Earth Hour 2009

Tonight at Chez Kosher Whine we participated in Earth Hour 2009. At 8:30pm we turned off our lights along with a billion or so other people around the world to help raise awareness and vote for more action on climate change.

I have no idea if it will change anything, but it would be nice if it did.

What I do know is that it was completely confusing to turn all the lights off right after Shabbat ended. It was even more confusing because KosherCop and I watched a dvd on the computer (via battery power - since flashlights were okay I figured the laptop was okay too).

So there we were in the dark, watching a movie - the power wasn't out so if we wanted to we could turn on the lights and they would have worked. We chose not to turn on the lights yet anything we could manage to do in the dark without breaking our necks was perfectly permissible - cooking, cleaning, writing, etc. Very confusing.

KosherCook and I always experience this same confusion on secular American holidays, especially Thanksgiving when there is a "festive meal." We always walk around all day reminding ourselves its okay to write, phone, cook, and no - we don't have to wait until sundown to eat or light candles.

But, tonight our self-imposed darkness only lasted an hour - an hour that a very tired KosherCop couldn't even make it through. He has a cold - complete with fever - and was begging to go to sleep by 9:15 - which is obviously well past his bedtime. Luckily, flashlight teethbrushing is one of KosherCook's many talents and KosherCop was too tired to ask for a story. Although KosherCook could probably have managed that as well, since he was perfectly happy to read by hurricane lamp candlelight for an hour.

What was interesting was that we talked to my Aunt this evening and KosherCop told her all about how were going to be turning off the lights and why. When I got back on the phone I clarified a few details and her answer was okay, I guess I'll turn my lights off at 8:30 too.

Now this is an 80-something year old woman who lives alone, and yet she was willing to participate in this brief bit of activism with absolutely no convincing. Pretty cool of her, and more importantly, it shows how easy it is to get people on board with this line of thinking.

Shh! The Blueberries Are Sleeping.

Again with the produce! That's right and this time it's blueberries. We went to Butler's Orchard today with 2 other families to pick blueberries.

KosherCop got tired of it early on and hired his friend to do his picking for him. I heard him "delegating" and told him he wasn't to boss around this other little boy - that he wasn't working for him. However, his friend was adamant that he was in fact KosherCop's "worker" and so I gave up. Disturbing as this was, I couldn't help kvelling a little at my son's leadership skills and daydreamed about his possible future as an entrepreneur. That is, until he announced it was picnic time and the 2 of them sat down between the rows of blueberry bushes and proceeded to chow down 2/3 of the profits.

Despite this short-lived business arrangement, we all had a great time and went out to lunch afterwards. This meant that our collective haul had to spend 2 hours baking in our 120 degree cars while we ate - the first of many hardships our blueberries would have to endure.

Amazingly, the berries were fine when we got home. To be clear, only I was amazed - KosherCook said, "What are you worrying about? They are out in the hot sun all day every day."

Hmm...good point - did they sprout roots and continue growing while they were in our trunk too?

The rest of the day centered around decluttering counter tops and washing various colanders in order to finally be able to rinse and put away the blueberries in our tiny kitchen. The plan was to freeze most of them since we have a poor track record for using up fruit before it spoils.

After I washed them I set them out to dry and asked KosherCook to check how to store them in the refrigerator. Apparently, I should have had him do this first, because the answer was that I shouldn't have washed them at all - they have to be put away dry, especially if they are going in the freezer. This made sense, and that was why they were drying.

At 11:30 pm they were still quite wet. It takes a long time for 5 lbs. of blueberries to airdry. So I invented the "blueberry spinner" which consisted of a wad of paper towels on the bottom of a colander and me shaking small batches of berries until they appeared dry. If that didn't cause them to explode or get bruised in any way, I can only guess that they are purposely bred to withstand consumer stupidity.

The shaking worked better than I expected and now the blueberries are safely tucked in for the night. They are very delicious, but please don't disturb them - they've had a tough day!

Low Cost Chemical-Free Pest Control

We have a terrible ant problem in our house.

We discovered it about 2 months after we moved in seven years ago. I don't know what sort of 24th century force field the previous owners had installed while they were showing the house, but we certainly didn't see any ants until we owned the place.

At first we called Terminex to come and vanquish the truly impressive marching brigade that had taken over our basement. The ants were like a tiny Roman army - very imposing - we were not equipped to handle them ourselves. Apparently, neither was Terminex. I'm not sure what the white powder that they threw all over the place was made from, but I'm guessing chips and dip from the reaction the ants had.

They strengthened their resolve and marshalled their forces. The Terminex guy kept saying we had to wait - it takes time to destroy such a large nest. Meanwhile, I'm pretty sure I saw an ad in Ant Times Weekly with our address and the words "party like it's 50 B.C.E." on it.

So we fired Terminex and hired Orkin. And for six years Orkin reigned supreme. We had two years almost ant-free after they used some ant baits with their secret sauce. But eventually we started seeing ants again and Orkin never really called us back when we'd ask for an additional spraying.

Finally, we got to the point where we had to ask ourselves why we were paying them. We kept writing them checks and they kept spraying poison all over our house - inside and out - and we still had ants.

So at the end of last summer I ended our contract and up until this past April we couldn't tell the difference. We saw about the same amount of activity as we had the previous winter - the ants are always less active in the winter anyway.

Then suddenly in April we discovered why we had been paying them. As many ants as we had with all of the pest treatments, we had a zillion more without it.

And let me tell you, they were driving me nuts. The problem is we can't figure out what they want. We're not getting big trails that would show us where they are coming in. If that was the case it would be easy enough to spray them and plug up their point of entry.

No, our ants are aimless wanderers and sullen loners. They just sort of meander here and there. They don't seem to want our sweets or even our crumbs, which I had to forbid KosherCop from intentionally leaving out for them. He kind of likes the ants and wants to feed them, viewing them as a one-crumb-at-a-time alternative to sweeping.

Finally, after trying various baits and home remedies like vinegar (sort of works), cinnamon (only 60% effective but it smells nice), and borax (totally worked in our master bath, but I can't see putting it where KosherCop could get into it) I was just about ready to break down and sign a new pest control contract.

But I noticed there were fewer ants. I figured it was just a low ebb in the normal cycle of activity.

Not so. It was not "ebb," it was "web." Spider web that is.

That's right. Our poor housekeeping has finally paid off. Several spiders have set up shop in various corners of the house, and are doing a fantastic job of catching the ants. They were able to figure out where the ants were coming in and take advantage of the best traffic areas.

And I'm letting them stay. They're free, they aren't bothering anyone and they don't leave fumes for half a day after they kill an ant. So unless I find a particularly disgusting web at eye-level or near food, for instance, they are our new eco-friendly pest management system.

Go spiders!

Fall CSA Program

It's very exciting! We've decided that the response to our synagogue's CSA has been so positive, that we are going to offer a Fall Program.

Since there is another more established CSA in our area that uses the same farmer, we can look at what they received last year for any given week to get an idea of what will be in our box.

I was really surprised by the vegetables that arrived from late September to late November, when the fall season will run.

I always assumed it was all squash and root vegetables, but behold the mouth-watering assortment of produce we have to look forward to:

• cabbage
• winter squash
• lima beans
• white sweet potatoes
• sweet peppers, green and red
• broccoli
• apples, low/no spray
• kale
• eggplant
• carrots
• parsnips
• white turnips
• yellow turnips (rutabaga)
• celery root (celeriac)
• radishes
• leaf lettuce
• lettuce greens
• Chinese cabbage
• Swiss chard
• beets
• collards
• head lettuce
• pumpkin
• red bell peppers, sweet
• leeks
• mixed greens
• herbs
• hot peppers in a bag
• tomatoes
• Asian pears (No Spray)

If I had stopped to think about it this makes sense - what with fall being all about the harvest. I mean we only have a Jewish holiday (Sukkot) and an American holiday (Thanksgiving) centered around this harvest during this time period.

I'm reading Barbara Kingsolver's book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life about how she and her family eat only what they can grow themselves or can find locally for one year. One of the things she talks a lot about is how unbelievably clueless most of us are about when the actual growing season is for most fruit and vegetables. Thanks to decades of being able to purchase anything from anywhere at any time of the year, we are all as spoiled as the vegetables left on a Sunday night at the local supermarket.

The way she presents the progression of the growing season makes a lot of sense. She asks us to imagine all the vegetables and fruits we eat as part of the same plant:

"To recover an intuitive sense of what will be in season throughout the year, picture an imaginary plant that bears over the course of one growing season all the different vegetable products we can harvest. We’ll call it a vegetannual. Picture its life passing before your eyes like a time-lapse film: first, in the cool early spring, shoots poke up out of the ground. Small leaves appear, then bigger leaves. As the plant grows up into the sunshine and the days grow longer, flower buds will appear, followed by small green fruits. Under midsummer’s warm sun, the fruits grow larger, riper, and more colorful. As days shorten into the autumn, these mature into hard-shelled fruits with appreciable seeds inside. Finally, as the days grow cool, the vegetannual may hoard the sugars its leaves have made, pulling them down into a storage unit of some kind: a tuber, bulb, or root."

- from an excerpt of her book in Orion Magazine

Using this imagery (which you can see an illustration of at animalvegetablemiracle.com), it makes perfect sense that asparagus (shoots) are one of the earliest vegetables to arrive in early spring, then green leafy vegetables, then later the fruits with lots of seeds like eggplant and peppers, and then the gourds.

I feel kinda dumb (for not thinking of it before), yet enlightened.

Veggiemania

Vegetables have taken over my life.

I'm constantly worrying about our produce. Is it stored properly? Is it humid enough? Is it comfortable? Is it depressed and considering suicide?

I'm considering not going out of town this weekend as planned because I don't want our produce to have to stay home alone. And possibly rot.

We are splitting our CSA share with my in-laws, but they keep going on vacation, which results in us having more produce than we are able to eat in a week. It should even out next week when they come back - they will take the whole box - but who knows how well our produce will fare until then.

The other problem is room - we don't have enough in our fridge and we're losing track of what's in there. There is actually a list on The Jew and the Carrot that addresses this very issue - what you need to have on hand (including room) to best take advantage of you CSA share. But since nothing on the list includes someone coming to our house and cooking for us I'm not sure it solves our immediate problem.

I guess, we need to start making lots of salads to use up more vegetables at once. Of course, by "we" I mean KosherCook. Which brings up a whole other issue. For the last 4 years he has been doing almost all of the shopping and cooking. But now that he's spending all Monday dealing with CSA delivery and member pickup, we are starting the week off on poor footing. It starts Monday night with him being too tired to cook any of the actual vegetables and instead making hotdogs or mac w/cheese. Unfortunately I'm a big fan of both those dishes so I'm usually kinda psyched. But then, by the time I wrangle KosherCop into bed, I don't have the energy to do more than just unpack the box - no washing, no removing from storage bags (bad produce-owner, bad). With a beginning like that, the rest of the week just sort of spirals away from us.

On a positive note, this week we got romaine lettuce instead of the lettuce we had been getting. It's had a lot fewer bugs - I was even able to take it unwashed to work and just rinse it off before eating it with lunch. Of course watching someone wash a head of lettuce in the lunchroom prompts a few questions, so I'm becoming quite the CSA evangelist at work. Despite my own niggling fears that this experiment may fail if we can't get our act together, I have taken every available opportunity to talk up our vegetables and give a shout out to our farmer. And if the unwitting victim person who says, "that lettuce looks great" seems willing to listen, I'll continue on about our synagogue and Tuv Ha'aretz. Most people are at least really interested in the CSA. I've had several inquiries from people asking advice on how to join one or start their own.

It's very exciting! I feel like we are on the cusp of a very large cultural shift. Maybe it's just me - being immersed in this small community of people interested in sustainable living, but it seems like things are going to change dramatically - for the better - and soon.

CSA Report

There are boxes of vegetables stacked up in our livingroom, so it must be Monday. (Well, it was when I sat down at the computer anyway.)

Every Monday, the delivery day for our synagogue's CSA, KosherCook comes home with a few boxes of vegetables that people have forgotten to pick up. This was the first week, however, that no one stopped by as I was trying to get KosherCop ready for bed. He absolutely loves this little ritual - people he doesn't know arrive at our door and instead of brushing his teeth he stands there interrogating them.

Those shares that don't get picked up by 6:30pm on Mondays (or by 7pm when the volunteers ACTUALLY leave the synagogue, or by the time we close our front door for the night) get donated to Manna Food Center, a local food bank, on Tuesday morning. Some people are away, but some actually forget to come get their veggies. For most people, knowing their food went to a worthy cause takes the sting out of not getting the produce they already paid for.

This week we received in our box: Snow peas, hull peas, head lettuce, cauliflower, broccoli, a bag of salad greens, garlic scapes, collards, and mint.

I had never heard of garlic scapes until we received them in last week's box. The Washington Post food blog, A Mighty Appetite describes them:

Here's the anatomy lesson: Garlic and its relatives in the allium family, (leeks, chives, onions) grows underground, where the bulb begins its journey, soft and onion-like. As the bulb gets harder (and more like the garlic we know), a shoot pokes its way through the ground. Chlorophyll- green like a scallion (maybe even greener), the shoot is long and thin and pliable enough to curl into gorgeous tendrils.

Meanwhile, we have been using them in place of regular garlic for the past week. They aren't as delicious as the spring garlic we received the first week, but they have a mellow garlic flavor with a crunchy consistency - at least the way we have been sauteeing or roasting them.

The Beet Goes On

For the second week in a row we've gotten beets in our CSA share. Personally, I love beets, but I know that for some it is an acquired taste.

Here are 2 beet recipes to enjoy - one from a cookbook and one that KosherCook invented:

Carrot-Beet-Potato Toss
from The Kripalu Cookbook

1 cup diced carrots
1 cup diced fresh beets
1 cup diced potatoes
1 1/4 cups water
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 tablespoons butter

In a medium-sized saucepan, combine the carrots, beets, potatoes, and water and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to medium-low. Add the salt. Cook for 45 minutes, or until the vegetables are very soft. (Check occasionally to prevent burning.)

Drain the vegetables and toss with the butter before serving. Serve immediately.

We tried this with the suggested variation of adding Parmesan cheese sprinkled on top and melted slightly. Yummy and very magenta! KosherCook served it with pan-seared salmon with dill sauce and steamed asparagus. A delicious Shavuot meal!

The second recipe is already a standard in our household. KosherCook invented it and I insisted it become part of the permanent collection. Sometimes in his quest to serve something new and different, my husband forgets that he can make a dish more than once. So if I really like one of his experiments, I have to explicitly insist that a) he writes down the ingredients and 2) makes it again someday.

Purple Passion Pasta
created by KosherCook (a.k.a. Chef-Boy-Harlee)

Whole Wheat Spaghetti
approx. 1/2 cup Feta Cheese, crumbled
1/4 Purple Cabbage cut coarsely
1.5 cup Red Beets cut in wedges
Red Onion diced
Frozen Edamame (Soybeans)
2 tbsp Extra Virgin Olive Oil
Salt and black pepper to taste
1 Pat Butter
1 tbsp Red Horseradish
Morningstar Farms Vegetarian "Bacon"

Set pasta to boil as per directions on box. Add oil and butter to saute pan and heat. Add cabbage first to soften. Next add red onion and beets and continue sauteeing. When onions are softened, add horseradish, salt and pepper and mix. Cook "bacon" according to directions and crumble up into pan. Add edamame. Cook 10 minutes on medium heat then serve over pasta. Garnish with feta and serve.

Variation: add mushroom and/or radishes to sauteed vegetables.

Verdant Living

Everybody's doing it. Going green. We too are trying to be more environmentally conscious, more eco-friendly, more "verdant", if you will.

So among other things, one of the ways we are "acting locally" is by organizing and participating in a CSA. A CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) allows a group of people to buy shares in a local farm. You pay for your produce in advance and the farmer knows how much to plant and that what they plant is already sold. Also, since it is local, you save the cost of the extra fuel used to transport your produce to the supermarket.

The KosherCook and I and a small group of other people we know from our synagogue spent the better part of March frantically marketing this project to our congregation and the neighboring community in order to sign up enough people to meet our farmer's minimum. We started really late to make this happen for this summer, but we got the buzz going and it's happening!

Every Monday our farmer delivers boxes of freshly picked organic vegetables and fruit (and free-range eggs for those who paid extra) to our synagogue. We don't really know what is going to be in the box until Sunday night - sometimes not until Monday - so it's kind of like getting a present each week (even though you paid for it in advance). The people participating are really excited and there is a lot of recipe swapping and posting on our synagogue listserv.

The other really interesting aspect of this project is that our CSA is a member of Hazon's Tuv Ha'Aretz program, so all of the usual issues of sustainable living are also examined from a Jewish perspective.

From the Hazon.org website:

What makes Tuv Ha'Aretz different is that it is a Jewishly-rooted CSA. Tuv Ha’Aretz provides a platform for synagogues and JCCs to offer outstanding educational programs within and outside of the CSA community. Tuv Ha'Aretz provides members with a unique opportunity to engage in Jewishly-focused education and have access to a great Jewish community. The intersection of Judaism and contemporary food issues provides an exciting opportunity for learning and growth. Through Tuv Ha'Aretz members can expand their understanding of what it means for food to be kosher – food that is not only “fit” for us, but “fit” for the Earth.

This week we received lettuce, scallions, radishes, asparagus, rosemary, rhubarb and strawberries. We are actually splitting our share with my in-laws as one share is intended to be a week's worth of produce for a family of four. I knew there would be a little more cleaning involved since these are organic vegetables (more bugs) and freshly picked and delivered (actual soil on them). But we have received a very delicious head of lettuce each week that is taking me a ridiculously long time to clean. Perhaps I'm becoming "crazy frum" with the washing, but frankly, kosher or not - I just don't want to eat bugs.

Standing in front of the sink gazing into the seemingly infinite crinkly crevices of a head of lettuce and running water for 2 hours (I know - crazy!) does give a person a lot of time to think, though. I thought about the ladybug that crawled out as I first started washing - I sent her outside but worried that she might have gotten stuck on her back and never got up. I thought about how when I unwrapped the lettuce it looked exactly like a storybook lettuce and I could totally understand why Peter Rabbit would risk life and limb in Mr. McGregor's garden for one of these. I didn't say they were deep thoughts. Just thoughts.

The added bonus in all this is that the KosherCop is totally in love with the idea of "farm-fresh" vegetables and has dubbed himself "the boy who tries new foods". If he balks at eating any vegetables now, we just have to tell him they are from the farm and he gobbles them up.