Anticipating the new year

The usual platitudes about the new year are familiar to us all: exercise more, eat less. We tailor them to our own lives: Choose the bicycle over the car, get up before the dog. Empty the compost before it overflows into a second and third bowl. Do more yoga, meditate, plant a bigger garden. Write letters.

I don’t make promises. But I love a new beginning and the hope it implies. Like the smell of new pencils at the start of a school year, the raw weather of January inspires me to look at where I have been, and begin to shape where I am going in a more deliberate and intentional way.

At our house, when we celebrate the New Year, along with good friends and celebratory toasts, we take time for reflection. What difficulties do we want to let go from last year? What hopes do we hold out for the year to come? We write these challenges and dreams on small slips of paper and burn them, releasing them to the heavens the way we blow on fuzzy dandelion seeds in spring, making wishes.

And then we turn back to the everyday, having visited the possible.

Good news

This morning I read two good-news articles in the paper. In a row.

I consider that a banner day.

Maybe it had something to do with opening up the local Gazette, instead of the nationally-focused Washington Post.
It’s not that the Post is a bad paper. It’s just bad news. More than once, I’ve put my subscription on hold because I just couldn’t take the depressing headlines any more.

Yesterday was particularly upsetting: a photo of Afghanis mourning the people jumbled in piles at their feet, people killed and injured in the most recent violence there, their brightly-colored clothes mixed with blood in a vivid, confusing pastiche of loss. There was also a story about Prince George’s County Executive Jack Johnson’s prison sentence, handed down for fiction-worthy greed: he infamously advised his wife to flush a $100,000 check and hide another $79,000 in cash in her bra, to avoid being caught taking nearly $1 million in bribes. I guess that could be considered good news: he got his due. But the echo of sad behavior is inescapable.

Of course, I could dig and find better headlines: “Cookies,” for example, the annual holiday recipe with the oh-so-tempting photos on the cover of the Food section. And the previous day’s piece on Jane Goodall was inspiring: at age 77 she says, “There is so much I have to do!” Since I turn 50 this month, I find this particularly inspiring.

But today’s Gazette took the prize. “Happy to see Santa” headlines a photo of a beaming little girl in Santa’s embrace. “Curfew proposal ends up on the shelf,” describing the County Council’s decision to table a teen curfew that, I feel, was an overreaction to gang violence and a curb on personal freedom. Good decision! And my favorite: “Pay raises proposed for county teachers.” Finally, a bright spot in this dismal economy.

Am I wrong to ignore bad news? I rationalize that my worrying will hardly help fix the tragedies that occur half a world away; even my activism, if I choose to rise up and take action through advocacy for any of a million good causes, would barely make a dent. Some people are built for international action, for fighting the forces of evil; I applaud their efforts. As for me, I believe I’m more suited for tending the home fires, making my own life and the lives around me feel more secure and fulfilling. I’m better at highlighting the good, rather than condemning the bad. I hope that’s not a cop-out. But I know my limits.

Maybe I’ll become one of those quirky newspaper readers who wind up in literary fiction: people who read the New York Times with a red pen, to circle any errors they find, or people who compile scrapbooks of themed articles. I could cut out all the bad news from the newspapers and leave the Swiss cheese of good news lying about the house to lift our spirits.

In fact, we already do this: our “Image of the Week” is posted on the frig, a changing tableau of inspiration. This week, the comic strip character, “Lio,” is shown with her snowman built of autumn leaves, turning the impending dark season into light-hearted fun. That’s my kind of news.

Savoring the home kitchen, wherever you are

Sitting in a high-rise, 2:30 p.m., the usual afternoon office slump
Brightened considerably this day by the best snack:
Apple pie from home.
Crust by Tyler,
Filling by Clara.
And as I enjoy this treat, I remember Ty prefers to use butter instead of shortening (a more processed food, he likes to keep things simple); and I remember that he learned, as he made this crust, that it’s best not to handle the dough too much or it will get tough (unlike bread, whose mantra is the more handling/kneading the better). I remember wondering with Clara how long to cook the apples so they wouldn’t be too crunchy or too mushy, and whether the variety we used would give us the consistency we wanted.
All in all, this pie strikes a good balance.
Even better, it brings me back to my kitchen, and my kids, in the middle of the work day.

This particular pie was a holiday pie, baked for the post-Thanksgiving gathering of friends we hosted last Friday. We don’t need a holiday to enjoy cooking together, of course, but we do tend to gather in the kitchen this time of year. There, working together, food becomes not just something tasty, but something that binds us together.

This year, the Thanksgiving Day feast at the Grandad’s house included a trifecta of pies—Katherine’s apple tart (beautifully layered, sophisticated, refined and oh, so flavorful, just bursting with tart appleness); Doug’s pecan (a southern classic from a southern boy, all gooey corn syrup and nuts); and my pumpkin (the usual pumpkin-y sweetness, this time topped with perfectly browned , cinnamon-dusted maple leaf-shaped pie crust cookies). There was also a locally raised, free range turkey from Anne and Giles presented, perfectly cooked and perfectly carved, and especially appreciated among those of us who choose vegetarian fare or “righteous” meat, raised sustainably and humanely. Thanks for that.

The post-Thanksgiving feast was full of kids in town for the holiday, all coming and going with various leftovers and fresh-made contributions, plus another bird roasted especially for this occasion (“righteous,” again) and two pies from our oven—apple and pumpkin-chocolate. Clara and Tyler also made the gravy together, leaning over their father’s recipe, stirring and tasting until it was, well, perfect.

It all comes back to me as I savor the apple pie in the office.

Thanksgiving all over again.

Huckleberry pie

There really is such a thing as huckleberry pie. I’ve just made it.
I learned about huckleberries from the country woman at the Farmer’s Market. Among all the young and optimistic organic farmers there, who I imagine are idealistic and out to save the world with local agriculture, there are a few old school folks. This woman is one of them: someone whose family has probably been farming for generations not because they want to get back to the land, but because they were already there. She is a big woman with a face that’s spent years in the sun, maybe without sunscreen, and she seems as though she’d be more comfortable telling you how to fix the tractor than debating the merits of sustainable vs organic designations. She knows a lot of stuff.
Last year, she taught me about “peppercress,” which she pronounced “pepper grass.” Peppercress looks like a pesky weed you’d pull out of your garden (and maybe she did, then slapped a price on the plastic bag full of it) -- but it tastes like a delicately spiced mustard green.
This year, Farm Woman sold huckleberries. I didn’t know they existed, really, beyond the pages of Mark Twain’s books.
These perfectly round, dark, purply-black berries are bitter unless you cook them, Farm Woman told me. People think they taste like blueberries, she said. I bought a quart (exactly enough to make a pie) and took her recipe to go with it.
Add enough sugar and lemon to these and she’s right, huckleberries become something like a blueberry, without the tartness. Depending on your piecrust, they make a respectable pie. Delicious, even.
The magic of huckleberries is that you can make something edible out of an otherwise unappealing plant growing out in your yard, I imagine sort of like a briar patch. And there’s the undeniable kick of nostalgia for bringing an old-timey sounding food out of obscurity and onto my table.
What’s for dessert? Huckleberry Pie. Don’t you so want to say that?

Garden Huckleberry pie
Modified from Homestead Farm, Charles County recipe

4 cups huckleberries
1 ¼ cups unrefined cane sugar
¼ teaspoon nutmeg
¼ teaspoon salt
1 Tablespoon butter
Juice of one lemon
2 tablespoons cornstarch
Pastry for 9-inch pie
Crumble topping (see below)
Stem, wash and drain berries. Place in a heavy pot, cover with cold water and bring to slow boil. Cook until soft – 5 or 10 minutes. Drain, and mash to break skins.
Add sugar, nutmeg, salt, butter, lemon juice and cornstarch. Cook about five minutes or until the mixture thickens.

Make crumble topping:
1 cup rolled oats
½ cup whole wheat flour
¼ to ½ teaspoon salt
½ teaspoon cinnamon
4 tablespoons butter, cut up
Stir first four ingredients together. Add butter and mash it into the dry mixtures with your fingers until it’s spread pretty evenly throughout.

Assemble:
Place the filling into the pie crust; top with the crumble topping. Bake at 350 for about 40 minutes.

Late season market

Standing at the Takoma Park Farmer’s Market, lines of people teem by with their market bags and baskets overflowing with the fall harvest. Our market is the kind of place where you comment to the stranger who’s picking over the big, fat green beans across the table from you, and say that even though they’re big, they’re tender, here, try a bite. And then you wonder out loud whether you should break them up or cook them whole, and the woman, who is wearing the most extravagant Sunday hat, with feathers flying off of it at least a foot from her head, says, in a sympathetic tone, “Oh, honey, you snap ‘em.” As in, how could you not know this basic cooking rule?
And I thought snapping beans meant just snapping the ends off, when it really means snapping them into bite-size pieces.
And then you see another neighbor who you thought would be the kind of person who would eat her green beans still crispy, and she admits that she likes them cooked to death, with bacon. The old-fashioned way.
This is how I get inspired to cook.
One stall this week has fresh black beans, with instructions on how to cook them (20 minutes, boiling). Wow, we eat a lot of canned or dried black beans, that’s something I’d like to grow. There are turnips and collards and carrots, too, bok choy and kale and onions, potatoes, four kinds of squash, pears and apples.
This is how I get inspired to garden.

Car-free giving

Today is my son’s 21st birthday. So, for his birthday, I committed to a car-free week in his name. I’ve told a number of people about it, trying to spread the good word, maybe inspiring them to try similar green projects—but not everybody gets it. “What? You’re not driving so he can use the car?” No.

Here’s an explanation:

One, Tyler is traveling, so presents sent across the country and then stuffed into the small car he’s sharing with two other people is impractical. Two, Tyler is the least material-minded person I know. He does not want big piles of stuff. He loves a celebration, though, and so when asked what he’d like for his birthday, he suggested something creative—a meal, a movie, a hike up a mountain. Car free week seemed to fit.

Plus, Tyler is determinedly eco-minded. For a long time he refused to pay for car insurance because he preferred to walk, bike or take public transportation. For an entire summer, he biked from Takoma Park to a job in Dupont Circle. And this is the most important point: Ty wants to reduce carbon emissions and shift the country to a lifestyle with a smaller footprint. By watching him walk the walk I have learned, once again, from my kids. Just do the right thing. Even if it’s just for a week.

I thought a car-free week would be no big deal, but it was more challenging than I expected it would be. There were no quick runs to the co-op for the one missing ingredient for salsa (limes). I had to postpone banking and I’m late returning my library book due to pouring rain. And I had to surreptitiously swipe at my dirt-spattered legs after a rainy bike ride to metro and an early morning business meeting.

But in other ways a car-free life is rewarding. There are no moral dilemmas about whether I should drive or walk—the answer is predetermined. No parallel parking in front of the house. No checking to be sure I have quarters for the parking meters. I am getting exercise even though I didn’t make it to dance or yoga. I felt the first fall days in a way I’d have missed in the car. I met a fellow bike enthusiast while I was unlocking my bike outside the grocery store. And when I was on the phone describing to Tyler how my bike began to feel like a part of my body, as easy to maneuver as my legs and arms, he knew exactly what I meant.

Happy Birthday, Ty. And thanks.

Locally laid

This week I’m eating eggs from my neighbors’ back yard chickens. “The girls,” they call them. Six hens, who live in a simple henhouse behind the vegetable garden in this suburban neighborhood. Each lays one egg a day. The household that owns these “girls” totals three people, now that one of the children is off at college; the mama says there’s only so much quiche you can make.

So I happily accepted a dozen eggs, and my friends made me feel as though I were doing them a favor.

Quite the opposite.

These eggs were so big the egg carton wouldn’t close. They made the brightest, yellowest quiche that’s ever come out of my oven. Fried up in a pan, they had nice, firm yolks and flavor to spare. A real treat.

Besides which, I love eating locally, and unless these chickens were in my own back yard, I couldn’t get more local than this. Local eating, as most of my readers know, saves the environment from the gazillions of gallons of gas used to cart food across the country, and it preserves the freshness and therefore the nutritional value of the food. It supports the local economy.

I also believe in free-range chickens: It can’t be a good thing to eat eggs from an animal that has been crowded into a tiny cage and/or de-beaked to prevent it from frantically pecking its fellow prisoners in a desperate bid for more space. I don’t go in for the over-the-top graphic descriptions of animal cruelty peddled by PETA and others, but I have made a conscious decision to buy only from farmers who take good care of their animals.

And there are plenty. Like the farmers who sell at the Takoma Park Farmer’s Market and other local outdoor venues. And the farmers at Weathertop Farm, in southwestern Virginia. I’ve visited Weathertop, and was thoroughly charmed by their birds, who move in a wave of feathers and self-important clucking, all together as if somehow attached to one another, their little voices rising in a chorus of curiosity when you approach their fence. They are real animals, living real lives, and their eggs are really tasty.

Even when I can’t get super-local, super-fresh eggs, I look for free-range in the stores. But beware: free range doesn’t always mean what I see at Weathertop and in the backyard around the corner. Case in point: a couple of years ago I called Wild Harvest, the purveyor for Shoppers Food Warehouse that supplies so many of their organic products – including eggs from “cage free” hens.

This has got to be a huge company, if they supply Shoppers, an enormous grocery store chain in the metropolitan D.C. area; I didn’t really expect much of an answer to my query about how well they treat their animals. So I was surprised when, a few weeks after leaving a message at Wild Harvest, I got a phone call from a farmer ready to describe to me how he raised his chickens—the ones that lay the eggs I buy at Shopper’s.

I wish now that I could remember exactly what it was he said, but I do remember that it was unequivocally inadequate. Each chicken, I believe he said, was given a full square foot of space in a group cage.

That didn’t sound like much to me.

In the real world, the one where you’re rushed to grab a dozen eggs because the kids are having friends over for breakfast, the one where you’re at the grocery store buying dog food and you can’t see making another stop at the co-op, the one where you’re really trying to save money and buying not-so-free-range eggs at 50 cents cheaper a dozen won’t change the world if I do it just this once, in that world, I occasionally buy the one-foot-by-one-foot-per-chicken “free”range eggs.

But not this week. This week I have these gorgeous backyard gems.

Here’s my quiche recipe, flexible for whatever fillings you might have on hand. The night I made it, I used broccoli from the farmer’s market, but my favorite thing is spinach. Or onions. Lots of them.

Ginny’s Quiche

One pie crust – preferably homemade (see previous recipes)
Half cup or more (to taste) grated cheese – your choice, but I like swiss or gruyere
Three (really) free-range eggs, with enough milk poured on top to equal 1-1/2 cups
(use half and half or cream if you’re feeling decadent or if you need to put on some pounds)
1 to 1-1/2 cups vegetable filling: steamed broccoli, lightly sautéed spinach or other greens, or onions
cooked in butter for 20 minutes or so, until super soft and sweet
Salt and pepper to taste

Spread cheese in the bottom of the pie crust. Add vegetable filling, spreading it around evenly.
Whisk eggs and milk together. The rule is: for every egg, fill the measuring cup with milk to meet the ½ cup mark – hence, three eggs, fill it to the cup-and-a-half mark. If that seems skimpy once you get it into the pie pan, add another egg-and-milk-to-reach-1/2-cup.

Bake at 375 for 20 to 35 minutes, until the middle doesn’t jiggle anymore.