Here’s a before shot of the entrance area to the studio. This was taken last weekend. I put down newspaper where I might plant this spring, and cardboard over the rest, and straw over all.

Today I worked on the left side of the garden where I plan to put our sandwich tomatoes in May. I’ve decided not to plant Radiator Charlie’s Mortgage Lifters this year. I got a few really good ones, but they tended to get so big that half of a tomato would often ripen and rot on the vine while the other half was still trying to catch up to ripening. Brandywines are still my absolute favorites for sandwiches, even though they don’t produce a lot. Sometimes you’ve got to go for quality not quantity, especially if you are serious about your tomato sandwiches.

The new tomato bed is the bed where I planted field peas and some doomed cucumbers last year. I planted garlic in a little corner about a month ago, and it’s doing fine. I added peat moss, a few more bags of topsoil, compost from my pile and some Plant-Tone over the past few weeks, and today I put down newspaper and straw. I do this to keep weeds from sprouting, and also to discourage Mama Kitty and the squirrels from digging it up. I keep some old window screen frames around to put over newly planted beds for animal control too, and some wire frames. My garden is not very gentile looking.

Miss Peanut almost put out her eye last winter and Sandy is concerned that it may have been from one of the tomato cages that I left scattered over the garden to deter the animals from digging. I’d hate to think that was true. It could have been any old stick. I haven’t written about Miss Peanut because her eye injury made me very depressed. It looked like a horror movie for weeks. Now she is blind in it and she looks like Igor. I thought that she would die from the infection. She was in a lot of pain and hid from me. For a while I thought about trying to trap her again and having her put to sleep, but I know she would never have gone in the trap again, and Sandy didn’t want her put to sleep. I put some of Jazz’s antibiotics in her food for a while - I told the vet that I spilled it. She seems to be better now and she lives on the front porch again in her peanut shack (a stuffed cloth kitty house under a chair filled with old towels). She is not as afraid of me (meaning that she doesn’t always run away as soon as she sees me) but I don’t think she’ll ever be the same. Miss Peanut used to follow me around like Mama Kitty does, so it makes me sad that she doesn’t like me any more.

Anyway, this idea has spurred me to clean up the garden some more. It was a beautiful day and I washed out my little plastic pots with the hose. Now I’m ready to plant leek seeds when they come in the mail next week. I’m thinking about going ahead with the pepper seeds too. Last year the bell peppers took forever to germinate. The eggplants got too big too soon, so I’ll need to hold myself back from starting them in February.

I’ve got this idea - I don’t know if I’d actually do it - of growing a winter garden and selling at the Greensboro Farmer’s Curb Market. I could sell parsley, leeks, maybe chard and parsnips? No one is selling these now and I’d do it for the fun of it. I could have done it with parsley this winter if I hadn’t dug up half my crop.

Today I thinned some carrots that I planted this fall. I actually harvested some little baby carrots in January. This picked up my spirits and I’m ready for spring to get here so that I can get serious about planting!

I get a lot of quickie food news tidbits by way of an e-newsletter called The Food Institute Daily Update, some heartening, some puzzling, some depressing. Here’s an example:

Testing by the FDA found that 6% of canned light tuna samples contained large amounts of mercury. High mercury levels were also found in samples of Chilean sea bass, and big-eye tuna, a species sold as ahi tuna and served in sushi. The agency said it would not take any action based on its newly released results, which come at a time when the FDA has been under fire for not adequately policing mercury in seafood, particularly canned light tuna, reported The Chicago Tribune.

Why?

From the Chicago Tribune story: “The findings are significant because the government has repeatedly stated that canned light tuna is low in mercury and a good choice for pregnant women and young children.”

I wonder if this is why my cats seem to be exceptionally dumb.

Are there bugs in your red velvet cake?

FDA is proposing to revise its requirements on food labels that would require companies to disclose when a food contains beetle-derived colorings including vivid-red “carmine” and bright-orange “cochineal.” Under current FDA regulations, food labels must identify certain man-made colorings by name, such as FD&C Red No. 40, but for carmine, cochineal and other naturally occurring ingredients, companies can use terms such as “color added” or “artificial color,” reported The Wall Street Journal (No link because I don’t subscribe).

I’m familiar with cochineal from my natural dyeing days as a fiber artist. But I thought that Carmine was Shirley’s boyfriend on Laverne and Shirley.

Deep breath, jump!

1. The chocolate biscotti is great, and was just the thing since they keep a long time, it was easy, and I could do them ahead of time. I’m going to do another batch tomorrow night. Thank you, Farmgirl!

2. I’m going to walk my talk and go to the Sierra Club political action training next weekend. I have emphasized that I will do no lobbying or phone calls. I just want to learn about the process and policy for political endorsements.
3. My work has stayed very busy, a good thing, really. It makes the time go by quickly.
4. A co-worker violated the first rule of life today - “Don’t piss off the secretary.” In this case, he pissed off two. Instead of staying mad about it, it’s a good excuse to have some fun and teach a lesson. A long, drawn-out lesson. Yesssss.
5. I finally put down most of the cardboard this past weekend and covered it with straw.
6. I have so many seeds from last year that are probably still good, but I ordered a few from Southern Exposure Seed Exchange last night. American Flag leek, Roma and Amish paste tomatoes, Ping Tung Long and Black Beauty eggplants. And a soil test kit. I’ll start some of my seeds very soon.
7. The ag extension service cashed my check for the community garden row, so I guess that means I’ll have a 4×50′ space to plant in the spring.
8. Ay yi yi, we got socked with a big tax bill from 2003. Again. You’d think we were rich or something. Damn, it is really time someone competent did our taxes.
9. I did a lot of reading about food, some of it achingly dull and depressing, some of it fun.
10. I didn’t go to my Italian class on Monday, and when I went back on Wednesday, I was lost.
11. Still with me? I had a panic attack Monday afternoon. It wasn’t a major one, though. Okay, we’re done with that.
12. Lately I have longed so desparately to stay in bed. But I get up and keep going. I think that it is partly that the house is cold.
13. Tomorrow, a networking guy is going to connect both our computers to the router correctly, so that Sandy and I can get on the Internet at the same time.

Nothing fancy here. It’s one of those staples on a cold weekend.

1-2 lbs. grass-fed beef stew meat
3 T flour
1 t salt
1 3/4 c beef stock or water
3 medium potatoes, cubed
4-5 carrots, sliced
1 c chopped onion
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 T tomato paste
1 T worchestershire sauce
2 bay leaves
1 t paprika
Black pepper
fresh parsley
fresh rosemary
Splash of red wine

Put the beef in the crock pot and mix with the flour and salt. Add the rest of the ingredients through the black pepper and mix. Cook on high for 4-6 hours or on low for 8-10 hours. Go have fun somewhere. About 30 minutes or so before you’re ready to turn it off, add the herbs and wine.

notes:
This is a very forgiving recipe for substitutions and additions. If you have room and you have mushrooms, by all means, add them. You can add them with the wine.

A few words about the beef - We don’t eat a lot of red meat, for budgetary and cholesterol reasons. But when I do, I now buy my beef from Rocking F Farms at the Greensboro Farmers’ Curb Market. They sell their local farm-grown, pasture-raised beef from a cooler, which they replenish from a freezer that they haul on a trailer. Their prices are competitive with the industrial beef you find at the grocery store.

The friendly vendor is more than happy to discuss what they feed their cows and how they are raised. They raise most of their own feed, and do not use growth hormones. The cows are pasture fed until the last six weeks or so when they are switched to a grain mix on site so there’s no need for unnecessary antibiotics.

The thought of eating industrial “confined animal feeding operation” beef makes me queasy since I read Power Steer by Michael Pollan (must reading if you care about what you and your family eat), so if I can’t afford better quality, I just do without.

I didn’t have beef stock, but I added 2 T of Vogue Cuisine Instant Beef Flavored Base to the water, and I thought that it was good. I also use their vegetarian chicken-flavored base. It contains mostly organic ingredients, but no organic seal. For some odd reason that makes me feel better.

sources:
beef stew meat: Rocking F Farms at Greensboro Farmers’ Curb Market
flour, beef-flavored base, vegetables, spices: Deep Roots Market
tomato paste, worchestershire sauce: Harris Teeter
parsley, rosemary: My back yard
red wine: A neighbor’s gift

As our nation becomes more and more controlled by large corporations whose sole focus is profit, the notion of the Sabbath has turned into a quaint custom of the past.

For the last few days, I’ve given some thought to taking up the spiritual tradition of the Sabbath. Not so much for religious reasons, but because I think that we all need a day of rest occasionally. A time and space to relax and recharge.

I grew up in a family whose lives were very much wrapped up in the church, and it was taken for granted that other than preparing meals, you did not work on Sunday.

When I graduated into the working world during the Reagan years, without practical skills and a liberal arts degree, I had to take whatever job I could get. That meant that I worked weekends for years. I didn’t necessarily hate working weekends as long as I could get two days off in a row during the week. When I was working for minimum wage and just above it, I often had to string together two or three jobs to pay my bills, so I was lucky to get a whole day off. When I was at Replacements and in retail management, I often had to work six days a week. Even when I was lucky enough to get to work only five days, if I didn’t get those two days off together, I felt exhausted the rest of the time.

I remember that my mother was shocked that I had to work on Sundays. An even bigger shock to her (and me) was when I worked for a company that did its annual inventory on Easter Sunday, an event in which I had to participate.

After years of paying my dues, and the decision that I did not want a high-paying career if it meant that I had to trade the precious moments of my life for money, I now have a modest job that allows me to have my weekends off.

I will not be able to begin my Sabbath tradition today, because I have some errands and tasks to do that I could not finish yesterday that cannot wait until Monday. I may have to be flexible on certain weekends and I will have to plan ahead. But I am going to make an effort to set aside Sunday as my Sabbath day, a day to do only the things that will rejuvenate my body and soul.

I decided to get on the Thursday Thirteen bus, a nice little blog feature that Leanne started. Unfortunately, it looks like I missed the bus, because she decided that it had become overwhelming for her to maintain! Rather than chase it down this week for one ride, I decided that it was still a good idea and I would just do it here from time to time. Or maybe do the Friday Five, or the Sunday Seven.

Jennifer was the one who finally convinced me it was a good idea with her comment that it was a “good excuse to throw out all those little fragments that tend to pile up, but aren’t postworthy on their own.” Hey, that’s a good enough reason for me. I’m all about efficiency.

1. Except you wouldn’t know it from my house. We have a small house, and we have no kids. But our house stays in a mess all the time. Usually one room is relatively clean. It gets messed up while I clean another room.

2. Io mi chiamo Laurie. Sono di Greensboro, North Carolina. Italiano 101, 9:00, Monday, Wednesday, e Fridays. We haven’t gotten to days of the week yet.
3. Oh God, we have so many fish at my house. I can’t stand to look at them any more. From the beginning, I said, this is my husband’s hobby, not mine; I will not lift a finger to deal with it. I have, however, forbidden the addition of any more aquarium tanks simply because my husband is too soft-hearted to get rid of the extra fish by, you know. Now he thinks he’ll buy a beta fish because it will eat the baby fish. Auuughh!
4. If we had to rely on hunting and fishing or raising livestock to survive, we would surely die.
5. Yesterday morning, I had a vision of my life. I was rolling out an endless carpet and someone behind me was rolling it up. And gaining on me. That’s how my work has felt these two past weeks.
6. On the local scene, when a blogger was disrespectful to an honorable non-partisan politician blogger this past week, she responded to my challenge by having a meltdown and ranting that she wouldn’t visit that blog any more. I wanted to make a comment that the politician could send me a check later, but I figure that money jokes aren’t very funny to politicians these days.
7. Lately I have been reminded of the phrase “given enough rope to hang yourself” on several occasions. Sometimes it is funny to watch, especially when it is petty and involves bad manners. Or when people contradict themselves.
8. I bought used books at Ed McKay’s again this week. Please, somebody stop me. I have so many more books than I could possibly read. This time: Potager, a French seasonal gardening/cookbook, Essentials of Italian Cooking by Marcella Hazan, Third Person Rural, and Writing the Sacred into the Real.
9. When I finally learned to like olives, I REALLY learned to like olives! I knew deep down that I would if I just kept trying. Why it took 44 years I don’t know.
10. The wind blew over the shelves on my front porch yesterday. Now I’m glad I didn’t spend the time mopping it this past weekend. Now there’s dirt and shards of pottery everywhere, including pieces of some of my own work.
11. I keep saving pieces of broken pottery for stepping stones to be made sometime in the future. I get unnaturally attached to coffee mugs, in particular. This kind of hoarding behavior is part of the reason why my house is always a mess.
12. I think that I’ll change my research paper topic from Slow Food Italy to the national organic standards and the role of large corporations. I wanted to do this research anyway. Now I’ll have the help of a knowledgable professor.
13. I need to make a dessert for a Slow Food event with an Italian theme coming up at the end of January, and I do not cook desserts. When I do, I am seldom happy with them. I was stressing over this, and then it struck me. This is the perfect excuse to make chocolate biscotti! Now I’m pumped. I can do it ahead of time, and still have time to write my first paper next weekend.

From the Kansas City Star, via the Grist e-letter:

USDA investigators slam agency for poor oversight of biotech crops

HONOLULU (AP) - In a report released quietly just before Christmas, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s investigative arm disclosed that the department failed to properly monitor thousands of acres of experimental biotechnology crops.

The report by the department’s inspector general said USDA didn’t thoroughly evaluate applications to grow experimental crops and then didn’t ensure the genetically engineered plants were destroyed after experiments.

In several cases, the agency didn’t even know where so-called field trials were located.

“The system has been set up practically as a self-reporting system,” said Greg Jaffe, biotech director for the nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest. “It’s a ‘don’t look, don’t find’ policy.”

The two-year audit, which ended in April, made 28 separate recommendations for improving oversight, the job of the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.

In a written response, W. Ron DeHaven, the inspection service’s administrator, said USDA has safely regulated biotechnology experiments since 1987 “with no demonstrable negative environmental impacts.”

A new biotechnology department was created at the start of the audit that is addressing most of the concerns raised by the report, he said.

Still, many scientists worry that biotechnology crops will inadvertently cross-pollinate with conventionally grown crops. That poses a particular problem for organic farmers who charge a premium to guarantee customers their groceries are free of genetic engineering.

Read the rest here. Of course the USDA biotechnology department is doing what they can to protect organic crops. Why, I’m sure that they asked Monsanto if everything was okay, and good buddies don’t lie to each other, do they?

UPDATE: Read the USDA audit report.

From the Kansas City Star, via the Grist e-letter:

USDA investigators slam agency for poor oversight of biotech crops

HONOLULU (AP) - In a report released quietly just before Christmas, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s investigative arm disclosed that the department failed to properly monitor thousands of acres of experimental biotechnology crops.

The report by the department’s inspector general said USDA didn’t thoroughly evaluate applications to grow experimental crops and then didn’t ensure the genetically engineered plants were destroyed after experiments.

In several cases, the agency didn’t even know where so-called field trials were located.

“The system has been set up practically as a self-reporting system,” said Greg Jaffe, biotech director for the nonprofit Center for Science in the Public Interest. “It’s a ‘don’t look, don’t find’ policy.”

The two-year audit, which ended in April, made 28 separate recommendations for improving oversight, the job of the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.

In a written response, W. Ron DeHaven, the inspection service’s administrator, said USDA has safely regulated biotechnology experiments since 1987 “with no demonstrable negative environmental impacts.”

A new biotechnology department was created at the start of the audit that is addressing most of the concerns raised by the report, he said.

Still, many scientists worry that biotechnology crops will inadvertently cross-pollinate with conventionally grown crops. That poses a particular problem for organic farmers who charge a premium to guarantee customers their groceries are free of genetic engineering.

Read the rest here. Of course the USDA biotechnology department is doing what they can to protect organic crops. Why, I’m sure that they asked Monsanto if everything was okay, and good buddies don’t lie to each other, do they?

UPDATE: Read the USDA audit report.

Yesterday I had some bananas that had just turned brown and I still have lots of pecans from my mother’s tree, so I made banana nut bread. Every time I make it I wonder why I don’t make it more often. It’s so basic that I almost feel weird posting the recipe, but here it is in the spirit of showing people that cooking delicious food doesn’t have to mean slaving over a hot stove.

Banana Pecan Bread

2 beaten eggs
3 very ripe bananas
2 c flour
3/4 c sugar
1 t baking soda
1 t salt
1/2 c chopped pecans

Preheat the oven to 350. Grease a loaf pan. Mash the eggs and bananas together. Mix in the rest of the ingredients. Put in loaf pan. Bake for a hour. Turn out and cool on a rack.

Sources:
Free-range eggs - Back Woods Farm
Organic bananas, flour, and sugar - Deep Roots Market
Baking soda and salt - Harris Teeter
Pecans - my mama

Credit where credit is due: derived from Fannie Farmer’s recipe.

I’m very good at making plans every weekend, but I’ve noticed that I mostly end up doing other things no matter what my plans are. I think I end up doing exactly what I need to do, actually, even if it means that I curl up lazily with a book.

For instance, I make plans to put down cardboard and straw every weekend, but it often doesn’t happen. However, it will have to happen this weekend because I have too much of it. The wind was amazingly strong here yesterday, though, and it would have been a frustrating task.

So I cooked, I read blogs, I read out loud in italiano, and I read articles for my anthropology class. And, I reorganized my kitchen somewhat.

Sandy took the cabinet doors off the top row of cabinets in my kitchen, and I love the look of it. The doors on our cabinets and drawer fronts are hideous. Now we can see the pottery plates and bowls that we have started using on a regular basis. It gave me an opportunity to go through all my pantry food and throw old stuff out. I hate to say it, but I found some stuff from 2001, the year we moved in! I threw old nuts and grains on my compost pile, cleaned the jars, and now I have lots of storage and containers for bulk items. Now if I could just remember to take them with me to the store…

One thing that I resolved to do (although it was NOT a new year’s resolution, I swear!) is to cut down on our usage of paper towels. Recently I bought a stack of cotton dish towels from a clearance rack, and I have an attractive flat basket from a Christmas gift basket. I put these towels in the basket and keep it on the counter so that I always have them in my sight to remind me. After I use one for a napkin or cleaning the counters or the stove, I toss it in the hamper to be washed. I try to reserve the paper towels for cat messes now.

What makes this work so well is that I have a LOT of cloth towels.

I haven’t bought new plastic bags in quite a while either. I got serious about saving and washing my plastic bags right after I bought the last box several months ago. I have two sizes and one of those drying racks with dowels. Sometimes I hang them over big spoons if I have a lot of them. I used to marinade food in plastic bags and throw the bags in the garbage. Now if I have a very messy reason to use a container, I use a glass or plastic bowl that is easy to clean. What I am finding is that plastic bags can be reused many more times that I would have thought.