Ten Days of Little Celebrations – December 2016

I decided to choose the little celebrations I looked in December that were non-traditional. There were four groupings:

Classes

I thoroughly enjoyed a 2-day class on aquatic macroinvertebrates last week. It’s been almost two years since I too anything that was more than a few hours in duration….and a long time since I had been in a lab. I celebrated the subject matter and the experience that reminded me a lot of my undergraduate days.

There are two Coursera courses that I celebrated – linearly since I was not taking them concurrently: Osteoarcheology and Anatomy of the Abdomen and Pelvis. They are probably among the most challenging Coursera courses I’ve taken…but I’m so interested in the topics that I’m celebrating their availability and that I have the time to dedicate to them.

Food

I volunteered at the Howard County Conservancy’s Natural Holiday Sale and celebrated the huge variety of cookies to choose from. I like trying different kinds of cookies – never having enough time to try all the cookie recipes that ‘look good.’

I made the Paleo Chocolate Pudding (made with avocado!) and wow! I’ll make it again as part of our celebration at the beginning of 2017.

Backyard Birds

I heard an owl in the forest behind out house just before it was light enough to see it…and celebrated knowing it was there.

A red-tailed hawk visited our backyard again. I celebrated that it did…and that it didn’t stick around long enough to scare away the birds that visit bird bath and feeder.

Out and About

The most Christmasy items on the list of little celebrations are a walk around Brookside Gardens’ holiday lights and the poinsettia display at Rawlings Observatory.

And I always celebrate seeing Bald Eagles at Conwingo. The birds – rare not so long ago – are back in large enough numbers that it’s possible to seem them often. Something to celebrate!

Bountiful Fall Food

September is the transition month for us – from summer to fall. At the beginning of the month there were still tomatoes in our CSA share. Now we have lots of leafy greens (mizuna, arugula, kale, bok choi, lettuce, cilantro, great beans) with color variety from peppers, winter squash, and garlic. There are so many ways to prepare these goodies.

I always cook the winter squashes whole (pricking the skin with a fork) then take out the seeds just before I eat the first serving. Left overs are easy to use up. I like spaghetti squash in salads and stir fry. Any leftover acorn squash, sweet dumpling or butternut squash is well suited for making muffins or custard.

One of my husband’s favorite sides for meat loaf of hamburger patties is sautéed peppers, onions, and garlic. I like the peppers in salads but recently have used them all in the side dish – the colorful peppers are the highlight of the plate.

Of course – sometimes all the bounty is overwhelming and I revert to my favorite snack, anytime of year: popcorn. We don’t buy the packages of microwave popcorn anymore since the Nordic Ware bowl for popping the kernels in the microwave works very well for us. When I am dieting, I only add a little salt. Yesterday (pictured), it was buttered and salted!

Raw, steamed, stir fried, baked…I like these fall veggies so many ways. I am savoring the bounty and fresh flavoring now - trying not to think about when the CSA will be done for the year at the end of October.

CSA Week 4

The medium share at the Gorman Farm CSA was large again this week. I’m going to take two bags instead of one next week…since the bounty really does require the spaces – and I can more easily spread the weight to carry it all to the car. This week the share included (starting in the upper left corner and moving clockwise: mizuna (my choice from the overage bins…it is only available early in the season and I really like it), peas, scallions, beets, chard, Romaine lettuce, collards, broccoli, savoy cabbage, and kale.

I took some close up pictures of the broccoli,

Chard, and

Peas….so many beautiful foods for this next week.

I fit the leafy things into two plastic bins and some plastic bags. The beets (minus their leaves, cabbage, and broccoli in the crisper. So far, I’ve not had anything go to waste via spoilage and I want to keep it that way.

I’ll make fruit beety tomorrow. While the beets cook I’ll make kale chips. Both will keep longer in processed form although the fruit beety is one of my favorite summer snacks so I probably won’t put any of this batch in the freezer.

CSA Week 3

Wow – week 3 of our Community Supported Agriculture share was a very full bag! Starting at the far left and moving clockwise around the image: Napa cabbage, kohlrabi, lavender, oregano, pac choi, red leaf lettuce, broccoli, spinach and parsley. The pac choi was from the ‘overage’ table but I like it so much I couldn’t resist. The ¾ pound of spinach was a stuffed bag…several salads for sure (and I plan to use as least part of it in one of my favorite salads: spinach, strawberries, almonds with marmalade dressing). It will take some heavy veggie meals to finish off most of this before next Wednesday. I still have some of the romaine, chard, and garlic scapes from the week 2 share.

One of the things I have learned from the CSA over the past few years is how to end up with relatively little waste from the veggies. For example – when I process collards, chard, kohlrabi, beet, or kale leaves, I cut out the tougher stem first (example below is a collard leaf) and then save it for use in soup or stir fry.

This past week, I made a stem soup: cut the stems into ½ inch lengths, cooked at a slow boil in beef bouillon and seasonings with dry roasted peanuts added for the last few minutes of cooking for protein. It was an excellent lunch.

Before I started getting veggies via a CSA, I didn’t buy large leaved veggies. I have become better at handling them over the last few years. Now I roll the halves of the leaves together,

Cut the roll lengthwise and then across. It makes small bite sized pieces! I have discovered that I like using collard leaves in salads when they are cut this small. My plan is to add some of the last of the collards from week 2 to the spinach salad with strawberries!

Strawberries

It has been a wet, cool spring here in Maryland and the Gorman Farms Community Support Agriculture is going to get a late start…sliding from June 1^st into the 2^nd or 3^rd week of June depending on what happens in the next week or so. But ---- the strawberry season is going strong. CSA medium share members get a pint of strawberries free each day the farm is open for picking!

I’ve been twice so far. The picking is easy from the mounds although that means the path between the plants is lower and very muddy right after a rain….which was definitely the case the first time I went. The good news was that there were plenty of berries to pick and more left to ripen.

On both days I ate half the pint right after I got home! And then the rest the next day.

Aside from just eating strawberries just as they are – I love them in salads. My favorite salad so far has been arugula, quinoa, almond slivers, and strawberries….with an orange marmalade dressing (a little oil combined with orange marmalade). This is salad as dessert (but actually eaten as lunch)!

Next time I go – I plan to pick a bucket of strawberries and pay for the amount over the pint. As a CSA member we get a discount. I’m going to load up the freezer with strawberries to start of the summer.

Beautiful Food – May 2016

Veggies are the beauties this month – in anticipation of the Gorman Farm Community Supported Agriculture starting up the 1^st week of June. Two veggies that are available already in pots on my deck or in the front flowerbed are chives and dandelions.

I love the shape of the chive buds when they are still closed and after they open. I simply cut them up with the slim green stems in salads.

My grocery store often has largish bags of baby bok choy for $1.99. They can go into salads or into stir fry – which makes it easy to use them up while they are still crisp. The green and white color combination has always appealed to me. The contrasting smooth and crinkle texture adds to the visual appeal.

And what’s not to like about colorful bell peppers. I buy the organic ones and usually every color except green!

Ten Days of Little Celebrations – April 2016

April was full of springtime activities. Volunteer activities took me

Outdoors with 7th graders in a stream looking for macro invertebrates (and seeing bluebirds and tree swallows on the way to the stream),

To my daughter’s elementary school (15+ years ago) for an outreach program with a barred owl and his expert handler

Into the flurry of activity helping preschoolers craft butterfly models (our of coffee filters, clothes pins, pain, and pipe cleaners), and

To the county STEM fair as a judge – hearing about a project that taste tested mealworm cookies!

There are multiple reasons I celebrate these volunteer activities --- the interaction with the students, the topics, and the frequent connection to the natural environment.

I saw two birds that were worth celebrating (along with the bluebirds and tree swallows already mentioned): a male wood duck at Brookside Garden and loons at Centennial Park.

I enjoyed some traveling and celebrated

Being TSA Pre for both flights – it makes the passage through security faster (and not feeling like I have to get stuff out and off…then back together)

Helping build a chicken coop,

Baking carrot cakes that turned out yummy for 2 birthdays,

Earth Day at Dallas’ Fair Park (and remembering times I had been to the Fair Park many years ago).

And finally – I celebrated a day just being at home!

Beautiful Food - April

The two beautiful foods that I picked this month are from opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to food processing:

Dandelion greens are wonderful when they first come up in the spring – before they develop any bitterness. These grew in the old turtle sandbox on my deck and I cut them to use immediately in a salad. There are several plants in the sandbox that I am harvesting by simply cutting the leaves – leaving the root in place. So far the plant has continued to put up new leaves and even managed to bloom and produce seeds while I was away in Texas.

Homemade carrot cake with marmalade icing – yum. I started with the recipe from the King Arthur's Flour site. It occurred to me that before food processors, carrot cake was a lot of work; grating 3 cups of carrots is so easy with a food processor...quite an endeavor with an old style grater. I liked that while the recipe listed 1.5 cups of nuts – they suggested other ‘additions’ that added up to 1.5 cups. I used 3/4 cup unsweetened coconut and 3/4 cup raisins for my husband’s birthday cake. The homemade marmalade icing was substituted for the cream cheese icing since I am lactose intolerant. I simply poured the warm marmalade over the sheet cake while it was cooling. The cake was better the second (thirds and fourth) day because the spices ‘matured.’ Later in the month I made the recipe again for my sister’s birthday – with pecans and raisins as the ‘additions.’ I made a sheet cake with marmalade icing and cupcakes that were left plain with a tub of the cream cheese icing for people that wanted it. Some people at her party preferred the plain cupcakes…this carrot cake is that good!

Beautiful Food – March 2016

I am enjoying unadorned whole foods for snacks and realized that they have a beauty all their own. Walnuts with their convoluted surface. I always put them in a very small container so that I don’t eat more than a serving (1/4 cup).

Blueberries (partially) thawed from the freezer. There glistening purple color is quite a contrast from other foods.

Oranges are a day brightener both because of the beauty of their namesake color and their taste. I like to eat them standing at my kitchen sink watching the birds at the bird bath. I take off the skin before eating the pulp so I can chop the peel up to dry or include as extra peel in a batch of orange marmalade.

The is the time of year I begin to make the transition from foods I enjoy on cold days like soup (butternut squash curry with lots of topping: pumpkinseeds, broccoli flowerets, and a hardboiled egg) and

Breakfast for dinner (pancakes with apples cooked in cinnamon butter on top)

To foods that are best eaten cold – like the colorful spring leaves that have quite a mixture of green, purple and read leaves.

They are all part of the beautiful meals of March!

Beautiful Food – January 2016

It’s been cold this past month. That has translated into beautiful foods that are warming. Even my light lunch of stuffed pitas and cucumber slices had a little warmed from the toasted pitas. The stuffing was a hardboiled egg mashed with roasted garlic hummus. It looked and tasted to good I ate one of the pita wedges before I remembered to take a picture!

And there is the standby quick meal of stir fry with eggs. This one had bell peppers, celery and cauliflower. I cooked the veggies first and let the onion flakes and no-salt seasoning sit in the whisked eggs. Then I poured the eggs in and stirred until they were cooked. It is a very quick meal and looks good on green glass.

Soup is one of my favorite foods in the winter. This one included tomatoes from the freezer and sweet potatoes – both from the bounty of last summer’s CSA. I cooked them for 5 minutes in chicken broth (with added seasoning like basil, dried onions, dried garlic, pepper) then added some soba noodles. After another 5 minutes I used my potato masher to turn some of the chunks into broth thickener. I poured it in the bowl and topped it with some pumpkin seeds. I like the brilliant color of tomatoes and sweet potatoes.

Of course there is still the clean-out-the-crisper stir fry. This one has zucchini, red bell pepper, savoy cabbage, onion, and dry roasted peanuts.

And that’s the highlights of the ‘beautiful food’ I ate in January.

Gleanings of the Week Ending January 9, 2016

The items below were ‘the cream’ of the articles and websites I found this past week. Click on the light green text to look at the article.

Here’s how climate will affect what we eat – Several alarming items from this post: “High quality chocolate will be less available in the future, and if you want it, you’ll have to pay a lot more for it” and crops that grow in small geographic areas (most things besides stables) will be most severely impacted. It appears that diets will become more standardized (maybe boring too).

A Breathtaking view of the World’s Oldest River System – The New River Gorge in West Virginia…maybe a vacation destination?

Mapping the National Parks – Topographic maps, national scenic trails, geologic maps, and remote sensing…there is a lot of information best displayed on a map!

Ancient city of Pompeii unveils restored homes – The results of 12 projects done by a 2012 partnership been the EUs European Commission and Italian authorities. I was glad to see that some restoration work is being done; the many tourists take a toll on the site.

The Best of Cool Green Science: Birds & Birding Edition – Pointers to 10 birding posts from 2015 on The Nature Conservancy web site.

The Year in Food: Artificial Out, Innovation in (And 2 More Trends) – How many of the trends have you noticed? Some of the labeling (‘all natural’ and ‘clean’) is not well defined but it is pretty clear that consumers are voting with the dollars – which forces the food system to respond. I know that we don’t go out to eat as often as we used to, do most of our grocery purchases around the periphery of the store, and compost the small amount of food parings we don’t eat.

Mapping 260 years of Global Carbon Emissions – A short video map of the world that shows the global emissions from fossil fuel burning from 1750-2010.

Chocolate + Fresh Fruit = Easy, Impressive Vegan Desserts – All of these desserts look good to me….and they are on the healthier end of the spectrum for desserts!

These Are Our Favorite Earth Images of 2015 – The image of earth from space – awesome!

Appliance upgrades that save the most water, energy and cost – Thought provoking article. Sometimes deciding the ‘best bargain’ is more complex that we realize. One surprising result: one of the best appliances to update for water efficiency was the gas furnace, not the more intuitive shower head or dishwasher, because of the water associated with producing energy.