Subtitle: To Have and to Hold
Here’s a classic. These are souvenirs from our trip to celebrate our 25th anniversary. Thermos from Starbucks (the first! In Seattle! At Pike Place Market!), mug from the Amtrak train that took us there. Oops, that sounded wrong; it sounds like I absconded with a mug when we reached our destination. Nope! Not at all: we bought it in the dining hall at our last breakfast on the train.
Today’s Market Goodies
From left to right: lettuce, peas, asparagus, strawberries, more asparagus, blueberries. My tasks today: cut up and freeze asparagus, remove peas from pod (there’s a snappier way to say that, I’m sure), freeze peas, hull strawberries, clean lettuce – oh, you get the drift. The brightly colored menu under the green bowl is the new menu for the smoothie place downtown. It’s going into my schoolbag so I can order from my desk in a cubicle just a few blocks away.
Meanwhile, I’ll sip on today’s smoothie (Groovy Grape) and start chopping asparagus spears.
Life is good.
Coffee, tea, hot cocoa – no matter what your hot beverage of choice, the mug it’s in is very likely to carry a story. This came up in a thread on Facebook, and I realized I had a number of posts featuring my coffee mug collection. Most of the posts are from my first or second year of blogging. Let’s start with yesterday’s mug, Where’s Waldo, and today’s mug of choice, Ducks in a row.
Where’s Waldo? Well, if you 
can’t find him now, just fill the mug with hot liquid (preferably Folgers) and all of the faux Waldos’ shirts will fade away. This mug has been in my collection for a long time — at least 13 years (Daisy’s update: at least 20 years, now). I ordered it free with a few labels from cans of Spaghetti-os and a miniscule shipping and handling fee. It has served up tea, hot cocoa, and of course, coffee. I’ve had a lot of fun with this mug over the years, including watching people stare at it in the teachers’ lounge. It was worth the shipping and the stamp. And now, Ducks in a Row. Continue reading
I might just like La Petite’s suggestion the best. Keep the name, change the mascot to a potato.
But if the owner won’t put his money into spuds, he could try these suggestions, also from La Petite.
- Washington Lincolns — mascot, a stove pipe hat similar to the cheesehead
- Washington Congress — Instead of practicing, they just stand and argue.
- Washington Georges — white wig, false teeth, I can see it now!
- Washington Minutemen — slogan, You musket to the end zone!
How about:
- Washington Gridlock – along the same line as Congress, see above
- Washington Eagles — oops, the Eagles are already taken. How about the turkeys?
- George Washington Bridge – ooh, that’s closer to New Jersey gridlock than Washington
- Washington Patriots — oh, wait, they’re already in Boston and call themselves New England.
- Washington Weebles — they wobble, but they don’t fall down!
Meanwhile, whatever will we eat when the Packers formerly known as Acme play the renamed football club?
Well, readers, what do you think?
The mainstream shops are getting the idea that people want to garden on their decks and porches and in small spaces. I bought a pair of strangely shaped pots designed to sit on a deck railing. At the moment, one holds a basil plant that was getting overpowered by the other three in the bigger pot. The other holds lemon basil seeds.
I came outside after a rainstorm to find standing water in the pot with the transplanted basil. The other one was wet, but not soggy. Chuck and his power drill came to the rescue.
Pot needs holes? No problem.
We watched the excess water drain from the bottom. The basil looks much happier.
Unfortunately…
The railing showed its age and snapped. I moved the pots to another part of the deck; now we’ll just wait for Chuck to have time to replace the wood.
Another reason to grow herbs, among other pretty plants: soup stock. Chuck had beef bones left after grilling supper. He knows to save them for me. I dropped them in a pan of water and added, fresh from the backyard:
Beef Broth in Progress
Beef Bones, sage, green onion, and garlic scapes. Did I forget to add basil? Dang it. The basil is growing like wildfire. Must make a pesto or something similar soon.
I’ve been waiting and waiting for this day. The Downtown Farmers’ Market has returned to my fair city! The weather was muggy, but tolerable. No rain, just the threat of it. And people? The street was mobbed. We bought — wait. I can make this easier.
Market Bounty, Week I
You can probably recognize the spinach, the asparagus, and strawberries, and lettuce, too. I also picked up whole wheat bread with flaxseed (from my favorite Amish baker) and a small loaf of cheddar cheese bread. For my sweet husband who loves to cook, we picked up scallops (not local, I know), red potatoes (much more local), and a great local barbecue sauce. He chatted with the sauce maker for a while and got some tips on how to grill really tender ribs. There’s more, but I must get to work prepping the strawberries and the peas. The peas are in the picture, sort of. They’re hiding under the asparagus.
Ah, the Downtown Farmers’ Market. Now it really feels like summer.
I read Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, Miracle about five years ago. I was wowed by the project of eating locally for a full year. Her experiment was impressive, starting in spring with rhubarb from the local farmers’ market and asparagus from her own yard and then moving through the seasons.
I still use some of the recipes from Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. I do lean toward local foods, in particular local produce. I’m nowhere near the level of Kingsolver’s experiment, but putting the locavore philosophy into practice is now a natural part of our food shopping and preparation.
Another year long experiment was No Impact Man by Colin Beavan. I’d had No Impact Man on my wish list for a while. When a copy became available on Paperback Swap dot com, I grabbed it.
Beavan’s project was impressive, too. He decided to create a carbon footprint as light as possible for a full year. His project started in stages, starting with walking or biking to and from work and resisting the urge to buy food or drinks on or in disposable containers. Every few weeks he would add in a new challenge such as limited electricity or water. His project was as urban as Kingsolver’s was rural; Beavan and his wife and daughter lived in a ninth floor apartment in New York City.
One trait both books share is the experimental nature of each project. The authors were both skilled writers before their environmental projects began; and their reflections throughout their respective projects reflect both facts and subjective responses. Difficulties, roadblocks, support, positive and negative attention, and real-life reflections make both experiments less clinical and more enjoyable. Colin Beavan’s toddler decided she preferred her new cloth diapers to the disposables they’d used previously. Barbara Kingsolver’s daughter went to college mid-project and relished her home visits for the good quality local food.
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and No Impact Man remain active on the web and in the green scene. That’s what impressed me. They didn’t dump their experiments the minute the calendar flipped to the next year. They left the extremes behind, but the core of each project remained. Kingsolver continued to buy and serve local food, growing what she can and raising her flock of heirloom turkeys. Beavan turned on his electricity and uses public transportation now, but he turns off the lights when he leaves a room and rarely uses an elevator.
Why a book review in June, years after these two were published? Well, folks, I realized that our family already makes a fairly decent low carbon footprint, and courtesy of our freezer and a hot water bath canner, we enjoy local fruits and vegetables year round. I’m not writing a book (well, not about that), but I’m using the space in my semi-urban backyard quite well.
Readers, what are your green habits of choice?
The rhubarb patch was getting overgrown – again – and I was stuck at home due to car repairs. What’s the connection, you might ask, and my family and close friends and regular readers would say, “Doh!”
I might add that the weather was wet, wet, and more wet, so I wasn’t likely to spend any time in the garden temporarily known as the Okay By Me Swamp. That brought me back to the kitchen and (full circle) the rhubarb.
I baked cookies. We now have rhubarb cookies, delicious and sweet, and a little more room in the rhubarb patch. A little, I said. I only harvested what I needed for one cup. There’s plenty left in the patch. For your enjoyment, here’s the recipe, slightly modified from the one I found on All Recipes dot com.
Rhubarb Drop cookies
2 cups whole wheat pastry flour
1 teaspoon baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1 teaspoon cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon ground cloves
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup butter
1 cup white sugar
1 egg
1 cup rhubarb, chopped thin
1/2 cup raisins
3 Tablespoons flax seeds
1. Combine flour, baking soda, baking powder, cinnamon, cloves, and salt in a medium bowl. Set aside. Mix the raisins into this mixture until well coated to keep the raisins from clumping.
2. In a large bowl, beat butter and egg until smooth. Beat egg into batter. Stir in the rhubarb. Mix flour mixture into the wet ingredients just until combined. Sprinkle with flax seeds; stir one more time.
3. Preheat oven to 375 degrees. Drop spoonfuls of cookie dough onto ungreased baking sheets. Optional: use a fork coated with sugar to flatten cookies slightly. Bake for 12 – 15 minutes. Cool on the pan for a few minutes before moving to wire rack.
Serve with coffee, of course.
And then, after you sample the fresh cookies, take the rhubarb leaves out to the compost along with the eggshell and coffee grounds. After all, compost is what happens, and what happens is all natural and good.
If you take the elevator entrance into my workplace, you’ll be in a tiny hallway next to this dark stairwell.
Enter if you Dare!
But if you feel like taking a risk, and you slip silently down the stairs, you’ll see this.
…and this.
There isn’t much sun in this window well – it faces North — but someone cares enough to water the plants and keep them growing.