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

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

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

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.

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

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.

Forking and Groveling OR Don't Fear the Potato

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.

Ate Many Berries

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.