Crafting: Garden Mint Sachets

Dried mint from the school's community garden (so much more on that later) + leftover fabric + ribbon = sweet-smelling pretties all over the house.

Cooking: Potato Leek Soup

I like this because, even in this climate, it can be made with local garden ingredients. It's inexpensive and hearty without being too heavy. Yummm...

1 Tbsp butter
1 Tbsp olive oil
1 medium onion, chopped
3 leeks, thinly sliced
6 – 8 potatoes, roughly cubed (I like the skins left on)
1 Cup fresh baby spinach, whole leaves or roughly hand-torn
4 Cups broth
salt and pepper to taste

Melt butter with oil in a saucepan over medium heat; add onions and sauté until transparent. Add sliced leeks, stirring while cooking until onions are at desired tenderness/transparency/caramelization (whatever you like). Transfer contents of saucepan to a stock pot, add potatoes, stir, and add enough broth to cover. Cook until potatoes are tender, stirring occasionally (and roughly, so as to break up the potatoes slightly and thicken the soup). Toss in the spinach leaves and cook a few minutes more, just to heat and wilt them.

Serve with a drizzle of cream or a dollop of plain yogurt and fresh cracked black pepper to taste.

Snow Day. Part 3.

The last snow pics of the season? Could be, could be.

My Quest for Felt (Felt-Quest?)

So I just need to bitch a little. And yeah, I'm gonna blame Wal*Mart. Because as trite as it has become, and as easy as it is to fall back on, sometimes it's the plain and simple truth that the retail giant is, in fact, responsible for the things we always say it's responsible for.

I was looking for felt. I have a 20-month-old, sometimes you just need felt. This time, I wanted to make Superbear a cape, but I'm sure the coming years will see me looking for felt on numerous occasions. It's been many years since we've had an actual craft store in this town. For a while we had the giant craft emporium, practically a warehouse. Before that, there were two outlets of a chain craft store, one in each of our main malls. I'm guessing, if you go back far enough in time, there were actual independent craft supply shops owned by actual local people.

Now, we have none of those options. So I searched the dollar store, no dice (well, they probably had dice. But no felt.) I searched Zellers, which is like KMart, only cleaner. “Our craft department consists of yarn and thread." And all kinds of pre-fab scrapbooking supplies, I could add.

And there is literally no place else, except the Big W.

I'm not saying the Dollar Store or Zellers are in any way more local, more just, or more sustainable than Wal*Mart. They import the cheapest goods from foreign sweatshops and sell them at prices that necessitate somebody along the line getting massively screwed. Even the craft chains were not much better. But the latter at least represented some specialization. Like pet food shops, bookstores, fabric outlets - they offer an alternative to “one stop shopping", the ultimate conclusion of which is Wal*Mart pet food, Wal*Mart books, fucking Wal*Mart health insurance. And, you know, for as long as this town has had (two!) Zellers, as far as I know it never put anyone out of business. Though stocked with similar offerings, it arguably operates under a different business model. It used to be that the mall was blamed for killing the downtown core here; now, on my last pass through I actually spotted mall stores closing up shop.

I won't go to Wal*Mart, so I guess I'll be buying my felt online. Shipping it from a long distance, though I suppose that would happen regardless. But you know, I've just realized that it would be really nice to have some bean-bag chairs for the sprogs. Guess how much luck I've had so far?

Cooking: Lentil Sausage Stew

I won't call this a recipe, as I'm seldom very accountable for things like measurements. But this was yummy, and it generated some pretty photos. So, you know. :-)

Ingredients:
2-3 spicy sausages (if you can find a local specialty all's the better)
1 medium onion
2 medium apples
2 ribs celery
1 cup red lentils
handful fresh spinach
4 cups or so stock

Cook sausages by simmering in a little water until cooked, but don't worry about browning. You can remove the meat from the casing first or cook the sausages whole and slice them later. Set aside.

Sautée chopped onion with a little canola oil until at least translucent. For this recipe I pretty much caramelized them and then deglazed the pan with a little apple juice. Add chopped celery and sautée for a few more minutes. Add chopped apples, give it a good stir, then add whatever stock or liquid you like.

Bring to a boil, then add lentils and sausage and simmer until the lentils are cooked, about 25 minutes. Toss in spinach leaves, let them get hot and happy, and you're done.

I served this with a dollop of good plain yogurt and some toasted pita bread, and a side of brown rice. Yummy - hearty but with a touch of spice and sweetness.

Snow Day. Part 2.

Same snow, different day.

 

 

Ruminations (ha) on Food Snobbery

One of my big damn heroes, Jim Griffioen, author of the brilliant Sweet Juniper, recently blogged about reconciling his “inner food snob” with his desire for social justice and food security. His anti-Wal-Mart, pro-arugula proclivities, he argues, can often make him feel like a huge asshole in a nation and a world where millions struggle for sustenance. I think a lot of us struggle with this same inner conflict – I know I certainly do. I aim to buy local, seasonal, organic, free-range, hormone-free, etc., as much as the next crunchy yuppie food snob. And I do this out of a desire both to feed my kids what I deem to be “healthy” food and to support the kind of “alternative”, small-scale systems that I believe deserve to thrive… as much as the next crunchy yuppie food snob. We all share the same justifications, it seems.

Yet with those justifications (and implicit in the fact that we feel the need to have them at all) is a heaping serving of guilt. As Jim asserts, the ability to purchase said foods – indeed, the ability to even have such a discussion about said foods, to have them as viable options for consumption and for debate – is a matter of privilege. It is a certain level of social comfort which allows me to shop this way (to the extent that I do - another inner conflict I experience is that of food snob vs. bargain-hunter vs. junk food addict). Access to financial resources permits access to “high end” food resources. Many of the comments on Jim’s entry touch on this theme, the belief we’ve all come to share, that eating well is a privilege afforded to the few.

I think, for me, the fundamental problem I have with this debate is that it has to happen at all. Why is organic, locally-grown food at the “high end” of the food system metric? Why is a seemingly simpler way instead just an “alternative"? Didn't people used to eat this way by default? It wasn't always novel, or snobbish.

Shouldn’t it be easy, even cheap, to grow our own food without pricey chemical inputs, and to purchase it from other growers within our region? Shouldn’t our food system be designed to support such food and everyone’s access to same?

Of course it isn’t. Subsidies directed at the wrong places and monocultures - not just of the fields, but of the mind - have made the least healthy, the least sustainable foods the most accessible. It is a sick twist of “justice” that has placed so much cheap food on the market and brought it into our cities and our homes. And it makes me angry. It makes me want to avoid Wal-Mart and McDonald’s not only out of snobbery, but out of bitterness. It is you, I think, finger pointed squarely at the ugly blue font (Antique Olive? Franklin Gothic?) or the iconic golden arches, that is wrong. It is you that helped break our system. I don’t want to buy from you. You can’t make me. Neener neener neener. And it pretty much descends into bratty name-calling from there...

Of course it goes much deeper than that. But these corporate monstrosities and the Race-to-the-Bottom approach they bring with them certainly don’t help. They make me want to rebel against them. They make me want to fight for a better way.

It’s not only about a love of sushi (although, may I insert a quick nom nom nom? looking forward to that Valentine's dinner...) or a crunchier-than-thou mindset. Sometimes food snobbery is actually born out of a sense of justice (or pure blind rage). And that phrase right there? Makes me sound like a huge asshole. Because it very, very simply shouldn't have to be this way.

And it drives me crazy that it is.