Lovely dinner

I didn't take a picture, but we just finished a really delicious dinner of handmade pasta with a sauce of butter, leeks, cream, and scallops, a salad of heirloom tomatoes and peppers, and some cheese. So yummy.

Pasta - homemade
Butter - eh
Leeks - from the garden
Cream - local
Scallops - farmer's market
Tomatoes - farmer's market
Peppers - from the garden
Cheese - we brought it back from Italy

I made the pasta sauce by thinly slicing the leeks and sauteeing them in butter. After about five minutes, I added the chopped scallops and cooked for another 2 or 3 minutes. Added a bit of salt and pepper, mixed it with the pasta, then added some cream.

Beginning of fall garden diagram

This isn't quite accurate - I haven't planted the fava beans yet. But otherwise, it's a plan-in-progress for what's happening in the garden right now.

First fall plantings

Now that we're finally having some cooler days, I can think about planting my fall and winter garden. It's still in the low 90's in the afternoons, but the nights are cool, and the days are bearable. It's a good idea to give the plants a start before it gets too cold for them. Plus, this way we may have some vegetables for Thanksgiving!

On Saturday, I cleared out a lot of the garden, dug in some compost, and planted lettuce and chard seedlings, and fennel seeds.

Today, I dug in some more compost and planted two rows of carrots, two rows of turnips, one row of radishes and one row of beets. I would have planted more beets, but I ran out of seeds. Whoops! It's the same package I started in the spring.

So we'll have the lettuce and radishes for salad by mid-October, and turnips, beets and carrots by late fall, hopefully. It will be my first time growing fennel so I'll have to do an update on how it goes.

Three cheers for the new seasons. If you have garden-attention-deficit-disorder, like me, you'll find that the seasons are just the right length to always keep you interested and excited by what comes next.

An argument for affluence

Affluence - as uncomfortable as I am with that term, I cannot deny that I am affluent. I cannot escape the fact that I am affluent because I am American and therefore I have more than others. When I say that, I mean it in two different ways. Relatively speaking, by definition, Americans are affluent because we have more wealth than the majority of other people in this world. Far more.

Based on a complex global economy, which in itself is based on treaties, embargoes, international policies, greed, protectionism, and exploitation, we are affluent because we depend on the rest of the world to provide us with what we want, essentially at their own expense. If all the poor of the world had even their basic needs met, we could not live at the standards that we now do. So I also mean that we are affluent because of this cause-and-effect mechanism.

Affluence as a term is very similar to wealth. One definition of wealth is “an abundance of items of economic value.” (from wikipedia). Economic value, at least in the western world, is typically determined by the “free market” (although considering the recent government bailouts of major corporations, the term “free market” as applied to western-style capitalism is really a joke). By this definition, wealth equals quantity. In a larger sense, wealth is a greater quantity of material things that have economic value in a global market, and the ability to trade these things fairly. America is a country that values material things, and uses them as a measure of wealth.

Often, when we talk about friends, family members, or even strangers who are in financial difficulties, we find ourselves becoming disgusted with their purchases, deciding unilaterally that what they’ve bought isn’t something they really needed. The responsible way to handle money, we tell ourselves (and sometimes others), especially when money is tight, is to buy only what we need, and not something we merely want. But we’re still talking about quantity, of course, and we’re talking about it in terms of economic measures, of physical things on which we can place a market value.

In a physical sense, as animals, all we need to survive is oxygen, food, water, shelter. Then we have non-physical goals that we would typically describe as “wants”. We want such things as love, acceptance, community, freedom from worry, the tolerance of others, a meaningful way to spend our time, recognition of our good qualities and forgiveness of our mistakes. To do more than just survive on a physical level, to really thrive, I would argue that these things are psychological or social needs. And interestingly, none of these things can be bought, directly, with money. In fact, in many ways, these things are either completely independent of monetary value, or they have an inverse relationship to money. They can’t be quantified.

Compared to typical Americans, the lifestyle my husband and I live might not be considered affluent (although by global standards we are incredibly rich). We share a car, and we either coordinate our schedules, or we take alternate transportation – bus (me), train (me), or bike (both of us). We grow a lot of our own food (well, that’s mostly me, too). I bake my own bread, shop at the local food cooperative and a variety of farmer’s markets, and preserve a lot of food for the winter. I enjoy making things by hand. I meet with like-minded friends for discussion and to read thought-provoking books. My husband and I both love getting out into nature, hiking, meditating, experiencing the beauty of the natural world. None of these things are valued in the “free market”. They have no economic value, and bring our family little or no wealth, despite the fact that they fulfill our psychological needs. By our own standards, we feel very lucky, and very wealthy.

Based on this, I would propose a new definition of the word affluent. “Wealth” derives from the old English word "weal", which means "well-being". Despite current usage, the term was originally an adjective to describe the possession of great qualities. Can you imagine a society in which people who have a sense of wonder, compassion, justice, forgiveness, quiet intelligence, humility, charity – these are the people who are considered wealthy? A society in which those who take only what they need and give everything else they have to those in need, they are the ones who are considered affluent?

Last big canning day of the year, I hope

Yesterday was a crazy day again. Loris and I went for a 29-mile bike ride, which was absolutely beautiful despite the fact that it was already starting to get pretty hot. We drove a few miles out of Davis and parked because I wanted to stop by a produce stand on the way back.

I don’t think it was local produce, considering they had everything from iceberg lettuce to broccoli to peppers and eggplant. But no heirloom tomatoes =(

We bought two 20-pound boxes of roma tomatoes to make up for the sorry supply in our garden, and I spent the afternoon making tomato sauce (and trying to make juice). By the end of the afternoon, I think I got my method down pretty well. I sliced the tomatoes at least in half (the bigger ones were cut into thirds or quarters), and cooked them on the stove for about 30-40 minutes. Then I used a ladle to scoop out the solids and strain them in my mesh strainer (NOT a fine-mesh strainer), then passed the solids through my juice/sauce machine. This made for a nice thick sauce, to which I added some salt and chopped basil. I strained the remaining liquid into a couple of pots, and I’m hoping to cook it down today to make some tomato juice. I think I’ll get a quite a few quarts of juice.

Loris used one jar of sauce with a jar of olives we bought at the market to make some fantastic pasta for dinner. We’re so spoiled.

Tonight I’m hoping to make eggplant parmesan for dinner and an extra one or two to freeze.

So the tally for the weekend:

6 jars of peach jam (4 small ones, 2 pints)
3 quarts of canned peaches
19 pints of tomato sauce (13 canned, one for dinner, 5 frozen)
Tomato juice (not finished yet)
3 loaves of French bread
Chocolate gelato (yum yum)

Just had a really long day followed by a fantastic homemade dinner. This is my big, final weekend of food preservation (I hope). I made and canned peach jam and several jars of quartered peaches in syrup. I also baked some bread and made dark chocolate gelato.

For dinner tonight, I made scallops from the farmer's market stuffed with a basil and garlic paste (pictures coming!). Loris made bruschetta with my homemade honey-whole-wheat bread, lardo from Italy, honey from the farmer's market, and grilled shallots from our garden. He also made a salad of potatoes, heirloom tomatoes, anchovies, capers, and basil.

Lists

I went to the garden after work yesterday.

I picked:

- A couple dozen tomatoes
- 3-4 eggplants
- 6-10 peppers
- Several LARGE zucchini/yellow squash
- A few handfuls of green beans
- One large bag of basil
- One large bag of parsley
- 3-4 leeks

I noticed:

- I killed the butternut squash plant when I accidentally pulled it up while weeding last week
- The last melon isn’t going to make it
- The lima beans have tons of flat pods, but no actual beans inside yet
- The green beans are really drying out and not producing much more
- The zucchini is probably almost done for the season
- Only one heirloom tomato plant is even trying anymore

I wondered:

- When I would have time to get my fall seeds in the ground
- What I would do with all that basil
- What I should have done differently with the tomato plants

Tonight I plan to:

- Make vegetable soup to freeze (still need to chop green beans and carrots)
- Make a summer vegetable risotto for dinner (and to freeze)
- Make bread for dinner and breakfast (and extra to freeze)
- Make pesto (to freeze?)
- Chop zucchini to freeze for later soup-making

By mid-September I plan to:

- Finish making and canning tomato sauce
- Finish making all the liquors I have going right now
- Plant my fall vegetable garden
- Get started on some craft projects that I’ve been putting off forever