A Delicious Day

It is Sunday, and the day started for me in a truly delicious way... I slept in. Chris started the day off entertaining the kids while I slept in. Yes, people. He is that awesome. After breakfast, we walked to the farmers’ market. The East Towne Community Farmers Market is brand new, runs on Sundays and is only a few blocks away from where we live.

The vendors were so friendly and we wanted to buy something from everyone- just to encourage them to keep coming back. We love having a walk-able farmers market! We bought beets and cilantro and pumpkins, peppers and watermelon. Despite the urge to support the farmers market (single-handedly if necessary), we could only justify buying what wasn’t growing in our garden. Which is still quite a lot, actually. We strolled over to the garden and harvested brussels sprouts, carrots, tomatoes, beans, radishes, strawberries (there were THREE still hanging on!) and onions.

It was time for lunch and Ella's nap, but the kids found Box Elder bugs and we just had to play at the playground on the way home.







Mmmmmmmmmmmmm... Box Elder bugs. Delicious.

After lunch (not Box Elder bugs, just leftover pizza) and Ella’s nap, we were ready to get outside again. The day was stunningly fall and glorious.

It was apple picking time.


We drove to Door Creek apple orchard and we picked us some apples. And ate some apples. And picked some more apples. And ate some more apples. Try this one! How about this one! Oh! This one is great! Nom, nom, nom. While there, we also went for a horse carriage ride around the orchard and met a wonderful couple with 10 month old twins who we shared the ride with. Twins. How do they do it? They looked at Jay who was trying to launch himself off the back of the horse drawn carriage and Ella who was headed the other direction, trying to climb on top of the horses and I am sure they wondered the same thing.

From there, we drove to the coolest playground ever:


We didn’t know that they would be hosting the Monona Family Fall Festival there today. They had Alpacas and chickens to poke little fingers at, a pumpkin hunt, fire trucks, live music, pony rides, and kayaks to paddle around in the creek behind the playground. We played until we were too hungry to play anymore (though we had ten pounds of apples in the car, not a one of us could eat one more apple) and decided to head home. But on the way home, we drove past an ice cream shop that we had to explore. I mean, who doesn't want ice cream from a place with a sign that has a fish and an ice cream cone in the same picture?




They had Babcock Hall ice cream, which is made at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Dairy Science program. There aren’t many places off-campus that sell it, so we really had to stop.



The kids went with Blue Moon, but I opted for orange custard with chocolate chips and Chris went with a berry choice. We finished our ice cream on the playground across the street from the ice cream shop. Now we are popping corn for our weekly Sunday night tradition. Delish!

I suppose I should have titled this, "The post in which I write in excruciating detail of a day full of good weather, good food and good fun," but then you might not have read it, and then where would we be?

Every once in a while, you have one of those days that you'd love to remember in brilliant detail. Because it was so very delicious. Today was one of those days.

I am happy to report

That I have solved all of the world's problems. At least all of the world's problems with crime. It is this: feed the bad guys Snickers bars and give them a comfortable place to sit.

I did not run yesterday at lunch time, because it was too cold. Instead, I ate fistfuls of mini chocolate bars and compulsively checked my email to see if we had gotten any word from THE foundation. Nope.

You know how they say that when you need energy, you shouldn’t reach for a candy bar, but instead you should go out for a brisk walk? When I hear that, I usually tune out after “candy bar.” My inner monologue goes something like this, “Nomnomnomnomom. I like candy bars. Yes, I LIKE candy bars. I like Snickers bars and Crunch Bars and Kit Kats. Nomnomnomnomnom… Dark chocolate… milk chocolate… is anyone else hungry? Where’s the closest vending machine? I like candy bars.”

Well, anywho, it turns out there may be something to this whole “walk, not chocolate” idea. After inhaling the bowlful of Valentine’s Day chocolate yesterday, I transformed into a slug. I pushed myself out the door for a Pilates class in the evening, but it was hardly worth the effort. I laid on the floor for forty-five minutes pretending to do torso curl ups or whatever and zoned out.

I won’t do anything foolish like give up chocolate completely, but I have slowly started to make the link between the food I eat and the way I feel afterwards. Turns out those recommendations for choosing a walk over a chocolate bar may not be based on chocolate hating after all.

…But what if I dipped sprouts in the chocolate, and ate them WHILE I walked?

It's a Sprout Time

Our sprout crop is in! Here's how they look on day 1:


And day 3:

And day 5:

This is a mix of alfalfa, radish, red clover, and two types of lentils. Since starting this, I have become addicted. I am now experimenting with chia (though I can not say this without singing the jingle from the chia pet commercial- can you?) and wheat berries. The wheat berries I will sprout and use to make bread, as someone suggested here.

In other news, Ella has learned how to say "Belly button" (pronounced "ba- BAH"). She enjoys lifting up my shirt and plugging my belly button with her index finger. Which makes me laugh. But there is something weird about a little finger fishing around in your belly button, so I pull my shirt back down. Which makes her laugh. And with surprising strength, pulls my shirt back up and wiggles her finger back into my navel.

Be afraid.

Sprouting

Ever since reading “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle” by Barbara Kingsolver, I have been conflicted about my food. As a vegetarian, I used to get a lot of my calories through beans, vegetables, whole grains, nuts… all the things women’s magazines tell you that you should eat.

Then one day I stopped being a vegetarian.

And how.

I went through a phase in which my diet was almost entirely comprised of meat, of any variety, the redder the better. I couldn’t stomach the thought of eating beans or salad and I would dismiss the vegetables on my plate as purely decoration. I ate bacon cheeseburgers and steaks and anything else I could chase down and put ketchup on.

After several months of this, I resolved to find some balance and began to try limiting meat and increasing my intake of other foods, especially fruits and vegetables.

Then I read “Animal, Vegetable, Miracle.” In it, Kingsolver spends a year on a locavore diet. Her family tries to get everything they eat from within their county- or closer. She makes some outstanding points in the book, about the economy, the nutritional value of food that has travelled long distances, and the environmental impact of importing your bananas.

I was tempted to throw up my hands and go out for a bacon cheeseburger, but I decided to put some more thought into it. We started baking our own bread and paying attention to where our flour came from. We redoubled our efforts in the garden. We headed out to the farmer’s market for our produce and meat and found a local supplier of organic milk.

This worked well. We felt satisfied with our diets and to some extent, ourselves.

It worked well, until it didn’t. Winter in Wisconsin is not a good place to get fresh, local produce. But being committed to a locavore diet, I could not suddenly walk away from it either. We make good use of our food co-op’s discount bins, where they try to quick sell some of their more perishable produce. So, from time to time, I can eat bananas and mangoes without feeling guilty (because they were going to go bad, if we didn’t, see? We like, SAVED them and stuff.) But around this time of year, our local produce is limited to stored apples and a few root vegetables, and the trucked stuff can be pretty expensive. It means that everyone is casing the discount bins. And that means no more bananas or radicchio for us.

Then I came across an article about growing your own sprouts. What a brilliant idea! I picked up some seeds, soaked them overnight, and now we have a garden in a Mason jar sitting on our counter top. The best part is we don’t have to weed.

Before I get too ahead of myself, I will say that this is an experiment and it is only day three. We have not harvested them yet, and they are only just now starting to grow. Still, the idea of eating local greens in winter is exciting and satisfies my craving for life and growth in the gray snowy days of January and February.

Plus, they’ll taste great on my bacon cheeseburger.

Cheap eats

What with having to feed Godzilla these days, I am an even bigger fan of cheap meals, especially for lunch at the office. Here’s my favorite cheap meal of the day: Peanutty Ramen Noodles.

Open a package of Ramen. Throw out the seasoning packet. Say something like, “Yuck,” or “That crap is disgusting” as you do it. Making a face is optional.

Cook up the noodles and drain the water.

Mix a spoonful of peanut butter into the noodles and then add some (or all) of the following stuff:

-Prodigious amounts of Tabasco sauce (Chipotle is my current fave)
-A dash of lemon or lime juice
-Soy sauce
-Any cooked vegetables you have laying around
-Honey
-Cilantro

Total cost: About $0.46

I have convinced myself that this is actually a “Thai dish” rather than post-college-student-broke-food. Then I try to make it too spicy for Godzilla to want any.

So, what cheap recipes do ya’ll have? And Dad, I’m relying on you to give us all some of your signature recipes: Weenie water soup, Stuffed Banana Boats…

Chicken Harvest

The mantra in our family is “Eat locally, in season, and know where your food comes from.” If you don’t grow it yourself, know the folks that do, well enough to ask about their families. It crystallizes an understanding that the grocery store is the middle man, not producer, in the food chain. And honestly, at the end of the day, what is more important than the food you put into your body, several times a day, every day, to keep it chugging along? So it was with absolute delight that we spent the weekend at our friend’s farm in Clintonville, Wisconsin, reaping the season’s bounty.

Before I go on, I’ll say this. I was a vegetarian for many years. But I got better.

The more I thought about my own vegetarianism, the more I came to understand that it just wasn’t the moral and ecological high ground I once thought it was. This is not to say it isn’t right for others. It just wasn’t right for me any more. I came back to meat one day when I was pregnant with Ella, and at a conference for work. They were serving turkey sandwiches and the usual bland vegetarian option, something like hummus on soggy bread. And I could not stand. One. More. Effing. Hummus. Sandwich.

So help me God.

I glanced around the room to see if anyone was watching the vegetarian gone bad, and quickly scooped up the turkey sandwich. My first in fifteen years. I’d like to say that at that moment I had some profound moral dilemma, that I had real inner debate, or even a few vague misgivings. But I did not. I annihilated that turkey sandwich, and as I ate it, the only real thought I had was, “This needs salt.”

I guess I am just not that deep.

And over the past year, now back in the ranks of omnivores, I decided that if I am going to eat meat, I must be intimately acquainted with how it is raised, killed and prepared. It is my duty not to deceive myself into thinking that chicken packages itself into neat little cubes ready for me to pick up in the freezer section. Or that cows enjoy standing shoulder to shoulder in inches of their own excrement without even enough room to turn around.

And so it was that we spent the weekend in Clintonville for the Chicken Harvest.

O.K., I have spent the last ten minutes trying to come up with a euphemism for “kill”. I can’t. So here it is. We killed twelve chickens. Then we plucked and gutted them and prepared them for the freezer. Finally, we roasted one of those chickens for dinner last night, along with potatoes plucked from the ground, minutes before being dropped into a pot of boiling water, fresh coleslaw from garden cabbage, beans, and for dessert, oh my… homemade cherry pie, with cherries from the tart cherry tree out back. And I don’t know if it was the friends, the fowl or the black humor that made the meal so wonderful, but it was one of the best meals I’ve ever had.

At one point, Jay rode his bike over to where we had four headless chickens strung upside down, while we plucked their feathers. Fully aware that any sociopathic behavior in his future would be traced back to THIS VERY MOMENT, I tried to distract him. To my surprise, he asked if he could help. After a minute or two of pulling at the feathers and listening to the adults banter, he got distracted and wandered off. I doubt he incurred any permanent scarring.

I have now witnessed and taken part in the full cycle, from holding the fuzzy baby chicks in my hand and admiring their unquantifiable cuteness in April, to adding a little bit of salt to their tender flesh in July. It was an honor to be part of it and I am truly thankful to our friends who gave us the opportunity to be intimately in tune with our food.

Now is the time for most folks to get out and truly enjoy what is in season, wherever they are. Whatever it is you’re eating, the fresher it is, the tastier and healthier for you and the environment it will be. Enjoy local eating, eat well, and be merry.