formed and everything that you'd want in a turkey. But they were also $3.69 per pound. I'd so much prefer to buy local! We bought and ate local veggies from farmers' markets all summer long, and it was great. But with the economy being what it is and our budget being so very small right now, 60 cents more per pound to get a local turkey was just too much. So I had to go with the one from California. At least the distance from California to Idaho isn't as bad as it could be. We could live clear across the United States from our source. But if money wasn't an issue, I'd have bought that locally-raised turkey in a heartbeat.

Our locavore experience so far has been a matter of making as many changes as we can without completely breaking the budget. When it comes to veggies, milk, cheese and butter, we've done well. Farmers' markets are off season right now, but we bought a bunch of potatoes from a wonderful lady we met at the Nampa market this year, who we consider a new friend. I'm making all our butter now from cream we have delivered from one of the not-horribly-far-away Idaho dairies. The other day, we used some of my home-grown frozen spinach on a pizza. There are gourds of various types in the garage, both home-grown and locally grown and purchased. I still need to go buy a case or two of local apples and make a bunch of dried apple chips and applesauce, but fortunately, apples do well in cold storage and some local harvest should still be available through approximately February. I've even found locally grown and milled spelt flour at the Co-Op, and the same day I bought the turkey, I also bought the quintessential budget food item: locally grown beans--Great Northern, pink, chili, and split baby garbanzos, all grown in Idaho. As soon as the stock is replenished, I'll be buying more of the Idaho-grown long black wild "rice", which is really a type of grass seed. And red lentils are also grown here.

But some things we use, we just can't get locally or in state, so we usually compromise on those items. Nobody's giving up tea in our house...like, ever. And three out of four won't give up coffee, either. Chocolate. White suger from sugar cane--no beets allowed, since pretty much all Idaho beets are now genetically modified crap. Fortunately, since we started trying to go local back in February, I've been learning what I can get when, and how much work I'll have to plan on doing to get and process it locally so as to have some of whatever it is for winter. It's great to know I won't have to give up most of my favorite things just to eat locally. The few things I actually depend on from out of state are also from out of country, and that list is fairly short. I just wish that the economics of all this would change enough so that more people could support our local farmers gladly and without fear of breaking their budgets. I'll try to post soon about some of the highlights of our farmers' market experiences this summer. We met some truly wonderful people who, in their own special way, are doing great things for our local population in specific and the planet in general.

Restitution

Well, the head of our homeowners' association and the father of the boy scout whose team messed up our house and garden have been attempting to fix the problem. They brought over some thinner or cleaner of some kind from the paint store, but at this point, they'd left it so long that the oil-based fence stain didn't come off the house when they tried to clean it. Then they wanted some of our leftover house paint so they could paint over the damaged area. The only paint we had left is very old and very thick. So they went to the paint store to get some paint in the right color, only my husband had made a mistake and didn't give them the right color, and they failed to double-check and make sure it was correct, so they ended up getting the trim color instead of the main wall color. Now they have to go get the right color and return next weekend to paint that wall of the house.

This whole thing is just a major headache for all concerned, and could have been so easily avoided. I did manage to go to the Co-Op and find out the prices for organic food of the varieties that were ruined in my garden, so hopefully we will at least be able to replace the organic food we lost, even if it's not locally grown. I hope the negligent parties learned something from this mistake. If so, then it wasn't a total loss.

What Next?

A friend just sent me info on the tainted Halloween candy scare. First there was the pet food problem, and now this. Here's an article on the situation. I'm just shaking my head over it all.

What did I say in a previous post? Stupid Homo Sapiens and their chemicals.

The family and I went to see Wall-E tonight, and while it was cute, it was also pretty frightening to contemplate. An Earth covered with garbage, while up in space, there's a spaceship like a luxury liner filled with fat, bloated humans floating around on hoverchairs with robots waiting on them hand and foot. Whoever wrote that did an amazing job of portraying a post-apocalyptic Earth while also telling a tale of romance, action/suspense, and redemption all at the same time. But when it was over, I wanted to go hit the treadmill and re-plant the garden even though it's late October. Which, I'm sure, was exactly the point.

Tonight the Huz and I took out three bins of recycling, and a large rolling garbage bin that was less than half-full. The neighbors had no recycling bin at all, their garbage bin was overflowing with trimmings from their trees and shrubs, and they also had several large black plastic bags full of more trimmings--all spilling out onto the street. I'm not even sure why anyone would put bags full of organic matter into the landfill in the first place. In the days before fossil fuels and global warming, people used to heat their houses with wood. What the heck happened that now we're stuffing perfectly good wood into bags and cramming it into the landfill where it can't even biodegrade?

I think I'm going to make some cookies and homemade candy for my kids, and check over the candy they do get Trick-or-Treating as carefully as I can, and...hope for the best. But I'm getting very tired of being disappointed in my fellow humans.

Looks Like Relish

Smells like relish, too. I admit I haven't tasted it yet, because with pickles you usually wait two to three weeks for it to finish pickling after you've processed it. But the jars all sealed and I now have nine beautiful pints of green tomato relish on my counter. The bad thing was how much of my time was eaten up by the process of making this stuff. The good thing is that assuming it tastes good, I now have all the relish I'll need for quite a while, since we don't use all that much, and I was able to use most of my remaining green tomatoes. It's nice that the early frost didn't make the garden a total loss. (No, that would be the Boy Scouts...oh, well.)

Apparently the homeowners' association is going to try to make some kind of amends for the damage the Scouts did with their stain, but they're hoping they can just clean the stain off the side of the house rather than repainting. News for them...it was oil-based stain on a porous surface. We can wash the stain off our bikes easily enough, since it didn't want to stick to the automotive paint or the steel, but we can't wash it off the leeks and green onions and probably not off the side of the house. Again, oh, well. At least they're willing to address the problem somehow.

I still have enough counter-ripened green tomatoes to make one more batch of that marvelous soup, and tonight we're making pizza with the sauce from the last of our vine-ripened tomatoes. Now that I've mostly dealt with the tomato issue, it's apples next. I need to find a place to pick up a case or three of local apples, and then I'm going to make major amounts of applesauce. I go through that stuff pretty fast when it's available, so I need lots of it to last me and the family until next fall. I think I want to make it out of yellow delicious apples--the stuff I made from our tree was amazingly good, and my teenager even decided she loved it. She devoured the last of what I had made, and now I'm starting to crave more. It makes Tree Top taste like some kind of pale imitation of applesauce. At least the apples will be pretty easy to process. I have the hand-cranked peeler-corer tool for the dehydrated apple chips, and the Squeezo will make short work of the squishing process for the cooked apples for applesauce. In fact, since I really don't need any other ingredients, I'm anticipating that the whole applesauce-canning project could be finished up in two or three days' time once I have the apples.

I do have a container of small Principe Borghese green tomatoes to do something with, and I'm thinking I may just dehydrate them the way I did the ripe ones. Given the dehydration process, I wouldn't think their lack of extra acid would be a problem in their preservation, so it seems like a good way to get a few more sun-dried (dehydrator dried) tomatoes. From the two heirloom Principe Borghese plants we had this year, we got an entire cereal-box-sized container full of dehydrated tomatoes. Not too bad.

The kids and I went out to the pumpkin patch this afternoon--same place we got our strawberries and the few blueberries I managed to go and pick a few months ago. Given our hectic schedule right now, we barely managed the pumpkin picking. We had about one hour today in which to go to the field, find pumpkins, ride the hayride back, pay for the pumpkins, and leave so we could get my younger daughter to her dance class on time. It felt a little rushed, which was a shame, but at least we got to do it in the first place. I also bought some little pie pumpkins for the Huz to process later. Maybe we'll do one pie for Thanksgiving and one for Christmas. I don't know. At least they'll be chemical-free pumpkin.

Green Tomato Relish

Thus far, we've been able to use quite a few of the green tomatoes we saved from the frost. We've had green tomato soup twice, and the Huz said if his mom would have had the recipe years ago when he was a kid, he wouldn't have minded about her wanting to use up the green tomatoes. And for the past couple of days, I've also been peeling, coring and chopping green tomatoes to make green tomato relish. It takes me about an hour and a half to get enough prepared and chopped for one quart, let alone four quarts, but after a very long couple of initial chopping sessions yesterday and two more such sessions today, (plus finally asking for a little help from the Huz) I finally got enough total chopped for my four quarts. It nearly used up all the green tomatoes that were still good, and we'll be able to use the rest of the green and/or indoor-ripened tomatoes over the next few days, so the annual bout of "what do we do with the tomatoes?" is nearly over.

The recipe for green tomato relish is from the Ball Blue Book, and it wouldn't be nearly so bad if it weren't for the need to peel, core and chop. My neck and shoulders hurt a lot from all the chopping, and for a while there, my right hand was starting to get sore as well. But the chopping is finally done, and the tomatoes, peppers, onions and cabbage for the relish is sitting there, salted, working on the second step of the process. We'll see how it all turns out. Based on the sheer amount of work involved in making it, this had better be the best darned relish ever.