State of the Garden (not shown-a superabundance of cucumbers)
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January Cold
Here’s a picture of the chard I harvested last Wednesday. I don’t usually harvest that much at a time just to feed myself, but it was harvest Wednesday or let it die back. I have most of my chard plants in a large rectangular container on my very sunny back deck (not really a deck, but a platform to which the patio stairs are attached). There’s room for my bay tree to go outside in the warm months and to have a few containers, maybe a chair. Barely that really. All it takes, though, is a few containers and a little mindfulness to be eating some fresh greens 10-12 months of the year in our hardiness zone. It looks like the plants survived the bitter cold last week and will go into leaf again when the temperatures are back in the mid-40s, but I’m not certain of it. I’ll be patient and observe what happens so in future years I’ll have a more refined gauge of what works and what doesn’t work for different shifts in the weather patterns. The weather will do what it will; but I can act to adapt in a way that tries not to fight what is. Dan — how is that chard patch of your in New Bedford?This morning my harvest was from my refrigerator and cupboard by way of the TPPS, Yes Organic, Farmer’s Market, Whole Foods, and Giant by way of all sorts of places — and this is supposed to be the good, healthy eating. I took the basic proportions from the back of a box to make muffins that had spelt flour, multi-grain flakes, wheat germ, hemp seeds, currents, flax seed meal, walnuts, chopped fresh apple (it all started with needing to cook the apple), ginger, vegetable oil, baking powder, salt, dehydrated cane (unprocessed sugar), and spices. No eggs, no dairy even on the back of the box of currents. By the times I was done transforming them, though I would have enjoyed the original, I’d ended up with the kind of muffin the Vermont-granola-style restaurants name “power” muffins, or “energy” muffins, or maybe “everything” muffins because it is too hard to be descriptive of this many ingredients. I think they will be good food to carry in pockets when out in the cold for extended periods of time.
Toasted Pumpkin Seeds (and Jack-O-Lanterns)
As I walk around the neighborhood seeing all the pumpkins on stoops, like Proust with his madeleines, I remember the scent of roasting pumpkin seeds and the salty taste on my tongue, and I return to the place of my childhood. My mother wasn’t much for holidays, but she very much enjoyed arts and crafts projects. The jack-o-lantern, was something then that showed up when we were little kids. I don’t think there was ever a jack-o-lantern carved when we did not eat the seeds. Part of the project was cleaning the seeds, oiling a cookie sheet, spreading the seeds out on the sheet, salting them, and roasting them until golden, and then enjoying the seeds as a special salty treat. I think it unlikely she has decorated a pumpkin at home since I was in early elementary school, but if she were to do it now, in addition to roasting the pumpkin seeds, I am sure she would decorate the outside instead of cutting it into a jack-o-lantern, so that the pumpkin could also be used for soup or pie.
