One red and one yellow cherry tomato were ripe this morning. The first of the season in my garden. Just in time for the solstice.
It should come as no surprise that I ate them before I had a chance to take a photograph. And really, they were far tastier than it was possible to photograph.
In response to requests, here are some photos of the garden in its current state.
The vine on the left is grapes–there are many dozens of bunches forming. The vine on the right is a kiwi. I planted it four years ago, and finally there are some fruits–at most a couple dozen, but it’s a start. There aren’t enough strawberries to bring inside, but there are always a couple to eat when I am out working.
Current herbs: cilantro, basil (thai and genovese), Mexican and Greek oregano, parsley, sorrel, tarragon, lemon balm, spearmint, kentucky colonel mint, garlic chives, savory, sage, thyme, rosemary, lavender, stevia, and dill. Greens include mesclun, arugula, kale, chard, and are ready to eat now.
Snowpeas are on there way (and I ate snow pea greens with garlic scapes and herbs for dinner tonight). Beans are blossoming; cherry tomatoes and cucumbers have formed, as have a couple of zucchini and a variety of peppers. Blueberries are ripening and figs are just starting to bud on the new growth. Carrots and turnips are mostly just a promise, but I expect at least a few. Leeks and spring onions are poking through, but don’t seem to be getting along with this year’s weather patterns.
What’s growing in your garden? (Even when I lived in an efficiency apartment in school, I had herbs growing in pots. And sprouting is its own kind of gardening and only requires a kitchen counter.) A garden can be made wherever you are, if you want one enough.
In November 2006, the New York Times published a recipe adapted from Jim Lahey’s Sullivan Street Bakery for “no-knead”bread. I immediately adapted it further (as did many of those who commented on-line). Many thought the NYT adaptation benefited from more salt. I also have made it much more energy efficient (the NYT recipe expects the dough to rest in a 70F room and for the oven to be pre-heated for at least a half hour). In the winter, I keep my house at 62F, and pre-heating for only 10 minutes (or baking something else first that doesn’t need pre-heating) is much better for the environment.
As I was baking a loaf (whole wheat, flax seed variation) this week, I thought about how much this recipe teaches about skill and steadiness. The reason the bread doesn’t need to be kneaded, but still yields a crusty peasant-style loaf, is the high liquid content of the dough relative to kneaded breads and the very slow rise time. That one can achieve the results of active labor by mere patience and an understanding of the science of the process recalled for me something I learned at a Rod Stryker workshop a number of years ago about having a steady practice. Rod Stryker was asking students at a week-long intensive whether they had a steady meditation practice. One woman raised her hand and said that she had sat and meditated every day for 30 years. We were all thoroughly impressed. Rod Stryker asked her how long she sat. I think she said three minutes a day, it might have been five. I don’t remember exactly. I was still impressed. Not because she would claim to have a 30 year practice when it was just a few minutes a day, but that she had the self-knowledge to set an amount of time to practice that she could keep. The daily few minute sit was obviously not her only practice or she would not have been at a relatively advanced yoga workshop. It is easy not to develop a home yoga practice, a good home-cooked diet, a garden, or anything else that needs steadiness, if we set the bar too high at the beginning. We don’t want to set it too low either, but finding what we can do with steady commitment and then allowing growth to be spontaneous is the way to keep at it without feeling burdened.
Every once in a while I bake bread that takes attention every day for seven days in a row and then involvement multiple times on the day of baking. It is my having spent the time making more difficult breads that has enabled me to create variations the “no-knead bread” and know it will still come out well. The “no-knead” bread, only modestly varied, I can make whenever I’m out of bread whether I’m busy or not. It just takes throwing a few ingredients in a bowl on a night when I know I’ll be at home the next afternoon or early evening for a three-hour block of time (doing other things almost the entire time).
The basic recipe is as follows:
3 cups of flour. (At least half needs to be bread flour; you should add a tablespoon of wheat gluten for each cup that is not bread flour, e.g., whole wheat or rye.)
1/4 teaspoon instant yeast
2 teaspoons salt (NYT had 1 1/4)
1 and 5/8 cups water
cornmeal or wheat bran for dusting
Day one: mix all the ingredients in a large bowl. If you store your flours in the freezer (which helps keep them fresh and lowers electricity usage because a full freezer is more efficient than an empty one), let them come to room temperature before making the dough. Dough texture is sticky. Cover bowl. Let dough rest for 15-20 hours depending on room temperature.
Day two: dough is ready when the surface is dotted with bubbles. When dough is ready, lightly flour a work surface, place dough on it, sprinkle dough with a little more flour, and fold dough over once or twice. Cover loosely and let rest for 15 minutes. Using just enough flour to keep it from sticking to work surface (I have a cutting board I use only for baking) or hands, shape dough into a ball. Coat work surface and a kitchen towel (not terry) with flour, bran or cornmeal. Place ball of dough, seam-side down on work surface and cover with floured towel. Let rise for about two hours until doubled in size and dough does not readily spring back when poked with your finger. If dough is slow rising because of cool room temperature, put near radiator or put it near stove when cooking something else and when starting to pre-heat oven.
Pre-heat oven to 450F with a 6-8 quart covered pot (cast iron, enamel, pyrex, or ceramic) in oven while pre-heating. When pot and oven are hot and dough is ready, carefully put dough, seam-side down into pot and shake pan to distribute dough more evenly. Don’t worry, it will straighten out as it bakes. Bake covered for 25-30 minutes. Then remove lid and bake for another 15 to 30 minutes until browned. Cook on rack.
Variations: Use just 1/4 cup rye flour along with bread flour. It will taste like a classic french bread. Incorporate a teaspoon or two of olive oil. Semolina flour works well and turns the loaf a beautiful shade of yellow. You can add constituted cracked wheat, but you have to know what dough should look and feel like, because it changes the moisture content. Same for oat bran. I’ve taken to adding flax seed meal into most of my baked goods for the nutritional benefits. Because flax seed meal can be used as an egg replacer, you cannot replace it one for one with flour, but if you replace a quarter cup of flour with a third cup of flax seed meal, and keep the liquid the same, it has worked for me. Try it without a variation first. Practice, enjoy. The more you know about bread-baking, the more options you have. I’ve done it with beer and molasses as part of the liquid and mostly a mix of whole wheat and rye flour to make it taste like pumpernickel. Not my favorite, but it worked.
Play in the same kind of way with your yoga practice at home. Start with a favorite pose you you learned in class. Start small. Start simple, and then let yourself get inspired by the desire to create your own variations.
When I was out gathering vegetables and herbs and doing basic tending for the day, I realized a cardinal, who is a regular visitor, had let me get closer than ever before. Then I saw that he was about to try and swallow a praying mantis. I got almost face to face before he let go.
At first the praying mantis was turned upside down, and I wasn’t sure if it was ok. Then I realized it was holding on to a bee.
Ahimsa, which is the first of the yamas in Patanjali’s Yoga Sutras, and thus is the first practice or principle of the eight-limbed path, is usually translated as non-violence or non-harming. Over my years of practice and study, I have read and heard many versions–some general, some personal beliefs–as to what it means to practice nonviolence as part of a path of yoga. As I watch the way people around me are behaving and reacting to the heat and drought, I thought about how, for me, the practice ahimsa is as much about seeking to be in alignment with the movements and shifts around us that we cannot change as about refraining from specific acts of violence (though that is obviously a basic element).
In terms of aligning with the world arounds us and the cycles of our own body-mind, when we are sensitive to what will best serve our own self while having the least impact on the environment, we are practicing ahimsa, in other words, “opening to grace.” How does practicing ahimsa by behaving mindfully incorporate many aspects of the Anusara first principle of opening to grace? Opening to grace, as a practice principle, invites us to be open, sensitive, spacious, and radically affirm what is so that we can expand, shift, and serve ourselves and others in the best way possible under the circumstance. To be open in this way, try not to rage at the heat–or whatever is your weather. Soften, listen, and mindfully discover how you can live at your fullest, kindest, and most generous with what you cannot change.
When the temperature soars above 95F for days in a row, it is an act of violence to rage against it or to consume outrageous amounts of fossil fuels to cool our businesses and homes enough to wear warm clothes, sleep under blankets, cook and eat hot foods, or do an athletic asana practice or workout (lest we feel that we are not fulfilling some externally motivated personal notion of fitness–having external notions of how we should look, act govern us without accepting the actual situation is its own form of violence against ourselves) that we would not do if we could not artificially cool our environment.
Perhaps I have no call to speak on this: my central air conditioning is on, though I’ve been keeping it between 78-82F and I have been moving, dressing, and eating in a way that honors the fact that those temperatures are as cool as it is going to be until the heat wave breaks. Some might argue that using any air conditioning or even an electric fan or a refrigerator is doing excessive harm to the environment. That may in fact be true, but asking for more than we can do just makes things seem impossible, and then we are less likely to make any shift at all.
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
Have you hugged (or otherwise taken care of or sent loving energy to) a tree today? Have you paused to appreciate the shade and delicious air trees provide you?
Peace and light, E — Posted with WordPress for BlackBerry.
