Wandered far afield

That's a term one of my old bosses used in management meetings when he and the two under-managers he supervised (one of whom was me) would find some topic related to work, but not actually pertaining to work directly, and happily chat about it for a half-hour or so before finding our way back to business.

"Well, we've wandered far afield..." he would say, and that was our cue that we needed to get back to the real business at hand.

And it's a term I've rediscovered in these first days of 2016, as it applies to myself and the life I've been living.

One of the ways hit home yesterday, when there was a power outage at about 8 a.m. The house was cold and dark, and because we chose an electrically-driven pellet stove instead of a wood stove the house hadn't warmed up yet, and now would have no chance of doing so. We have a central heating system we use for back-up, but of course it doesn't work without electricity either. 

So as the temperature dropped inside and I bundled up, I reviewed that choice. Did I ever.

So I sat in the cold and read my Kindle, played music on my iPod and checked Facebook and email on my phone until those devices all died. At that point I decided to head into town to run some errands (thank God I had gas), where at least I'd be in some warm buildings and I could use the car to charge all my devices and run the heater while driving around, which felt SO delicious after being in a cold house for several hours, let me tell you.

Where I feel like I am.

One ironic thing is that the book I was reading before my Kindle died was one called "Patient Heal Thyself" about a young man who discovers healing of his Crone's disease through eating a diet identical to what our biblical ancestors would have eaten 2,000 years or more ago. Yes, I was reading a book about the diet of the 20 BC man on a 21st century Kindle. Boggles the mind, no? If it had been on papyrus I could have at least kept reading without fear of a battery dying.

Anyway, the book reminded me of a time when I adhered to a similar diet just through making healthy food choices and refusing to buy into the industrial food system of feedlot beef, trans-fats, refined sugar, and over-processed bleached white flour. While I haven't backslid all the way (you will not find me in line at McDonald's when McRib returns, for instance) I have cut corners as life got more busy and complex and food still needed to be served. 

So to review, I cut corners by getting a pellet stove instead of a wood stove and I cut corners by just accepting what the regular supermarket thought I should be eating. It's an uncomfortable truth that sometimes we know what the right thing is to do and still do something else anyway. And when we do that, we wander far afield from the selves we want to be.

The solution for the pellet stove is a simple one -- we can buy a small generator for the house or a back-up battery for the stove itself. And the solution to the food issue is there as well. We're already growing a lot of what we eat, but the fact is, even if we had 10 times as many acres we would probably still not grow everything we consume. And so the choice then becomes to purchase those things at the health food store, expensively, or drive an hour's south to the local Whole Foods Market and get it there.

And since I've committed to getting back to those things that matter most to me in 2016, perhaps you'll notice something of a course correction as we get farther into the year. It will be a homecoming of sorts. I've wandered far afield, and it's time to get back on the road I most want to be on -- gardening, planting, conscious food-buying, and healthy living.  It doesn't so much mean giving up on any good things as much as taking the time for different good things that aren't necessarily as easy to come by. 

One thing is for sure: When you wander far afield, eventually the road that leads home will call you back to it, if you're willing to listen. I'm listening, road. I'm listening.

Where I want to be.

Tis The Season (for Food Wars)

Living the life we do means that most of the time we eat very natural foods, almost always made from scratch.  My egg nog recipe has real raw eggs, cream, and lots of liquor in it.  I have similar scratch recipes for other foods which became popular in their commercially-processed states -- stuff like Sloppy Joes, Egg-McMuffin type sandwiches and sodas.  

When you commit to living the simple life, the former convenience foods you loved are suddenly no longer convenient since you're making them from their most basic ingredients, and leaving out all the stabilizers, artificial colors, and preservatives. And sometimes they are worth it. And, yet, to be honest, they often do not taste quite the same. 

Real eggnog

Both Big Ag and myself grew up eating at least some  of what the 1960's and 1970's offered in terms of convenience foods, so adjusting to some of those taste changes when we've "gone natural" has taken time.  But after awhile you get used to it, and then when you pick it up again in its processed form, you actually notice certain flavors are missing -- the ones you first reacted to when you made it naturally.

I remember the first time I bit into a chocolate-chip cookie made with whole wheat flour instead of white and the wheat had a much stronger, nutty flavor than I was used to. I felt vaguely cheated, like my previously delightful sin had somehow been made more respectable and therefore less tasty and fun.  But now, I love the stronger flavor whole wheat has, and much prefer it to white flour in almost everything.

The taste change also happens if you switch from chocolate to, say, carob and if you change from white sugar to honey or agave nectar. I've heard nightmare stories from people who switched from coffee to chikory, although most got used to it after time.

Real mac and cheese

And some foods you cannot reasonably replicate.  The carob-for-chocolate swap is one shining example. It just never tastes the same, and is never as good. Another one happened here this afternoon, when I made my homemade egg nog.  I think it's awesome, but I know that tomorrow or the next day, Big Ag will stop by the supermarket and come home with a carton of that awful, artificially-flavored egg nog from the market because it's what he grew up with and therefore what he prefers.  And my oldest son, who I call TrainMan, will be staying with us after he has some dental work done after the holidays and has already asked that I stock up on Kraft Macaroni and Cheese -- that's right, the bright orange boxed stuff.  Sigh.

Un-real mac and cheese

The fact that I make a killer gourmet mac and cheese with three different kinds of cheeses does not matter, because no matter how hard I try I will never achieve the orangey, tangy, velveeta-textured goo that TrainMan feels is a mandatory part of the Mac and Cheese Experience.  And since its him who will have the sore mouth, who am I to turn a blind eye to his wishes?  (For the record, I never made Kraft Mac and Cheese at our house, but evidently it was on the menu at friends' houses enough that he developed a taste for it.  I guess I should just be thankful they weren't serving meth.) 

So tomorrow I will go to the store and buy some stupid, boxed Kraft Mac and Cheese, grimacing as I pull it off the shelf and throw it into my cart.  And I will also grit my teeth when the artificially flavored-and-colored "egg nog" shows up in the fridge next to my fabulously-natural Colonial Egg Nog (made from a recipe penned by George Washington himself!) as I just know its going to. It's a holiday tradition, just like bad sweaters and Christmas songs by The Chipmunks.  These are all things that must be endured as we plow through the season.  

Un-real eggnog

One thing that makes me feel better is remembering a story natural food guru Michael Pollan told once, about walking through the grocery store with a box of Fruity Pebbles cereal in his cart (for his daughter, who insisted on it) and someone noticing and saying something to him about it.  His response was that, although natural is better, if we have spouses or children we also have to acknowledge that sometimes we're going to have to compromise, and to pick our battles.

Which I guess means that although Kraft, Knudson, and Kellogs may win a round or two here and there, we natural cooks are still committed, long-term, to winning the food war. And so next week I will temporarily surrender on the Mac and Cheese front, open that packet of orange powder and make something that makes my son happy.  

But I have not given up the war. I'm just surrendering, temporarily, on one front.  A gooey, artificially orangey one.

Battleground Lost.

Snap peas and generation gaps

I walked into the staff meeting at the winery last night with a large bag of snap peas, and immediately became the most popular lady in the room. Three of the girls I work with and a couple of the guys came right up and started taking handfuls of peas out of the bag as if it was a cookie jar, oohing and aahing as they bit into the crunchy pods.  After the feeding frenzy I noticed one of my friends tucking what was left in the bag into her purse to take home and eat later.

 I find it heartening that so many 20-somethings are fans of healthy food.  In fact, I love taking excess produce to the winery for that exact reason.

My grandparents' generation ate healthy food which they grew themselves.  The ones who were not land-owning farmers turned parts of their city gardens into growing spaces, whenever possible. My parents' generation, on the other hand, entered adulthood at the exact time large supermarkets came into being, complete with frozen food on Aisle 5, where you could pick up a boxed TV dinner, bring it home, and heat up individual and unique meals for everyone in your family in minutes. 

It was a convenience that took hold, and the result is that many of us born in the 1960's grew up eating that way.

This was, I should add, a purely American phenomenon back then.  When I visited London in the late 1960's as a child, I was amazed when we went shopping with my grandmother.  We visited the butcher, the baker, and the fishmonger.  Paper goods we bought at a local general store. Milk, cream and butter was delivered to the front door every morning. Nowadays of course London has the same giant supermarkets we do, but back then they lagged a good 20 years behind the states.  And they were probably healthier for it.

Anyway, post-war London was the environment my mother grew up in, and so I can somewhat understand her wonderment and willingness to plunge into American Supermarket Life when she moved here and married my American father. We ate hot dogs, fish sticks, TV Dinners and Stouffer's Lasagna on a regular basis.  Our next door neighbors did the same and, in another nod to convenience, ate nothing that was not served on a paper plate, thereby eliminating dishwashing.

And so my generation grew up expecting that kind of convenience, and you'd expect that most of us would simply have passed that onto our own children when we came of age.  And most of us did ... for awhile.  Sometime after the Good Times With No Social Responsibility ended (also known as the 1980's), food became important again.  Trend forecaster Faith Popcorn called it "Nesting."  Staying home more, learning the art of cooking again, and even keeping an herb garden or small veggie patch in your suburban backyard.

"Nesting" took hold with the financial uncertainties of the 1990s, along with a swing back towards natural ingredients. My generation discovered a lot of the food we'd grown up with in the 1960's was, to speak frankly, crap. Kool-Aid contained Red Dye #3, which caused cancer.  Saccharine, which was supposed to deliver us from the weight-gain of eating real sugar, also was found to cause a variety of health issues. In short, my generation realized that if they continued on the path that our naive but well-meaning parents had put is on, we'd be dead or at least in chemotherapy by age 50.

But if we started the "natural foods" trend, the next generation ran with it and made it the norm.  No longer was eating at McDonalds seen as a healthy dinner option.  No longer would Diet Coke and a can of Pringles be an acceptable lunch. If my generation went back to the land for our food ( while sometimes wistfully remembering the soft, spongy texture of Wonder Bread or the extreme sugary sweetness of a Cherry Coke), my kids' generation turned their back on all that tasty but deadly garbage completely and made endamame, quinoa, pomegranates and locally raised-and-butchered animals the new cool food. And kudos to them for it.

The new "supermarket" in town.

As I sat on the counter of the winery watching this new generation of 20-somethings and young parents fighting over a bunch of fresh snap peas from the garden, I realized that Mother Nature always has a reset button -- a generational one.  My generation pushed it, the next one furthered it along, and now we just have to make sure the new generation -- the toddlers growing up now -- understand the reasons why their grandparents and parents turned their backs on food that wasn't real, and opted for a crisp snap pea over the stale snap of a processed supermarket cookie.

I hope they understand why. I really do.

Salad Days

Finally, after a seeming eternity, the crops in the raised beds are producing what would normally have been their late fall crop. Carrots, scallions, spinach, onions and....lettuce.  Yes, here in this part of California, salad days are in fall, winter and spring.  But an unusually freeze-filled winter held up the lettuces until now.


As there's nothing better than fresh lettuce, we're now in a wonderful time of abundance for it, which will probably last until late spring.  It may be late this year, but it was worth waiting for.


As far as our house sale goes, the realtor is coming by to take some pictures now that we're almost finished sprucing up, and our lender in Paso has given us the pre-qual green light to start looking.  Yesterday we saw a lovely old farmhouse there that suited my needs nicely but Big Ag thought was too much of a fixer.  He was right, the house did have some issues, but it also had a panoramic view of the northern hills and an absolutely magical garden. Whether or not that trumps dry rot and a rodent issue is a matter of opinion.  But since I'm feeling patient and have plenty of faith, I'm going to agree with taking a pass on it and waiting to see what's further up around the bend.  Hopefully something with less mouse turds in the attic.  Funny how sometimes the smallest things in a house can sometimes signal the most trouble.

George Washington slept off his hangover here

So last night I decided to make George Washington's original colonial recipe for egg nog, which he came up with himself (perhaps with a little help from Martha) and which I found on the  Farmer's Almanac website.  Like many people my age, my only experience with egg nog came from a carton, bought at a supermarket during the holiday season.  Supermarket egg nog contains some of the same ingredients Washington's does, but adds stuff like high fructose corn syrup, carrrageenan, gum arabic, and mono and deglycerides to give it the super-thick egg nog taste we are all familiar with.  I wanted to try real homemade egg nog to see what it is actually supposed to taste like.


I was right, it was very different.  Colonial egg nog is, more or less, simply a rather plain platform unto which Mr. Washington loaded an unbelievable amount of alcohol.  I was surprised how bland it tasted without any liquor added (I was making it in a house where teenagers could have it, so I left the booze out).  It's rather like melted vanilla ice cream, without the vanilla flavoring.  Very eggy.  And yes, it does have raw eggs in it, but I'm guessing with the amount of liquor Washington added to it 1) any pathogens or bacteria did not stand a chance of living or reproducing in it, and 2) no one remembered it as "bland" if, in fact, they remembered anything at all the next morning.  Which I'm guessing they didn't.


So here it is:

George Washington's Colonial Egg Nog

"One quart cream, one quart milk, one dozen tablespoons sugar, one pint brandy, 1/2 pint rye whiskey, 1/2 pint Jamaica rum, 1/4 pint sherry—mix liquor first, then separate yolks and whites of eggs, add sugar to beaten yolks, mix well. Add milk and cream, slowly beating. Beat whites of eggs until stiff and fold slowly into 

mixture. Let set in cool place for several days. Taste frequently."

Bottom's up

P.S.  I did actually add the liquor Mr. Washington recommended after the kiddos had gone to bed.  After all, he is the Father of our Nation, so it seemed somehow disrespectful to not take his full advice.  Alcoholically enhanced, this egg nog packs a bunch.  It's kind of like drinking tiramisu.  Delicious, as long as you don't have to drive your horse and carriage home after you've had some.