okra from my garden!

I have a real garden this year, which is a new venture for me. I've been discovering the challenges (rabbits, heat waves) and joys (pesto whenever I want, and so many butternut squashes ripening!) as I go. One thing I decided to try growing this year is okra.

I associate okra with cuisine from hot places: the southern US, India, Africa. I didn't know how it would grow in a first-time gardener's New England garden. It came up kind of late in the season, and it has remained small; I figured it was too small to produce any okra. But then I got some tiny flowers, and now... some tiny okra pods!!!

 Aren't they cute? Two of them--that is, two pods--were ripe yesterday, so I picked them and mixed them with some CSA-acquired okra and other veggies to have with our dinner.

Obviously it's not like I'm growing (or able to grow) okra as a crop, but it was  cool to supplement our dinner with something from our garden.

Barbeque tofu, quinoa "risotto," and mixed roasted veggies--including our two okra pods!

ongoing project: my front yard

I'm trying to get back into the swing of blogging, no less because VEGAN MOFO is in September this year! Since I'll be posting about food every day of that month, I'm writing about the house this month. I meant to be updating all summer.. but it turns out that the first year of being a first-time homeowner is really time consuming! July's post was and the next couple posts will be about some of the projects that have been taking up so much of my time (which would otherwise have been spent blogging, I'm sure).

First, here is the home my husband and I bought a little over a year ago:

It was a partially flipped house built in 1910. I say "partially" because it seems like the flippers did the minimum amount of work they could do while still getting away with calling the home "flipped." But that was okay with us--we were both okay with the "fix-me-up" nature of some of our house.

I'll show you some inside shots in a later entry, but the real projects that have been sucking up my time are outdoors. Did you notice my front yard in the picture above? And how by "yard" I mean "dirt?" Here's another view:

 

When we moved in, the only green in the front of our house was a few patches of crabgrass. (Which, true to crabgrass's nature, soon became "a jungle of crabgrass.") I put down grass seed and am still slowly trying to choke out weeds.

The slope of the front of our lawn is a difficult angle to mow, so I decided to turn the worst of it--the edges-- into flowerbeds. First I had to get rid of what was already there. I bought some black plastic sheeting. (Specifically I bought "landscape fabric," but any black plastic sheeting will do.) Because it is black plastic, it not only blocks the weeds underneath from getting any light, but it absorbs light, making the ground underneath it super hot, killing the weeds and (hopefully) their seeds. I laid it down along the edges of the lawn. It comes with flimsy plastic stakes, but I knew they wouldn't do the job for the many months I intended to leave them there, so I also just weighed down the plastic every few feet with pavers.

The green on the lawn in this picture is all crabgrass.

I did this in October of last year and warned our neighbors that it would look ugly for many more months, but it was in an attempt to make it look pretty in the future.

This past April, I rolled back the plastic, which had done a good job killing the weeds! I used a digging fork to turn the soil, mixing in some compost as I went. In retrospect, I should really have used some stronger tools (like my hoe axe!) and done a better job of really mixing up the soil, but I didn't know that at the time.

The picture above shows freshly-turned dirt on the bottom left side, and the paler row of not-yet-turned soil. Please ignore my thumb in the corner (oops). The picture below shows the fully turned bed:

One bold robin, one of the first robins of the season, LOVED ME for turning all the soil, and followed me around the yard like an excited dog. All I had to do was turn my back, and when I'd turn around, there he'd be. He was sort of my yard work mascot this spring, as every time I did a new project, he'd be watching me and eating any worm I might unearth.

I then planted flower seeds. many of which died. Our front lawn gets full sun all day, every day, and we had an incredibly dry spring. I had picked all drought-resistant varieties, but despite daily watering, I couldn't keep the flower beds moist enough for little seeds to thrive--poor things! I replanted a few weeks ago, and some of the flowers are finally coming in, but it's a slow process. I've learned my lesson for next year: I'll have to start my plants indoors.

This is still a work in progress. It's not as pretty as it will be next year, but it's a start. I'll keep you posted!

spring 2013 project: my back yard

(AKA, DIY yard terracing! Whoo!)

One of the reasons I wanted to move out to Waltham, our city/suburb, was that I wanted to be able to have a house and outdoor space of our own. I wanted a garden and a yard where our future kids could play. We couldn't get that in the middle of Cambridge or Boston. The lot we ended up with is relatively small, but the front is big enough for some flower beds, and the back yard had a small green space and the edge of a rocky hill. It looked spacious enough when we had first seen our place in late winter, but when the back yard started to fill in with weeds and poison ivy come spring, I realized we actually had very little useable outdoor space.

(You can see larger versions of these picture by clicking on them.)

That lush green jungle is primarily just rocks, broken glass, a large dead tree, and poison ivy. Definitely not useable.

We paid landscapers to remove the worst of the brush last fall; I had gotten a bad case of poison ivy last summer (I used to be immune! but no longer) and didn't want to mess with it again. We were then hoping to have the landscapers terrace the backyard a little, but when we got the estimate for the work, it was about $10,000. We could definitely not afford that! I decided to try working on it myself. (After paying a professional to take down the dead tree. I knew I couldn't do that myself.)

I had no idea what I was doing. I have never landscaped or done anything close to it. Mowing our lawn last summer was the first time I'd ever mowed. The only "garden" I've ever grown was the pots of herbs I grew on the fire escape of our last place. But I am not one to let inexperience stop me! Have you ever heard the silly kids' joke, "How do you make a statue of an elephant?" The answer is "Take a block of stone and chip away everything that doesn't look like an elephant." This was the approach I decided to take with the backyard. I would chip away everything that didn't look like "my" back yard.

I got started in late March/early April, after the snow had melted but before anything could grow. I wasn't sure what I would do yet, but I knew that the first step was to clear away all of the leaves, sticks, and branches so I could get an idea of the land I had to work with.

Partially cleared. Unfortunately I didn't take many "before" pictures. This was the worst part of the project. There were decades' worth of leaves to rake away, wrapped around decades' worth of rotting branches and garbage. More than half of the yard was covered in winter creeper, an annoying, invasive vine that kept getting caught in the rake and making my job even harder. I had to pull out all the vines and runners and roots, some of which turned out to be poison ivy roots. I couldn't tell at the time because it was too early for the poison ivy to grow leaves, so it blended in with the winter creeper runners. After my first rash of this season cropped up, I started wearing long sleeves, arm warmers, and my work gloves, and washing myself and all of my clothing obsessively after each time outside. There was also a huge amount of broken glass throughout the yard, which I removed shard by shard.

While I did find a couple 3-4 hour chunks of time on weekends, the vast majority of this work was done between when I got home from work and when the sun set, which was about an hour a day in April. And because of social life stuff, I couldn't be home before dark every day. So it took me the whole month to clear the back yard, one hour at a time.

All cleared. Now that I had an idea of the shape of things, I could sort of envision how best to make it useable space. I imagined two distinct levels: one larger, even one on the bottom, where someday I'd have a garden, a seating area, and a bird bath. The other, upper level would be smaller, left sort of wild, with trees and eventually flowers. I would make a path between the two terraced levels.

I didn't know how exactly that would work, but I liked the idea. Online searches for the best way to level one's land mostly gave me answers like "rent a tractor" or "hire a landscaper," so I was on my own. I did find that for small leveling jobs, people used what a bunch of sites called a "grub hoe" and a dirt rake. I could have gone to the hardware store for these, but first I went to my dad. He had an extra dirt rake (this is the best part about being from a really rural area: of course my dad had an extra dirt rake) and while he only had one grub hoe, he gave it to me because he "never wants to have a reason to use it again." (This did not bode well for how laborious the work ahead of me would be.)

What I call a grub hoe, on the left, is also called a grubbing hoe or hoe axe. It has a hoe on one end and an axe head on the other. You use it to hack at the ground to dig and loosen up the dirt you want to move. It belonged to my grandfather, who was a farmer. It was really exciting and sort of sappily symbolic to me that I would use the same tool he used on the land where I grew up to improve my own home and land. The dirt rake, on the right, is what you use to move the loosened dirt around. These were my buddies for weeks of work and remain my favorite yard work tools.

Again, I could only put in about an hour a day of work, and even then only a few days a week, but I hacked at and raked the ground, pulling out winter creeper, poison ivy, and locust tree shoots as I found them. (I am proud to say that I seem to have eliminated the first two, but those darn locusts are still my enemy.)

The finished version! At least, as finished as it's going to get this year. I sprinkled some grass seed around just to have something growing out there, and other plants have sprouted up. I also planted a garden! A real one! That wild rabbits love! The bottom area is mostly leveled and larger, with plenty of space for our garden (which will hopefully be twice as big next year). Someday we'll put a bird bath and a seating area back there, too. The top area isn't quite as leveled as I had hoped it would be, but there are so many roots from our trees and the trees on our neighbors' property that it was really difficult to move the earth around. It is flatter now though, so it's easier to walk on, and I made a little path between the layers on the right side.

It's getting overgrown, but I just can't spend much more time on it this year.  It's still a work in progress, but I'm so happy with how far it's come!

earth machine compost bin

House decorating/beautifying is still taking place, as well as yardwork. I've been doing yardwork! The most yardwork I've ever done is maintaining a tiny flower garden when I was in college, and now I'm mowing! I'm creating flower beds! Everything is a process; pictures will come soon (or, more realistically, when the projects finish--so maybe not super soon).

In the meantime, my greatest domestic triumph is that we've started composting! When we first moved to Waltham (the Boston suburb I now call home) and went to pick up our recycling bin from the city municipal building, the lady who works there told us that Waltham has teamed up with another nearby suburb to provide compost bins to residents at discounted rates. A lot of places do this, as it saves the municipality time, money, and space by not having to pick up so much garbage,  so if you're interested in getting a compost bin, look into whether your city or township has a composting program or subsidy.

from earthmachine.com

The city gives you a choice of compost bins, and I went with the Earth Machine, since it seemed like the easiest. It retails for around $60, but with the city subsidy, I paid half that. The only trick was that I had to go to the municipal center of the next town over and pick i up--then drive it home. We have a tiny car, but fortunately the composter comes in parts that you assemble at home:

Getting it into the car was tricky, getting it back out was much tricker.

I had already plotted out the place it would go in our back yard: close to the house, but not so close that it would be a problem in case it attracted critters or began to smell (I know compost is not supposed to do either thing if you do it right, but I was afraid I might mess it up).

You have to put it somewhere flat or the convenient bottom panel won't sit properly. I put it by that rock because the rock is already hard to mow around, so I figured adding a hard-to-mow-around compost bin wouldn't change much.

My first step was the attach the bottom panel to the bottom half of the bin.

It clicks in, but it doesn't actually secure with anything, which might be frustrating for if I ever want to move the compost bin. So I'll just aim not to have to move it ever.

Putting on the top half of the bin was trickier than I imagined.

The dude at the municipal center told me I'd have to get someone to help me with it, but I had thought he meant because I was a girl and it might be too hard for me. Nope. It's really just more of a two person job--it's hard to click all the tabs into place at once if you're by yourself. I finagled it by stepping inside the bin and sitting on one edge while I pushed on the other.

Next was sliding on the door to the compost bin,

...which was no big deal.

It comes with convenient pegs to secure the whole thing to the ground. Again, there's nothing to secure that bottom screen to it if you remove these pegs, but these are still handy in case I get really vigorous with my compost turning.

They were also easy to drive into the ground.

And voila! I have a compost bin!

I've had it less than a month, so it's much too early to know how it's doing, compost-wise, but the results are pretty dramatic in terms of waste reduction. In composting our food scraps, we have reduced our garbage by 1/3 to 1/2. And I'll get some great compost to apply to the gardens I'm hoping to have ready next spring... A pretty good deal! And even if it doesn't work out, it's an interesting experiment.

My biggest complaint, however, is that I got the first manicure of my life a week before setting up the compost bin, and the set-up process chipped my nail:
 

...so I guess they were not meant to be installed by ladies with pretty nails. I normally don't have pretty nails, though, so I guess I don't mind.

I've been so busy with the house that I haven't been cooking that much in the way of new and exciting recipes yet, but I'll try to get back in the swing of food blogging for September. I'm definitely planning to do daily Vegan Month of Food blogging this October, though, so that should put me back on the front lines of blogging. See you soon!

The Way of All Flesh: Pretzel Rolls

I love food and I love to read. As a result, each month, I combine these two interests in a post about food from literature. I'll mostly be sticking with books from classic literature, so you're likely to know the storylines anyway, but just in case you don't: warning: there may be spoilers ahead.

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The calendar may say it's spring, but we got hit with snow this week. Fortunately, most of it has melted, but I've been yearning for spring for so long that this cold, gray weather is making me grumpy. So what perfect timing to introduce a book that takes place in a cold, gray world: Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh.

Having previously published some essays and the then-popular Erewhon, Butler was already an established author when he began to write The Way of All Flesh in the 1870s. The book spans four generations of the men in the Pontifex family, and is semi-autobiographical; the Pontifexes are basically the Butlers. It was for this reason that Butler did not want publish until after his death; he knew that his frank and brutal depictions of the Pontifex family, with their faults, foibles, and petty piousness would reflect badly on the family members who survived him. (The book was published posthumously in 1903.)

There are few Pontifexes who escape the narrative unscathed--not just by the narrative, but by their surroundings. The Way of All Flesh is a harsh invective against Victorian society and morality, showing the hypocrisy and cruelty in the supposedly refined, well-mannered middle class, and it shows us all of this through its characters. The earliest Pontifex, “Old Mr. Pontifex,” is a poor but happy renaissance man, content with his simple life. It is the advancement into the Victorian era and into enough money to make them middle class that turns the Pontifex family sour. Each generation takes out its unhappiness on the next, in a vicious cycle of cruelty and repression. Butler attacks middle-class Victorian family structures and religious beliefs and shows that the only way to free oneself from this cycle is by completely cutting off communication with those who participate in it. The book has a bit of a happy ending, but none of it is especially cheerful.

Guys, I have to confess: I did not make the food item I'll be talking about in relation to the book this week; I bought it. But reading about the cold, gray world of Victorian England and living in the cold, gray early spring of Boston was seriously making me miss warmth. And sun. And flowers. And farmer’s markets. And the food I present to you is my favorite non-plant item to get at the summer farmer’s market: PRETZEL ROLLS!

Pictured here with a tofu stir fry, which is topped with micro greens from my container garden—and garnished with a nasturtium from said garden! I took this picture last summer. I miss plants. And I miss these rolls! They are made fresh daily at a Swiss bakery in Reading, MA called, appropriately enough, swissbakers. They come out to Boston-area farmers markets and sell their breads… which include pretzel rolls, pretzel baguettes, and of course, pretzels.

I know I’m going to have trouble conveying the amazingness that is swissbakers' Pretzel Rolls. My guess is that to make them, you make dough as if you are making pretzels, but instead of making pretzels... you make rolls. Delicious, pretty little rolls. The process may be basic (I mean, "basic" for people who make pretzels. I’m a klutz and am always a little worried about any process that involves dropping things into a large pot of boiling water, so it doesn’t sound too basic to me), but the result is AMAZING. The crust is shiny, smooth, and a little salty. The inside dough is soft and fluffy. And amazing.

Okay, sorry, I was depressing myself so much with the description of The Way of All Flesh that I stopped talking about it before I could mention how the rolls relate. One of the few joys young Ernest experiences at the boarding school to which his parents send him is sneaking with other boys to buy hot rolls from Mrs. Cross, a shopkeeper who likes providing food to the boys. Unfortunately, since they’re on tight budgets, the boys often buy the rolls on credit. Over Ernest's winter holiday, his parents find out about this "terrible" behavior (the sneaking and the debts, which, mind you, the boys pay off), they promptly notify the headmaster, and the boys are all cut off from any more hot rolls. Poor kids! I feel like them, cut off, for the winter, from delicious rolls...

Have any of you ever made a form of pretzel bread? How did it go?

Are you missing warm weather as much as I am? I'll close with a picture of marigolds from my garden last year. I'm thinking of doing marigolds again, but I'm not sure--maybe I'll stick with mostly herbs instead...?

a garden entry (aka a couple ideas for a glut of zucchini)

This is my garden:
It is a basil plant whom I have named Gary Snyder (I name food plants after literary figures). Gary and I have been cooking together for a while now, and I find him to be quite impressive.

But I was lucky to be able to visit my family's homestead in Upstate NY, where my father has raised a much fuller, organic, composte-fed garden:
Parsley, Basil (don't be jealous Gary Snyder), Chard!
Tomatoes!
Potatoes!
Butternut squash!
Buttercup squash!
Broccoli
Wheat!
And oh, wait, what's below all this green stuff...?
Yellow Squash!
And of course, zucchini. That's my father, holding his biggest find yet. His garden makes me wish I had a lawn. Carrying any/all of these things on the train home to boston would've been impossible, but the thought of that zucchini made me decide to work (store-bought) zucchini into every recipe I've made lately, from
a simple chick pea pasta
to (even simpler) veggies covered in peanut sauce (my default "healthy" snack [I make an approximate 2:1 ratio of sauce to veggies])
to Heidi Swanson's Lemon Chick Pea Stir Fry (can you tell I've also had quite a bit of chick peas around lately?).

BUT the [vegan]creme-de-la-creme of zucchini-containing recipes I made lately were my Veggie Gyoza - aka Potstickers!
30-40 dumpling wrappers (thanks, Super 88 Market!)

1 box silken tofu (Mori-Nu, for example)
1 small zucchini, grated
1 small carrot, grated
2-3 scallions, finely chopped
1/2 cup spinach, chopped or shredded (optional)
1 clove garlic, minced
1 1-inch knob ginger, minced
2-3 Tbsp sesame oil
2 Tbsp rice vinegar or 1 Tbsp apple cider vinegar
1/4 Cup say sauce/tamari
salt and pepper
In a large bowl, combine all of the ingredients (except the wrappers) and stir savagely until it is one big mush.
Take a wrapper.
Put on 1-2 Tbsp of the filling.
Wet the edges of the wrapper with a bit of water. Crease one side of the wrapper so it bunches nicely. Repeat until you run out of filling. At this point, you have three options: 1.) freeze the potstickers for later use. 2.) Steam the potstickers for 10 minutes, or 3.) the more-work-but-more-tasty way: lightly oil a pan and fry the postickers, flat side down, no stirring, on medium-high heat for 5-10 minutes, or until slightly browned. Pour 1/4 cup water into the pan, cover it quickly, and cook for 5 minutes, until all the liquid has turned to steam. Serve with a 2:1 mixture of soy sauce and vinegar, with a touch of mirin/sugar (if you like).

I froze about a bazillion of these when I made them, so I'm sure you'll see them again.

And let's be honest, you are all just reading this far because you were hoping for a chicken update. Fear not! The chickens are doing well. The pullets are now full grown, grumpy hens:
And the rooster and old chickens are doing well, though apparently the rooster may have some chickeny version of pneumonia. Poor fellow!
I'll be visiting NY again sometime this month; I'll try to refrain from too much chicken news, but I'll let you know if Rooster's pneumonia clears up.

ALSO, in good news, this whole "quitting the 9-5 to go back to school" thing means I will probably have a little more time to update this blog! Hopefully we'll be back to once a week starting this month.