What We Need Is Here

Our Locavore-ish Kitchen

To simplify our grocery shopping, we have come up with a list of items we need for the kitchen to be “stocked.”  Our goal, of course, is to buy whatever we can from local producers.  But items that were never, or are no longer, produced here that we think we've got to have (quite a few things, unfortunately) we’ll buy organic, preferably from a small producer, and only from our local grocer. Here’s our first list of “necessities.”  Asterisks indicate truly local (within 100 - 150 miles) food. 

Grains                                                

Oatmeal

Whole Wheat  Flour

White Flour

Cornmeal

Brown Rice

White Rice

Pasta – spaghetti and other

Beans

Black

Pinto

Lentils

Dairy and Eggs

*Milk

*Buttermilk

*Eggs

Butter - we would like to try churning our own, but are going to need a lot for the Breakfast Brigade

Cheese - local goat cheese when possible

Processed

Peanut Butter (not sure where those peanuts come from)

Canned Tomatoes

Other

*Sugar

Vegetable Oil

Olive Oil

Rice Vinegar

Soy Sauce

*Honey

Salt

Vegetables and Fruit in Season

August and September –

*Grapes

*Pears

*Mangos

*Peanuts

*Field Peas

*Sweet Potatoes

*Hard Squash

*Cherry Tomatoes

*Peppers

*Eggplant

*Watermelon

This is a first try at identifying our “staples” as a community, and I know we’ll probably need to make adjustments. As a family, we've been successful this year at serving at least one locavore-ish meal each day and one entire day of locavore-ish meals each week. Now that we've moved into the Catholic Worker  House and are living with others, the community here is striving to create simple meals from the ingredients above (we take turns cooking - yay!!), and are beginning to share the locavore-ish vision. Being a like-minded group of folks, they’re enthusiastic.  It may get somewhat monotonous before fall produce begins rolling in toward October, but our mouths should be watering for those delicious greens, salads, and citrus by then!

An Aside

Oh my! I am going to have to briefly interrupt this local-living blog to say, "Ben is still cancer-free!!!!"  I think I want a Snickers Bar!

Feeling Good, Nina Simone

Boiled Peanuts

I am sorry for the continuing delay between postings... I had intended to get back to updating more regularly during August, but we've had a bit of a relapse scare with my son Ben's leukemia and I've  been a little distracted. Ah, cancer, the gift that keeps on giving... Hopefully, the biopsy scheduled for Monday will be negative and we can keep moving forward with life.  Meanwhile, let's talk about nuts. 

Peanuts, that is. In our neck of the woods, they're "bolled," although I understand that for other southerners they're "bald." In any case, I was at Ward's the other day, scooping up a bagful of raw peanuts to boil, when the woman across from me with the other scoop said conspiratorially, "These things are the best-kept secret in Gainesville."

I don't know how else to explain why there isn't a line snaking out the door and down 23rd Avenue. They are good in so many ways. You cannot eat just one, for one thing.  And they are fairly good for you (if you are not watching calories or sodium). Decent protein, and they're full of anti-oxidants - more than their raw or roasted cousins. And they're local and in-season between May and November. The only problem I have encountered with the love of boiled peanuts is from people who are not from the South and expect them to taste like roasted ones. They are not like that at all, much more legume-like, (they are in fact a legume, which the "pea" in peanut would alert you to if you were paying attention). 

My mother would drop a couple shelled nuts into the bottom of a bottle of RC, let them flavor the cola, and then enjoy the prize at the end of the drink. But that is probably advanced peanut-eating.

Here is a traditional recipe for neophytes: Place one pound of peanuts in a large pot, cover with water (two inches or so over the top of the nuts), add 1/2 cup salt, and bring to a boil. Turn down the heat to allow for a very slow boil for 2-4 hours.  It depends on the peanut, so start testing after two hours. They should be completely soft and nice and salty.  After they've reached the desired state, turn off the burner and let them sit for an hour or so before draining them. Store in the fridge, or call up your friends and eat them all while they're still warm.

No one knows for sure how the peanut became a favorite snack south of the Mason-Dixon, or who first thought up boiling them. But like so many things of the South, they seem to have a bit of a checkered past: They originated in Brazil and Peru, made their way to Africa during the slave trade, then back across the ocean to the southern U.S. with the abducted Africans. Boiled peanuts became a nutritious mainstay during the Civil War - high calorie, good protein, and good keepers when boiled and salted. Confederate soldiers carried them in their rations. By the turn of the 20th century, they were being sold on street corners all over the South. Today, you can find them sold out of the back of trucks and from tiny shacks on many a country road - including our own Hawthorne Road in east Gainesville.

Get yourself some, empty your mind of those dried-up roasted things, and enjoy the taste of summer in the South. Because, God knows, it gets a little trying by mid-August.

Isn't This Beautiful?

Muscadine grape season is here!  It caught me a little by surprise this year; my internal calendar has been so damaged by travel chaos, that I almost forgot it was August.  But there they were in Ward's!  And I was beside myself with joy.  This kind of thing reminds me of why so many festivals grew up around certain foods.  As soon as I got home, I rinsed one, popped it in my mouth, and wanted to sing and dance.

Muscadines are a wild grape indigenous to the southeastern U.S.  "Scuppernong" was one of the first named varieties and is now sometimes used as a synonym for all muscadines. Some people call the purple ones muscadines and the golden ones scuppernongs.  But a lot of deep southerners call them "bullet grapes," which is a corruption of "Bullace" - a type of European plum that the large purple ones apparently resemble.  A grape by any name...

They do taste sweet - and I might say  with "oaken" or "earthy" undertones if I understood wine adjectives, which I don't.  They do have an unusual flavor though - and an even more unusual texture.  Their insides are sometimes described in terms like "mucilaginous" or most recently by a college-age friend: "loogy-like" (although this same person ate half my grapes).

For me, and many other southerners, they are singularly delicious.  They have the perfect qualities: wild, sweet, transient (August and September), and with usually wonderful associations for people who have lived here a while.  In my case, they are part of the one memory I have of my great grandmother's house - sitting in the shed on a hot summer evening learning to play Monopoly with distant cousins, and of the vines that grew around my grandparents' (from the other side of the family) chicken coop. These, with no fertilizer, watering, or special care at all, produced the large purple variety that were always at their peak around my birthday. Magical. 

The other thing about these grapes is that they don't ripen once they're picked, and they're at their peak of sweetness when they're quite soft.  So, they don't travel well which is why they aren't available usually beyond our region.  It's also why the best way to get them is at a u-pick grape vineyard.  Although I got some mighty fine ones at Ward's and again on Wednesday at the downtown market. 

You should try them if you haven't already.  I was taught to eat them by biting a little hole into the stem end and sucking out the fruit. If you really practice, you can do this in such a way that you leave the seeds behind in the skin. The skin can be a little astringent if not extremely ripe, but If you get some thin-skinned, very ripe ones, then go ahead and eat the skin too.

Then go sing and dance!   

Travel ... and Home

Now, that was a quick month, which is exactly how I like my North Florida Julys.  We are pretty much moved in, although still going through duplicates of kitchen things, organizing the office, and rearranging furniture.  I weeded the little postage stamp garden out front – mostly flowers - while thinking how to round up some more food garden space quickly.  And I traveled.  And traveled.  And traveled. 

I thought of all that traveling as a way to make up for some of the homebounded-ness I felt during Ben’s cancer years (and to escape the aforementioned month).  Look at where I went!

First, five days after moving, to Pagosa Springs, Colorado to visit my parents.  Pagosa is at the foot of one of the most incredible mountain ranges in the world, and my parents have a view of them from almost every window.  I never got tired of rounding the curve of the road a few yards from their house and seeing them spread out before me, never got over the lump in my throat of seeing something so beautiful.

 

photo thanks to Pagosa Chamber of Commerce

After a week at home (filled with going through boxes), I left for Guatemala to visit my son, Joe, who was teaching school there for the summer.  There’s a wholly different kind of beauty there that I wrote about here.  Several times I felt astonished by how vast the world is, and at the same time so much the same all over. Mountains and mothers and babies and buses and schools and chickens and gardens, but the mountains are volcanic, the mothers are wearing handwoven skirts and the babies are on their backs very quiet, the buses are crammed six to a seat (school bus seats made for two children), the chickens are walking down the road next to you (along with cows) and the gardens are planted on hillsides so steep that I can’t imagine how they all don’t wash away.  And the beautiful languages!  In one day we passed through three different Mayan language regions while listening to radio music on the bus belting out Spanish pop tunes.   The topsy-turviest experience of all, though, was trudging obediently behind my son, who held onto the money (quetzals), spoke for me (because my Spanish STILL sucks), told me where to sit on and when to jump off the bus, ordered my food in restaurants, and even made me dinner.  I felt like a child, or a very old woman. (Definitely like an old woman jumping off the back of the moving bus).

 

I was scheduled to have a quiet week at home by myself (everyone was on their own trips to visit family members), but then Kendera, our fellow Catholic Worker and housemate, had her baby!  And I was there!  I’ve never been at a birth other than my own; it is quite a different experience from this standpoint.  And a miracle.  I couldn’t sleep for two nights thinking about it all – just like a new mom. 

Next, we headed up to Georgia to John’s family’s beautiful mountain home for a family reunion. We just got home yesterday.  And it is good to be home.  While I felt like the good of all this travel outweighed the bad, it’s not at all environmentally – not to mention financially - sustainable to travel this way (and I realize the irony of this “what we need is here” blog chronicling my travels all over the place). But I also recognize that, in addition to family, there are other goods to travel. I know the places I have visited and the differences and similarities they held for me vastly changed the way I see the world and my own life.  I encourage every young person I know to take a year off and travel or live someplace very different than where they’ve been.  It’s one of those things you can’t be too dogmatic about… Would Wendell Berry have come back to the farm in Kentucky if he’d never been to France?  Will the question of virtue and travel be completely undone by the practicality of it as fuel prices continue to rise? 

Regardless, I hope to be spending most of my time HERE for now. There is still so much to do and figure out in moving to a different home under different circumstances, but living in the heart of Gainesville within 50 miles of where my great, great grandmother lived is where I want to be, at least until global warming makes it completely unbearable, or underwater.  I am excited about living with a community of people interested in living simply, locally and with generosity - and  with whom I can struggle to figure out how to do that with all the complications of family, near and far.