Our Slow Food convivium is starting a regular potluck night on the last Sunday of every month, and last night was the first one. If you have never been to a Slow Food potluck, hoo boy, is that some good eating! There is always an assortment of people with all kinds of interests, so when one group is watching the game in one room (it IS March in North Carolina), some are swapping toddler stories, a couple of others are discussing mushroom cultivation and another group is talking about raw food.

On the table, the feast included roast venison, deviled eggs, turnip greens with ham and homemade hot vinegar sauce, salad with soba noodles and tofu, and orange cranberry sweet potatoes. The only requirement was that the dish contain at least one local ingredient.

Sandy and I both attended, so I took two dishes with the main ingredients fresh from my garden. The first one is proof that vegetarian food is not diet food. I tossed sliced leeks and fennel bulbs with butter from the farmers’ market and braised (simmered) them in water and lots of butter for a long, long time until the water had simmered away and the leeks and fennel turned into silky melt-in-your-mouth goodness. Then I ground some fresh black pepper and grated a little Pecorino Romano cheese on top. This is a typical Tuscan style of cooking vegetables, except the Tuscans probably wouldn’t combine the two.

The other dish I took from a wonderful, well-known food blog, 101 Cookbooks. I have had a sealed plastic bag of farro from Spannocchia since October 2006 when I bought it there (in Italy). When I looked it up in Italian cookbooks, I was instructed to soak it a day ahead of time and I just couldn’t remember to do it, and eventually forgot about it. I saw a link to this recipe and remembered the farro and decided to try it. Turns out that you don’t need to soak it at all, and it also turns out that I liked the flavor a lot! You can order farro, an ancient variety of wheat grain, from Anson Mills in South Carolina. I used lettuce, beet greens, and claytonia from the Back Forty, garlic chives from the Back Forty instead of a shallot, honey wine vinegar from Quaker Acres Apiary, the rest of my olive oil from Spannocchia, and goat cheese from Goat Lady Dairy. This recipe was a winner and very easy:
Citrus Parmesan Farro Salad.

Yum - I was so stuffed - I guess I didn’t mention the Swedish cake and the chocolate/Guinness stout pie.

I am delighted with the progress I’ve made with Mama Kitty this week! I’ve petted her quite a bit. I feed Miss Peanut and Mama Kitty on the front porch, where Miss Peanut lives in the Peanut Shack (she is mostly blind), and although Mama Kitty eats with her daughter, she likes to hang out on the back deck and annoys a few of the neighbors, I suppose. Mostly she sticks close to home and if I’m out in the yard she follows me around and supervises, with an occasional security check of the studio. I’m particularly fond of Mama Kitty because she is Squirt’s mama and they share a lot of personality traits, even though it has taken years to earn any of her trust.

One night I fed Miss Peanut and Mama Kitty didn’t come to my whistle. I went to the back deck where she was, and I scooped her up. I gave her a good kitty massage before I put her down. She ran around in a little circle, and then I picked her up again. This time I walked with her to the chair and sat down and tried to pet her in my lap, but that was a little too much. I put her down and she again ran around in a circle back to me instead of taking off. So I walked with her up to the front porch, talking to her about how Miss Peanut was going to eat all the canned food if she didn’t hurry, with her following behind me just like a happy little dog.

Now, I can’t get too attached to Mama Kitty. It’s bad enough already. She is very bony and I can’t get her to eat anything with de-wormer or medicine in it. She is 12 years old and semi-feral. I’m looking at potential heartbreak here. But I’m thinking that with this progress, I could possibly get this vet who makes house calls to come over and update her rabies shot, and do anything else possible for her. Plus, I could probably apply some Frontline or Revolution to her neck and make her life a lot more comfortable.

Yes, I am very wary about getting too attached to another of our cats. The way I felt about Squirt was so far beyond how I feel about the others, but I’m sure that was because I fed him by hand as a kitten. As far as he was concerned, I was his mama, and he was probably as close to a son as I’ll ever have.

I’ve thought a lot recently about the paradox that I’ve been happier than I have been in years since Squirt died three months ago, when I thought that Squirt’s death would surely send me to the loony bin or even leaving home on one of those middle-aged spirit journeys. I think that a good part of it is from changing my antidepressant and Sandy getting his job back. But it’s a lot more than that.

I have dreaded the day when I would have to put Squirt to sleep for ten years, since I fell in love with him as a little baby. I never could imagine how I could deal with it, and in my imagination I couldn’t see being with him as he died, and I couldn’t see NOT being with him as he died. I was with my father when he died, and it was a horrible experience. I couldn’t be with Sharky when I had him put to sleep. But I was with my little Squirtley, and I looked deeply into his eyes as he passed from this world, and he is at peace, and I survived.

I guess that I didn’t realize how deeply that dread had pervaded my life. I still miss him terribly, but I am relieved as well. Isn’t that strange. It makes sense, but I don’t really want it to make sense. I don’t want to be relieved that Squirt died. But I know that I am relieved, not because of his death, but because his death released me too. It is very complicated, the mixture of my grief and my happiness.

Now when I check my stats, I see that I get a lot of hits of people looking for solutions about feline CRF, and it saddens me that they will see a story with a sad ending. I realize now that Squirt must have been sick with CRF for a long, long time before he was diagnosed, plus he had so many other medical problems. In the end it was liver failure that got him. Just the difference in how much water I need to put down for our three other indoor cats now that Squirt’s gone has made me realize how long Squirt was sick. His thirst had increased over a long period of time until it was excessive enough for me to notice.

So if you’re reading this because you’re desperate to find a solution to your cat’s CRF, I hope that you won’t despair. The fluids that we gave Squirt really did seems to help him. It’s just that he had come to the end of his life. It was an excellent life, and one that enriched mine forever.

I’m trying to get over the shock of the last post. Jeez, it’s like Predator Meets Alien, right? Maybe the only corporation evil and big enough to meet Monsatan in the ring is Voldemart. Seriously, I am stunned. There has GOT to be a catch.

And I’m sitting here trying to lower my adrenalin from a very, very busy week at work. Can’t tell you just how nice to was to wrap most of the important stuff up and sit on the back deck with a book! I finished The Memory of Old Jack by Wendell Berry this week, and started What We Keep by Elizabeth Berg.

I’ve fallen in love with Wendell Berry’s novels after being an admirer of his nonfiction and poetry. Now I’m trying to go through his fiction from the beginning, because I am so interested in the lives of his characters. They remind me of my older relatives and to some extent of my childhood in tobacco farming country, when there were general stores with woodstoves and hoop cheese and somehow we managed to survive without Wal-Marts and K-Marts just fine, imagine that! That’s one reason that it’s so easy for me to boycott Wal-Mart - I know that it’s possible. It baffles me when people claim that they can’t.

The cherry trees in the front have exploded with pinkish white blossoms and standing under them looking up fills me up with joy.

I took down and put away the row covers this week, and I’m looking forward to taking down the greenhouse, maybe on Sunday. It was close to 80 today but the high on Sunday is supposed to be only in the forties. The Back Forty is looking better and better and I’ll try to take photos this weekend.

Today a -ahem- younger person asked me if I had plans for the weekend, and said that he was sorry when I said that I didn’t. (Actually, I have, but he wouldn’t have been interested.) I told him that I had reached the age - good God, y’all - that I had reached the age when I think having no plans for the weekend is a good thing. I really didn’t think that when I started typing that that it would sound so…well, anyway.

I’m going to weave now.

I had decided long ago to stop trying to be a food journalist blogger, but this deserves a mention.

Wal-Mart Move ‘TIpping Point’ for Driving Monsanto’s Bovine Growth Hormone off the Market

I don’t know what to say. I’d like to say, “Woo hoo, go Wal-Mart!” but my throat closes up and I get dizzy.

So, I’m sitting here thinking about how happy I am, and I’ve got this bite guard in my mouth that makes me look like Jerry Lewis, and I’m thinking about how I hope that my 3 day old toothache is from clenching my teeth, because the last time my teeth hurt like this that’s what it was, and I just had my teeth cleaned and examined a month ago, and I’m thinking that it would be really weird if I am clenching my teeth when I’m so happy right now.

Last night, after I wove my little ATC, I went on a cooking jag and made lasagna with zucchini and leeks and fennel and garlic pine nuts and marinated sauted tempeh. The tomato sauce was bottled, but organic, and I used organic ricotta and unorganic mozzarella and parmigiano. I didn’t taste it because I was not hungry. Then I had lasagna noodles left over, so I cut them up and went out to the Back Forty in the dark and gathered a few leaves of ruby chard and Siberian kale and rosemary and thyme and parsley, chopped up another leek and garlic, sauteed them in some olive oil and added the noodles and a couple of boxes of organic chicken broth. I sipped it and it was okay last night but will probably be better on standing and I can add whatever. I divided both dishes up into portions and froze most of it.

Tonight I tasted the lasagna and oh my god. It was totally wonderful and I don’t even know if I can reproduce it. I really did not expect it to be so good because I’m not usually crazy about veggie lasagna, but I wanted to use some zucchini from my freezer. I think that it could have been the red wine/olive oil/soy sauce/garlic marinade from the tempeh that I poured over everything in the saute pan. It was really awful wine too, leftover from the reenactment last weekend, saved in a soda bottle and brought home by my dear husband. I took it out of the fridge and thought, uh, what the hell, I’ll throw it in the marinade.

And tonight I wove another little weaving, and I’m really happy right now, even though I look like Jerry Lewis and I might be going to the dentist tomorrow.

My goal today was to complete a woven artist trading card, and I achieved that goal! Well, almost. I have to put a backing on it, but I think that I’m going to wait until I get about half a dozen woven and back all of them at the same time.

Earlier this month, I wove two other little tapestries which I meant to be artist trading cards, but the size was not quite right. The only two restrictions for an artist trading card is that it can’t be sold and it must be 2 1/2 by 3 1/2 inches. Think baseball card. So those two will be pins. When I hit the size right, it will be an ATC, and when I don’t, it will be a pin.

The theme of Art & Soul is “By the Sea.” From what I understand, most of the attendees carry with them lots of little handcrafted goodies to trade. I’m weaving these tapesties on little cardboard squares, and they are doing double duty - they will be trades and they are studies for my next tapestry bag.

Weaving these little tapestries is one of the most relaxing things I’ve done for a long time, and it is so easy. Taking photos of the little weavings, not!!!!! Also, I planned to do a lot of beading on my collages and art quilts and fabric journals and weavings. I might need to get my bifocals first - it is definitely ten times harder than it used to be to thread a needle and poke it through those tiny little holes. So, to recap, weaving = fun! Photography and beading = frustration.

After the 9:20 service this morning (at which Joyce joined me, yay!), I spoke to Jim Dollar and told him that part of the reason I haven’t been coming to the services is that I can get his sermons and thoughts on the Internet. There are other reasons: the main one is that I get up at my normal time and there is just enough time to get involved in some project, and before I know it it’s 9:45 or 10 a.m. I told him that I was happy and in serious art mode.

His response was “Good, I don’t want to see you back here for, oh, about two years!”

Much different that my mother’s philosophy, which is basically, you’re not a good person if you don’t attend church every Sunday, or you’re missing out on any kind of spiritual “redemption.”

Jim’s Flickr site is wonderful. Besides his stunning photography, he writes his brand of thought-provoking philosophy in the comments. The link is http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimdollar/.

And his sermons (AKA monologues) and thoughts are blogged at Loose Change, Too.

Maybe I should make a category here just for the posts that are inspired by Jim!

Substitute any dream for the word “artist”…

“Give yourself permission to be a beginner. By being willing to be a bad artist, you have a chance to be an artist, and perhaps, over time, a very good one.

“When I make this point in teaching, I am met by instant, defensive hostility: ‘But do you know how old I will be by the time I learn to really play the piano/act/paint/write a decent play?’

“Yes . . . the same age you will be if you don’t.

“So let’s start.”

~Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way

Yesterday I switched my plans a bit, just like always. When I went out on my errands and saw what a gawjuss day it was, I knew that I had to get out in the Back Forty. I hauled all the cardboard out of the studio and got to work on mulching the paths. It is such a relief to see floor space in the studio again. Maybe I’ll actually move back out there now. It will be nice to not have to listen to Guido squawling and pawing at the door of the Happy Room!

Anyway, I took some before photos this morning. When I don’t, I always wish that I did later when it looks beautiful.

I’ll put wood chip mulch over the cardboard for now, but the ultimate goal is to put down fieldstone and finish out the side path, extend it out to a little patio area in the middle, and continue up the path to the studio door.

I still have a lot to do today, and I can’t believe that I didn’t have enough cardboard to do the worst path. I’ll be trashpicking and hauling boxes home from work again, I guess.

There mi-i-i-ght be enough lettuce here for a baby salad, when combined with the claytonia. It was too hot in the greenhouse this winter for the most part.

These are the “winter” beds. They get sun only in the winter, and now are sprouting turnips, peas, a variety of mustards, spinach, and arugula. Claytonia, sorrel and parsley is established here, as well as chard from last year. I’m letting the Tuscan kale and brussels sprouts go to seed.

Still lots to do in the top two photos.

Left: The “fertile crescent” where I keep my most frequently used culinary herbs for a quick dash out in the middle of a kitchen inspiration. This year there are purple artichokes growing there too. Right: Bee balm, lamb’s ears, yarrow, yellow lilies, Red Nanking cherry bush, maybe one cardoon (the others perished during the winter), daffodils, and a fabulous French hydrangea.

Mama Kitty, my constant companion in the garden, is Squirt’s feral mother. She is much more trusting than she used to be.

Joyce asked me about the “Sojourners” service. It is at 9:20 at the Presbyterian Church of the Covenant on Mendenhall St. near UNCG and Greensboro College. Here’s an excerpt from Jim Dollar’s last post on his blog, where he posts his sermons and thoughts. If this appeals to you, you would love this service. All of it is good and it was hard to choose an excerpt, so I chose a part that relates to how this group is attempting to grow as a community. You’ll find the whole thing at Loose Change, Too.

My wish for us all is to know what is important, to know what truly needs to be done, and to have what it takes to do it. For me, this kind of knowing is part of my idea of “the dynamic core” around which we coalesce and out of which we live. The other part of that dynamic core is being aligned, inner and outer, so that what is “deepest, best and truest” about us is reflected, expressed, in how we live our lives, in living the life that is ours to live (and not the life society, or the church, or our parents tells us to live). The right kind of community helps us find and live out of this dynamic core (dynamic because it is not static, but changing, fluid, evolving).

I think the right kind of community does this by engaging us in conversation about the things that matter. It listens us to the truth of our being. By helping us say what is important, it helps us see what is important, and helps us live toward what is important. If it is important, we will have to live toward it, around obstacles and through resistance. Knowing what is important puts us on a path to what is important. The right kind of community, then, gives us ourselves.

On the way to ourselves, I would say to you: be alert to happenstance. That’s my best advice. When you happen upon something special, know it. Be alert to it, aware of it. Sit with it for a while. Take the time to relish the experience, to cherish the moment, because it is passing.