Hello folks.  Hope you enjoyed time out in the sunshine this weekend, getting your hands dirty!  Ella and Ben created her garden bed, and she got right to work hoeing.

From last week, we’re still loving that sourdough challah.  On Saturday morning, I made Challah French Toast, which I think definitely makes the cut for a weekly tradition.  Indeed.  (Whoops, I just realized I used the same photo of Ella twice last week, haha!)  The Beet and Potato Salad was yum, and so were the Baked Hedgehog Potatoes (they’re really just potatoes sliced, with lots of garlic slices put in, and baked).  And the Green Smoothie Challenge has been awesome.  I’ll talk about it more soon, I promise.

This Week’s Menu:

*Lots of Kale Chips!  We shared our recipe here last spring – check it out!

*More Green Smoothies – we have ours at breakfast, and sometimes leftovers at mid-morning

* Fried Polenta (leftover) with black beans, portabellos, and onions

* Porkchops, and Whole Wheat Berry Tabbouleh (I’m going to test this out – if it works, I’ll share the recipe with you!)

* Spelt and Lentil Pilaf with Shiitakes (from the New Vegetarian Epicure by Anna Thomas) and Cornbread

* Baked Potatoes with various toppings and Arugula White Bean Salad (from the New Vegetarian Epicure by Anna Thomas)

* Julia Child’s poached chicken breasts again (they were really tasty, and we got more chicken breasts in this month’s meat share) with the Spinach and Feta Alligator (from the New Vegetarian Epicure by Anna Thomas)

* Whole Wheat Crust Pizza with Black Beans and Root Veggies, with a side salad

* Potato Sorrel Soup with Cheese Popovers (the popovers are from the New Vegetarian Epicure by Anna Thomas)  If you’ve never had sorrel before – it’s a cool weather herb that has an amazing lemon flavor, and is a great spring tonic.

* Spa Salad with Bitter Greens, Asparagus (it’s here!), and mint, with hamburgers (salad is from Anna Thomas – hmm, can you guess what book I got out from the library this week?)

This weekend, after a day spent grumpy for no real reason, I was reminded of this phrase:

How can I be of service?

Which was, for me, a needed reminder that our family’s intention  truly is to be of service, through our work, our personal lives, and this space as well.  We hope that this is a source of inspiration and also information.  So many times over our journey, we found that willpower and resources (especially information) were often the stumbling blocks between us and where we wanted to be.  These Monday Menus and our Ten Steps posts are not intended to show how gourmet we are, or how much greener than thou.  Our intention is absolutely to just share our ideas and experiences.  To show that eating whole local foods (even in the winter in New England) can be delicious, or to see how to continue carrying an intention to avoid plastic by planting seeds in potting blocks.

It can be easy to get trapped in our own minds and “needs,” when truly, we all have opportunities to be of service each day.  To pay a farmer or laborer fairly for their work instead of focusing on getting the “best deal”; to smile at a stranger walking by; to offer to help a friend, even with words of understanding; to be of service to our good earth by choosing to eat foods without pesticides, or reducing our carbon loads.  We have so many chances, and the incredible thing is that we ourselves benefit so much from serving others.  When we focus on our own stories, we can become trapped, and feel the need for more and more.  When we can begin to turn our gaze outward, we often find our own loads lightening.

So, thank you for being here, friends.  This week, I’ve got some fun things planned for you – some tips on organizing your kitchen to make cooking more fantastically fun, a new recipe, and perhaps some more poetry (it is National Poetry Month after all).  May they be of service to you.  (And by the way, if you have questions, or there’s something you’d like to see here, feel free to ask!)

From last week, I made the sourdough challah again – it’s really yummy!  And the Farro (emmer) with Portabellos and Thyme was easy and delicious (we used dried morels, oh my).  We all loved the Poulet Mornay from Julia Child, also, which was really simple.  Poach a chicken breast, make a roux, add the poaching liquid to the roux, stir in cheese and your chicken pieces, and brown under the broiler.  It was still yummy for lunch the next day (always a big bonus in our house).

This week:

* Salade a la d’Argenson (the only beet recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, which seems rather odd!  It’s Beet Salad with Rice or Potatoes and Herbed Mayonnaise, which sounds amazing.  I never would have thought of herbed mayonnaise.)

* Baked Hedgehog Potatoes with Yogurt Mint Dipping Sauce (from Super Natural Cooking by Heidi Swanson.  I’ve used some great recipes from Heidi’s blog, so I was excited to get her book from the library.  A little nervous at first – sometimes cookbooks from California are impossible for a New England locavore to use, but as you’ll see from my list here, there’s lots of goodness inside!)

* Gnocchi all Romana (from Super Natural Cooking by Heidi Swanson.I’m going to make these with the Roasted Tomato Sauce from Ad Hoc, by Thomas Keller, using one of our two last jars of tomatoes).

* Winter Rainbow Gratin (from Super Natural Cooking by Heidi Swanson.)

* Lentil Crostini (from Super Natural Cooking by Heidi Swanson.)

]]> http://www.localgrain.org/fieldsandfire/2010/04/19/to-be-of-service-monday-menu/feed/ 11 http://www.localgrain.org/fieldsandfire/2010/02/09/love-me-some-felting/ http://www.localgrain.org/fieldsandfire/2010/02/09/love-me-some-felting/#comments Tue, 09 Feb 2010 06:29:15 +0000 adrie http://www.localgrain.org/fieldsandfire/?p=1218

With the help of my friend Jen and these two cutie pies, I entered the world of felting this week.  I’ve been gathering some wool sweaters at the thrift store with this purpose in mind, and I was finally ready to begin!  We took the sweaters, some dish soap, two sweet toddlers and put them all in a hot bath together.  Ella and Lily definately got a kick out of being in the bath with all the wool, and stomped and splashed away.  Afterwards, I put the sweaters into the dryer (I think I’ll just line-dry them next time, since this was the second time all year I’ve used the dryer and it felt weird, plus I don’t think it was necessary).

When I first heard about felt, I thought it was nuts.  Shrink wool?  On purpose?

Consider me converted.  With $1 sweaters from the thrift store, some of which had holes or stains and weren’t great for wearing anymore (and one of Ben’s which had already accidentally been partially felted -sorry sweetie!), I was able to get over my inherent reaction to “wasting” wool.  The felt is so soft, super warm, and really fun to work with.  One of the best parts is that you don’t have to enclose seams, since there’s no fear of it unraveling.  Woo hoo!  Felting, and then sewing with the felt, is sort of like instant knitting.  Ok, not that I’m going to stop knitting, but it’s fun to get the quickness of sewing and the yumminess of wool.

Since I can’t convince Ella to wear socks in our house, resulting in mighty icy toes, my first project was these slippers, from Betz White’s Sewing Green.  She chose the colors, and this project was super easy and fast.  It was done, start to finish, in under an hour.  Ella has worn them non-stop, and I love their elf-ness.  I want some!

I was thinking about making her some felt mittens, too, since I’m trying to capitalize on her sudden ease in the outdoor winter world, but cold hands and feet have been bringing us inside after half an hour.  Then today, I lost one of her mittens, so it was settled.  To the cutting table (yay for my new big table in my new room!), and these sweet little mittens were born.  I just traced her mitten, with about a 1/2 in seam allowance all around, sewed the outline, flipped them, and sewed on the cuff.  I did the cuff seam on the outside, since I thought a seam right on her wrist might be irritating.  For the cuff, I used some felt that was stretchy, from a ribbed part of the red sweater.

Next up . . . a heart garland, inspired by Kyrie.

Now that I’m addicted, can you recommend any good felting books or projects?

feed the world thing

our Top 10 Steps

Oh yeah, that project.  Photos of crafts and our sweet daughter and parties aside, this is what keeps us going.  Some of your recent comments and emails have got me thinking – how much do people really know about what we do?  How can they help?  What does our work mean, in the bigger context of the good work so many people are doing?  So call this a little housekeeping if you will – here are a few answers.  A beginning to the conversation, which I really hope you’ll join.

When we started our bakery almost five years ago, we did it because we loved food and loved making food.  But not just any food.  We had a strong commitment and belief that so much of the food being consumed in our country was destroying our health, our communities, and our Earth.  (Our only Earth, as the Wombat reminds us.)  We had begun growing vegetables at home, we had tasted real, fresh, loved food and had an inkling of how important that was.  We hadn’t yet truly begun to understand peak oil, the environmental (and human) impact of shipping ingredients across the continent and back again (or worse yet, across oceans and back again), or the frightening rate at which our country is losing farmland, but we had enough of an inkling to make local, sustainable, real foods and community our goal.  When we look back now on our original mission statement, we still say, Yeah, that’s it, which is pretty amazing I think.  We even thought at the beginning, Wouldn’t it be great to bake with locally grown flour?  Living in a relatively blessed farming region, we called around, but no one was growing wheat, so we put that on the back burner while we started our business and learned many, many things the hard way (including how to bake – we are primarily self-taught).

While the bakery was turning from an idea into a reality, our vegetable garden doubled or tripled each year.  One season we grew on town conservation land and hauled buckets of water from Ameythst Brook to water our plants.  When we bought our house in Shutesbury, we turned a blind eye to the crazy sea-foam green siding and the crazy shag carpeting upstairs, and started digging in the dirt.  We taught ourselves to farm, with the help of some wonderful books, and with each passing day in the bakery and in the garden, with each bite of real food we understood more and more how truly precious and fragile our blessed Earth is.  How deep our calling is to be stewards of the land, not plunderers.  To be builders of community, providing bread for our brothers, teaching skills to our sisters.

And how much we hope for all of you to join us.  Because our task, my friends, is enormous.  We have already passed 350 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, we are contaminating our limited water supplies as if they were limitless, we are paving over farmland to build giant box stores that sell goods we don’t need, made “cheaply” by exploiting people, land, and our tax dollars, and we are, as a nation, deeply depressed and unsatisfied.

So what the heck?  I say, what have you got to lose?  We may as well work our tails off for a future worth living in – one where we can feed our children, drink clean water, and know our neighbors.  Someday soon we may not be able to drive our cars anywhere we want, whenever we want, or eat asparagus anytime of year, or air-condition our houses.  We may not have cars or electricity at all, in fact.  I, for one, am willing to learn how to live without many of these “conveniences” now, in order to ensure that this girl here will have food and water and shelter, instead of famine, pollution, and disastrous weather patterns. In the meantime, I get the pleasure of good work, a healthy body, beautiful animal companions, and good friends.

Want to join us? Don’t know what the heck peak oil or climate change are?  Check out this article, this website, and Global Warming Fast Facts. Don’t know where to start?  I’m going to work on adding a book resource page, but in the meantime, here’s my top ten to help save yourself, your family, the world.  And I must tell you, the up side is that you may find, as we have, and as Colin Beavin’s family of No Impact Man did, that you really love it.  Already doing everything in your power?  Well then, thank you deeply and truly.

1.  Stop buying a bunch of junk you don’t need.

Seriously.  Every object comes with a trail of packaging that will never biodegrade (there is no such thing as throwing something away – it just goes to someone else’s backyard), electricity, CO2 emissions, fuel (from transportation, and you driving to get it), and in most cases, underpaid workers, environmental destruction, and contamination of air and water.

If you really truly need something (not want, need – a really hard difference to learn for us who live in a land of seemingly endless bounty), then buy it used!  It is really amazing what’s out there.  Craigslist and Freecycle are your friends.  If you live in the Pioneer Valley, I highly recommend the thrift stores and also Kay Baker Antiques in Amherst.  We’ve committed to buying used, and it’s awesome.

Super bonus of buying less – you spend less money, you need to work less, you get more time with your friends and family.  This temptation is especially hard to resist at holiday time – try giving gifts to charities, handmade gifts, or best of all, the gift of yourself – coupons for a home-cooked meal, babysitting for a friend with children, a massage, etc.  Great green holidays article in the current issue of Mothering Magazine.

2.  Grow food.

Maybe you thought this would be number one, and it’s a hard pick, but the problems caused by the useless exchange of unwanted goods is huge.  Now, grow some food.  Start with herbs in a window, or a single zucchini plant (they’re super easy and produce lots!).  Join in with Food Not Lawns.  Or just use the time you previously spent applying pesticide to your lawn and trimming dandelions, and eat those dandelions instead!  Don’t be afraid of a little “hard work” – humans are programmed to enjoy physical labor, so try gardening instead of jogging.

3.  Eat local foods.

You’ll notice that quite a few of these center around food, because it is a high-impact way to affect change.  We all eat, everyday, in pretty substantial quantities.  And while Americans spent much less of our income on food than Europeans, if we stopped buying some of that useless junk mentioned above, we could use that money to buy healthier, fresher food grown without chemicals by our neighbors.  You’ve probably heard that the average bite has traveled 5,000 miles before it reaches you.  Sound fresh?  Buying locally grown food ensures that food will continue to be grown in your community, which may become critically important in the not-too-distant future.

And you’ve probably heard that for every dollar you spend at a local business, and 45 cents stays in the community (as opposed to 13 cents staying in the community when you spend a dollar at a chain).  One of the best reasons to eat local?  It reconnects you to the pleasures of the seasons, of anticipating the first ripe tomato, and the incredible taste of an actual fresh tomato (ones that are being shipped are harvested green and gassed until they turn red – yummy).

4.  Eat less meat.  Especially red meat.  Eat it grass fed.

This is one that Ben struggles with, but also takes pleasure in.  What you eat has even more impact on CO2 emissions than where your food comes from.  Eating meat one less day a week reduces 1,000 miles of driving worth of CO2 – wowzer, eh?  Livestock create a lot of methane emissions, and industrial meat factories (yes, they are factories, not farms) also create an insane amount of manure waste, contaminated with antibiotics, hormones, etc, which often contaminates local water supplies.  If you do eat meat, try to reduce it, and eat it grass fed – cows are meant to chew grass, not corn.  There are also awesome health benefits to reducing the amount of meat you eat – we have never as a species eaten meat multiple times a day, or even every day!

Here in the Valley, we highly highly recommend Chestnut Farms meat CSA.

5.  What you do buy, buy in bulk, bring your own packaging.

See The Story of Stuff (it’s free and only 20 mins long).  See number 1 – you make trash, you pollute the world, we all pay.  Bring your own shopping bag, but also bring bags to put your produce in, your flour or sugar, better yet – just order a 50lb bag and stop driving to the grocery store every week.  Bottled water and other drinks produce a ton of packaging, contaminate your body with BPA, and just all around suck.

6.  Big Box Boycott.

Don’t shop at big box stores.  If it’s a chain, it is taking money from your community in the form of tax cuts, falsey low wages, and reduced local jobs, not to mention robbing your town of its soul (who wants to live there or visit when it looks just like everywhere else?).  Chains  also keep prices falsely low by strong-arming farmers and suppliers – if you want to sell to them, you have to sell at the price they name.  Rent The High Cost of Low Prices, and shop at a locally owned store (yes, even Whole Foods counts as a big box).

Think your local store is more expensive?  That’s because they’re not getting tax incentives from the town, government incentives for hiring, etc etc .  . . They are paying fair wages, creating interest and life and teaching skills to your neighbors and friends.  They will work their hardest to meet your needs, because to them you’re a customer and a friend, not a number.

7.  Reduce the Amount of Seafood you Eat (Especially Shrimp and Tuna)

This one is particularly hard for me, having grown up on the coast.  But after reading All You Can Eat, I’m so horrified I’ve hardly eaten seafood at all.  Basically, we’re destroying our oceans to get seafood (mostly wasted) just like we’re destroying our topsoils to grow massive amounts of corn.  We use giant bulldozers to roll across the ocean floor, crushing coral and gobbling sealife, to get a few choice species.  The ocean is our largest ecosystem, and we’re working hard to destroy it for cheap shrimp buffets.

8.  Clean it green.

Household cleaners are seriously scary stuff.  There’s a reason housewives used to pass out while cleaning the bathroom – it’s toxic. Did you know that manufacturers don’t have to do any sort of safety testing before releasing new household chemical products?  Yes, you heard me right.

My two best friends at home are baking soda and vinegar – I’m convinced that if I just keep trying, eventually those and some homemade soap are all I’ll need (and they clean way better than any store-bought product ever did for me, plus they’re way cheaper!).  I highly recommend this post by No Impact Man Colin Beavin, and the book Organic Housekeeping by Ellen Sanders, for information on what’s being sold in stores, and how to do it better.

While you’re at it, go through your house and get rid of all the stuff you don’t want/need anymore – less stuff to clean and have to sort through!  We’re in the midst of this ourselves and it is so awesome.  What you’re not using, someone else might be looking for.

9.  Use less power, pay for green power, drive less.

Turn off your lights, change your bulbs to CFLs, offset your electric use through Native Energy or the New England Wind Fund, dry your clothes on a clothesline, be mindful of consolidating trips in the car.   Observe an Eco-Sabbath if you can.  Turn off the TV!  These are so simple, and yet so easy to not do.  They add up folks – let’s do it.

10.  Be more joyful.

That’s right!  Take time to count your blessings, make friends, enjoy the beauty and bounty of nature, make music, tell your family you love them.  Joy is free, joy doesn’t harm the world, it enlivens it.  Celebrate each small step you take towards a happier, lighter life.  Know that what you do matters.

What would you add?  What’s your favorite way to be the change you want to see?  What other questions do you have?