The Lonely Goatherd

Some Thoughts I Have About Raymond

2011-09-27T21:05:00.000-07:00

Raymond and I have conducted our relationship in secret for almost fifteen years. We weren’t hiding it, we weren’t up to anything-in fact there was a very marked lack of any sexual attraction between us though he has given me many compliments on my rack over the years. Thanks, Ray, by the way. We just had very different lives, different social circles, different schedules.

So when I found out he had died it was about 24 hours later and only because someone posted something about it on Facebook. FACEBOOK! I was in my office and I got up, walking past all these computer monitors and silent typists wearing headphones and stumbled out onto the street. My body shook. I didn’t know who to call. Our lives are like a venn diagram and no one else seemed to be in that overlapping area, that little place where our friendship existed. Just like that all traces of it were gone. I barely have even any photos of us together.

I wanted to call him and ask if it was true.

When people die everyone says the same things. Unlike our friendship my grief isn’t private-it’s shared by everyone who knew him, loved him. It’s shared by everyone in the world really, because time keeps marching on and keeps dragging us from each other and we try to forget during the in between times. We probably have to or every moment would be this agony of feeling, just constantly screaming at the top of our lungs, “I love you, I love you, I love you.” Because in this moment, knowing that he is gone, I wonder why I ever said anything else.

My last word to Raymond was on Gchat. We have been IMing each other pretty much every single day since it was invented. Maybe that’s why it was always so easy to tell things to Raymond that I could never tell anyone else- about my chronic depression, about my family, about my low self-esteem. Most people don’t want to hear about those things because they think it makes you tainted in some way, like a sick animal that should just slink off somewhere shady to die. Raymond never made me feel like any of my thoughts or feelings were unsafe to share. He never made me feel like the things I hoped for were stupid. He was, no matter how much we butted heads, always kind which is not something many people (definitely not me) manage to be. And my last word to him on Gchat was, “whatever.” I was annoyed with some disagreement we were having. I wasn’t angry or anything just being dismissive. On Sunday I called him to see if he wanted to go get a drink and he didn’t answer. I can never take back that last irritated conversation. So instead I want to remember the last time we were together which was at his house a few weeks ago.

It was rainy as shit. I went to his house and we drank beer, ate pizza and watched stand up. We smoked a cigar on the stoop and made a pact that we would do a stand up show together by November. We looked out at the rain and said we should write a song but by the time we got upstairs we were too lazy and drunk. We sat around his room while he played music and talked about people we love, think we might love, think we might get laid by. We said good bye and I hugged him and said let’s do this more. He agreed. Memory is strange because now, wanting it so desperately to be true, I think as I left I said I love you. Did I? Had I ever? It was true and he must have known it but even though I can picture myself saying it and I can picture him bashfully mumbling, “Love you too, Aimee, now get out,” or something like that...I don’t know if it really happened.

I doubt very much that I was anywhere in the top best friends of Raymond’s life-he had so many. But I believe our friendship was one of the most special in my life, one of the most unique and long lasting. A huge part of my life has been extinguished and besides I Love You I’d like to tell Raymond that. We don’t always know the ways we touch people, what compartment inside their psyche or heart we fill. I can walk into so many rooms in my mind but now one of the biggest ones is empty. If there are people in your life who shape you, understand you, indulge you, argue with you, make up afterwards with you, get crazy on the dance floor with you why keep it a secret? I wish it hadn’t been. I didn’t even know it was until I knew he was dead.

On my iTunes there is a bunch of music Ray picked out and a few that he wrote, a couple we wrote together. The ones I was involved with weren’t as good, but he always helped me anyway. One in particular popped up a few months ago and I hadn’t listened to it in awhile and it made me so happy to hear it. It reminded me I had this friend who wrote me this silly song just because I asked him to and a tear came to my eye even then. It was for a video I made about an evil villainess called the Pie Socialite who pies her enemies and Raymond wrote it from the perspective of her boyfriend before she goes evil, when she’s just plain old Holly his girl. He probably wrote it in like two minutes but it’s so catchy and funny and sweet. I’m listening to it now as I write this and trying to remember all the moments we’re supposed to remember in times like this- when I flashed him on stage during his first show with Ohnomoon, watching him walk out my door forgetting he was still wearing a pair of bunny ears over his hat, him running down the hall away from me in our high school after teasing me, tasting honey together at a harvest festival, smoking pink cigarettes on my stoop, dragging his drunk ass into a bed while he clutched a slice of pizza, him chastising a driver who almost doored me in Williamsburg as he biked cavalierly by, roasting together on Brighton beach, the sound of him calling me Red which is a nickname no one else living remembers...

There is nothing in this life worth as much as the capacity to be loved and to love others. I love Raymond Blanco. I believe the world and my life is a lesser place for not having him in it. There is no solace.

The Philosophy of Fasting

2009-12-06T11:41:00.000-08:00

This morning I was sitting around the kitchen table with my roommates, debating the merits of exercise. I was pro-exercise and others were con or somewhere in the middle. And one of them made the point that Elle MacPherson doesn't look like she does because she hits the gym every day. That exercise doesn't ever really make the life altering change to our looks that we hope it will. And I told her that in the last year I've lost roughly 20 pounds and definitely look different. She asked if this was just from exercise and I said yes...but it's not quite true.

Just after Thanksgiving last year I embarked on a five day fast. For five days I drank salt water, lemon juice and tea. During those five days I lost maybe eight pounds, most of it water weight. Which means I should have instantly put it back on in the days following the fast, but I didn't. I kept getting thinner. I ate less generally. I started exercising. So now a year later those five days of not eating have left their mark on me and I wonder if it was kind of a cheat.

This summer I was in a used bookstore and I found a slim yellow volume entitled "The Philosophy of Fasting" by Edward E. Purinton. Published in 1906 it advocates what is essentially the Master Cleanse, what I did a year ago (a very truncated version). I flipped through it, intrigued.

When you're not eating there's not much else to do but think. All the time you usually spend planning a meal, buying ingredients, preparing your food (or in lieu of that, the time you spend arguing about where to get take-out) is now just dead air. Since I was avoiding the thought of eating I thought about lots of other stuff that I had been avoiding by eating all the time. My way of dealing with difficult emotions or thoughts has always been through food, eating as a kind of sedation. Part of the reason I went on the fast was because that compulsion had begun to take over my life in a scary way.

This is a weird thing to write about because this blog is about things I think are cool or funny or interesting or poignant or would recommend other people try. But fasting is none of those things. It's personal, as is everyone's relationship to food and their bodies. As much as we do it in groups, fetishize it, torment each other over it, teach and write and talk about it, eating is like a relationship. No one knows what goes on between you and your food except the two of you. Edward E. Purinton's book touched a lot on the spiritual side of fasting, how starving yourself leads to all kinds of revelatory experiences but he sounds pretty crazy and self-obsessed, much like this post is starting to sound...but I still get it.

Because I fasted, which led to thinking which led to philosophizing. My reasons for eating more than I needed to and then more than I even wanted to became clearer to me and I found that those reasons held less power when I was aware of them. Am I cured of these compulsions? No. They manifest in a hundred other ways and I'll never abstain from all bad behavior, god willing. Do I have control over myself? What an ugly word control is especially when related to the physical self. But now I know what's possible. Change is possible. I've changed. I don't think fasting is the only way to make that happen for myself or anyone but I'm still really glad it did happen. I wont ever look like Elle MacPherson, obvs, and while I look different, kinda, maybe its not as different as I'd hoped when I started loosing weight.

Could I fast again? Well, I have one or two days at a time. It's not the same because the first time you don't eat for many days in a row you're not sure what to expect and it's kind of exciting. Now when I do it I'm like, oh yeah...that bullshit. But with it having been a year and all I'm beginning to feel some of that desire, to just set aside time for myself. Time to think, to have a headache, to reflect, to pee a hundred times a day, time to work out my philosophy. Whatever it is.

Secret Garden Tour Part 2: Waterpod

2009-11-05T21:52:00.001-08:00

Well, well, well. Look what we have here. It's one in the morning and winter was in the air as I walked home tonight. To warm myself I looked back on summer days of yore and it hit me-I haven't written a blog post in over a month! What the what!

Also to get through the night shift I've had about 50 ounces of yerba mate in a twenty minute period. I'm so pumped I've already jogged around the block a couples times, painted my room and rearranged all my books according to the Dewey Decimal system. I even smoked a cigarette to pass some time. It was either write this post or count all the hairs on my head until dawn. GET PSYCHED EVERYONE!!!

A lot has happened since the summer. I've finally settled into a new house and unpacked about 45% of my boxes. I got a hair cut.

So, the Waterpod. I visited twice this summer, once when they were docked in the Bronx, once in the Queen's marina. The first time it was just the tour. We saw the chickens, the greywater system, the wood burning stove the tiny lofted bedrooms and the Three Sisters garden. The second time I went and built a boat. But what is the Waterpod? Part art project, part experiment in sustainable living, the Waterpod is a giant barge that was dragged from borough to borough this summer teaching the local populace about food and agriculture from their very own working farm! The people living aboard fed and watered themselves from what they grew and the rain water they collected. It was kind of like a dream come true. Who among us hasn't been sitting around with friends late a night and said something along the lines of "Guys...guys. We should live on a houseboat. Seriously. Like, let's get one and live on it. We'll be free, man!" Well, that was like this except better.

The second time I visited it was the last weekend for the Waterpod and they were cramming the events in. There was a foraging tea and dance parties and music but my favorite thing was a boat building session led my Douglas Paulson and Christopher Robbins, artists who are interested in community building and also floating objects made from garbage. My friend Robin and I elbowed our way into their project and helped lash a couple of doors together along with giant chunks of styrofoam found floating along the shoreline. When time came to launch the very shady looking raft only the four of us volunteered to go for a spin. I'm not gonna lie...the paddles made from pine branches and two by fours were not the most wieldy. But again I felt like I was living the dream! Is there anything better than taking the detritus of human existence and with some comradery and power tools turning it into an adventure on the open water? I'm here to tell you...no, there is not. Of course, we were slowly sucked out towards the sea and had to be hauled to shore by a kayak, but near drowning is part of the fun. And when we got back there was rose hip tea and a sleepy cat in a captain's bed.

Lotus Garden: Secret Garden Tour Pt. 1

2009-09-16T09:03:00.000-07:00

I snuck home last weekend for the Secret Garden Tour and visited two amazing places. So I decided they each deserved their own post (And then I'd feel less nuts about all the writing I'm doing. Or more nuts?)

The Lotus Garden is on the Upper West Side which is like a foreign country. I'm a downtown girl, if you know what I mean. The townhouses and condominiums of Central Park West through to Riverside Drive are completely alien to me. They're full of rich people, you guys! What's interesting about The Lotus Garden is it's completely ornamental and this was a stipulation of its existence. The garden had originally been a ground floor community garden and when it was ripped up for Columbia to develop another building they had enough sway to demand reconstruction. Now the garden is elevated over the new building's parking garage, but growing vegetables was banned as it was considered 'low rent'. Why would you need to grow food when you can buy it?

I don't mean this as a criticism of the garden. Frankly, it's totally beautiful and well maintained and verdant etc. I just find it pretty fascinating how people's attitudes about home gardening have been reflected in the landscape. Upstate now I've noticed that depending on the neighborhood you're driving through many people have started to have vegetable gardens (or continued to if they never had any snobbery about it). Will there come a time when Lotus Garden needs to grow vegetables? Since I'm not usually that interested in ornamental gardens, especially the shaded hosta filled variety I spent a lot of time thinking about that as we toured around.

Members of the garden have a key to let themselves in and not many open hours. That plus the fact it's up a locked staircase on top of a private parking garage means it's a secret garden indeed. The Lotus Garden is also run solely by volunteers and to register as a non-profit they'd need to be open at least 20 hours a week which would be pretty challenging. I wasn't clear from listening if they need more members or money or what...but I guess being a non-profit they could then apply for grants and then get more members and then more money.... wahhh! How confusing the access to park and growing space is in New York! I heart community gardens but they need to become less rarefied and more inclusive if they want to survive. Probably not the Lotus Garden though. Their roots run deep.

They have trees standing twenty feet high and a koi pond whose ancestors probably pre-date my birth. The people who met us there, with cider and crisp apples from the farmer's market as a gift, were gracious and incredibly committed. Carolyn Summers showed off her miniature garden, tiny Hen and Chicks planted in the gravel, baby hostas and ferns stunted by the pots shortening their roots and hidden carefully under ground. It's kind of fascinating how people take pride in what they grow and what they choose to grow and why. With space limitations she made her plot a museum of the small. I could never grow a garden like that...but wouldn't it be incredible if everyone had a little space to see what they'd sow?

You can visit The Lotus Garden from 1-4 every Sunday April-November on W. 97th between Bdwy and West End. Thanks to Huong for photos!

Small Potatoes

2009-09-11T08:56:00.000-07:00

Well, it's September 11th. I don't think about September 11th very much. I didn't think about it today until I checked Facebook and saw everyone's statuses reminding me and telling me that they were thinking about it and also pretty sad about it.

I woke up this morning planning to write a post about some potatoes I grew in a window box. They're Magic Mollies, purple potatoes that I hoarded for almost a year to plant in my garden. When we had to move out and couldn't take the garden with us I got the shovel and uprooted one of the potato plants. It was a wonderful color, dark green with purple coming up the stem and spreading into the leaves growing in every direction. I put it in a long narrow plastic container with some silty dirt and hoped for the best. Over the summer it continued to grow, taller and taller but there were never any flowers on it. Eventually the whole thing collapsed on itself and I made the executive decision to rip the thing up rather than cart around twenty pounds of dirt to yet another of my many homes.

All that came of it were a handful of tiny potatoes. They looked like something a woodland animal leaves behind. Appetizing, but I didn't get around to eating them, then forgot them in a friend's refrigerator. It was a disappointing yield but still the Mollies are magical to me. Anytime you have a hand in creating something, even something so small and turd-like, it's kind of a thrill.

The scale of the worthwhile and the meaningless is such a difficult one to balance. On the one hand I'm thinking about a day eight years ago when thousands of people died a short subway ride away from me. I have memories of the day and the days that followed. My mother got sick that same week and was in the hospital for ages, it seemed. I remember visiting her and walking through the ER hallways lined floor to ceiling with pictures of missing people. On the other hand I'm thinking about potatoes.

When today passes I'll be thinking about the potato side of life far more prominently. Or there will be another unspeakable tragedy and I'll think about that. Or another crop, something even more sustaining and delicious and I'll think about that. I guess on the anniversary of important events, both good and bad, we're not just thinking of one day but all the days in between, all the events that have changed and shaped us, who we were and what we've evolved into. And we hope this time next year things will be better.

The Secret Garden Tour/ I Love Plants Like Whoa

2009-09-06T08:50:00.001-07:00

Someone recently said, "Your posts are so long!" without adding "And really interesting..." so here's a pretty short and sweet and matter of fact one for ya. Ya knows who ya is.

This summer I met two lovely people, Colin and Huong. They're artists and though I'm not sure about what kind of objects they make (if only objects qualify) they certainly know how to throw a party. Frankly, there is an artistry to that I greatly admire. Many fun times were had but this fun time in particular took place on their Secret Garden Tour. Colin has assured me it's not really a secret so I am at liberty to divulge. They've been developing the tours all summer and this particular one brought us to two very diverse examples of community growing.

Damn. I typed a whole bunch and then my computer shut itself down and it was all lost. There's a lesson in here somewhere but for who?

Let me regroup. THE FIRST PLACE WAS...Red Shed Community Garden on Kingsland Ave. and Skillman. They have a willow and fig tree, a shed, and a grill that they started to fire up at the smallest hint we'd be staying a while. Didn't bring anything to bbq though unfortunately. This garden is very reminiscent of a community garden I grew up next to in the East Village run by Open Road. I had a plot there which still remains. I planted a tree in it so they can't dismantle it. Cherries!

Anyway, at Red Shed there are the locals who've been living in the neighborhood and nearby projects for ever and there are the gentrifying intruders. As a visitor I can only say that things seem friendly. They have community plots and personal ones with lots of fruits and vegetables growing. Eggplants were flourishing when we were there and mosquitos. The keep extra bug spray in the shed.

Our second stop on the tour was Rooftop Farms on Eagle St. in Greenpoint. Rooftop is run by Annie Novak and Ben Flanner and they've been getting a lot of attention this year because they've taken the idea of a green roof and turned it into a working farm. The roof's owner wanted to install a green roof and Annie was called in to figure out how to make it all work. We talked for awhile before the tour started and it seems like that's what she does circling the world, stopping at farms and meeting challenges in growing. As she said several times in different ways, "I love plants like, whoa."

Rooftop sells their produce and welcomes volunteers. They're hoping to make the farm work as a viable option for other buildings around the city. The installation is quite expensive but since then she says they've been farming as cheaply as possible. With time the produce will begin to pay for itself and make up the original cost.

We walked down the rows of tomatoes, carrots, squash, beans, fresh herbs, melons and Annie told us about the different plants and their composting system. They also have two bee hives (!) and are growing hops up the side of one of their walls.

Now, I'm not a farmer. But I do love plants like...well, like something. What was especially exciting about the tour was the feeling that hey, you want to grow things, grow them! You want to start a community garden, start one! You want a farm, build it on the roof!

So how about it? Anyone want to start a community garden with me?

The next Secret Garden Tour is this coming Saturday Sept 12th starting at 2 PM at The Lotus Garden then going on to the Waterpod at Concrete Plant Park. If you can't come then find another time to visit either place (the Waterpod in particular looks cool as shit) or hell, just go to your nearest community garden and sit back on a bench. Enjoy the last warm days of September as the harvest comes rolling in. Think what you'll plant next year. Imagine it grow.

Fly Away Home

2009-08-29T19:51:00.000-07:00

Since moving from Sunset Park this spring I've lived in four other locations, not counting a few regressive nights on my mother's couch, which would bring the total to five. Certain aspects of moving have become very streamlined for me. Every time I start packing to go to a new place I go through my things and ask myself, When was the last time you touched this object? Wore this shirt? Opened this book? Things have been paring down. Coming to my current roost I had one bag of clothes and a backpack. Of course the weather has completely changed since then and I've been wearing the same long sleeve shirt over and over. I don't know if this means I should have packed more or if I could have gotten away with packing even less. One shirt. Done. Who needs pants? The Man.

Earlier this summer I went camping with some friends in Harriman State Park on the edge of a lake. We took a train to Tuxedo then walked through town and off the road into the woods. I have been looking back on that trip as some of the worst packing of my entire life. I walked into the woods prepared for little more than dying cold and wet in a ditch covered head to toe in ticks. Yet somehow my backpack was so fucking heavy it felt like my collarbone was being gradually pulled apart by the straps across my shoulders. It was a two hour hike to the camp site and this wasn't considering the walk through Brooklyn to the subway then wandering all over Penn Station for the train.

Luckily, my friend Zach lead the way and he loves to camp! It's just camp camp camp day and night with this guy. He has a camp stove, a bear bag (this is where you keep your food not your bears...unless you eat delicious, delicious bear), various tarps, and an extra tent for myself and my pal Robin who would have been sleeping on the dirt with me otherwise. He also had lots of great advice, like "Don't wash your face with the water we cooked pasta in," and "Don't bring berry scented lotion to the woods full of bears".

Some of you (I mean the two people who read this blog) may know how terrified I am of sleeping out of doors. Like most unreasonable fears this one has waned through practice or the 'facing' of fear. I've slept in a tent a few times now without prescription drugs OR a panic attack and though I went to bed that first night startlingly sober (though he packed everything else Zach forgot the bourbon) I believed in the possibility of sleep and not that I would be murdered by an itinerant woodsman.

Fear is not the same thing as discomfort and within the hour both Robin and I were shivering in our sleeping bags. At least that's what she claims. Every time I looked over at her she was calmly breathing out frozen white puffs. According to her she tossed and turned and declared me an 'excellent sleeper'. We'd borrowed our bags from a couple who told us they'd slept on the snow with them. We realized they must have zipped the bags together and cuddled but Robin rejected my offer to spoon. You can lead a horse to water but you can't make it spoon with you.

The next night I thought, if I could just be warm I would sleep like the dead. But the body wants what it wants. It was warmer but there was no peace. You see, I hadn't packed a mat and through the thin texture of my sleeping bag I felt every rock and clump of grass and rabbit dropping held together by the hard hard cold cold ground. My eyes closed occasionally but that was as close to sleep as I got.

Since this trip I've thought a lot about what's the least amount someone would need to live in the woods and though there are many people who actually have the experience to answer this question let me dwell on my suppositions a moment. Fire. Food that wont quickly perish, until you learn to throttle squirrels for soup. Good walking shoes, until you walk them off your feet and develop a thick sole of skin. A tarp. A place to sleep. Well, I seem to be wavering here...because what is necessary to living in the woods depends a lot on how much you want it to be like living in your home. One could slowly shake off what is vital to a civilized life and keep only what is vital to survival. I don't think of that as a romantic idea. Being uncomfortable is hard. And if you're going to live in the woods, well, why not build a cabin? As camping goes we were in a pretty good place, not a cabin but there was a nylon roof keeping the rain and some of the bugs out.

I still don't have a permanent home but when it happens how will I face the flood of...stuff? All the lamps, the mattress, the bags and bags of clothes I never wear, boxes of books to the ceiling, letters, photos, drawings, twenty-five years worth of knick knacks pouring in on me from storage to be sorted through and categorized and valued again. They wont take it well if I say, "Sorry. You're not vital to my survival." Then I imagine myself in a bare room, in a poorly insulated sleeping bag tossing and turning on the floor. But hey, at least I don't have BAGGAGE! There must be a happy medium somewhere.

Wait, before I finish I just want to mention the bugs again. There are a lot of bugs out there. Ticks especially. Zach had a handy little plastic tweezer to pull them out. Robin was covered in them every time we came back from a hike. I never found any on myself but did enjoy mooning her under the pretense of a tick search. The thing about bugs is in the city we think of them as scurrying around the floor, hiding in the dark until we go to bed. It's a war and we think by keeping our homes clean, lining the cracks with poison we'll win every skirmish. But as soon as you go out where there are more trees than people you can see the fallacy in this thinking. Bugs in the woods are not shy, they're not gonna hide and you're in THEIR house. A tent is basically a little air bubble where you can breath without inhaling gnats.

I'm in the woods again, in a cabin actually, and the line where my house ends and the bugs' begin is blurry. There's no heat and the screen doors droop on their hinges. I have to evict squatting spiders and hypnotized moths pretty regularly, ants swim in my honey and this morning I killed a mosquito helping itself to the buffet of blood in my eyelid. Later I was walking along the road and saw a black raspberry bush, the last of the season's fruit glistening on its stems. Falling on it like a gremlin, I ate what was there leaving nothing for the birds or neighborhood children. When I stood up I checked my legs, for ticks of course, but found instead a little red stowaway, a ladybug clinging desperately after what surely must have been a traumatic trip through space.

I recited the old rhyme. Ladybug, Ladybug fly away home...and just like that she spread her hard candy wings and fluttered off. It was kind of like magic and I appreciated that she didn't let me get to the grim conclusion...Your house is on fire and your children are gone. Now trying to imagine my future home I keep thinking of the ladybug's scorching tinderbox. The tiny firetruck manned by grasshoppers. Her (many?) eyes reflecting the dying flames and charred remains. She'll have to rebuild.

On our third day of camping we woke up to pouring rain. We shook out our temporary homes, rolled them up and packed them away. When we got off the train we went en mass to a friend's house for showers, a hot meal, Pictionary and a big bottle of bourbon. Damp cold and sobriety has its place...but not at MY place. That much about my future residence I do know.

April is the Cruelest Month...and May Through August

2009-08-26T12:14:00.000-07:00

Statistically speaking I dropped off this whole blogging thing at about the right time. Half a year and I checked out. I can go on about the reasons why I did but what's more interesting are the reasons why I'm writing again, which will hopefully not be just another whim. But hey, who knows? Life is long and full of impediments.

Let us take a journey back to April then, that far flung month of Fools and sudden flurries. It was wet, it was cold but Spring had reached out to tap our shoulders and say, "Hey, wait up I'm coming! Don't go without me!" I looked out at the sagging broken bits of my garden and thought, Let's do this thing. Earth was turned, leaves composted, cement swept and the great Craigslist search began. First to build a garden box you need wood and free wood is the best kind.

My roommate Claire and I met up on a desolate street a hair's breadth from Red Hook then followed a strange woman into her warehouse, using a flash light to pick through her debris and find chunks of wood of an approximate size to one another. They were all different finishes, some actual lumber, some just the hacked up drawers of an old bureau, some were lined mysteriously with cloth that no force on earth (barring industrial solvents) could remove. We bungeed what we could to the back of Claire's bike and the rest on a tiny black hand cart and walked the forty or so blocks to our house, with the weight of the wood tipping their conveyances over every ten feet or so. Tenacious C, as I like to call her, urged me on as my shoulders separated and we finally made it, April wind whipping our faces and the clouds rolling over.

Aw, look at this photo. I'm so glad my Nalgene is pictured here. I lost it a few weeks ago at a yoga studio. Never forget!!

When we finally got to hammering all this garbage together we noticed our boxes were perfectly coffin sized, if you were being buried 150 years ago in the Old West.

There was one for me as well but I like the power to the workers tone of Claire's pose here with the hammer and all.

Hmm, now we have boxes. Where to find dirt? Until you need large amounts of it at once you assume dirt is the most readily available commodity out there. I mean everywhere I look I see dirt, right? But no. Craigslist again! This time it lead us to a bar on Fifth Ave. where the proprietor had been digging out his basement, hoping to make the ceiling a habitable distance from the floor. One day it will be a music venue but that particular day it looked like where we were going to be murdered. It didn't help that in the corner sat two hundred partially filled black garbage bags under a caged bare bulb. These turned out to be full of dirt, not body parts, and we started hauling them up the perilously steep basement staircase. Another surprise about dirt-it's pretty fucking heavy! It took the both of us to manage certain bags and when we peaked in one we saw why. This wasn't loamy compost full of rich organic matter. This was red silt, the clay earth of old Brooklyn sitting under the pressure of a building for a hundred years. Not entirely sure anything would even grow in it we loaded down a friend's car until it sagged and drove the bags home to go through another back breaking session of moving them down the long alleyway to our apartment.

Now the fun part! Slashing the bags with a razor blade filled me with glee. Because I'm deranged. Claire upended our compost bin over the red clay, ignoring un-composted bits like corn husks and what we'd just eaten for lunch, assuming it would all work itself out in the end. We mixed the two together hoping to create a hospitable environment for our seeds.

And such seeds. I had it all worked out. I was gonna grow a whole season's worth of food and have enough to can and jar, freeze and dry, and subsist on all winter. I dreamed big, baby. Tomatoes, snap peas, kale, carrots, green onions, potatoes (Including the purple Magic Mollies I'd hoarded in a paper bag all year. When I reached my hand in to get them I shrieked. Their eyes had sprouted and the stems caressed me like antennae), strawberries, five kinds of basil, rosemary, thyme, beets. All of these I planted in peat lined trays and covered carefully with clear plastic. I worried over them like a mother. A negligent, inconsistent mother but somehow they sprouted. I built a trellis over the boxes out of old silkscreen frames for the climbing peas and sat back waiting to reap what I'd sown.

Then the blow! My landlord wanted my house, Tenacious C was moving out and I had to find a new place to live all of which is a saga for another day. I suffered in a few ways, throwing out most of my personal belongings, losing money etc. But the hardest thing was saying goodbye to my garden that I had planted and tended in good faith and which now was reduced to a charge from my landlord. Removal. He trashed it all. All our work in a dumpster just like that.

That's assuming he didn't just charge me and keep the beds in his new yard anyway, which I'd really be glad to hear.

So here I am, in upstate New York again, a part of the world that first inspired me to begin writing about food and the outdoors and growing things. And I said this was going to be a post about why I've started writing again not why I stopped but it seems they're the same story, really. I stopped because my garden was taken away before it could be anything and I'm starting again because writing about food and life and plants brings it back to life, allows it to stretch its tendrils out and climb that trellis where it can unfurl and bear fruit.

Metaphorically, I mean. Because it's actually in a landfill now.

They Know What We Want

2009-03-30T10:30:00.000-07:00

Hey, by now this is kind of old news, but Michelle Obama is starting a vegetable garden at the white house.

I'm not a particularly informed or political person and part of the reason for that is I feel like a lot about politics is just a big show to keep disinterested parties like myself complacent enough to not take any kind of action. And what was scary about the Bush administration (aside of course for EVERYTHING) is that they didn't even bother putting on a show for people like me, who care about food or the environment or social programs or anything good in the world. Is Obama a savior? Is he really that different from what we had in the past? Is it possible for a powerful political leader to be that different?

Well, this is obviously not the forum to answer any of my bullshit questions...but hey, good show, Michelle. Thank you for patronizing me! I feel good about it.

Bird Watching

2009-03-06T19:03:00.001-08:00

This is partly an effort to meet my personal four blog posts a month quota and partly because what I am about to relate blew my mind grapes and I need to share it with my two readers.

Today I was walking in Greenwood Cemetery and saw a giant bird of prey pecking the flesh from the leg of a squirrel in a tree branch just a few feet above my eye level. I watched in terrified fascination for awhile, hoping it had gotten that squirrel bastard who kept eating through the stems of my sunflowers last summer when it looked up and stared me down. It was like in The Last Unicorn when the unicorn is trying to get away from the harpy...well, I'm a nerd. But I turned and walked away slowly so as not to attract its attention in much the same manner.

Nature!!!

And where the Devil stepped onion grew from one foot print and the other, garlic...

2009-03-02T18:22:00.000-08:00

I've failed. I made a New Year's resolution and kept it private so no one would know my shame but the truth must come out. My resolution was to write four blog entries a month. Crazy, right?

Luckily my birthday is in February, so I always get a chance to renew resolutions and start over for a new year, a personal new year. And I hereby renew. Right now I'm sitting on the couch watching BCAT and finishing off the better part of a bottle of red wine. Just signed a petition to legalize beekeeping in NY.

What's the hot news on BCAT? Mostly about saving Coney Island. My roommate Claire is working on a website, saveconeyisland.net, which just put up its own petition. Sign both!

So...back to me.

I wanted to write about garlic because a few weeks ago I was sitting on my couch deliriously ill and over the phone my friend Robin suggested two possible home remedies for the common cold:

1. Drink hot water over crushed ginger

2. Eat raw garlic mixed with warm water and honey

Now I heard number 2 as "Eat raw garlic with hot water OR honey," and thought, of course honey is the better choice here! It'll disguise the intensity of the flavor...duh. Only an idiot would do anything else.

If you've ever eaten a mouthful of raw garlic minced by a fever-addled madwoman (by which I mean in large irregular chunks) you may not know how painful it is. I gagged and fell to the floor clutching approximately where my esophogus turns into my stomach. Or is it the intestine? Well, anyway. It hurt. It hurt again the next morning when I gave it another try. Eventually I checked in with Robin and figured out the warm water kind of helps the whole mess slide down a lot better.

I have a much admired tank top that says GILROY GARLIC FESTIVAL, but I've never been. It's one of my great dreams because horrible throat burning aside garlic is one of my favorite things. I put loads of it in every meal and that's why I smell and no one will ever love me. BUT on the flip side garlic is supposed to help prevent heart disease and cancer so it'll be a long life alone. Garlic thins your blood which is probably what's keeping the vampires away. They want the arteries choked with saturated fats...I'll never have a pale night-walking lover!

Around mid-summer we get bunches of beautiful green garlic scapes with our CSA. The first time they arrived I had never seen scapes before and was mystified by them. A garlic scape is basically a head of garlic bolting, or sending its flower up into the world. Garlic can cleverly grow from seed or by increasing its cloves under the ground. Since we like to eat the cloves it behooves garlic growers to snap off the scapes to keep them from flowering. That'll get the plant to concentrate its growing power on a full delicious bottom.

But you can eat them! Apparently. My cooking of scapes hasn't reached transcendental levels quite yet. It took Claire and I awhile to even figure out what the hell they were.

On both farms I stayed garlic was a part of the experience. At Frosty Morning Farms the garlic wasn't ready to harvest on my first visit and the second time they'd all already been yanked out of the ground and laid out to dry on stack after stack of plastic crates.

In between I was at Cross Island Farms where Dani was growing garlic for the first time. She'd planted a bunch of different varieties to see what would grow best in their wet clay earth. Now I don't want to sound like I know a damn thing, but Dani left the garlic in the ground way to long. I didn't know this until I spoke to Allison at Frosty as we went through the drying trays later. You need to pick garlic while the stalks are still green. Dani left her garlic in the ground until their tops molded and broke off as we attempted to ease them out of the ground. They were still tasty but they weren't pretty and probably wouldn't hold up as well to drying and preserving. Many of the heads were split open in unsightly ways or lost forever in the dirt.

That's ugly garlic. Pretty garlic is what I made with Allison!

She taught me to braid garlic in a simple rope. You soak the dry stems in water to soften them then over, under, through the loop...well, I can't really describe it (or replicate it on my own). The one pictured above I held up to photograph, telling Allison, "I'm pretty proud of this guy." She nodded in a non-commital way.

All these boring non-anecdotes have only garlic in common. But garlic has so many appealing qualities-medical, mystical, decorative...a fourth thing. It's the base for all my soups and under the skin of my roasted chickens. What else runs through so many aspects of our lives in such a positive way?

I don't really have an answer but if I'm going to keep my re-resolution I better publish this post. Feel free to leave any ideas in the comments

OH god!! WHY??

2009-03-02T18:10:00.000-08:00

So congrats all you assholes who voted for 'Dr. Watson'. Your sick whims have been indulged. It's my own fault...I donated no money at all. I'm sorry, Vince...FOR YOUR FACE!

Some positive news though. Babyface came in number 3. There are some aesthetically sensible people in the world!

Oh yeah, and Vince raised $1376 for Just Food. Yay!

A Hirsute Heart

2009-01-25T06:03:00.000-08:00

That's Vince. Vince is raising money for Just Food a very amazing local organization that is trying to build a sustainable food system in our fair state by connecting with farmers and NYC communities. They're also working to legalize bee keeping in the city. Throw your hands up!

So how is he doing this? The most convoluted way possible. Every dollar you donate is a 'vote' for your favorite beard, choices shown above. On February 28th the votes are counted and Vince will be shaving your favorite look onto his face. Why? Because it's Bearduary, apparently.

Now you may not (probably don't) know Vince so your interest in how much or little hair is growing on his face is probably pretty nil. Yeah, it's a great and worthy cause, but that's not why I'm imploring you, a stranger, to give a crap. It's because BEARDS MUST BE STOPPED.

Beards are the worst. They are lazy and repulsive, particularly on a young man who has beauty and symmetry of face. What a cruel waste! In my book only ship captains and guys who bare a vague resemblance to Santa Claus should ever put down the razor. But even then, what if they're a hot young ship captain? Or Sexy Claus? You see the murky moral territory we're in with even those concessions. Bearduary and all beard related celebrations should be SHAVED FROM THE FACE OF THE EARTH.

So vote NO on proposition Vince Has A Beard. Put your dollar(s) towards Babyface and you're putting a dollar towards civility and smooching without stubble-burn. Here's how:

1) Check out the pick above to decide which is your favorite beard (NO BEARD- AM I RIGHT??)
2) Go to: http://www.nycharities.org/donate/c_donate.asp?CharityCode=2262
3) Enter your donation amount. Anything helps. Really.
4) Towards the bottom of the donation page, dedicate your donation "in honor of" the beard of your choice (NO BEARD-AM I RIGHT??) -- i.e. insert the name of the beard.
5) Then put this email address in the "notify someone" blank so Vince can receive a record of your vote. ( tvtrotter@hotmail.com ). You have till February 28th-don't delay.

Of course, if you disagree with my well formed and articulated opinion, bring it! Vote for the mutton chops or the gay one or whatever. Because what is right will triumph here...what is right must triumph.

there was not a sweeter kitty meow meow meow in the country or the city meow meow meow

2009-01-11T09:19:00.000-08:00

I've had a very cat-filled week (this isn't going to be about food insomuch that I haven't eaten any cats). First my dear boy Lloyd got a urinary tract infection and had to be rushed into surgery before his bladder exploded all over his other organs and it cost me EIGHT HUNDRED DOLLARS. I got this cat from Kitty Kind, a no kill organization full of crazy people, as all people willing to devote so much time and resources to rescuing garbage animals probably are crazy but also thank god they exist or a cat like Lloyd would have been thrown in the drowning bucket. When we got him he had an eye infection and a hernia and now he's got a defective wee wee. He'll have to eat prescription food for the rest of his life which will hopefully be a long one cuz I love him like crazy cakes.

Then like an idiot I volunteered to baby-sit a kitten all weekend. I say I'm an idiot because I had to go pick her up after the longest day of work and disappointment carrying ten tons of shit already and when I got home and wanted to black out for a proper ten hours I had a six week old ball of fluff needing my head and purring all night. TOTALLY WORTH IT.

I've got a lot to say about cats because I am a crazy cat lady. No, there are no (permanent) cats in my apartment right now and there probably wont be for many years. I can't afford them and don't have the time to spend with them. My roommate just told me about an article she read as she petted little Daffodil (the kitten who I assume was named by a child...I hope) that said a pet on average costs over a thousand dollars a year to keep. Perhaps this was a 'how to cope with the recession' piece, encouraging everyone to euthanize their animals to save a buck, I don't know. Whatever, I have no pets now...but when I can there will cats all over the damn place. Still, I am already a crazy cat lady. If I walk into a room and there's a cat in it, it's like everyone else just fades away and there are only the two of us. Music swells. Cats purr.

In itself this isn't such an embarrassing quality. I've definitely had more humiliating objects of affection. But since my family knows of my obsession I get lots of cat related gifts-socks, shirts, pendants, cat shaped boxes, books of cat quotations. So yeah, a cat lady isn't a crazy cat lady until her family finds out and dresses her appropriately.

Anyone who loves animals knows they're setting themselves up for heartbreak. Cats die. It's their worst quality, I think. Not wanting to go through it again this week I maxed out my credit card for Lloyd. Seeing him all sick and scared and drugged up brought back memories of all the other cats I've known, late nights of anxiety and early mornings full of dread as the phone rings with the news. No, they didn't make it. At the end we think back on the quality of that life and try to assess. Was it worth it? Did I do them right? Obviously, these are much easier questions to approach with a cat than a person. Both love and death are far less complicated with animals which I guess is part of the pleasure of their company.

Do animals living in an apartment really have quality of life? My mom's are pretty spoiled. She's like their personal chef/masseuse/cleaning lady. She begs scraps of fish for them at the market and mixes oyster juice into their water. Still, they often seem bored, restless and, let's face it, fat.

Farm cats don't necessarily live an idyllic life either. The drowning bucket was invented out on the farm. There's lots of competition and often little veterinary care, so I hear. I was on two farms this summer. Frosty Morning Farms had two cats, Jezebel and Don Gato. Jezebel was as fickle as her name suggests, but both cats seemed happy, fed, sun kissed etc.

In stark comparison was the cat at Cross Island Farms who I didn't even know existed until I'd been there two days.

Dani, who has four dogs running around like they own the place, mentioned that David had a cat. What cat, I inquired. I see no cat. Oh, it lives up in his office she replied. The office was down the hall from my bedroom and before turning in I peeked in on it. It was a black matted thing kept up in the attic like the mad first wife in a Brontë novel and it creaked the saddest, craziest meow as the light went on. I visited it every day but god that broke my heart. I asked Dani why the cat had been banished and sniffing she said, "Well, it peed in my potted plant and I just don't care for the smell." Good...god...there is no picture of this as it was too depressing.

So there's a wide range in quality of life in the country and the city for cats and people. I've learned through trial and terrible error how a pet should be treated, just how everyone painfully learns how other people should be treated, and themselves. Hopefully well. No locking anyone in attics unless it gets sexy V.C. Andrews style. It never does.

Meow meow meow.

Five Roses

2009-01-05T18:26:00.000-08:00

2009 will never see Five Roses Pizza. My first job was there, I was 13 and they paid me five dollars in cash per hour, plus tips. From what the final owner, Cristina, told me recently, not much involving pay roll has changed. This may explain why she was always the only one behind the counter the last few years with the occasional circulating delivery boy.

If you've never worked in a pizzeria let me tell you the pro and con: You can make a pie however it is you best like it, more sauce/more cheese, and eat a slice fresh. You go home with the greasy smell of pizza clogging every pour. Which is the pro and which is the con??

Even though my time there was relatively brief in comparison to other jobs I remember it very vividly. The aprons, the texture of the dough, electrocuting myself on the stove, learning not to drink milk with pizza, a fifth thing...like when Josephine pointed out I shouldn't touch my eyes and hair in front of customers before serving them food. Thanks, now I'm totally self-conscious.

Aside from extorting child labor Five Roses was a meeting place for neighborhoodites. You always bumped into everyone you knew there, family and friends. I remember blushingly trying to cut a pie before the inquisitive eyes of my first serious crush. All their food was from authentic Sicilian recipes, made in the kitchen in the back by an authentic Sicilian. They didn't buy stuff frozen or belong to chain. It was a truly local establishment.

The East Village from ten years ago is so completely changed that when I walk there now it's almost unrecognizable and it'll be different in another ten years. It's weird how shocked and saddened I was to turn the corner and see it had changed in a way I'd never prepared for- Five Roses is closed. The gates are shuttered, the space is for rent, there are poster boards of photos and farewell wishes in the windows. If only I'd known and savored that last slice. Had one last surprise party (I've had like three surprise parties thrown there for me and was surprised every time because I'm an idiot) or at least said goodbye to Cristina...my childhood...something.

But that's kind of how it is. You don't always get to say goodbye.

Five Roses, I love you.

"I bet you don't even bother to compost your own feces!"

2008-12-29T15:13:00.001-08:00

Last week someone made a joke about how I should write a blog post about going to the bathroom in a stranger's apartment and it reminded me of another joke someone made to me about how I should write a blog about urinating in public, with photos of all the places I've made my mark. Layers upon layers. So many jokes about composting feces in Robin's sleeping bag! So many!

There was a time when the outdoor relief list would have been very short, non-existent really. A female growing up in the city has few opportunities to pop a squat that don't leave her frighteningly vulnerable. Then a couple years ago I was in Utah with my roommate Claire tailgating at a rodeo and could not fucking take a piss behind the pick up truck. Not kidding when I say it was totally embarrassing. What's so hard about peeing?

Anyway, when I was at Frosty Morning Farms they had an outhouse or 'composting toilet'. It was a little wooden shack up a flight of stairs full of dust, spiders and peat moss to throw down the hole after your bizness. Now, I drink a lot of water and am often self-conscious about the number of times I run to the restroom during the day. But out in the hot sun, weeding or god knows, drinking water and going to pee was the best way to get out of the heat and break the monotony (partially true for working in an office as well) so I did it freely, lighting the way with a candle by the peat moss bucket. After a couple days, Allison took me aside...

She let me know that urine really isn't so good for a compost toilet because it gets too acidic and she usually went, oh, behind the tool shed or by the paddock or behind any convenient tree. A few days later a visitor to the farm was in the outhouse and I could hear the stream like a gushing white water rapid-poor Allison had been listening to me ruin her compost!!

So yeah, peeing outdoors. Once the floodgates were opened...I kind of dug it. Especially at night, in the pitch black, coyotes howling madly in the distance, chickens scattering, night bugs hopping around and down my throat in one noteable instance...it has a kind of magic.

(The view into the farmhouse as I peed on the doorstep)

If you haven't developed the muscles to do it, ladies, get on it. Okay, I almost gave Allison and Karl's teenage sons a free show one afternoon but it's worth the risk.

All jokes about urinating aside, composting toilets are awesome and though I am currently bound by my landlord's stifling restrictions, if I ever build my own house I'd have a composting toilet put in. You wont be contaminating rivers and streams or disrupting soil systems by installing pipes. You can build them anywhere that plumbing is inconvenient. And if you're very bold you can use that compost to fertilize your garden...just don't pee on your garden. That's what behind the tool shed is for.

Incidentally, I didn't get over my outside/bathroom fear on the farm (though they did bring my comfort to an unprecendented level). I got over it just a few days after the tailgating party. I was at the top of Timpanogos, a mountain in Utah, leaning against the summit shack, in front of god and everyone. Which shows if you set a goal for yourself there's nothing you can't accomplish.

Black Bean Soup

2008-12-06T10:43:00.000-08:00

Hot off the presses! Hot of the stove actually. I just made the most amazing black bean soup!! It was so good I wanted immediately to tell the internets about it. Hopefully, some poor protein deprived soul will come across this and fill the bean shaped void inside. I was told about this recipe just last night by my pal Robin, so props to her for spreading the word via her mouth.

Black beans and black bean soup always remind me of National Cafe, a tiny Cuban restaurant that used to be on first avenue, where I spent large parts of my allowance in my youth. Or it would be a reward after going to the dentist or something and I'd eat from the side of my mouth that had feeling while food dribbled out the other. They made incredible beans, rice, stewed chicken and banana milkshakes. The day it closed a little part of myself was shuttered and hung with a 'for sale' sign, ya know?

But still I feel National Cafe's influence. Rice and beans, cooked in a variety of styles, is my comfort food. So Robin told me about this recipe and I was like well I don't have rice and I don't have beans, but I have all the other bits so I ran around the corner to my local friendly deli guy and bought a 99 cent can of Goya black beans and got down to business. Delicious comfort.

Recipe for vegetarian black bean soup:

Can o' beans
veggie stock or bouillon cube (you could make it non-vegetarian and add chicken stock or pork which is I'm sure what was going down at National Cafe, though I was blissfully uncaring)
a few scallions
couple cloves of garlic
lemon
healthy teaspoon of red cider vinegar (any kind would do except maybe balsamic)
tiny pinch of cayenne pepper
dash of black pepper
olive oil
optional, yet highly recommended: slices of avocado

Chop up your scallions and set some aside. Put the rest in a pot with a bit of olive oil and minced garlic. Cook them on low heat till they're soft. Open your can o' beans and rinse them then throw them in the pot when the garlic/scallions are ready. Add enough water (or stock) to cover the beans and set it to boil. When it's boiling add the bouillon unless you used stock. Add the cayenne and black pepper and stir. Turn the heat down to a simmer. At this point if you want to thicken it you can puree some of the beans and liquid then add it back in. I have a hand puree thing which is awesome. Add the vinegar and stir. Pour some in a bowl and squeeze in lemon juice. You don't need that much, use sound lemon judgement. Sprinkle the rest of the scallions on top and avocado slices and you have a bowl of heaven.

I don't have a picture of the soup because I ate it so fast, sorry. Make your own and you'll see how it looks.

UPDATE:

I was thinking about this post the last couple days, because I'm a dork and I realized everything I espouse about eating locally and seasonally is kind of thrown out the window here. I mean-lemons? avocado? In New York? In December? That's fucked up. I guess beans could be worse, they are canned not refrigerated. No icy trucks to get them around but still, trucks. New York being the cultural capital that it is has many different cooking histories from every part of the globe and they all import their sensibilities and ingredients. Cuban cooking (though its pretty presumptuous to align my soup with Cuban cuisine) has infiltrated my personal tastes and I haven't yet gotten to the point where I can cast aside black beans because they don't grow in my back yard. What do you love that's out of season or from far away? What do you love that's only east coast?

Seeds

2008-12-01T09:44:00.000-08:00

This summer I neglected my garden. I was away in other people's gardens and had no time for things like weeding or watering. The sun was there doing its thing. Sometimes the clouds would part. That's it.

Of course upon my return the place looked like ass. Nothing had been transplanted on time and all the herbs were sadly strangled in their pots, by their own roots no less. And yet...things grew.
Nature-what a crazy bitch she is.

So here was the total:

Six tomatoes, a handful of beets, and enough beans to replant them next spring. There were also enough basil leaves to flavor a mixed drink. Speaking of which there's a lot of mint growing randomly around, so mojitos for everyone! I have grand plans for next year. There's going to be a pea place (where I grow peas) and troughs of Magic Mollies. There will be strawberries (we have a few in a big yellow tub now but my mouth didn't harvest any) galore and chickens. Chickens.

There is a chance it will all fall to ruin again. That's the chance everyone takes any time they attempt something positive because unlike things that are bad for you doing something good for you is hard work. Diets, exercise, educating yourself, being nice to people... All practically impossible!! At least this is what we're conditioned to believe. Eating organic is too expensive, shopping from local growers is too complicated, eating healthy is too boring, recycling is a waste of time, no one can remember to take canvas bags to the grocery store don't bother, nothing you plant will ever grow.

My garden marched on without me much as the planet will march on without humanity once we've wiped ourselves off it. But if I'd done a little more with it, some weeding for instance, we could have supported each other! No one would have to be wiped off anyone's face. I'm trying to say that you can work with nature or you can ignore it-guess which action turns out better? It's not a perfect analogy since my garden's decline isn't causing climate change but you get it.

Personally I'm not very active on the doing things for the planet front but I've noticed my awareness and interest has increased with every seed I plant. Every seed. We have a compost bin so now I don't throw organic waste into the garbage (for anyone holding their breath to find out what happened with my almost full compost bin, one day Claire just picked it up and dumped the whole thing over a garden bed. It had actually turned to dirt! Didn't need that help line after all) and I reuse bags and recycle and buy organic and am trying to just buy local (if only Europe didn't make such awesome cheese) and these are all pitiful small things, seeds if you will, that hopefully will grow into something more, with time. But only if I put in a cultivating hand. Mmm, mixed metaphors are delicious. Like Mojitos.

I guess what I'm saying (and reminding myself of) is even though a seed looks small and insignificant, plant it because it's amazing what it can produce.

Raymond Sings!

2008-11-28T09:03:00.000-08:00

Hey here's that song about pie making Raymond wrote. I hope he appreciates me putting his picture all up on the internet. Kisses, Ray!

"Liveblogging" Thanksgiving

2008-11-26T16:53:00.000-08:00

Wednesday November 26th, 7:52 PM

So I wanted to record my cooking experiences this year since it is my first Thanksgiving where I've taken a really active part in any kind of preparation (As I type cranberries are popping merrily on the stove. Wait, are they supposed to do that?) But I can't really keep up with today's modern technologies of whatever the hell live blogging is...partly because I'm not particularly tech savvy and partly because I've imbibed a good deal of the cooking wine and bourbon for the Kentucky Derby Pie. I should be so lucky to escape this ordeal without any third degree burns.

Isn't it interesting that on Thanksgiving everyone is eating more or less the same dishes all across America? I haven't decided if that's creepy or cool but as I compiled my grocery list for this undertaking I noticed that the traditional dishes are composed of ingredients ACTUALLY IN SEASON. Refreshing.

I just plan to write what I'm doing when it gets interesting (...to me) and post it all on Thanksgiving night with pictures. You're welcome!

8:07 PM

Hmm, cranberry sauce smells a lot like mulled wine. Or is that me? Oh well, everything is better mulled...with wine. Moving on to stuffing. Jeez, that's a lot of bread. Stuffing is fascinating-like many soggy bread dishes it was obviously once a solution to the eternal question, "What the fuck to do with all this stale bread?"

8:38 PM

MC Hammer just came on the iTunes. Thank god.

8:46 PM

Okay, the cranberry sauce is a little too sweet but you can't unsweet what has been sweetened. Life lesson, people. Cut up my potatoes for the first bake of the twice-baked potato recipe and have them precariously balanced in the oven with the stuffing. What to do, what to do? So much of cooking is deliberate planning and timing. The pecans have been stewing in bourbon time to make a crust. And dip into the bourbon supply.

9:01 PM

Let's Get It On was playing as I kneaded my pie crust. I'm anticipating some sexy pie...which considering who it's going to feed is fairly disturbing.

9:20 PM

As I formed my pie crust into a pretty border my friend Raymond's song about pie came on iTunes, he wrote it for my little movie about a pie making villain. The recording is excellent and made me smile. I'm gonna find a way to post it here so you can all listen as you make your next pie and imagine you are Holly, the Pie Socialite.

9:37 PM

I used caraway seed sour dough bread for the stuffing, it's tasty but doesn't quite have the right texture. It's supposed to be like glue right? More vegetable stock and back in the oven...is this the beginning of disaster? I KNEW it was going too smoothly!

9:44 PM

I'm waiting for the potatoes to cool and drinking Jack Daniels on the floor. Ahh, the holidays.

9:50 PM

Found a cranberry on the floor. Ate it.

10:34 PM

Okay, cut up sweet potatoes and put them to boil. Now I'm digging the potato insides out of their skins, leaving the shell intact. In the battle of me vs. skins, skins is kicking ass. I probably should have baked them longer! Pie and stuffing have come out of the oven and look good though the stuffing has baked down a bit. No one likes stuffing anyway, right?

10:51 PM

The last skin is empty!!!!!

11:35 PM

Skins refilled! I am horribly sober and should probably have a glass of water.

Thursday November 27th, Thanksgiving, 12:03 AM

Oh God, what's the point?

12:04 AM

Rallying, I made the first part of my sweet potato souffle to be baked tomorrow morning because I don't know how it'll survive being heated up. Next year I need to find recipes that don't rely so heavily on sugar or at least stock up on more honey earlier (One day I'll have my own hive!) so I can do some substitution. I did a bit in my S. P. mix and we'll see how it tastes.

12:23 AM

Okay, twice baked potatoes have been baked twice and I seem to have consumed an entire meal through osmosis. Now some clean up so my roommate doesn't strangle me in my sleep.

12:45 AM

While struggling to make room for all this prepared food in the fridge I came across containers full of materials that can not be identified. After hours of delicious cooking smells I'm being sent to bed with the gagtastic leftovers of meals past...I ran out to the garbage to get rid of the horrorshow as quickly as possible and almost ran into a guy walking a three legged pitbull. Sad...Time for sleep.

Black Friday November 28th, 12:07 AM

I wrote a bunch of stuff between last night and now and it was all deleted. Let us say sweet potatoes were sweetened, showers were taken and I eventually made it out the door. And what happened? Mostly eating. Also a fair amount of waiting since the turkey wasn't cooked as soon as we'd all hoped. And what of the turkey, indeed?

Well, I wasn't responsible for cooking it. I did ask that we buy a free range organic turkey this year and was graciously indulged. Mr. and Mrs. Ed accompanied me to the Co-op and bought that fancy turkey just for me and it was awesome once it was finally roasted through. So dinner was mostly all my side dishes until about six 'o clock.

There are a few stages of learning re: Thanksgiving. First you learn about the desperate Pilgrims aided by friendly Indians who helped them through a terrifying American winter and the delightful feast they had to celebrate their new friendship. Then you learn about the Trail of Tears. After that, the scope of America's gluttonous consumerism obscures all positive aspects of the holiday. But, finally, I've settled on the idea that whatever we dress it up as, Thanksgiving is really a celebration of the harvest, a good old-fashioned animal sacrifice(yay, Buffy!). Winter is ahead. For the Pilgrims and everyone that meant long nights, cold days and the very real possibility that they might not make it through. On my cozy couch, stuffed with pie, that possibility seems so remote it's almost offensive to consider it. But there are dark times always where we think spring will never come and on Thanksgiving we're setting aside one day to appreciate that it WILL come and with it the bounty and life before us will be renewed. It's a cycle humanity has trusted and relied on for a long time and part of the reason I think and write about food so much is because of how important and rare it is to really be connected to that cycle.

Sharing some food with some folks renews that connection in some small way, I think. I am thankful I did it today. And for the half a Derby pie in my fridge right now.

Recipes:

Cranberry Sauce
-a 12-ounce bag of cranberries.
-1/2 cup cabernet wine
-2 tablespoons of orange zest.
-1/2 cup orange juice
-1 cinnamon stick
-some salt, a pinch, and also a pinch of cayenne pepper.

Add 3/4 cup of sugar to a sauce pan. Pour in the juice and the wine; add the zest, the cinnamon stick and those spices. Bring that up to a simmer on medium heat. When it's simmering, add the cranberries. They are going to start to pop, it's going to take about 10 minutes. The sauce will also start to thicken. Throw in a 1/4 cup of cold water and turn off the heat. Take out the cinnamon stick.

Herb Stuffing
-12 cups slightly dry bread
-1/3 cup snipped parsley
-1/3 cup finely chopped onion
-1 1/2 tsp. salt
-1 tsp. ground sage
-1 tsp. dried thyme, crushed
-1 tsp. dried rosemary, crushed
-2 cups of vegetable broth
-6 tablespoons of butter, melted

Combine bread, parsley, onion, salt, sage,thyme, and rosemary. Add broth and butter; toss lightly to mix. Use to stuff a 12-pound turkey or bake covered, in a 2-quart casserole at 325º until heated through, about one hour.

Sweet Potato Souffle
-3 c. mashed sweet potatoes
-1 c. sugar (or one cup honey so your teeth don't fall out)
-2 tsp. salt
-2 eggs
-1 tsp. vanilla
-1/3 stick butter, melted
-1/2 c. milk
Mix all ingredients and pour into greased baking dish. Cover with topping.
TOPPING:
-1 c. brown sugar
-1/3 c. flour -1 c. chopped nuts -1/3 stick butter, melted
Mix thoroughly and sprinkle over top. Bake at 350 for 25 minutes.

Twice Baked Potatoes
I had a recipe but didn't follow it...cut your potatoes in half, bake them till they're soft enough to scoop out the insides then mash those insides up with everything fattening and delicious-milk, chedder, butter, sour cream, salt, pepper, green onions. Put the filling back in the skins and baked 'em till they're brown on top.

Derby Pie
Again didn't follow a particular recipe...made a crust from butter and flour soaked my pecans in bourbon, mixed them in a butter/sugar/egg/flour/vanilla mix, laid the bottom with chocolate chips, pecans on top, baked till goldeny on the edge. I should write a freaking cook book.

So Many Beautiful Men, So Little Time...

2008-11-21T16:54:00.001-08:00

So this has nothing to do with food, farming or even my life actually but every single media outlet I enjoy (and they are not all websites built around fart jokes, I swear) is going nuts over Twilight the existence of which I was not aware of until about a month ago. Whoa out of touch with nerdy fantasy porn, what?? I have to say it's piqued my curiosity. I'm a little jealous that I'm no longer a tweenager with a pretty boy to swoon over, Mr. Pattinson...then I remember I've already experienced the as good as it gets vampire fantasy.

I want to share with everyone, because we all deserve to see it once more before time completely ravishes the memory, the beauty and awesomeness of James Marsters as Punk era Spike:

That is what I am talking about. Again:

Nice. And how bout that Hugh Laurie, huh?

Ah, men on TV. Without them what would emotionally stunted women do?

Forking and Groveling OR Don't Fear the Potato

2008-11-19T20:44:00.000-08:00

Oh, Potatoes! Potatoes! Say it loud and there's music playing, say it soft and it's almost like praying...

Dear Reader, I would like to relate a short anecdote about a dish I made. In this dish were the following ingredients: quinoa, kale, tomatoes, onions, some olive oil, and little bitty pieces of potatoes. It sounds simple but it is out of control delicious. I made a bunch, ate some, put the rest in a bowl for the next morning.

Next Morning: Open the fridge. My beautiful bowl of food which I so lovingly prepared has been decimated. Kale: Gone. Onion: Gone. Tomato: Gone. Little Quinoa Sprouts: Gone. All that linger are the potato bits, clustered together at the bottom, shell shocked by the ravaging of their cohorts. Perhaps tormented by the guilt of survival.

Of course I experienced the usual rage that comes with finding your roommate has eaten sustenance you set aside for yourself. Of course! But the insult to the injury was leaving the potatoes behind, like they were something tainted and wrong. So agonizingly wasteful. Since that day I have been determined to spread this life changing message: DON'T FEAR THE POTATO!!!

Potatoes do not make you fat. Bread does not make you fat. Pasta does not make you fat. A constant buffet of these things with no vegetables, lots of sugar, and mostly fried WILL make you fat. But as a part of a balanced diet-a small component of a dish with many healthy ingredients like kale, quinoa, onions, tomatoes for instance-they can be quite good for you. Potatoes thicken soups. Absorb flavor. Chock full of vitamins. Easy to store. What I'm trying to say is stop ruining my cooking.

Since I have friends and apparently roommates who have no interest in potatoes it's hard to find a place to talk about my love. Which is why blogs are great. I can just get it out there! An alternative to blogging is farming and Frosty Morning Farms grows lots and lots of potatoes. When I was first there the potato plants were all leafy and tantalizing. I kept insinuating we should just rip them right out of the ground now and I'd make some soup. But no, there were still flowers on there, still secret rooty things happening underground and the only things I could do in the potato patch was weed or squash potato bugs. WITH MY HAND. THEIR INSIDES ARE ORANGE.

After days of coming back covered in dirt and bug juice with nothing to show for it I had begun to resent those plants a bit. When I revisited the farm in September I was hoping to even the score, pull them up and mash them good. What I saw was shocking. Those proud plants had fallen, limp and brown to the ground. Around them the weeds had taken over (yay, more weeding!) and it was hard to tell where the rows had been.

If, like me, you've never harvested potatoes you probably have visions of pulling up a plant with lots of nodules just hanging off it waiting to be plucked. Or you have no idea where potatoes come from and don't really care but I'm about to tell you anyway, so suck it. Basically the potatoes are taken out through a process Allison called Forking and Groveling. If you're lucky enough to have two people to share the work, one will use a pitchfork to gently loosen the earth while the other (kneeling on the ground) runs their hands through the soil trying to differentiate the potatoes from lumps of earth or rocks. You have to be careful not to make two many cracks in the soil ahead of where you're groveling because the best place to store the taters till you need them is in the earth unless you're prepared to lug bushels to the root cellar. And cracks let in sunlight. Which ruins them! Don't eat a green potato, it has been exposed to the sun and is not good for you. If it has little eyes though, it's fine.

SO that's the boring story. I asked Allison if the word groveling came from the way potatoes are picked, grovel=down in the dirt at someone's feet, but when we did a bit of a search there was no indication of where the expression came from. We all grovel sometimes without knowing why, I guess...

My back broken from alternately forking and groveling we carried loads of fingerlings and yellow potatoes back to the farmhouse to be washed and sorted by size. There were also a few Magic Molly's, an 'experimental' (F.M.F. sometimes runs tests on new plants to see how they do organically and what kind of tastiness they produce) potato that comes in a deep beautiful purple. I snuck some in a bag and plan to plant them this spring and fork and grovel on my own. That night I made an amazing potato, carrot and celery soup with goat yogurt to make it creamy and full of all the dried spices Allison grows around the house. Yay!

Usually I try to tie in my mundanities with some pretentious conclusion I've drawn about life into an annoying package. This, however, is a simple message coming from a heartfelt place. Don't fear the potato. It's more afraid of you than you are of it...that's why it's hiding underground.

P.S. Fun fact. In upstate New York they have a dish called simply Salt Potatoes. The area used to have many salt mines and the workers would throw their potatoes into the vats of boiling salt then fish 'em out and chow down. Nowadays the tiny round taters featured above sell at a higher price to make this 'delicacy'. Funny how time makes all things for the rich. Except being poor.

Is There No Love More Sincere Than the Love of Food?

2008-10-22T11:54:00.000-07:00

On Saturday, the Lord's favorite party day, I went over to the Red Hook Harvest Festival with my pal Ray who took a series of crappy phone photos of me posing with hot cider and desperately clutching a copy of Edible Brooklyn. I now regret not bringing a real camera but will try my best to illustrate all my important points through these images.

First of all, wow. I've never been to see the Red Hook farm though I've touted their organizers, Added Value. Added Value works in Red Hook on community programs that clean up parks, teach leadership, good nutrition, provide access to healthy affordable food and build urban farms, like the one in front of Ikea. That's right, there's an Ikea next door if you weren't sold before. I went without even knowing about the Ikea so just imagine my delight. In fact I had so little knowledge about where I was going or why that Ray and I wandered around for almost forty minutes before by the grace of an unseen force (Ikea?) we stumbled across the festival grounds.

Now I don't know what I was expecting but those expectations must have been low because I was pretty blown away by what from most perspectives was a less than breathtaking affair (Ray's perspective). First of all, they had the South Bronx bee man there, Roger Repohl giving a demo on the ways of the bees and violently disputing the lies promoted by Jerry Seinfeld's Bee Movie to the little children all around. Having seen a few demos of honey harvesting and bee hypnotizing I opted out but came back later for a tasting. Can I just say Wow! And Whoa! Roger harvests a few times a year, through summer to late fall, and every batch has a different color and flavor. Most larger distributors just mix all their honey in one big pot so they can get a consistent product. No generic sweetness here, each bottle contained a separate and unique bouquet of aroma and sensation. It's times like these that I wish I had a more colorful food vocabulary... particularly considering my supposed investment in food. Hmm. Let us just say they were fruity and burst across the palate with an amber fist of nostril flaring-eh, forget it. Let us just say instead that I spent my last six dollars on a bottle, six dollars that may break the bank for rent this month. THAT'S how good it is.

I wasn't going to go on and on about honey again but in that issue of Edible Brooklyn I'm clutching there happens to be an article about urban beekeeping and how New York is one of the few cities that outlaws it. It's pretty interesting and I think once I have enough start up capital (never) I may flaunt the law and my landlord and start up a hive of my own. Their fall issue isn't up yet or I'd link to it, but it is really interesting and can be picked up around town or you can check in later this month here.

Also Roger has a blog that seems to be largely about politics, oddly, and I haven't really reviewed his opinions...but he has a few funny articles about bees too.

There were a lot of vendors around but since I had a budget of eight dollars and spent six on honey my choices were limited. A dollar for cider and a dollar for a raffle ticket-fingers crossed I'll win that vintage bike! Amongst the people selling edible fall goodies were various organizations handing out information and free swag. Big ups to Heifer International for bringing loads of colorful lapel buttons featuring such classic slogans as 'Go Goat' and 'Bee Sweet'. Raymond took so many I was embarrassed to continue the button-glutton, but did manage to snag those two. Because I can get behind Goats and Bees, for realz. We weren't alone in our attraction to shiny colorful objects- a local step dancing troupe outfitted in fringed tie dye (hurray for classics again) had clearly stopped by the table before their performance. Maybe they'll look up what Heifer Int'l is when they get home...

There were also representatives from Compostville, or The New York City Compost Project. I don't want to belittle what they do or say that their table was anything but covered in pamphlets and helpful info on how to compost, but the guy I talked too seemed completely baffled by all my questions regarding my compost bin, which right now is just a garbage can full of rotten food.

"But, that's what compost is...", He said, smiling uncertainly.

"Yes, but it's almost full!! What do I do?"

Pointing at pictures from the pamphlets of what my bin looks like and reiterating that it's almost full had no effect. Luckily there's a compost helpline (Seriously): 718-817-8543. I haven't called it but may this weekend as my roommate and I have vowed to do something about the compost situation. Stay tuned for further reporting...Anyhow he loaded me down with booklets and magnets and sent me away to bother someone else.

The farm itself, which I realize still hasn't been described aside from being blessed by Ikea as a neighbor, sits on a piece of land that looks like it was once a park or playground surrounded by chain linked fence and rowed all across with hay and beds and its own tall compost pile. They have a greenhouse and a few chickens, plus a demo hut which in addition to the Bee Man also featured a canning/jarring how to. There was a even a pumpkin patch in the back filled with parents and shrieking children and some sadly crushed pumpkins. Better than sadly crushed children. Am I right?

The pumpkin patch encapsulated the urban farm for me. It was kind of crazy in there, full of diverse families crushing pumpkins...actually I'm not sure where I'm going with this. Maybe I mean to say that we think of farming and nature as being exclusively for rural parts of the country, and it's true that when you take farming to an urban setting it's not as picturesque as we like. But it is lively and inclusive and brings people together.

This image is beautiful. I may get a carrot-pierced heart tattooed on my chest.

After all that fresh air and love of nature we walked to Fairway and ate all the samples. I call it Urban Foraging. Here's another link to Added Value. They're great. Did I mention they have a farm next to Ikea? (I really couldn't care less about Ikea)

Red Barn, Blue Roof

2008-09-30T08:21:00.001-07:00

So something I've been doing since getting back from the farms is eating red meat. I never really did before except out of curiosity and for a while after giving up factory farmed chicken I was pretty much a vegetarian, being too lazy to cook meat for myself. Much better to subsist on pasta and potato chips, right?

In a way I respect vegetarians (I'm stealing off Micheal Pollan right now, I'm sure he doesn't mind because we have a deep soulful connection) because they consider what they eat and what the ramifications of their food choices are on something other than themselves. There are probably vegetarians out there who do it purely for health/beauty reasons but mostly they're sad about the wittle animals (Gross Generalization Alert!) I'm constantly on the fence about this because I wuv animals myself, but there are lots of places in the world where raising meat for food makes a lot more sense than any other kind of farm production.

Okay, but I live in America, land of plenty where I can have food shipped to me all year round that no animals were murdered to produce. Well, what is all the shipping and out of season vegetable/fruit eating doing to the planet at large? Who's exporting their own produce to me? What's the cost of the fuel to our environment? What went into this veggie/fruit production in pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers? If I'm eating processed grains what kind of energy did that take and what about all those poor little mice in the threshers? And the birds?? And the manatees! God, think of the manatees!!!!

I guess what I'm trying to say is that my priority is ultimately with people (I've noticed lately I use the word ultimately a lot). The only reason I give two toots about the planet is because without a planet there are no people. The food choices you make today influence the environment of the future and eating meat under the right circumstances can be the better environmental choice.

Aside from that, grass fed beef if quite tasty. It begins to quench my thirst for blood....blood...

This summer after reading about how horrible corn fed beef was for the environment and how depressingly cruel people are to cattle just to get those McD hamburgers ground out I was pretty curious about these other cows living so dreamily off GRASS/CRAZINESS. So I visited a grass fed beef farm. I've told several people this story and each time it was met with a resounding Meh. Why is it so exciting to me that I went to a place where a bunch of cows are standing around chewing cud?

Well, since I decided not to eat meat without knowing where it came from, actually seeing a place where the meat is being raised is kind of a big deal-I could see how they were living and decide if I was okay with it or not instead of just accepting that grass fed is better, the way I accept organic is better though a lot of places are organic through loop holes rather than practical application.

Also farms are cool. Obviously.

We were greeted at the barn by Veronica, a very small Korean woman with a grip like a vise. She and her husband run the place with their son, raising and selling both sheep and cattle. We drove out to the fields to see the cows. NY state has great clay-ey earth for growing hay (though that makes it challenging for other kinds of produce without a lot of mulching etc.) so Veronica grows all her own hay for the winter months. The rest of the time the cows move from one pasture to another and as their designation implies, eat grass.

We stood on the side of the road and watched them chewing. They watched us back, tearing up the grass and occasionally lowing for attention. They started to wander closer and Veronica yelled, "No, it's not time yet! You stay there!" at which they mooed. As I looked one of the black Angus lifted its head and a stream of mucus drained from its nose. Gross. I asked Veronica if they give the cows antibiotics and she laughed. They don't need it, cows get sick when they're kept in close quarters and force fed corn, which isn't easily processed by their delicately evolved stomachs. So I guess mucus is normal?

After we got bored of staring at the cows and them staring at us we went back to the farm house which was a whole other menagerie. There were half a dozen dogs, a couple sheep, like twenty goats and a gaggle of black (?) ducks wandering the premises without the benefit of a fence between them.

There were chickens somewhere too as evidenced by the somewhat comical bucket of eggs in their foyer.

Dani, my WWOOF hostess who arranged this lovely visit, bought a bunch of beef and helped Veronica brainstorm ideas for self promotion. Dani loves the business aspect of her organic farm, PR I guess you could say. Veronica has a lot of beef and a lot more coming (though grass fed cattle have longer life spans than corn fed generally, about two years before heading to the slaughterhouse as opposed to seven or eight months). Despite this she seemed pretty lackadaisacal (sp?) about the whole thing, casually eating blueberries as she talked about maybe starting a web site or putting up signs along the road. I weirdly admire the kind of impracticality that resists outside influence but I could see Dani getting worked up about how little action the beef farm was taking to sell itself. Finally we left with our beef and that night Dani cooked it up.

My god. It was a revelation.

So here's this amazing web site about how factory farming is affecting the environment, the water we drink, our health. There are a few pictures of CAFOs but it isn't one of those sites that just throws how the animals are suffering in your face. It's pretty easy to distance oneself from the wittle animals especially when they're not super cute and snot mucus all over the place. But you cant distance yourself from the fact that corn fed beef is destroying parts of the planet and by supporting grass fed beef farms you're supporting a sustainable mode of production. Which is awesome. And tasty.

Oh and I forgot she had horses. It's not a very clear picture because she said one of them likes to bite and I didn't catch which. And they were closing in.

The Mosquitos! Oh God, The Mosquitos!

2008-09-14T20:51:00.001-07:00

This weekend I helped my pals Ella and Pete weed their new garden. After five years of living in a boxy little place with many tiny rooms and no sunlight they moved to farther afield pastures, a place equipped with a back yard.

I'd heard about it, I'd seen pictures but I still wasn't mentally prepared for the horror show. While I was fantasizing about going with Ella to pick out chickens and a pygmy goat I ignored the reality of how much work rehabilitating an overrun garden would be. I'll say right now I didn't contribute much to the process. Mostly I drank beer, swatted mosquitoes and identified the one plant they didn't want to rip out of the ground. Hibiscus. Someone who lived there long ago loved hibiscus and it's sprouted up in tall shrubby trees everywhere. What a fun kind of archeology to look back and see what meant something to someone who existed there, what made their heart sing to see blooming on a bright summer morning. Coincedentally, I found a used condom next to it's wrapper. It was a Magnum.

There are three levels of hell to this yard and it's only in the back where the ivy has completely taken over that you can really appreciate the extent of the neglect. The fence tappers off except for where its remnants are bound together by an old hospital bed frame and rusty rake head. The back is where we also found the source of the mosquitoes. Seriously, I know it's fall and that's when they like to have their last hurrah but it was like a plague. All day into the evening they swarmed and followed us around from one room to the next. Killing them and measuring the blood streak was a crowd pleaser. The breeding was going on in an abandoned dog crate filled with water and larvae and fear. Around the crate were a few toys, a bowl and a broken chain. It's only a matter of time before they find the dog.

But you know what? I'm jealous. I have my lovely little yard but I've had to build most of my garden boxes. There's no helpful ground to throw compost on, just our alarmingly full bucket. As 'we' raked over the earth iridescent worms squirmed hysterically back into the soil. There's life there, potential for growth and lots of nutrients from all the buried dog carcasses. One day, if they can maintain their current crusade, Ella and Pete are going to have someplace beautiful to grow tomatoes and herbs and a pygmy goat. Of course, Ella's mom came down with hives from something that may or may not be poison ivy out there and Pete treed himself sawing dead branches so who knows? Growing stuff is hard work. And I'm sure as hell not gonna help.

Just kidding. That whole 'tend your own garden' thing is really not such great advice. We should all tend each other's gardens. If we all do a little the world will be a bit greener, more beautiful and soon everyone will know a hibiscus just by looking at it. And poor unsuspecting people who were wearing work gloves praise Christ wont be finding deteriorating condoms under very leaf. Or if they do, they'll know who left them and that person will be held accountable by God!!

Also I need some weeding assistance myself. They owe me for cleaning out all those beer bottles.

Cheating

2008-09-10T20:10:00.000-07:00

I love to bake. Baking is closer to science then most forms of cooking. Things like baking soda and baking powder can be confused so easily or added too much or not enough and KABLOOIE! Like the particle accelerator. Or just really bad tasting cookies. Anyway there's a weight of responsibility when you're baking that isn't there in the average stir fry or soup. Like Spiderman but with cake.

When I was at Frosty Morning Farms Alison and Karl grew pretty much everything they ate. A lot of people on Commonplace did and it made them think in a kind of luxurious fashion-they can talk about how great it is to eat and live sustainably and how wrong it is to buy food shipped from far away or grown with pesticides etc. On a farm you can pick your food. You can jar it, turn it into jam, store it for winter. What ever's leftover, if something spoils, you can feed it to the pigs or chickens or just the compost heap and it will eventually feed you too. The circle of life! It's a lot harder to find the time and space and animals for all that in the city, stacked up to the sky like we are.

So after being judged as a wasteful city dweller who throws out her egg shells it was kind of a relief to see that the Frosts cheat. They sneak in all sorts of stuff even ::gasp:: bananas. That shit is bananas. B-A-N-A-N-A-S. How do they do it? Well, I'd like to point fingers here but even as cheaters they're kind of doing a service-they get buckets of compost from the Syracuse food coop that would just go into a garbage/land fill otherwise. During the summer the buckets often get pretty pungent and melt into something gloppy and good for livestock. Occasionally you get a bucket of out of season tomatoes, a bunch of fresh spinach for soup, avocados for the guac or some overripe bananas. As the weather cools what's inside the buckets stays edible for humans longer and they have some true delights for those cold winter nights. Avocados and bananas don't grow round these here parts and I can't imagine the Frosts buying them under any circumstances...but for free, hey, why not?

Anyway after days of fennel, kohlrabi and other not sugar filled veggies I was about to bite someone's throat out. If there was carbs inside. A load of stuff arrived and I begged Alison to let me bake something with the browning fruits. First we had to empty the oven which works as a kind of rudimentary dryer for her, the pilot light slowly sucking the moisture from a dozen baskets filled with herbs. She uses the herbs to make teas and tinctures or just for cooking. They all had to be sorted and crunched through to remove stems and air them out. When the oven was finally empty I looked up a recipe for banana bread in the Moosewood Cookbook. If you're a vegetarian this book is where it's at. The vegetarian recipes that is.

Since I was using all these foreign ingredients, the bananas and sugar and wheat and baking powder (or was is baking soda?), Alison suggested I go collect berries from around the farm. Late July is an amazing time for berries. Things were blowing up all over the place! Blueberries, black currants, mulberries, gooseberries. They all went in the pot. It's kind of sad how little berry experience I had, what I didn't even know I was missing. The next time you have the chance try a new berry out.

There were also a few soft pears courtesy of the compost buckets and we threw them in too. Plus almonds. I'll just say, GOD IT WAS GOOD! I WISH I WAS EATING IT RIGHT NOW!

All this made me think about the ways the Frosts cheat being good organic farmers who care about the earth, like the buckets and...well, they're pretty good. Caring about the earth is tiring because a lot of fun stuff involves shrugging off thoughts of consequences or responsibility and you barely ever eat cake. But I shrug all the time. So then I started thinking about the ways I could cheat being someone who throws stuff out when it spoils or who buys stuff from another hotter hemisphere.

We compost. Today I made soup from some leftover lima beans. I buy stuff grown locally. Not sure what to do with my big can of compost yet. Any other ideas?

In the mean time I'm going to bake what ever's around into cake. Ingenuity is really what's behind eating good food because you use what's available. It makes you a better cook too if my banana bread is any indication. Of course, if I keep up my own form of 'cheating' I wont be eating bananas for awhile.

Here's a cool site about worm composting which is pretty manageable even in a small apartment, I've seen them, they don't smell and you'll be making great fertilizer:

http://www.cityfarmer.org/wormcomp61.html

Coincidentally, I'm listening to Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog. It's available free on Hulu.com and it's great. Hurray for Neil Patrick Harris and Joss Whedon, they're like every delicious berry baked into a tart. A saucy tart.

Back On the Dark Horse

2008-09-06T18:28:00.000-07:00

Hey, It's been awhile since I hollered at y'all. I know it seems like the Sophomore Blogger Slump (the second month is Sophomore) but actually it was just a general mental slump. My life has a hilly terrain and, much like upstate New York, there are lots of ups and downs. So I went to the actual upstate New York again to spend another week on the farm and rejuvenate myself. It's worked pretty well overall. I learned lots of new interesting things that I plan to drone on and on about in the coming weeks (sneak peak-Garlic Braiding! Yeah!). So don't abandon my ramblings, tell your friends and tune in tomorrow. Same Bat Time, Same Bat Station.

2008-08-29T14:53:00.000-07:00

A lot of people start eating organic food for selfish reasons. I've eaten organic fruits and vegetables pretty much my whole life and it wasn't because I spared a lot of thought about the benefits for the planet. Really it was my mom who sent me down the organics road and she wasn't thinking about Mother Earth either. I'd guess the logic for her was that organic food was healthier for our bodies and would make us more attractive with nicer skin. My mother would probably drink powdered kitten bones stirred into puppy tears if someone told her it would reverse sun damage. She's a lovely woman though.

What the word organic means has changed a lot over the years and if you think about food for a while you realize how many words are used to manipulate our food choices, even words like organic that are supposed to signify something. Natural, healthy, gourmet, traditional, farm fresh. It's someone's job, lots of someones, to place those words in a pleasing fashion across all kinds of packaging so you and I will happily shell out a little extra money for them. And I have to admit they get me all the time. It's because I'm a snob and have been since my mom started feeding me solid foods, bits of fruit that she hoped would turn me into some sort of eternally youthful organic super being who could keep away cancer with a flex of the muscle. I got used to the taste and the smell and the look of it all.

Of course it's the look of things that's most easily manipulated by human hands, we quite excel at it. Packaging I associate with healthy tasty things are covering all sorts of crap and unless I'm very careful I don't always discern the difference between the two until after I leave the store. One answer of course is to eat whole foods, nothing processed or as little processing as possible. Processed items have lots of ingredients and the more ingredients something has the less you can know about what you're eating, the more places these ingredients came from, the more fuel that went into the machines to transport and make them. But, meh, I like cheese puffs. Much to my detriment.

Another solution is don't be taken in. Something has begun to change for me over the last year and I can't say why it's happening or if it'll last. I don't necessarily eat organic for me anymore. Or even eat organic at all if there's a minimally treated option available grown within a few hundred miles instead of Argentina. I don't buy things just because they have nice wrappings (well, there was a recent incident with some cheese wrapped in a leaf but a lesson was learned). Now I'm trying to eat organic and locally for the environment and makes the world a healthier place not just my body. I haven't really tried to do this through a winter yet, so I think a lot of canning is in my near future. We'll see.

Anyway I was in a farmer's market and thinking about all this and how smug I am when I noticed a table covered in little plastic containers. There were pretty labels glued to them and inside were a few stems of Johnny-Jump-Ups. These flowers are edible and very pleasing to the eye and I stopped to look at them and admire how clever this farmer was selling something cheaply produced as Gourmet. They have little nutritional value, aren't filling or even that flavorful but they look great! Cleverness appreciated, I then thought, What A Scam.

Plastic containers? Four dollars? Gourmet flowers? What? Nuts!

There will always be something exhilirating about buying a little special something for yourself, there will always be a need for organic farmers to make money through 'specialty' items. But this particular item is a call to arms (exaggerration). A lot of people could reduce their food costs, get in touch with the cycle of planting and harvest, find a use for compost in their own homes just by growing something on their window sill or fire escape or yard if they're lucky enough to have one. Why not start with flowers? They're easy to grow, pretty, don't require a lot of space and you can put them in drinks, on cakes, make them into candies, put them on spreadable cheese, in salads, and teas. Wont really cut your food costs but maybe adding a decorative element to a meal that was produced by their own hand would inspire people to grow something more challenging the following season and the one after that. First the thing that pleases the eye, then the thing that pleases the body and then the thing that pleases the world. The order should be reversed-World, Body, Eye- but you have to start somewhere. And no plastic containers required!

This is a great list of edible flowers and recipes for them:

http://whatscookingamerica.net/EdibleFlowers/EdibleFlowersMain.htm

The Old Ennui

2008-08-25T19:48:00.000-07:00

The last couple weeks I've been moping around and immersing myself in a Buffy the Vampire Slayer marathon and generally falling off the Living Right Wagon. Until pretty recently I didn't have a very firm idea of what living right means exactly. More like a vague outline- no students loitering after school, no horrible murders with hearts being removed. And also no smoking. Buffy Huzzah! But as a day to day guide those aren't issues I really wrastle with. Smoking, bleh.

So if I had to make a new living right code it would look something like this-exercise, eat healthy food that is good for the environment that you can share with family and friends, slay demons. Easy! Well, I haven't been managing any of my to-do list and am in a shame spiral. This happens to me pretty much every year in late summer. It's probably common for most peeps to look back on the long languorous days of possibility that make up June July and August and think, "WTF was I doing??". It's odd because many of us look forward to the season as being a time to sit on our lazy asses, watch stupid movies and fall asleep on the beach. I've done those things in spades this year and now that the shortening of days is visible I feel like I've accomplished nothing! Though I've accomplished everything summer's meant for! A Paradox.

When I'm feeling depressed all my actions compound and beget. So I haven't written a blog post in awhile? Might as well not bother then! Haven't gone for a run in a week? Might as well not for another month. Or ever (fuck running). When you feel like you haven't done anything right in a long time the effort to change becomes monumental. I think this is why we don't do things we know we should, because it seems like all the times we were doing the wrong thing can never be balanced out...or we'll get on the Living Right Wagon just to get knocked into the dust further down the road. That's pretty much why I've never flossed. Though I really should. Oh god, I'm going to hell! Or some alternate dimension composed entirely of shrimp (Buffy Huzzah!)!

Which brings me to my low point today. I went to Chipotle.

I wont say going to Chipotle is the low point for my entire life because that would certainly be an exaggeration. But definitely for today. Fast food restaurants have become bad to think for me, by which I mean they're now mentally in the category of the inedible. I was a Chipotle believer for quite awhile, particularly working in Midtown where choices were slim and disturbingly gritty. A burrito from Chipotle seemed like a pretty clean tasty alternative. I knew they were owned by McDonald's and had a kind of 'boo corporate' thought when I found out, but rice and beans are my fav.

Then I read Fast Food Nation and threw up in my mouth. I couldn't walk into Chipotle and not see the evil wrapped in every burrito. It didn't help that the last one I ate (before today) was draped by an employee's dirty dish cloth before my very horrified eyes. Anyway, it's been awhile since I've been inside a fast food restaurant except to use the bathroom and I was surprised by the list of numbers paralleling the prices on the menu hanging above the counter. What could they be trying to tell me? Okay, so they were labeled 'calories' but a salad was listed as being 118-813 calories. Huh? That's quite a range there. So is that the leaves and then the cheese with sour cream? Mm. Sour cream. All the items were like that, with a calorie low several hundred integers from its high.

I'd heard this whole calorie listing thing was going to become mandatory but hadn't witnessed it though now dimly recall the gals at the office screeching about having consumed 1800 calorie lunches all year. Personally, I don't count calories. I know what I'm eating and what will be likely to make me fat and what it feels like to be stuffed to the gills. When I make bad choices and eat a family sized bag of potato chips for dinner instead of a balanced meal I don't look at the bag and flip out because I've eaten my caloric intake for the week in one sitting. I flip out because I'm an idiot...hmm there goes the Living Right Wagon again!

I'm kind of on the fence about this whole calorie listing thing. Yes, nutritional information should be available, but is counting calories the same thing as knowing about good nutrition ? Is it good to ask corporations to take responsibility for their customers health or are we passing the buck and ignoring the question of health education in schools? Are these listings so vague that their informational value is just a kind of scarecrow to the wary i.e. 'look out you may possibly be eating 813 calories or maybe just 118, no knowing'? And if you do risk, then it's your own fault you obese diabetes-courting fuck up!?

Anyway, I ate one. A burrito bowl this time since the calorie content ranges about a 200 less than the burrito. But I got chips so that probably added the overall. Jesus. I might as well just eat a bag of potato chips and go die under a rock. I'm feeling terrible remorse and have sworn off the fast food again. Because of the evil thing not the calorie thing. It really is all about choices, the choice to eat something you cooked for yourself from healthy whole ingredients, the choice to change out of your footie pajamas and go out to enjoy a warm summer day, the choice to floss. Tomorrow I'm going to make a better choice and if the day after that I fall back on old habits it's okay. I can catch the Living As Best As I Can Carriage.

This is a website from that helpful NY gov trying to tell us how to be, which I found reading about this whole law thing and it tickled me. Very sensible advice overall though they recommend reducing television viewing hours. You know what I say to that?

Buffy Huzzah!

I Will Feed You Nothing But Yogurt and Honey

2008-08-12T20:01:00.000-07:00

My first day on Frosty Morning Farms Karl drove me from Cortlandt to Commonplace. Jason and Alison were at the Farmer's Market in Cazenovia. My bus was an hour late and I was starving and experiencing the usual anxiety I get whenever I'm physically discomfited. We stood silently in the kitchen I'd get to know pretty well over the next ten days until Karl politely asked me if I'd like some yogurt.

I mentioned before that he makes his own yogurt from their goat's milk. How you make yogurt-heat a bunch of milk, add a container of yogurt. More yogurt ensues. Sorry, didn't write down the recipe. Really I'm not a huge yogurt fan but I'd taken a personal (and thus easily broken) vow to embrace whatever foodstuffs were thrown my way during this little trip, since that seemed like the spirit of eating locally and off your own labor. So I said yes, a bowl of yogurt would be dee-lightful.

From one of the coolers he plucked a mason jar full of white liquid. It didn't have the consistency of milk, exactly. Cream was gathering on top and it dripped slightly slower than water into a bowl the size of my head that he'd set out for me. "That's plenty!" I shrieked but it was already full up to the brim. I was holding a spoon and looking at the glop despondently when he pushed a second mason jar my way-this one was opaque gold and the top came stickily away. Honey, raised right there on the farm, unfiltered and the perfect compliment in a heaping spoonful to Karl's yogurt. I'm not exaggerating when I say these two things together were in the top five best flavor combinations I've ever had in my whole life. I slurped that mother up.

While the mysteries of yogurt propagation are less than intriguing to me, bee keeping is like Jedi Knight mysterious...by which I mean COOL. Honey itself is an amazing entity, something edible that never goes bad or sour or molds or does anything but taste like heaven sauce. Something my main squeeze Michael Pollan writes (about apples, not honey, in The Botany of Desire) is that in this day and age with sugar cheaply abounding we take for granted the transcendent power of sweetness. How precious a bee hive would be in a world without sugar. Can you picture the anticipatory mouth watering that happens in your mouth when you long for something sweet? How when it touches your tongue it's so overwhelming it's almost like pain?

A few weeks later at Cross Island Farms I got to peak into actual beehives and wear the hat and everything. David Belding keeps three beehives, two that he harvests from and one that is just building up its brood now. They're Buckfast, a popular variety that is a hybrid from England known for its gentleness...except in the Americas where they're known for their swarming and possible hybridization with the African killer bees blah blah. David prefers the Italian honey bees which are supposed to be quite sweet but they're very vulnerable to harsh winters and there are quite long harsh winters up by the St. Lawrence river. His last Italian hive died out awhile ago. He does still have an Italian Mentor, a man named John who came by the house one day to check on David's hives while David was out. I watched him open up the Buckfast hive and cut out combs the bees had been building in a gap between frames. He had a wild turkey feather he used to brush the bees out of his way and told me in a heavy Italian accent that David's bees were nasty and made no honey unlike HIS bees which were totally awesome super great. Later I found a wild turkey feather of my own by the house and have kept it to start off my bee keeping kit.

A couple days later David decided to check on the hives himself at John's urging. He and another bee-keeping friend, also confusingly named David, donned their suits. After watching John perform the same tasks with nothing more than a hair net and turkey feather they looked a bit like overdressed aliens wandering down the road in the blazing heat.

David Two was a very mild-mannered man who proudly showed me his swollen thumb, stung just a few days before. One of his hives had flown suddenly off which is not an uncommon occurrence. He'd found them in a tree near his house about fifteen feet off the ground and was considering how to reclaim them without being swarmed and stung at the top of a ladder. The interesting thing about bees (one of the many interesting things) is that even the most domesticated varieties might pick up and leave you someday or a wild variety might fall under the spell of man's hand, lured by sugar water and protection from mites or simply the hazy dream of a smoking bellow.

Perhaps you've heard about the sudden death of honeybees we've been having the last few years, huge populations dying out dramatically and unexpectedly. Most of the deaths are taking place in the large commercial migratory beekeeping sector. That's exactly what it sounds like-companies that tie up their bee hives, shove them on the back of a truck and cart them from farm to farm. It's mainly for pollination and without that pollination vegetable and fruit growth is detrimentally affected. David One and Two agree that the deaths aren't necessarily environmental factors such as pollution, the more likely cause is just plain old stress. Bees aren't meant for the highway (also the idea of a giant angry bee filled truck driving beside you sounds kind of like a bad idea on steroids). They're yet another example of something in nature that can be hugely beneficial to its caretakers when managed on a small scale, on site, but when taken to a commercial size will collapse in on itself.

Bees have some advantage. Unlike livestock shoved in CAFOs or genetically modified corn they can decide when they've had enough, close up their combs and set off for the wild wild woods, leaving us behind. With our sour yogurt.

Feel It In Your Heart

2008-08-09T19:53:00.000-07:00

Friday night I dozed in a garden and got bitten by bugs. The garden was in Queens at P.S. 1 in their gravel filled courtyard that's been transformed into an urban farm of sorts, a giant structure of cardboard tubes rising above our heads growing a variety of produce suited to the intense sunlight beaming down on industrial L.I.C. It's kind of embarrassing but I had no idea that this thing was here. Or there, actually. The only reason I was at P.S. 1 was to hear a lecture by Michael Pollan and though completely appropriate it was a surprise to discover the rows of fresh greens, tomatoes and zucchini plants (shudder). The structure is supposedly built with environmental consideration and all the building materials are completely recyclable- which is more than you can say about most art right there. Here's the website page describing the project in flowery language:

http://www.ps1.org/exhibitions/view/201/

One thing this page didn't answer for me was how do they pick the stuff at the top? Also how do the chickens fit in? Don't get me wrong, I'm glad they do. What is life without animals crammed into every nook and crevice? An empty shell. If anyone has answers to my first two questions please pass them along.

Disorder and lackadaisy were pretty much the mode of the event and it wasn't long before me and my friend Zach were shotgunning free wine at the 'private' reception. Michael Pollan sat behind a table in the corner signing books and chatting up his guests. I'd seen him arrive in the courtyard and giggled like a school girl. If you don't know who M.P. is let me introduce you to a truly engaging writer. He's the author of Botany of Desire, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and most recently In Defense of Food. All of these books are about food issues in America and to some degree across the world and they're all pretty enjoyable to read. Some of Pollan's 'big ideas' that run through out his books, in a very general list, are how plants have in many ways domesticated us by appealing to our desires the same way a flower manipulates a bird or bee with its color and scent, how corn has crept into our food supply across the board and now our cars as well, how we view nature as something that must be slowly depleted for us to survive and the alternative systems of farming that give back to the land in ways that make it richer, and how nuttycakes people are about what they put into their mouth without the strength of regional diets to give us some direction (we can get anything anytime! even when it's not in season or from this hemisphere! what do I cram in my mouth?!).

What to cram in my mouth is a pretty consuming question for me so naturally I'm one of Michael Pollan's many groupies. Rosy cheeked from wine and sunshine we hustled up to the lecture hall, a big circular room with a spinning mirror on the ceiling. Zach and I took seats on the already crowded floor since chairs had long ago been staked out. When the crowd was ambling around the courtyard it had seemed like a sparse turnout but now we were crammed thigh to thigh in a way very reminiscent of a fire hazard. The mirror reflected the crush down on us and the room heated up to pressure cooker levels. In the mirror I could see a few other friends seated in the front row. I waved.

Finally the man himself appeared! I have to say at first I was nervous. M.P. built up his speech slowly, recounting his first stoner musings out in his garden watching bees hover around his apple blossoms which went a little something like this (paraphrasing): Hey, bees think they're important but really the flowers are making the bees work for them...whoa, what if the potatoes I'm planting are making ME work for THEM by being so tasty? Fuuuuck...We are all both Subjects and Objects.

Which is all basically the basis for Botany of Desire and the overheated crowd was obviously having this collective thought, "We know, already! Inspire us with something new, ok? It's hot as fuck in here." So he did.

"It's one thing to know something. It's another thing to feel it in your heart," said Michael, splaying his hand across his chest. Essentially he was saying that many of us know what industrial farming is doing to us both ecologically and as a society but until you feel how important it is you can't make a change in your own life or the world. That's where art and writing come in, the tools to bring the meaning of a situation from people's heads to their hearts. Which is why he was at P.S. 1. It's called SYNERGY.

I say that without sarcasm. I say that with very little sarcasm. Michael Pollan's books, particularly The Omnivore's Dilemma, were truly the catalyst for feeling all this organic farming shizzy in my heart. Perhaps it had been building from a thousand different experiences throughout my life, from eating organic fruit and vegetables growing up to working in a neighborhood garden all through junior high and high school, but without his writing I might not have reached a place where I wanted to make meaningful choices about what I eat and also how I live. One aspect of his work you can't help but notice is the intensity of his desire to know. There are so many things we let pass by without challenging their origin, meaning and affect on us because it's such a burden to find out and then carry the weight of that knowledge around. Michael Pollan wants to know everything and he wants to share it. That kind of curiosity is incredibly moving.

Anyway, after the lecture we went out to dinner with a couple other attendees at a restaurant in Fort Greene called iCi that buys fresh local food and cooks it verrrry deliciously. They buy some of their produce from Added Value, a program that grows produce in Red Hook with city kids as a way of connecting them to healthier living and eating choices. It was a beautiful evening, cool and breezy out in iCi's garden/yard where I was also bitten by bugs. We ate from each other's plates, appreciating the flavor and the company.

Here's a link to Added Value, they're pretty cool:

http://www.added-value.org/announce/

Just When You Think You Wont Wake Up Covered In Blisters

2008-08-07T19:58:00.000-07:00

So the morning David and I were going to lance a boil on one of the new she-goats I discovered a delightful rash of my own all across my knees, hands and arms. At first I was kind of intrigued and fascinated by it. The rash presented (this is about to get gross and then grosser) as a red blotch that felt about as painful as a light scrape then rose into a water filled mound. They were of various sizes and depths of wateriness and in the work of a few moments I'd pretty much annihilated them. Full Disclosure: I've begged friends to let me stick pins in things as intimate as blood blisters. Begged.

"That was weird," I thought and went about my daily business at Cross Island Farms. Goat boil lancing, garlic harvesting, zucchini picking ::Cue Ominous Music:: and planting carrots.

Before leaving NYC I'd considered a lot of the bad things that could happen to me on a farm. I might loose a limb in a thresher or get rabies from a raccoon nesting in my tent or just a good old fashioned horse trampling. Of course the shit that goes down is never what we expect. The evening after their first appearance was just a couple days before I was heading home and I thought the wounds would quickly heal up and that'd be the end of it. I was mildly disappointed that I wouldn't be able to show them off. It wasn't until the bus ride home that I thought, "I have a problem. And no health insurance."

The scary red blotches had begun rising up all over my forearms past my elbows. Tiny splotches climbed each knuckle of my fingers and soon every one of them had a royal blister crown. I controlled my well cultivated urge to open them up to the horrors of the Greyhound bus bacterial pool and tried to keep a level head.

If you're like me (I like to think everyone is) then you've probably made a top one hundred worst ways to die list. I have to say 'covered in blisters' is one of my top twenty five at least. Also, I've never really been prone to allergies. I get a little sneezy around the time when everyone walks around sneezy mumbling, "They say this is a bad pollen year," but that's it. If you're unused to surprising skin rashes the mind immediately goes to the worst case scenario. Hiding my oozing sores from the other passengers for fear of being put out on the road as a leper, I tried to figure out what I'd done to deserve this. I remembered a conversation I'd had with Karl Frost almost two weeks prior, when he noticed my dirt blackened fingers and cracked skin after a particularly diggy day.

"Won't have such soft white hands now!" he mocked.

"My hands bounce back quickly," I said. Smugly.

Now I was being punished for my confidence.Because our ailment's appearances correlated I associated my blisters with the she-goat's boil. She almost seemed responsible. Somewhere on the property she'd gotten sick and then so had I! Of course the she-goat had an infection on her face probably from where one of her fellow goat inmates had butted her and punctured the skin, which was pretty dissimilar from my condition. Who knew what secret violent lives goats lead?

I held gauze and rubbing alcohol for David as he squeezed the infection out of her wound. Normally right up my ally but I didn't want to get butted myself. She looked both annoyed and relieved, gobbling up grain as reward for tolerating us. When I arrived back in NYC tender and freaked I poured on the rubbing alcohol myself and thought of her again. It's funny how vulnerable you become at the first sign of illness especially when the symptoms are consistent with one of God's plagues. Any animal, livestock or pet, is at the mercy of their caretaker. I'd felt sorry for the goat waiting out in her pen for someone to notice that something was wrong, that she needed help and also for her natural fear of being handled and treated. Then there I was trembling in the bathroom over my own problems, as fearful and disturbed as she'd been as we climbed over the fence.

Anyway, I eventually realized I wasn't going to die, at least from this, and my blisters were caused by contact with the almost invisible spines all over the stems and leaves of the zucchini plants I'd been picking from all week. They've all healed, kind of, into charming reddish white scars on my glowing farmer's tan. So yes, my hands functionality have bounced back if not their lovely white softness. Not YET, Karl! Lessons Learned: Wear work gloves. Get health insurance. Be grateful you didn't pick zucchini with your face.

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Cheesecloth

2008-08-05T14:57:00.000-07:00

So I was just thinking about cheese like I do every morning, noon and night. This is not going to be a oh-what-a-world entry in the life and times of a boring not-knowing it all...it's more of a holy-shit-that-was-cool kind of post. BECAUSE IT'S ABOUT MAKING CHEESE!

That's right, suckas (my U key is really sticky for some reason but I didn't mind until it made it hard to type suckas), my man Karl Frost makes his own delicious farm fresh cheese and he does it sans animal bits or cultures. He milks his goats twice a day and saves it up in mason jars, sticking them in coolers. They have one cooler out in the barn under a Power Rangers blanket and one in the kitchen. The Frosts have no fridge so this makes them eat up all the little bits of leftovers most of us forget in the back of our refrigerators until they're as discolored and malformed as our sense of human decency. I ate a lot of meals there that I then ate for lunch the following day and then again for dinner but with some yogurt mixed in or something (yogurt also made my Karl. The man is a wizard). It sounds boring but it kind of made the cook/s more creative in their cooking because they knew the taste would have to entertain them for awhile. Also there were a lot of us to eat everything-Karl, Alison, Jason, myself and the young family down the road who I think of as The Gilligans even though that's only the mom's name, Wendy. Yuri is her non-husband and Elu is their baby. They had recently moved to Commonplace and were fixing up a cabin far up the road with the promise that they could live and homestead there in exchange for their work. I liked them very much but was also weirded out because Wendy is my exact age. Watching her carry around a baby is freaky though their family in general seems really happy. Wendy and Yuri stopped by most evenings after a long day of spackling and ditch filling by their cabin, either to help cook or do some work around the farm in exchange for their CSA share. Elu is about eleven months and when I first met them at the Strawberry Festival I thought "This poor sunburned bug bitten baby! Damned hippies!" Now I just kind of feel sorry for all those lily white babes who never breath fresh air or eat dirt.

Anyway...

When the coolers are full Karl gets out his equipment-a double boiler, a thermometer, and a cheese cloth. He boils about five gallons of goat milk to 180 degrees, takes it off the stove then adds one and a half cups either white vinegar or apple cider vinegar. BAM! Milk curdles.

He uses a strainer to separate the curds from the whey (suddenly that little Miss Moffet jam bag has some visuals) then packs them in a cheese cloth adding salt and chopped garlic, which in turn gets stuck into a cheese shaped container with holes all over and a lid. On top of the lid he sets a bucket full of water. The weight of the bucket pushes down the lid and squeezes more whey through the cheesecloth. The longer you leave the weight on, the dryer the cheese gets. Karl saves the whey for Alison to soak beans in since she thinks it makes them less gas inducing...No. No, it doesn't.

The final product is very light and airy cheese. It's not meant to be aged but rather eaten up right away. It's almost like cottage cheese but not nearly as curdy or wet. You can slice it. And eat it. Mmm. People call all the time asking for Karl's cheese which he no longer makes to sell. This isn't hearsay, I answered the phone a few times to these requests.

A kind of interesting 'fact' (I didn't verify it at all) is that a lot of dairy farmers, of which there are many in upstate New York, make money through specialty items they can produce with their milk like cheese or butter. We kind of undervalue milk even grass fed organic because we're so used to buying cheaps quarts of cow juice. Dani, from Cross Island Farms, described this as Added Value, their time and knowledge making the milk more valuable to buyers. Also CHEESE IS DELICIOUS!

I was going to put a link here to a make your own cheese website but there are a million of them. Go to 'google.com' and type in 'make cheese'. Or follow Karl's recipe if you have a lot of goat milk handy. I'm buying a cheesecloth myself.

The Chicken in the Egg

2008-08-01T11:39:00.000-07:00

The chickens behind my tent were 'enclosed' by a wire fence...chicken wire you might say...with a hen house and a mulberry tree that rained delicious tidbits on them with every passing breeze. I write enclosed hesitantly since the chickens embraced the term free range with more abandon than their human masters probably intended when putting up that enclosure. Most of them are young and small enough to squeeze out the gaps and run wild through the garden, popping out at unexpected moments from every nook and cranny ("how did you get in my backpack?"). The rest take short flights from the yard to the top of the fence to outside the yard. Or the one or two smart enough to fly up into the mulberry tree hang out up there much of the day snatching the ripest sweetest fruits from reaching human fingers.

I think one of the first animals I spared a sympathetic thought for outside my own household or the Amazon rain forest were chickens. I felt some responsibility for them since they were my primary meat source. Without chickens life would be an unending march of tofu. It doesn't take much looking to find out how most chickens are raised, not free and easy in the shade of a mulberry tree, but stacked to the ceiling wing to wing, legs breaking underneath the weight of bodies bred to grown at unnatural rates. I found out about it...and didn't really give a shit. A teenage girl I'm teaching this summer who recently gave up her vegetarianism put it this way: "I was just like, why shouldn't I eat this chicken? I'm better than this chicken. So I ate it." She also admitted that the chicken (one of the boxed up varieties, presumably) was stringy and not very tasty.

The Frosts had two kinds of chickens-the back yard chickens, the ones in the pen, and the front yard chickens, a smaller golden variety who were just beginning to raise up their babies and still had the luxury of a rooster. Occasionally the rooster would try to chase a back yard escapee, strutting comically after a hen twice his size but mostly the front yard chickens hung out around the goats stealing their grain and sleeping slumped over on their stable doors. A couple more teenagers in on the tainted vegetarianism conversation asked me this,"What's better, caged chicken or free range? CAGED is better because free range you give them some nice time outside and then BAM kill them. The caged never know what they're missing." Well, I know what they're missing. It's pretty good.

Alison Frost took me to the county fair where she'd been asked to judge the art submissions for the 4H club. What I know about the 4H club is pretty limited and since it's a very extensive program this is just the most basic description-4H is an agricultural club where kids experiment with the crafts that are popular with scouts like wilderness survival but also raising livestock, baking, jam making, vegetable growing etc. etc. Its also a way to make money since every ribbon earned in each category is traded in for points which equal a small amount of cash. So Alison and her kids used to come to the county fair with their goats, rabbits, chickens, giant squash, preserves and pieces of art to collect points and socialize with other home schooled farm kids in the area. They're too grown for it now but Alison's still tight with 4H organizers and she invited me along to guest judge.

The county fair was pretty dead in the middle of a broiling hot day except for the judges and their 4H child assistants (why weren't they in school come to think of it?) with stacks of drawings and aprons and quilts in front of them. On the walls and in booths were posters and dioramas of farm activities and in one corner was a small cage full of chicks next to an incubator. As Alison sorted through the elementary school drawings-she gave away blue ribbons until they ran out, then we had to admit some were red ribbon material-I wandered over to the chicken exhibition trying to sneak a finger through the cage bars and pet a downy head. A girl of about nine or ten came up and pointed to the most demented looking one staggering around, its black fuzz a bit sticky and dusty looking, and said proudly, "That's my chick. I donated the egg."

"He's looking a little bedraggled," I said, thoughtlessly.

"Well, he just hatched," she informed me like I was a fucking idiot. Shut me the hell up!

I looked over at the incubator which had a clear plastic top. Inside were about a dozen eggs of different sizes and colors. Did you know some chickens lay blue eggs? Not like a robin's egg blue more a greeny blue, like sea foam. Along a few were hairline fractures and to my everlasting shock a baby chick kicked its way out of a shell as I watched. It lay there slick with birth, breathing shallowly on the damp paper towel of the incubator as stunned to be alive as I was to see it being born. The little farm girl shook her head at my slack jawed ignorance and wandered away.

So there's knowing and then there's knowing where chickens come from, how they come into this world and how they go out of it and all the ways they can be treated in between. The chickens at the Frost's have a sweet life and then BAM it's over. But chickens in factory farms live lives they probably wish would be over a lot quicker. It's interesting to think about how an organization like 4H might awaken a lot of school kids to the amazing responsibility of raising an animal to feed yourself and your family, to point at a chicken and say, "That's mine", knowing the care that went into its life as well as the benefits of its death. Of course 4H does not in any way cater exclusively to organic or free range farmers, for all I know that little dusty baby was going off to to be shoved in a cage with a hundred brothers and sisters.

I stood for a long time over the incubator, entranced. The newborn chick lay under the weight of its fresh existence, tossed to an uncertain future on the shore of its sea foam shell.

If you'd like to read a bit about 4H they have a crazy convoluted website here:

www.4-h.org

Ate Many Berries

2008-07-28T19:10:00.000-07:00

I slept in a tent! And with only four or five bouts of hysterical paranoia.

My first night at Frosty Morning Farms happened to coincide with their Strawberry Festival. The word festival conjures up all sorts of images for me- sword swallowers, bobbing for apples, pulled taffy, waking up in a paddling pool full of beer cans. Something big that leaves you sticky and hungover for a week afterwards. The Strawberry Festival in comparison to my lurid imagination is the anti-party. The members of Commonplace Community Land Trust get together, pick strawberries, then sit around a mud pond cooking and eating them. When it gets dark they form a circle and sing songs about fighting the establishment with hand holding or something and drink dandelion wine. It actually looked quite delightful if you knew everyone and felt comfortable sitting on the grass for eight hours straight. But I'd just arrived and wanted to get to work, whatever that meant. Unfortunately for me the Strawberry Festival is the one weekend all summer when no one works.

Around dark I was a mile up 'the hill' on a treacherously unlit rock strewn road. I had to escape We Shall Overcome so I did something I never do and begged total strangers for a ride. When they dropped me off at the farmhouse there was only the dim light of the kitchen window to see by. Jason, the Frosts' teenage son, was watching a movie with an Unnamed Youth. I begged him for some sheets and blankets to cover the bare mattress awaiting me on my tent platform. As he rustled around upstairs the Unnamed Youth and I exchanged words of a fuzzy bizarre nature as I'd gotten into the dandelion wine.

Stealing Jason's flashlight off the counter, I tried not to let my peripheral vision acknowledge the darkness. The night was unseasonably cold especially after the boiling heat of the city. I crawled inside the tent, not checking to see if the flaps were zipped completely shut against the wind because it seemed like touching the canvas walls would admit what flimsy protection they were. In my bag was a bottle of codeine cough syrup and I decided the only way to knock myself out was a heaping tablespoon of the good stuff. Shivering, I tried to pour out a portion big enough to put me to sleep instantly without inducing vomiting and instead splashed an elephant's dose all over my arms, legs and bedsheets. I finally managed to get some in my mouth and fell into a restless sleep. My last thoughts were either that I'd die of an overdose or be eaten alive by fire ants attracted to my cherry cough syrup coating.

Accomplishing neither objective I was forced to rise the next crack of dawn and sit through another day of strawberries. Before leaving town I'd jokingly (kind of) told my friend Robin that if I ever wrote an autobiography it would be titled "Ate Many Berries, May Poop Self". After two days of berry syrup, berry pancakes, berries and whipped cream this had become my mantra.

By my last night at Frosty Morning Farms the strawberries were pretty much out of my system and I had begun to love my tent. The gentle breeze blowing up from a nearby grove of trees, the sweet murmur of the chickens just outside, its delicious cherry scent. It didn't feel unsafe to peer into the darkness anymore. One night I was sitting on the edge of my mattress combing my hair dry and listening to the creaking outside without wondering if it was an ax murderer. I looked up and bumping against the netted ceiling was a signaling firefly. A little peeping Tom hoping for some hot l.e.d. light action.

Why are fireflies so poignant and touching? Maybe it was because I only saw three the whole time I was there and began to think it was the same one, blinking quietly and alone in my part of the yard, our part. There we were in a vast empty evening wishing each other goodnight through the walls of my tent.

Is it evil to anthropromorphize insects?

Perhaps the reason I began to like going to sleep in my tent was that when I woke up it was to this:

The next step of course is to sleep without any semblance of walls at all...perhaps when I've been prescribed methadone. Before streaking off into our drug induced dreams the firefly and I can flash sans boundaries into the night. Except it's a bug without thoughts or feelings.

Home Again, Home Again

2008-07-27T18:49:00.000-07:00

It's been a strange three weeks. I didn't expect WWOOFing to be life changing. I had a lot of ideas about it that weren't completely rocked by the actual experience of new people and places. Then the experience that did rock me happened here in the city amongst old friends. Well.

I wanted my first return post to be a kind of conclusion-good or bad, yea or nay- and then go on to the anecdotal as they relate to the issues that interest me. But now that I'm sitting here I don't really have a conclusion because I feel like three weeks wasn't enough to scratch the surface of what being a farmer is like, what homesteading is like, what raising and slaughtering your own animals is like (I didn't eat goat, incidentally).

The two farms I stayed at represented two sides of organic farming. There are probably many more sides but for the sake of comparison I'm wearing tunnel vision. One was all about environmental sustainability and the other about economic sustainability. At the Frosts' home everything they did was with consideration of what was good for the world. They took as little as possible from the land around them and put back as much as they could. At Dani and David's the foremost matter was how to make money off their farm. They didn't care much about organic food and barely ate out of their own garden except for the castoffs that wouldn't sell on their stand or in restaurants.

I'd like to say I'm not judgemental...but I also like to judge.

Whatever their personal choices were, if you have a small farm the healthy choice for it is organic, so good for you for trying to make it work. If you have a farm, period, how you're going to support yourself with it is a challenge. Farmers work hard as shit and we're addicted to cheap food. It's kind of a losing battle for them and selling 'gourmet' and specialty items, aggressive marketing and never eating something you can sell out of your own mouth is one way of dealing with that.

Also, I couldn't live the way the Frosts do, even though they seem pretty happy with how they've arranged their lives (the Frosts have been farming for about fifteen years, Dani and David for only 3). Well, that's not entirely true, I lived how they do for about ten days and settled into it pretty comfortably. It's not so hard when someone else is building the composting toilet and installing solar panels and making goat cheese (I did eat goat cheese!) though hopefully not in that order...Their way of life is possible because they live in a community that supports them. It makes me want NYC to be a friendlier place for solar power. We're all so used to letting our comfort and amenities swirl invisibly under us. How can I live more like the Frosts and still like me? It's something I'm wrestling with. Again, no conclusions.

Ultimately, yes this was a great experience. I'd do it again. And my life has been changed by it, though it may be the kind of passion inoculation that needs a booster shot. Eating locally, organically, seasonally is something I'm striving for but it's easy to forget the value of it when you just want to stuff potato chips into your mouth. Can we do it?

Please check in to read about my pathetic failures.

Amelia Geocos

2008-07-16T05:39:00.000-07:00

I'm back in town for a few days. A friend of mine, Amelia Geocos, was hit by a van on her bike last Friday and killed.

Amelia and I were part of a close circle of friends from the time we were twelve through high school. Since then I've seen her a few times a year, at parties, on the street. We both lived in Stuyvesant Town, a weird little community of old people and preppy kids where we didn't quite fit in. We rebelled in small ways like getting high on our rooftops, throwing eggs out the windows, screaming late at night at the flagpole to see if anyone would peak out the window. They never did.

The last time I saw Amelia I was on my way into Rubulad, a giant loft party in Williamsburg, and she was on her way out. She stopped and said something like, "I wouldn't expect to see you at a place like this!". This pissed me off. What, am I not cool enough? But it was true-I am not and will never be as cool as Amelia. Maybe I could go to Rubulad but she'd already be leaving to go someplace even better.

There's a lot of things I could say, a lot of memories that have come back to me thinking about her the last few days. Many of the things I did for the first time, the adventures I had as a teenager were because Amelia was there egging me on in both good and bad ways. She had a way of jumping into whatever the next thing was without thought for the consequences and you couldn't know her and not want to follow along. She lived vividly. I could never quite keep up but thoughts of her and how she did things have influenced me into my adult life and will continue to do so.

Last night was the first of several memorial events this week, a party at our friend Keiji's house. We basically got crunked and listened to jams like she would have wanted. I am totally hung over.

It was very special and hard to see all the people there who loved her and will feel the loss of her. I wouldn't write about it here if it hadn't profoundly touched me to see them come together. I can't really just go about my farming adventures or life adventures without acknowledging it and saying how sad I am that Amelia is not out in the world doing all the crazy beautiful stuff she always did. She'll always inspire me to live a little brighter, a little bolder. As we all should.

And Away We Go

2008-07-05T06:48:00.000-07:00

Okay, rushing to get out of the house now. Hopefully I can post a couple times during my sojourn but if not check back July 27th, when all this hullabaloo will come to fruition. Unless I'm eaten by Man Bear Pig.

The Dark Tent of the Soul

2008-07-04T18:48:00.001-07:00

A lot of the things I've been thinking about and writing about in the last few weeks would seem pretty ridiculous to most of the world who've done things like roast whole chickens and sleep in tents on a pretty regular basis. On the other hand I often take for granted the things city life has allowed me to do that many people haven't experienced. Like, "You've been to Times Square? Like where the Coke sign is?" is a pretty commonly asked question when people find out I grew up in New York.

Of course I'd trade a million Times Square sightings for the capacity to sleep outdoors without having a panic attack.

When I was growing up all my friends were from NY too, and they all had a sense of the terrible danger we were in to varying degrees. They lived in a apartments small enough that you could stand in one corner and know exactly who was home, apartments with a million locks and chains. When I went to college I met people who grew up in big houses with huge pictures windows that had no bars or alarm systems, who left their doors unlocked and walked down dark roads and had camped for fun in their yard as kids. I remember two roommates who asked my opinion about taking the bars down from their window in their new East Village apartment. To me, a window leading to a fire escape with no bars is an open invitation to be murdered in your sleep, but they got out their tool box and did it anyway, against my assertions that they'd soon be dead. Spitefully, they proved me wrong and lived to reattach the bars for their deposit a few years later (though someone did get conked in the head with the gate during its removal...trying to knock some sense into them to no avail).

Two summers ago I went to Utah and on a road trip down to the Grand Canyon. On our way my friend Claire and I attempted to camp along the Green River. We even set up a tent and lit a fire then dragged our sleeping bags to the river's edge. After the gnats settled down and stopped trying to fly into our mouths Claire fell quickly asleep. I lay rigidly awake, fully clothed in a sleeping bag full of sand. I looked over at the tent and thought it was a pretty clever ruse. Perhaps we'd hear the Hook Man slashing through it trying to get to the tender girly flesh inside and we'd have time to run into the river and drown ourselves instead of being chopped to bits.

The sky was very beautiful that night or maybe it just looks the way the sky always looks when you can see stars. There were many layers of them it seemed, almost a fog of stars, and the sky took on depth as I looked at the ones that burned clear and close then the ones that faded in luminescence in the distance.

The vulnerability of being outside at night is not the only thing that makes it so hard for me to sleep there. I was uncomfortable, freaked, itchy but there was also no way to shut any of it out. The sky was huge and the little noises in the darkness innumerable. The whole world was whirring all around and I couldn't make it go away, I could feel it pressing down on me even with my eyes closed. It's like sleeping in a bed with someone for the first time. Your consciousness of them disrupts your dreams, a part of you is waiting for them to stir or speak. I felt like I was waiting for the universe to say something and I didn't want to hear.

When I couldn't bear it anymore I woke Claire and said we had to drive to the nearest motel now. Very obligingly she rose and we walked past the dead fire to the tent to dismantle it and throw it in our car. I would have just thrown everything in the back myself, Claire and all, but I needed her to drive. As we walked Claire whispered suddenly that she was scared of the dark. We started to giggle. She said when she'd been asleep she could shut it out but now she was scared. In turn, now that I was walking around there didn't seem to be anything to be afraid of. I squeezed her hand and we got in the car and drove ten minutes to a motel (the town consisted of about ten motels, a coffee shop and a melon stand). In the room, with walls and a door with a dead bolt and windows that locked I fell into the deepest sleep of my life.

At Frosty Morning Farms I'll be sleeping a tent. Claire, probably thinking of my desperate scrambling by the river's edge, warned me, "You'll hear a lot of noises. Scary noises that sound like something. But they're not." No, they never are. Almost never.

Do I really think anything is going to happen to me? Hmm. Can bears really smell menstrual blood a mile away?

It's not the vision of what is out there in the night that makes me nervous, it's what's inside the tent that I'm dreading. Myself, alone in the dark with out all the helpful mental compression of an apartment building. My own mind rushing, streaming, wandering to some thought I don't want to hear.

So you want to live on a farm...

2008-07-02T05:22:00.000-07:00

The idea to go WWOOFing (working on an organic farm in exchange for food, shelter and knowledge) had been rolling around in my head for awhile so all my friends heard me talk about it to death. Naturally this lead to a couple of them deciding they wanted to go WWOOFing this summer too.

This couple signed up with WWOOF and started searching for a place to stay while I was still dithering around, trying to rent my apartment and decide if I wanted to stay in state or not. When I asked them how the search was going their response sent me into a panic.

"Almost everybody is full!!"

Uh oh.

Eventually they found a place to stay in Maine which is where they are right now, generating their own electricity and swimming on the beach everyday. Meanwhile I sent out a million emails and put in half a dozen phone calls to farms from New York to Vermont and wasn't I surprised to find that nine out of ten places had room and needed help.

Uh oh.

How to choose the right farm for you?

1. Ask what kind of work you'll be doing and how much of it.

I was interested in more than weeding rows of vegetables (though there will surely be a fair amount of that in my immediate future) so I chose farms who have livestock and keep bees, hoping to find some variety of work to do. Most farms agreed that five days a week for about six hours a day is enough of a workload to justify the expense of feeding you, but double check. No one wants to work from sun up till sun down, part of being out in the country is having a little leisure time to be bored.

2. How many people are around, who are they?

One farmer I spoke to talked my ear off about his divorce and all the problem Wwoofers he's had over the years and basically told me I'd be completely alone as he worked most of the day and went cross country biking during his free time. Picturing weeks of solitude with the occasional burst of incessant chatter was a turn off. You may want to go to a place with other Wwoofers to hang out with or maybe not...if you're a weirdo.

3. How near is a town or something to do?

You might need to bring a bike or ask if they've got a spare one you can use since most farms are not within walking distance of entertainment. During the boring leisure time you've negotiated you may want to do something, like go the local general goods store and finger the general goods. Or something like a beach, river, swimming hole...Also most farmers know the other farmers in the neighborhood and if you're interested in learning about different ways of running a farm (Wheeee!) they might be willing to send you around to meet people and check out their places of operation.

4. What is there to eat/can I smoke myself to death?

They're supposed to keep you from the brink of starvation so ask what that will entail. Most places are set up for a vegetarian diet since they're growing vegetables but a lot also have animals on the premises for food. If you've got a problem with this ask first rather than have some sort of mental breakdown later. Some also have rules about drinking, drugs and tobacco. The rule may simply be 'don't bogart the doobie' but if you can't live without a constant stream of nicotine don't go someplace you'll be strung up for it.

5. Where will I lay my head?

I'm not a camper (more on that later) and many of the people I talk to will house you in a tent, usually one they provide but sometimes not. If you need the security of a roof and fours walls at night make sure they'll be there waiting for your arrival. Plus, if there are other workers you may be bunking it. You might also want to ask about facilities like showers and toilets (how often you can use either). I didn't...so we'll see where that leads...

6. WHAT DO YOU PEOPLE WANT FROM ME??

This is more ephemeral. It's hard to describe and since I haven't actually gone yet my theories may prove meaningless, as so much in life proves to be. But when I was talking to people I tried to just get a feel for how they treat their Wwoofers- as friends, formal guests, migrant labor...across the board people were pretty friendly, but you never know. Things like if you share meals together, if they'd want you to cook, if they're interested in why you want to WWOOF and ask what you'd like to learn, if they offer to drive you places and show you what's fun to do, those were all telling moments. A lot of the farmers I spoke to had a lot of pride in the place where they lived, its natural beauty and personal history. If they want to share that then it's probably a nice place to go.

Of course, I'm just talking out of my ass. But I've narrowed it down and am heading first to Frosty Morning Farms on Common Place Land Cooperative, an intentional community, then to Cross Island Farm further upstate. Hopefully I've chosen wisely and wont be chopped up and fed to the pigs.

That's Choppy, the two headed pig from China. I should be so lucky to be eaten by him.

Oh, one more thing-don't believe your friends so you have to turn down a dozen farmers who are excited to host you. Take it one or two at a time, you'll probably get the place you want.

Roasted

2008-06-30T21:36:00.000-07:00

Robin mentioned I should include recipes but I think of this blog as being about the experience of food in my life and how it changes what I do and how I think about other things. Also a lot of my recipes aren't so great and are totally ripped off other people's fantastic cooking ideas.

Still, I'd like to mention cooking food when it relates to an experience, like the first time I roasted an entire chicken which conveniently was just last week.

I've mentioned before that I gave up factory-farmed meat which means I don't eat meat not bought and prepared by myself much. Where are all the restaurants advertising their cage free quails? I'll patronize them! (I've never eaten a quail but I saw some at the New Amsterdam Market and am intrigued...they look like dolls if raw chickens played with little dolls of themselves. Ew. Never mind.)

One of the things I missed the most was roasted chicken. There's a Cuban restaurant in my neighborhood that makes amazing rotisserie chicken and I mourn it.

I'm pretty lazy and when the taste for flesh comes on too strong I usually just broil a chicken breast or cook it on the stove top. As I trolled the poultry isle at the Park Slope Food Coop, in my fit of carnivorous lust, there was a cornucopia of animals that had been grass fed, hormone free blah di blah. Most of them still had their bones, or feet, most were probably stuffed with graphic little baggies of organs. Why haven't I ever had duck or rabbit (not technically a bird, but still)? Was it more than laziness but rather squeamishness, a reluctance to acknowledge that what I was eating was once a living thing that died to feed me?

Hunger and curiosity drove me to pick up a whole chicken and take on preparing the meal I always pictured in my mind as an event, something for a special occasion. When I got it home and unwrapped it I was surprised not by the blood or expected organ baggie, but by the heft and texture of the thing outside its packaging. It felt kind of like a baby (Note: If your baby feels like a raw chicken consult a pediatrician immediately).

So this is how I made it:

Wash it out then dry with paper towels. Cover the whole thing with black pepper and salt and stick some garlic into slits you cut in the skin (another weird 'this was alive' moment. The skin moves across the flesh so you can see your garlic chunks lost beneath the surface.) Put it in a high sided tray breast down then in the oven at 450 until that side is browned, flip it over and brown the other side. Then I took it out turning the oven to 325 and added onions and potatoes around the chicken with a little bit of water, probably more than I need to, then put the whole thing back in for about an hour, checking on it and basting it occasionally.

It was remarkably easy and tasty. Though the process of preparing it had moments where I was just plan grossed out I think this was a testament to how disconnected we become with the source of our food rather than a sign from God that eating animals is wrong. Perhaps on the farm as I lead a Billy-Goat to the slaughter house I'll reconsider that position, but for now I just want to use this experience to establish a personal ground rule for eating-If you can't bring yourself to handle the materials you shouldn't eat the product.

For info on where my chicken came from (It's Amish!) check out these chicken people:

dartagnan.com

Going to Market

2008-06-29T19:09:00.000-07:00

Today I checked out that New Amsterdam Market shortly before the monsoon came. The market is full of locally grown food and the people who process it and sell it. Their goal is to eventually move the market into the Tin Building and the New Market Building, previous home of the Fulton Fish Market. Right now they're under the FDR drive.

Writing that made me think of another market I used to visit when I was living in Paris that set itself up under the Metro. Walking through it sometimes felt like you could pick your feet up off the ground and be carried onward by the swell of people. The food was very very cheap and I have no idea where it came from. The placement of the New Amsterdam Market is only similar in that it's under a large bridge-like structure meant for transport. It's also a stone's throw from the South Street Sea Port which means lots of tourists which is great for sales (sometimes-tourists probably aren't so interested in fresh veggies and meat they can't cook) but maybe not the place to attract real New Yorkers in a residential neighborhood. On Sundays in Paris everybody and their Maman was at that market. Here, there was a crowd but I wondered who was representin'.

First of all it was blazing hot. So I went over to the People's Popsicle where I was 'greeted' by an array of beautiful fresh-faced young lads and lasses with charming British accents who seemed to be selling popsicles pretty much on a lark. All four of them served every customer, taking out the individually frozen pop, dipping it's plastic case into a mason jar of warmish water, then working it in their hand until it could be eased out of its molding. I asked if this was their first time ever selling popsicles and they admitted that yes, this was the dry run-through.

An hour later when I got my Blue Velvet pop (blueberries, yogurt and honey) I hoped it would be worth the wait and $4. I know, $4. Kind of outrageous but I would never have described a popsicle as filling before. Seriously, it was practically a meal.

Refreshed, I continued on and got a big score-the last head of purple cauliflower!!!:

If you eat something purple made of synthetic chemicals it's probably bad for you. But any opportunity to eat colorful vegetables should be taken. It pleases the eye and the body! Here's the picture of the last purple cauliflower I ate that a friend bought and cooked for me in October:

Hauntingly beautiful, isn't it? I like taking pictures of myself with vegetables.

I also bought some fancy Gruyere cheese which was actually, it turned out, from Pennsylvania, being distributed by White Dog Community Enterprises which is a non-profit that tries to help farmers hook up with local wholesalers. Had I read the fine print I may have on principal tried to find the New York State equivalent but the cheese lady had already started hacking away and seemed a bit flustered. I didn't want her to stab me and ruin all her lovely cheese with blood. Anyway, I spend a fair amount of time in the Poconos. Pennsylvania cannot support its economy with scented candles alone! (The candle store in our hamlet burned down)

It would have been pretty easy to fill up for free, since as one excited shopper exclaimed when I asked if she knew of an ATM around, "Free samples! FREE SAMPLES!". Yes, lots of those, cheese and bread in particular. The bread isles were a little lonely looking, with the heat and colorful competition all around no one wanted a slice. Atkins, what hast thou wrought??

But speaking of eating for free one of the most popular stands was Wild Foods, headed by Nova Kim and Les Hook, two foragers from Vermont. They go into the forest and come out both full and not horribly dead. Verrrry curious, I bobbed along the perimeter of the crowd to see what they might have-air? Grubs? Actually, lots of little bags fulled of funny roots and furry leaves with photocopied recipes stapled to them. They also had several photocopied DIY books with all the ways you can eat from the side of a road and not kill yourself. There were even little laminated spore grids that look like Sudoku puzzles that you somehow use to not eat poison mushrooms...I don't know, I'm not a doctor.

Anyway as soon as I picked one up Nova Kim herself leaped on me. She and her fam live off the grid which I would guess gets lonely. She told me several interesting facts:

There are about 2,600 identified mushrooms in the U.S. and only 13 or 14 will kill you or make you wish you was dead. I like those odds!

If you eat a poison mushroom, consider yourself lucky it's not Hemlock. Hemlock runs through your circulatory system, so as you struggle to walk for first aid you're basically helping it kill you, whereas with a mushroom you'll make it to a hospital most of the time.

Hemlock and Wild Chervil, an edible plant, look much alike.

She and few others are trying to set up a Wild Food Gatherers Guild and get more and more people gathering food and certified to teach what's edible and what definitely isn't. Talk about taking personal responsibility for what you eat- according to Nova the most important thing is knowing your own environment and trusting your own expertise. Um, I know what crab grass looks like...

Here's a place to learn about that (it's pretty much as cool as martial arts):

wildgourmetfood.com

And I must say a much nicer looking website than I would have ever anticipated.

So eventually I came home and made a great meal of steamed cauliflower with pecans, honey, garlic, and grated Gruyere. Jealous?

You're jealous.

For more info on the New Amsterdam Market go to:

newamsterdammarket.org

Get That Delicious Meaty Monkey Off Your Back

2008-06-28T13:47:00.000-07:00

Last night I received this text message:

"What the fuck kind of vegan bullshit are you getting yourself into?"

I responded with a disparaging comment about the sender's meat consumption, to which she replied:

"Red meat makes me happy. Blood red."

End of conversation. Now, I'm not a vegan. I'm not even a vegetarian. Shortly before last Christmas I made a vow to stop eating factory raised meat. I've maintained that vow except for two occasions. Once at my company's annual benefit at Tavern on the Green. No filling baskets of bread laid helpfully across the table to soak up all the alcohol from the open bar. No, you get one roll the size of a chihuahua's head (I like to measure things in chihuahua units) and you have to make the best of it. When the main coarse arrived the green beans were already soaked in the juice of their chicken breast counterpart. It was eat or drink more, and I ate. In retrospect that sounds like a stupid choice but it seemed like the right thing then.

The second time I broke my new rule was also at a benefit, for a public elementary school at a Chinese restaurant downtown. This wasn't intentional, I thought the little cube of something I popped into my mouth would be tofu. It wasn't. I'm not sure how it could be classified but it tasted like something suffered to make it.

Meat is a touchy subject for a lot of people. It has been fairly easy for me to stay away from factory farmed animal products mainly because I wasn't raised eating one of the most seductive and destructive-red meat. Blood red. I say destructive because CAFOs, the places where thousands of heads of steer are crammed shoulder to shoulder in their own filth, eating by-products of their predecessors (Helloooo mad cow disease), have changed the face of agriculture in America. No more small family owned farms growing a diversity of plants in a delicate ecosystem of crop rotation and animal grazing. Now it's acre after acre after acre of corn owned by large agribusinesses. To feed cattle, who aren't really built for eating corn anyway and have to be injected with all sorts of antibiotics to be kept from keeling over dead from ulcerated stomachs before they get to the slaughterhouse.

And I say seductive because red meat is tasty. I have eaten it and it tastes like blood and to carnivorous animals like humans, blood taste is the taste of protein and life and macho chest beating. All fun things. I could probably list a lot more reasons why steak is awesome if I were a connoisseur of that particular dish and had eaten more than a few experimental bites from a friend's plate. What I can say is that steak if heavy. If you don't eat it much a few bites will knock you out. So, is beef like crack and my friend craves it because she constantly eats it? Probably more like nicotine since I hear crack is instantly lovely that very first time while my memories of my first smoke all involved severe nausea and regret. Until it gets into your system.

There are options. There are free range chickens and grass-grazed beef. There's also this really interesting article I read a few weeks ago in the New York Times about how to start eating less meat:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/11/dining/11mini.html

Not NO meat, just less. I think it puts a few things in perspective about how much meat we really need to eat. No one likes to be told what to put in their body but I do think its important to experiment and consider why we eat how we do. If nothing else you may find a recipe you really like.

SUNDAY SUNDAY SUNDAY

2008-06-28T07:06:00.000-07:00

Hey Y'alls,

I'm just putting this up there in case anyone wants to check it out:

http://www.newamsterdammarket.org/calendar.htm

The New Amsterdam Market is off pier 17 near the South Street Seaport. Whoa, South Street Seaport. Scary territory.

Anyway the Market has growers and purveyors of delicious native New York food. A fun and yummy way to learn a bit about what's locally available. I assume it's fun since I've never been, but I'll report back my findings. Wearing a plastic Statue of Liberty hat.

CSA!

2008-06-26T20:45:00.000-07:00

Tonight I had dinner with my friend Robin for which we cooked from some of her CSA vegetables. That was the intention anyway but a CSA provides you with whatever's in season and this time of year that pretty much amounts to greens greens greens. Robin claims there were strawberries too but I didn't see any of them.

CSA stands for Community Supported Agriculture. Basically, you buy a share in a local farmer's crops and receive a basket of produce weekly or bi-weekly. Some CSAs include fruit, eggs, herbs, flowers, even milk. These ones are generally pricier. One of the benefits to this arrangement is lots of healthy produce that's grown organically from someplace nearby. What you eat isn't giving a brutal beating to the face of the planet with the fist of fossil fuel. No refrigerated trucks covering thousands of miles so you can eat pre-washed salad!

In fact if you want something pre-washed you're not going to get it at a CSA. Root vegetables seem to be strait up ripped from the ground. I once stir-fried a caterpillar in a bunch of fresh kale. Yeah, I ate the kale anyway. Caterpillars are probably protein.

Another benefit to this arrangement is you can usually visit the farm where your food comes from and meet the people who grow it. They have things like garlic harvesting parties and cider drinking festivals. Some CSAs even require their members to come work on the farm for an afternoon during the growing season. Wait, is that a benefit? Guess I must think so, what with the wanting to farm crap, but it may be a turn-off for people flirting with the idea of joining their first CSA. Don't be scared! It would be totally cool to shake the hand of the person responsible for your caloric intake and not in a creepy weighing-your-slice-of-cheesecake nutritionist kind of way.

The next benefit didn't really occur to me until my CSA began (this was last summer, this year we didn't sign up due to logistics) which is that whatever they give you, you have to find a way to eat it.

Crazy! I've alway been a picky eater and have pretty much rejected salad from birth. Guys, it's eating leaves. WTF? Why not eat a delicious, meaty squash or zucchini or tomato or anything else at all that isn't poisonous.

The answer is because those things do not grow in April or May or June, at least not in this part of the world. If you're eating one right now, a big mouthful of butternut squash falling from your lips to your lap as you scream, "WHAAaaaat??" it ain't from around these parts.

It wasn't that I ever read the from Mexico/California/Chile labels and thought they meant Mexico, NY. But seeing what rolled in every week from our CSA was kind of a wake-up call about what my immediate environment (the definition of which has to encompass about 300 mi these days) could sustain through out the growing season. It also forced me to eat a lot of things I would never pick up in the grocery isle, because dammit I was getting my money's worth! (On that note, the CSA we signed up for came to about $10-$15 a person a week, and we had enough food in each load to feed 3 people all week long. For the quality and quantity I'd say it was totally worth it)

My cooking has improved in both the scope of its ingredients and general flavor. Kale is pretty bitter whether there are bugs in it or not, you need to be inventive. Inventiveness is a good word to describe what taking part in a CSA makes you do. Most of us are not comfortable with eating so many fresh vegetables. We've been repelled by them as children, by their boring preparation and purported health benefits. Gross! The CSA made my taste buds grow up a little and that was awesome.

So tonight what Robin had was lettuce and mustard greens. I still don't reach for the lettuce first so she sautéed me up some mustard greens and I made an omelette. The omelette could be considered organic if not local though really by that point I was too hungry to care. Afterwards we tried to include one more of Robin's CSA finds into a recipe-lavender. She'd gotten a "Secret Lavender Chocolate Chip Cookies" recipe. We tried it out and the secret is they taste like ass. Sorry to spoil it for you.

For more info on CSAs near you check out:

http://www.localharvest.org/csa/

Um...Facts?

2008-06-26T13:26:00.000-07:00

A friend passed along this article from Travel & Leisure magazine about WWOOF:

http://www.travelandleisure.com/articles/farm-stand

It has got some of the basic information about WWOOF, how it started, with whom and a few details of the author's, Patricia Marx, experience. This article has been pretty thoroughly fact-checked because that's how they roll at T&L-I know because I worked there last year for about four months.

Fact-checking is a strange gig. Reading this article I had a flash back to the looping hallways, long paper trails and quietly ringing phones of the Hippodrome. I never fit in there because I never really tried which isn't exactly something to be proud of. A lot of people would want the opportunity to work as an editorial assistant at a publication like T&L, I saw them waiting in the lobby clutching resumes, and the FACT that I didn't make much of the situation is a testimony more to my failures than T&L's.

That being said....

There were times when the fact-checker's job was more about justifying inaccuracies than correcting them. Sometimes the letter of what was being written could be considered "fact" but the spirit of what was being conveyed was skewed for the sake of T&L's prospective readership. Very wealthy and, probably, white city people. If you challenged the perspective of an article you were an enemy of the writer, the editor, everyone. You were gumming up the works! Just say that it's true so we can go to lunch! What could I expect from a popular magazine that focuses on life's luxuries for the elite ? Travel and Leisure... it's right there in the title, moron. That's what you get!

Marx's piece brought back my discomfort with this attitude. She's a little snide, a little dismissive. Presumably this trip did more than affirm her love of artificial sweetener. Yeah, she probably shouldn't pack up and move out to the country to live in a yurt. Most of us probably shouldn't, until the apocalypse comes. But, to me and many people interested in organic or locally grown food, WWOOFing is more about breaking down the crazy consumerist, industrial, micromanaging structure that makes the place our food comes from seem so distant, out of reach or impossible to change/improve. Instead of approaching it from this far more positive, truthful angle this article instead delineates the difference between those nutty new age farmers dancing their "Universal Peace" crap out in the woods and us New Yorkers who have the decency to shut ourselves into a spa during those ten days off a year from the office. Why promote the idea that only a dirty hippie or stunt journalist would attempt to WWOOF?

At the moment I'm neither a farmer nor an office worker. I haven't gotten to one place and I didn't belong in the other. But I like to imagine a third place (or several thousand such places) that isn't so concerned with cramming people to fit the labels laid out for them or the facts into the conclusions we wrote first and researched later.

So am I being a total jerk or what?

Happy Are They...Who Farm

2008-06-25T19:03:00.000-07:00

In twelve days I'm going to live on a farm. This is not that shocking. Lots of people live on farms, they're called farmers and if you threw a dart at a map of upstate New York chances are it will obliterate the place where a farm would be indicated if we put farms on maps.

I have no idea if there will be electricity when I get there. I spoke to a few different prospective hosts and heard lots of possibilities. I could sleep in a tent (if I wanted to mow a piece of ground to stake it out on), I could stay in the unfinished barn, the hay loft, a bunk, in the cellar (if Arthur's brother isn't down there...), a room in the house. Some farms said they'd pick me up at the bus station, others encouraged hitch-hiking. They wanted to know if I smoked, if I minded smoking, if I took a lot of showers, if I could cook, if I liked children, ate meat, drank.

It may have been a good idea to press for more details but here's the deal-I'm volunteering to work there for just a few weeks. I'm a guest in their home, eating their food and sleeping on their blow up mattresses. So when they asked if I like to shower with hot water or had a problem with animals being slaughtered on the premises I tried to be as accommodating in my response as possible.

"Well, I don't eat a LOT of meat..."

"Oh no, not us either really, just you know maybe after we've slaughtered a goat we'll have meat for a few weeks, like that."

Guys...I'm probably going to eat a goat.

So when you're talking to these very down to earth (like they put their hands IN TO THE EARTH and food comes out) people and hoping they'll let you into their homes you don't want to ask some douchey question like, "Um, can I plug my Powerbook in? Because...it would be good for...illuminating the tent."

I'm not saying I wont see a light bulb all month but its definitely possible that I wont-ye gods!-check email. Still, documenting the experience is important to me, because I am the most interesting person in the world. No, seriously, I am....no, seriously, a few people wanted to know about Wwoofing-which to clarify stands for World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms (which is totally not what I've been telling people until I just double-checked now) and their website is wwoofusa.org. That's just for America, WWOOF is all over the world (Duh, world wide) and there's a different website for Canada, Europe, Australia...etc. It can get a little confusing and overwhelming. What WWOOF provides you with is a listing of their respective country's organic farms that have registered to be hosts. You go through the list contacting the farms that are in an area you find appealing to see if they need help/have space for you. If so, you get to go live with them and learn about where the food you eat back in the big city comes from and what goes into making it. Of course, most of the food being pipe-lined into the big city doesn't come from organic farms...

So I've started this blog and in the next twelve days I'm going to add to it with information (i.e. wild speculation and unfounded fears) about Wwoofing, getting ready, intentional communities, CSAs, my hacking cough, and whatever the hell else I feel like. During the actual WWOOF time upstate I may have to scratch on a piece of birch bark with a twig dipped in goat blood, but I plan to transcribe all that here upon my return along with photos.

Hopefully when the WWOOF experience is over my mental and physical scars wont be so disfiguring that I can't type. Stayed tuned to find out!