Triumph!

Something happened today that really meant a lot to me. Not an event on the level of, say, my sister delivering her babies in a couple of weeks, or next month celebrating the 1-year anniversary of dating my boyfriend, or [crossing fingers] someday getting a fabulous winemaking job. However, this was enough to make me cheer happily inside all day long.

I was able to donate blood. Because my blood was chock full of iron-rich red blood cells.

This hasn't happened in, oh, about seven years. Every time I went in, they'd check my hematocrit and it would be too low. Sometimes just barely too low, sometimes well below the limit. That pesky vegetarian-induced anemia.

Yesterday I received an email about the blood drive happening at work, and signed up for a donation appointment figuring I'd at least get an idea of my hematocrit before they sent me away. Instead I blasted past their donation threshold.

Amazing. Less than six months on a deliberate iron-rich-animal-product-including diet and I've fixed that anemia problem. Just goes to show that liver is more powerful than you could ever imagine. :) And clams.

I particularly feel warm and fuzzy when I donate blood because I'm O+, so a large proportion of the populace can receive from me, and I either lack or have a particular factor in my blood that enables me to donate to babies. Do you have healthy blood? Find your local donation center and give some of it away.

This week's surprising CSA haul

Wow. Everything I pulled out of this week's CSA box was my favorite.

A basket of padrone peppers

A head of butter lettuce

A bunch of baby leeks

A bunch of carrots

Three kohlrabi, with leaves

Two baskets strawberries

A head of cauliflower (!)

A small bag of sun-dried tomatoes (!!)

Plus, of course, six amazing eggs

As I was carrying this load to the car, I thought about my sister's CSA, and the fact that she bought into half a share for her and her husband. They don't get through all their fruit and veg, and every week give something or another to our parents. It makes me wonder whether my Fifth Crow Farm CSA box was filled with the intention of it feeding two people over a week. If so, that just confirms that I am a vegetable eating machine, as the only things I've ever thrown out are the green tops of carrots, radishes and turnips.

I have so many leaves in my fridge right now. Let's see: beet greens, kohlrabi greens, red cabbage, red butter lettuce, green butter lettuce, mixed salad greens, swiss chard. The beet greens and chard need to be cooked next. I'm thinking of treating the chard more like spinach, and making a curry with lamb. I was all set to look up a recipe in my pan-asian cookbook when I realized that it was a *vegetarian* pan-asian cookbook, and likely not to have a recipe for lamb curry. Of course, all I really have to do is follow the recipe for potato and spinach curry and add the browned lamb to it....

This blog post is brought to you by the surge of energy that enabled me to make pesto out of the basil plant that's been sitting on my kitchen table for, oh, at least two weeks now. 2 C basil leaves, 4 cloves garlic, 1/2 C walnuts, 1/4 C parmesan cheese, and 2 T olive oil all mixed up in the food processor. Scoop into a jar and cover with a layer of olive oil to prevent oxidation. Store in the refrigerator. I haven't decided yet what to use the pesto on, as I don't eat pasta. Beans or potatoes are always options, or I could spread it over a burger.

Currently listening to The Moody Blues "Days of Future Passed". One song left, and then off to bed with me.

Taking a break

I'm still alive, and still hale and hearty. What's awesome is that I'm working at a new job. A job that is engaging, satisfying, and leaves me no time for laziness on the computer during the day. I recently finished a very time-consuming sewing project; and I'm gearing up for the renaissance faire, rehearsals for which started this week. Busy, busy, busy.

So, in the name of my blood pressure, I'm going to take a break from blogging. Y'all come back now, y'hear?

Late and words only

Aargh. I have a photo of this week's CSA box, but I can't find the cable that connects my camera to my computer for downloading images. I'll have to keep looking, because there are a lot of pictures I want to share.

I've been on a little summer vacation this week, which is partly to explain the lack of action here. Spent last weekend up in the Redwoods National Forest with a couple of my college chums. Camping, hiking, chatting, eating food cooked on sticks over the campfire, more chatting--just what one would expect from three outdoorsie ladies.

The forest itself was incredible. Like nothing I had ever seen before. The redwoods were so massive, so gargantuan, so brobdingnagian! I could have (and actually did, come to think of it, on Saturday) spent all day hiking on that soft trail, amidst the ferns and clean air, craning my neck to see the tops of the trees touching the sky. I think my favorite part was imagining a diplodocus walking through the thick ferns and trees.

Anyway, I am hoping to post photos at some later date.

Now for vegetables! My refrigerator, as usual, is bursting. This week I received:

3 golden beets

a bunch of turnips

a bunch of collards

a head of red butter lettuce

a head of red cabbage

2 yellow onions

2 baskets of strawberries

a half-dozen eggs

This time I am definitely eating the turnip greens. As for the turnips themselves, I am going to ferment them, middle-eastern style, with a bit of beet in there to give them a bright pink color. (Hah! I could break tradition and use a golden beet to give them a bright yellow-orange color!)

My fermented vegetable recipes come from Nourishing Traditions, by Fallon and Enig, and are based on lactic acid-producing bacterial fermentation using whey. One obtains the whey and bacteria the old-fashioned way (old-fashioned whey!) by separating yogurt. As it so happens, I have a quart of home-made yogurt in my fridge, and the resulting yogurt cheese is amazing with strawberries (or any kind of fruit, for that matter.) Time for me to go spend a few hours in the kitchen.

My CSA Farm Loves Me

Who has two thumbs and 15 pints of strawberries? This girl!

Yesterday's gorgeous CSA haul contained things in threes:

3 zucchini

3 beets

3 kohlrabi

3 baskets of strawberries

3 leeks

3 pairs of eggs :)

bag of salad mix

head of broccoli

All this, plus an entire flat (12 pints) of strawberries. Gorgeous, deliciously sweet, organic strawberries--at the amazing rate of $2 per basket. I normally don't snack on the drive home with my haul, but two berries met their end in my belly.

This extra flat of berries is all going in the freezer for winter consumption. Last night 6 pints were cleaned, hulled, and laid out in a single layer on a cookie sheet for overnight freezing. This morning they ended up in 3 quart-sized freezer bags. I will be repeating the procedure this evening.

Speaking of repeat procedures, the first batch of stock is cooling in my fridge. It had simmered in the crock pot for about a day, then strained into a stainless-steel bowl and popped into the fridge. While I ordered plain bones ("gelatinous bones") from my meat dealers, one of the bones contained a considerable amount of meat, and a considerable amount of fat, so this first batch of stock is particularly rich. I know, because I drank a bit of it last night. About a cup of stock + a cup of reconstituted vegetable bouillon = so much goodness I had to save half as leftovers. Silly me, too, for drinking hot soup on a hot July evening, but whenever I make something new I really want to try it right away. It has a pronounced flavor to which I am not accustomed, but I expect it will grow on me, especially if my body responds well to all the alleged nutrition. In any case, I've read that you can get more than one pot of stock out of a set of bones, so they're simmering for another day. My freezer is going to be so full!

Heading out on a weekend camping trip (ladies only!) early tomorrow morning, so I've been thinking about suitable food to take with me. Dense vegetables--carrots, beets, kohlrabi--will come, the latter one to eat raw for lunch and the former two to roast in the fire. I'm also bringing the salad mix, because it's fragile, needs to be eaten soon, and I can just nosh on the leaves straight from the bag. At least one pint of strawberries will also come out with me, to share with the girls.

I'm really excited about the trip. Aside from the fact that I love camping, we're going to be up in the Redwoods, which I've heard is gorgeous. Best of all, I'll get to enjoy the company of an old friend who I haven't see in more than ten years.

Adventures in Shopping

I made a quick shopping expedition to my local Whole Foods Market yesterday after work. Here was my list: milk, tomatoes, dates, coconut, almond butter, cayenne pepper, dried basil. I added a pint of half-and-half, since I've been missing drinking coffee in the mornings. Over the course of the evening, the milk went into a batch of yogurt, while the tomatoes are now cooling their heels in a tasty marinara sauce.

While walking down the canned fish aisle (picked up some tinned sardines and kippered herring), I stopped and perused a snack. Unfortunately, the aisle which contains canned fish also contains most of the fried carbohydrate snacks: potato chips, tortilla chips, cheesy poofs. While they may be all-natural, that doesn't mean they're good for me. A package of Inka Chips made its way into my hand. The ingredient list is brief: plantains, palm olein, and sea salt. Achieves a snack trifecta: crunchy, salty, sweet.

I resisted. I had to. I feel as though I can't let any packaged food into my life right now, so that I can break the cycle of junk food. (Seriously, yesterday there were cookies, pastries, and pretzels all over the break room. I could have just grabbed three or four of the large cookies and eaten them in secret. No one would know, so no one would care. No one, except myself. It's still hard to pass up free carbs.)

These brief moments of struggle enable me to understand how hard it can be for most people to eat only real food. It takes so much time and energy.

Take the marinara sauce, for which I peeled and chopped seven tomatoes, one onion, and three cloves of garlic. Once it started simmering, I could walk away from the stove, but still had to come back periodically in order to stir. Tonight I'm going to pluck all the leaves off my basil plant, wash and chop, then mix them in. Compare this to the ease of buying a jar of sauce. To some people, it just doesn't make sense to cook. For me, it is all worth it. (Though I wish I could have bought the tomatoes at a farmers' market. Must plan ahead next time.)

Of course, now I'm thinking that I should find some plantains, slice them thinly, then roast them in my oven. I can have my chips and eat them, too! As an occasional (very occasional) treat.

Movie Review: Captain America

After missing "Thor" and skipping "Green Lantern", yesterday I finally caught up with my comic superhero movie cravings and saw a matinee of "Captain America: The First Avenger". Quite simply, it was fun. There was one gaping plot hole, which I hope can be explained to me by someone in the know. Chris Evans was looking very fine as the strapping, blond Steve Rogers, providing a goodly dose of eye candy. Hugo Weaving was an excellent choice for the villain: brooding, scowling, grimacing, and generally chewing the scenery in a dastardly, sinister way. There are some excellent quips from minor characters, and of course a cameo by Stan Lee, which lets one know that the moviemakers are not taking themselves too seriously. I left the theater interested in the next Avengers installment, theoretically due next spring, and I'm planning to catch Thor once it comes out on DVD.

I have to say this, however: can I have a superhero movie wherein the main character portrayed is not a white male? While I understand that all of the original comics were written by white men, and "you write what you know", I'm feeling the effects of the Golden Age of American Patriarchy. Or perhaps that was simply the over-the-top propaganda machine omnipresent in Captain America.

My relationship with the classic superheroes is awkward. I prefer them in the modern reincarnations such as "Kingdom Come" and "Red Son"--wherein the heroes are enmeshed in a plot full of depth and character development. I like seeing Superman torn between the desire to always help people and the knowledge that he can't save us from ourselves. I've always been a fan of Batman at his most angst-ridden and brooding. The movie "Iron Man" has been the best of the Marvels for me so far because you see Tony Stark move from the devil-may-care genius playboy to a man who sees his duty to make the world a decent place. I've yet to see any depth to Captain America, but I hope it comes.

My most gleeful moment came before the movie, during the trailer for "Rise of the Planet of the Apes". I have to say, it looks so fabulous ridiculous that I think it's going to be ridiculously fabulous. I had tears in my eyes, I was laughing so hard during the trailer.