Slow Food Piedmont Triad and Deep Roots Market co-hosted the Chef’s Showcase at Greensboro Farmer’s Curb Market this morning. Volunteers played with fruit and blenders and served up tasting samples to market customers and vendors.

Here are some smoothie combos that we gleaned from cookbooks and all over the web - sorry that I don’t have sources but these are pretty basic. Do a search (use Goodsearch and put in Slow Food USA as the beneficiary please) for “smoothie” and whatever fruits you have on hand. You’ll find lots of ideas!

If you don’t like what you get, play with adding different ingredients or more sweetener. Bananas are often good choices, and strawberries are great, but they’re not in season at this time.

Cantaloupe Smoothies:

Peel, seed, and cube all fruits as necessary. Blend ingredients until smooth. Chill if you don’t use ice or frozen fruit. Makes about four cups.

6 lemongrass, green, or mint tea ice cubes
1/2 cantaloupe
honey (or sweeten tea with honey)
fresh mint leaves

Note: Emily played around with this one to get a very light refreshing drink. We’re not sure what she did exactly, BUT she did use green tea ice cubes.

1/2 cantaloupe
1 cup milk
1 cup vanilla yogurt
1 cup crushed ice
2 Tbsp honey

Note: Mixed reviews on this one!

1/2 cantaloupe
1/2 cup orange juice
honey
1/2 cup ice

1/2 cantaloupe
1/2 cup plain yogurt
1 cup blueberries
3 Tbsp honey

1/4 cantaloupe
1/4 honeydew melon
1 lime, juiced
1 Tbsp sugar

We played around a lot with the cantaloupes and made many adjustments and experiments.

Other Smoothies and Beverages:

Peel, seed, and cube all fruits as necessary. Blend ingredients until smooth. Chill if you don’t use ice or frozen fruit.

CHAI SMOOTHIE
1 c soy, whole, or rice milk
1 banana
1/2 t cinnamon
1/8 t cardamom
1/8 t ground coriander
1/8 t ground cloves
1/8 t black pepper
1 Tbsp honey
6 ice cubes or 6 frozen chai tea cubes

Note: Emily made the spice mixture in bulk ahead of time, and used rice milk and plain ice cubes. This was a nice surprise to those who weren’t so sure, like me!

WATERMELON YOGURT MINT SMOOTHIE
1-2 cups seeded watermelon chunks
1 Tbsp honey
1 Tbsp fresh mint leaves
1 cup yogurt
Dash cinnamon

Note: Everyone thought that this one hit the spot on a hot muggy morning. The recipe called for lemon yogurt, which we didn’t have. I think that someone added a bit of lime juice.

BANANA BERRY APPLE SMOOTHIE
2 bananas
1 cup blueberries
1 apple
1 1/4 cup apple juice
1 tsp vanilla
3 ice cubes

Note: A colorful hit with the kids!

PEACH SMOOTHIE
4 peaches
8 oz. plain yogurt
2 Tbsp. honey
1/3 cup apple juice

Note: If you like peach yogurt, this is a drinkable version.

SOURCES:
Bananas, limes, green tea, spices, rice milk, apple juice, orange juice, yogurt: Deep Roots Market
Cantaloupes: Fawcett Farm, Gann Farm
Blueberries, watermelon, and cantaloupe: Gann Farm
Peaches, apples: Dodge Lodge Farm
Peaches: Kalawi Farm
Honey: Quaker Acres Apiaries
Mint: Slow Turn Farm

(Cross-posted at Slow Food Piedmont Triad.)

This morning was a little different at the Curb Market - several women including myself served up smoothies at the Slow Food booth. The person who was going to do it (with my and Anna’s assistance) suddenly had to drop out late Monday because of a job promotion and move. My anxiety level during the past week was sky high and when you have an anxiety disorder, something like this can seem like a major problem, but of course, it wasn’t.

That afternoon, I sent out a call for volunteers and got several replies along the lines of, “Can’t do it because of [insert reason here], good luck,” which, friends, I know you have the best of intentions when you do this, but please consider the effect it has. My hopes were raised with each email reply I received only to be dashed. If you really feel the need to say no and to explain, please do it in a separate email, but better yet, let it go. Just saying.

On Tuesday afternoon, I received an email from Gerry asking me to be interviewed at the market for the PBS Simple Living show the next morning. This was more than my nerves could handle and I promptly had a panic attack. Charlie kindly talked me back into reality, a place where the fate of the world doesn’t actually hinge on my every action, and I gave myself permission to say no, and also to cancel the Slow Food booth if I decided it was the best thing to do. Gerry was very kind about it too.

Bummer, though. If I had been in good shape, I would have been all over that one. It’s quite ironic, really.

Anyway, the Slow Food booth was finally saved by Emily at Deep Roots, who found a volunteer, Sallie, who is a kindred soul just moved to town looking for “her people.” We decided to do a joint Deep Roots/Slow Food thing, and I was joined by Emily, Sallie, Anna, and by surprise, Gwen and Dinah, who helped even more by fetching another blender and some cutting boards from home. We played with fruit and melons and yogurt and mint and tea and spices all morning.

We agreed that we should do it again (with a little more organization and pre-testing of recipes next time) and it ended up being much more relaxed and fun than the last Slow Food Booth, when we had lines of people. The difference with that one was that smells of garlic and herbs wafting through the market tends to draw more people, so some better signage will be the other improvement that we’ll make. Sallie said to call her if I needed help again, and that’s as good as gold in my book. I warned her that I believed people who said that and followed up on it!

As far as the anxiety thing, I pretty much slept the rest of the rainy afternoon and feel much better now that my Slow Food “obligations” are done for a while, although I am aware that all of the pressure is self-induced. I’m going to the doctor next week to renew my prescriptions before school begins. Every summer I think that I am better enough to try going off my medication, which is very light, but by the end of July I am beating my head against the wall. Oh well. I’m grateful that I finally found something that works and doesn’t have a lot of side effects (Buspar). And especially that I got to meet several wonderful women who came to my rescue.

And we’re going to the lake with my cousin and some of his friends and my sister and brother-in-law for a weekend mid-August, so that will be a nice getaway.

Next post: some smoothie and cool summer beverage combos, which I’ll cross-post to the Slow Food blog.

O-kay. It’s not just me. The sewing machine was filthy and I cleaned it best I could. I don’t know how it got that dirty when it had a cover on it - of course the cover was filthy too. It has a textured finish that made a tough job even for my Charlie’s Soap. It was already threaded except for the bobbin thread coming up, and I couldn’t get the needle thread to pick up the bobbin thread. I couldn’t figure it out and then I realized that there was a thread stuck in the bobbin mechanism and it was really dirty in there too. I could blame the dirt on our old attic or my old housemate but I think that I’ll tell the sewing machine serviceperson that I inherited it from some dead relative. Quick and simple lies are best.

One thing for sure is that a trip to the library for a book on basic sewing is in order. I don’t remember anything about this machine.

Does anyone else out there have a problem with Kenmore sewing machines and bobbins? My co-worker says that she got rid of hers and bought a Singer because the bobbin mechanism on her Kenmore drove her crazy.

ZhaK, I might be over for a sewing lesson after you get back.

I received my mill-end yarns today from R&M Yarns, and I am so happy! I misread the web page - the yarn was measured at 20 wpi (wraps per inch) rather than epi (ends per inch), making it perfect for what I wanted. Now I want to order a few more colors - told you that it was a slippery slope.

I finished weaving my set of kitchen towels and finished measuring off the warp for a new set. So it’s been a productive day. Now I have to hem the towels, which I’m NOT happy about and wonder why I made this choice at the beginning. My sewing machine hasn’t worked for years so now I’m considering getting it fixed and relearning how to use the thing or buying a new one and giving this one away. It probably just needs a tension adjustment but I know nothing about it. I’ve never been good with a sewing machine, and god only knows that I have tried to learn. It seems like it’s a good idea to try again.

From the Spannocchia blog, here’s a post about the class that I am saving money to participate in next summer: Organic Bookmaking. After reading about the fires in central and southern Italy causing tourist evacuations, I was glad to see this post!

Also, they link to a great article, Siena and Sustainability at Terrain.org - don’t miss the co-article about Spannocchia in the sidebar.

I think that these are Green Zebra and Peach tomatoes. I know that they are delicious! (Just looked them up. Yep, yep, yep. Gotta be.)

I hope that I’m right about identifying the “Peach” tomato because I definitely want to get the seed for next year. I’m not sure that saving the seed will come out true since it was surrounded by other tomatoes.

Same for the Green Zebra (I think!). After eating a lot of mild, sweet Brandywines, it was good to taste a tomato with a little more zing to it.

I didn’t take a photo of my dinner plate this time for the OLS post. It just didn’t look as appetizing as it tasted. Besides, what could compete with those tomatoes?

Dinner:
Baked chicken breasts: Alison’s Family Farms, NC, from Earth Fare.
Yellow wax beans and other “green” beans, tomatoes, parsley, and garlic: Back Forty
Braised carrots with honey and parsley: Carrots and parsley from Back Forty, honey from Quaker Acres Apiaries.

After tonight, all future green beans will go into the freezer or will be given away until next season. I’m totally sick of them after eating them nearly every day for weeks. BUT I do have a good recipe. This is how they prepare green beans in Tuscany, from my handout from my cooking class, In the Spannocchia Kitchen with Loredana. The measurements are typically Italian.

Fagiolini con aglio e prezzemolo
String beans with garlic and parsley

1 kg string beans
ground parmesan cheese
1 handful garlic and parsley
salt
pepper
4 spoonfuls olive oil

Clean the string beans, cut off both tips and rinse them without letting them dry completely. Chop finely the parsley with the garlic (5-6 cloves) and put into a pan with the string beans and olive oil. Cover and cook for 40 min. on low heat. Sprinkle with parmesan, turn stove off and put lid back on.

I may have started down a slippery slope. Yesterday I ordered some unmercerized cotton yarn mill ends from R&M Yarns. Sight unseen, other than the photo on the web site. $5 a pound!

This is good, and bad. Now I’m thinking - 20 epi. Do I want to do more fine weaving? And the main baddie is that I swore off buying new yarns until I could make a serious dent in my stash. Stash is barely touched. I need to save money to go to Spannocchia for the book making class. Yes, I am still planning to go back next summer!

In my defense, much of my stash had a serious cat hair problem, and I was fairly ruthless in getting rid of a lot in the house move and the recent studio reorganization. I had to wind a lot off the cones before I got to the layers that don’t have cat hair on them. I don’t consider throwing the stash out as fair play, and so that doesn’t count in my stash reduction goal.

And while I used to be completely in love with dyeing, I’m not really interested in it now. If I need a certain color, I’d rather buy it that way. Since I have had two weaver friends with terminal brain cancer, it makes me more aware of all the chemicals my skin soaked up during my dyeing phase.

The first crack in the yarn buying dam was going to John C. Campbell Folk School and the Yarn Circle in Murphy, where I decided I needed an 8-dent reed for the Baby Wolf so that I could use some bigger yarns without a lot of warp wear. Then I just had to have two cones of rich purple and golden perle cotton and a small cone of unmercerized black “carpet warp” cotton. If you are in the Murphy area (the far western tip of North Carolina), the Yarn Circle is a great weaving/spinning supply store. If I lived nearby I would surely go broke.

Then I ordered natural bulrush from H.H. Perkins to make hats, but I consider that a good purchase. I still intend to buy some different size hat forms from another supplier so that I can make a variety of sizes, and I’ll start using more cattails, which are free. (My brother: “You got cattails out of that ditch? There are big snakes in that ditch!”)

Then I visited Spinners Ridge (housed inside Yarns Etc. in downtown Greensboro), where they didn’t have much in stock as far as weaving yarn. She carries some Maysville carpet warp and Henry’s Attic yarns and can order yarn for you, but she’s not big enough to carry much in her inventory. The shop generally caters to knitters and has beautiful knitting yarns, and it also has basketry supplies. I bought one small cone of blue carpet warp there, and she’s going to get her husband to make me a new tension bar for my inkle loom. When I go back I may buy some more Maysville cotton, since it makes good dish towels.

Weaving can be an expensive addiction. It doesn’t have to be. In the early years when I had no money and no credit, I wove rags on homemade frame looms. But once you start down the road of letting yourself spend money on it, it’s so-o-o-o easy to run up that credit card.

I’m obsessing over weaving now because I’m in the middle of what I’ve come to think of as my “midsummer meltdown.” Thinking about weaving is the easiest thing to do these days. Actually, I think that I’ll head out to the studio right now.

Just relaunched jazzcat productions, my clunky old 20th century web site, as a fiber blog. Well, fiber/feline blog. As I said in an earlier post, I renewed the domain name for another five years at my husband’s request, then he decided he wasn’t interested in taking it over. So I decided that I should do something with it.

It’s mostly old stuff, and some silly things about the cats, but I plan to crosspost only my fiber/art posts there for the benefit of people who have my business cards. It’s a place where I’ll collect links for fiber-related web sites and blogs, too.

So if you’re a fiber person who doesn’t give a flip about my personal life or food, this might be the place for you! Otherwise, all posts there will be posted here as well.

Visit with brother and his girlfriend is over and went well, except that I might have agreed to sharing a weekend trip to Bald Head Island with them, which we can’t really afford. But that can be resolved.

Conversation with my brother was interesting. He just turned in his notice with the agricultural chemical company where he has worked for years. He hated that job so much. He said that he doesn’t see a good future ahead, because farmers spend such an enormous amount of money on chemicals and spray so much simply because a salesman tells them that they should. Everyone is in a lot of debt and digging deeper holes since they have to produce more to pay their debts, so “need” more chemicals, etc. etc. As a former farmer, he was amazed at the amounts that the other farmers use. How sad that the world has come to this kind of self-defeating spiral.

He also warned me off peanuts. He said that I wouldn’t believe how much poison was sprayed on them. I buy organic peanut butter and peanuts from the Farmer’s Market so I don’t have to worry about it. Besides, the salmonella cover-up at Peter Pan sealed that deal anyway.

Of course, I’m happy for him not only because his job was at odds with the very thing that I am most passionate about, but also because I have always worried about his exposure to all those chemicals almost every day. And because he was miserable, and I know what it’s like to be miserable in your job. There are not a lot of employment choices in an area that depended upon tobacco farming and textiles not so long ago…

One thing that stuck in my mind from my Simple Living class and reading the book Affluenza, was the huge building boom of storage facilities for people who have too much stuff and can’t bear to get rid of it. I had noticed it peripherally but had not made the connection to rampant consumerism. Now, ironically, he is going to help build and manage a storage facility! I didn’t share my observations with him. It would not have been a good idea. I’m just grateful he’s getting away from the hell job. Besides, it’s probably going to be used by a lot of businesses anyway.

He said that Mama Kitty was ugly after she was so cordial too

Looking at him was like looking at my father

It’s a beautiful coolish day here with highs in the low 80s so I’ve spent a lot of time weeding paths. It looks much better and now I can put down cardboard and mulch. I’m going to put a layer of landscape fabric on top of the cardboard in one area because the weeds grew quickly through the cardboard I used there last year. The earthworms will still enjoy the cardboard and the landscape fabric, while synthetic, will at least allow me some time to concentrate on other areas. Weeds will still grow on top, but they are much easier to pull up and the fabric lasts for years. I used it in the difficult area next to the fence and it is much easier to weed that area years later because the vines and roots run along the top of the fabric.

Since we busted our asses cleaning the last few days, I can spend my Sabbath doing peaceful, restful things. One of those things will be drying peach slices in the dehydrator, which will make my house smell lovely.

This morning at the Curb Market I forgot my pocketbook, so couldn’t buy as much as I wanted, but I was still able to pick up milk, eggs, peaches, and Silver Queen corn. And really, how much more do I need from life, when I have Brandywine tomatoes in the back yard, a shelf full of books, and a loom warped up waiting for me to sit down and weave at a moment’s notice?

I wish that I had an on/off switch for my desire to write. If I had to make a choice, I guess I’d choose the “off” switch since I sometimes feel compelled to write about things that I don’t feel comfortable sharing. Then again, I am distantly related to an author who ended up being infamous for writer’s block, so maybe I should choose “on.” So when I get like this, the only thing to do is to sit in front of the computer and start typing.

It’s not that I haven’t had a full week. There was the Slow Food dinner at Fabian’s in Winston Salem on Monday night, which was as fabulous as predicted. But it deserves a post of it’s own. I’m afraid that I can’t do justice to it, so I keep putting it off.

I’ve been gathering some real beauts in the tomato patch - Brandywines and what I believe are Green Zebras. Others are not so identifiable. My squash plants ended up being zucchini, which might not seem like a big deal, but for a long time I said that when my bad luck with zucchinis ended, I would declare that I’m a green thumb. Well, I’ve gotten the most that I ever had and the plants look healthy and productive. Usually by the time I’ve gotten two the plant is dying. I’m a green thumb, y’all. And guess what - there’s one FIG on my 2-year old fig tree that we rooted and one BUTTERBEAN. Woo-hoo!

The big slicers may be ripening wonderfully, but the canning tomatoes look awful, to be blunt about it. I don’t know if it was the drought or the plants are rootbound in the pots or they need more fertilizer. To be honest about it, I’m not that upset. It’s clear to me now that I’m not going to have enough paste tomatoes to can. Last year around this time, my kitchen counters were covered with Roma and Amish Paste tomatoes. I think that I lost count at 300 at one time. It was overwhelming, but if they had decided to do the Eat Local Challenge any time before June, boy, I was ready. I think that I might have a few jars of tomatoes still. It’s a bit of a relief not to do all that canning, but I’m not in the clear yet.

Speaking of the Eat Local Challenge, it is in September this year. That should be a piece of cake for most anybody, especially vegetarians, but I don’t think that I’m going to participate. I haven’t decided for sure, but I feel like I learned what I needed last year when I did it in May. If I do decide to do it, I’m going to allow myself to be exempt from lunches. The fact is that I value my lunches out with my co-workers and it’s impossible to do local lunch out in Greensboro for even a week. I need that social time because I don’t get a lot of it. About the only rule I keep for eating out is that I don’t eat factory farmed meat, choosing vegetarian for lunch. Once in a while I will succumb to a non-fast-food-chain cheeseburger, because hey, I’m human and I try not to be too terribly O-C, which is my tendency. And I really like cheeseburgers. Good greasy spoon types, like the What-a-Burger on Church St.

Today I had lunch at Jack’s Corner with Lorraine Ahearn, and we talked about local food for an article she is collaborating on. It was very pleasant - we have a mutual friend and our husbands used to play war strategy games together. I miss Kevin coming over in part because he is a very good home brewer, and used to work for Red Oak, a local micro-brewery, and I do love good beer and ale! I feel like I already knew Lorraine because I always read her columns in the newspaper. I guess that is how some people feel when I meet them at the market and they tell me that they read this blog! It’s a little weird when it happens and I tried to keep that in mind but I suppose that she is used to it. She is very down to the earth and it was a very pleasant lunch and conversation.

My brother is coming to visit me tomorrow, briefly, for the first time in over twenty years. He has never seen my house and he is a rather spiffy fellow so Sandy and I have been really busy trying to clean up all the cat hair and vomit and the fish tanks and the worst part of the weeds in the yard. When people wonder how I do everything that I do, all they would need to do is take a look at my house. When my mother gave me a sign that said “Dull Women Have Immaculate Houses” I loved it, but on my very best day ever you could never call me immaculate or even neat. People seem to like my house though because they immediately know that they won’t ever have to clean up if I show up at their house unexpectedly. It puts them at ease and they say, “It looks so…lived in.”