Farmers' Market Fail (ish)

So the red onion linguine I was so excited about...not really that fabulous. In fact it's pretty much wheat pasta with a vague hint of sweet red onion, and all the fabulous color bled out when I cooked it. Total fail.

My eggplant was pretty good though. I just threw it in a pot with mushrooms, tomatoes, onion, jalapeno, and a carrot. I seasoned my pot o' veggies with corianger, smoked paprika, and a tiny bit of cumin. I really cooked the veggies down to mix them in with the boring pasta. Yum! The veggies were fab.

I also bought some sweet italian sausage that paired nicely with it all. I won't be buying the fancy pasta again. I will stick to buying glorious veggies at the farmers' market.

Farmer's Market Find #1

I like to talk about food, so I am thinking I will do a "Farmer's Market Find" of the week every Saturday.

Today my find was Pappardelle's Sweet Red Onion Linguine. I'm a little sad to discover that they are not local. In fact they are huge and nationwide, but I don't think that diminishes the joy I find at discovering a sweet red onion pasta. Let's not go into how much effort it took not to also buy the orange szechuan or the dark chocolate linguines. Yes...they have dessert pastas, I know! The selections are so tempting, and choosing is so difficult.

I'll need to figure out what to do with this pasta, but I bought an assortment of Schurl essentials, some of which I can perhaps pair with this beautiful pasta. Other finds include: 1 white onion, 9 beautiful large button mushrooms, 1 pound of very red tomatoes, and 3 skinny eggplants. I've also got some carrots in the fridge purchased last week that need to be eaten.

I'm thinking I need to keep things simple with this pasta, so maybe I will just cook and serve them with a little oil. Maybe a light touch of parmesan shavings?

I can eat the eggplant on the side, I think. Don't even ask how I plan to prepare this purple mystery food. I want to love eggplant, but I have no idea how to cook it successfully or season it so that it tastes worth eating at all. I bought them as a gesture towards figuring that out.

This will be a meatless meal since the animal fleshes in my fridge at present are some swai (fish) and bacon. Yes, animal fleshes. I spend a lot of time with my vegan friend Molly lately, so I feel inclined to emphasize meat in ways that might bother her. I love to eat animal flesh, and I think it is a most natural thing, though I don't mind a meal without flesh or even without dairy. I'll be eating a vegan dinner with Molly this evening.

Anywho, if you're wondering, my beet adventure resulting from the farmers' market visit last week was pretty fabulous. I ate two helpings of beets, which was a poor choice since they can be rough on your digestive tract until you are adjusted. Regardless, I went for the roasted beets with cumin, lime, and mint. It was sooooo tasty. I'm not sure I recommend eating beet leaves like one would Swiss chard though. They were pretty bitter.

That is all, I guess.

You Did It to Yourself

I just read this blog: Open Letter From a Millenial: Quit Telling Us We're Not Special. It made some good points about how younger generations struggle in ways we were not prepared for. And while I sympathize with some commenters who are older and experience the same struggles, I wonder if the mindset isn't still slightly different.

I was brought up to work hard at school, work hard at my job, and I was told I would succeed. My parents genuinely believe I can do anything. I agree that I'm pretty smart, but anything? Really? I'm too scared of failure. Trying is scary because the've made no room for failure. I settle for mediocre because it's safe. Smart or not, there are smarter more hardworking people out there. There are probably a lot of people with more impressive backgrounds too. As the author of the blog emphasized, I know I'm not special. I'm capable, but not special, and I'm not usually convinced that the full application of my capacity is worth the effort.

I have a Master's degree. I rocked grad school. But what does that mean? Not a heck of a lot. Not much at all. And I can be sensible. I know I am perhaps too educated. When I was worried that nobody would hire me post grad school because of this, my dad said to me, "You did it to yourself." And I felt some righteous indignation. I thought, you're my Dad, you're not supposed to say that. When I read the blog above, I was reminded of this comment, and I thought. No, I didn't really do this to myself because my dad was psyched when I said I was going to grad school and I was going to be teaching to pay my way. He told everyone.

My parents trained me up to be an academic--school was emphasized, but nothing beyond it. They acted like I had a bright and exciting future in front of me, but the vision stopped at that. I sometimes think it's bright, but not the brightness that was envisioned for me. It's the brightness of having a fully charged flashlight in a world of power outage. I have a job with insurance and other benefits. I think that's awesome. Lots of my friends don't have jobs. My last job didn't have benefits. It seems so cool that I have these very basic things when I know so many without. I do not live with my parents, and I can pay all my own bills. Go me!

Then a family friend asked me what I make. Feeling pretty proud of myself because, for a person with an English degree, I think I'm doing fabulously well. When I told her, her face fell, "that's not very much." No, no it isn't, but when I look around at the world today, I feel so much relief in the present knowing that I can take care of myself.

But don't get me thinking about the future. I started paying into my first retirement account at 22, the minute I got out of college. Back then, I was hoping I'd have a second account started for my parents because I know they won't be ready, and I can't rely on Social Security to take care of them. I can't afford that account I dream of setting up for them. I pay my bills and not much is leftover. I eat out maybe 4 times a month, and that's it. My expendible income is exhausted at that point.

Will I ever own a house? I have my doubts. I'm not sure I'll ever own a dog. Will I ever be able to afford kids? Maybe, but I'm not sure I'd ever be brave enough to take maternity leave to pop out tiny people to terrorize the earth.

Do I even want to invest in any of those things? I dunno. My fear about Social Security failing to take care of my parents and being entirely unavailable to me reflects the real concerns of my generation. The nation sometimes seems to be crumbling. I've thought about storing money under my matress instead of keeping a savings account, but then I think to myself, if the nation crumbles, will the currency even be valid? That's the world I live in.

Older middle class generations worried about buying a house and investing in stocks. Now they worry about keeping their homes and losing their jobs. I worry about the entire systems failure. If the banks fail and the nation shatters, I have nothing, not even the basic resources to feed myself. I live in a second floor apartment with a single north-facing window. Plants are doomed here. Maybe I read too much post-apocalyptic fiction, but those are my fears. My fears are not about being unsuccessful or losing my material wealth. My fears reflect a much greater potential for chaos in my future.

A Masters in English wasn't the smartest decision, no. I'll admit that. I should have married a farmer and worked with my hands because sometimes I think I should worry about a future where an education is worth nothing, but I was raised up to be an academic, to meet the expectations of an unsustainable American dream destined to whither before I could even attempt it.

Sundays are for Dreaming

Sometimes, I find Sundays are for getting things done--all the things that I should have done on Saturday but didn't because I was being a bum or had too many social plans. On Sundays, I clean; I run errands; I cook and bake.

Sometimes, I find Sundays are for thought, for deep thinking. On Sundays, I'll sit in the bathtub and read a book. On Sundays, I sometimes actually write and draw. On Sundays, I sit around with ideas, write blogs I'll never publish, read articles, makes lists and plans to do things I will probably never do. Sunday is often a day for dreaming of how I want my life to be. Life may never be as I dream it, but I think the exercise of dreaming it is important. It keeps me sane. Dreams are what keep everyone sane. Lord knows our lives usually aren't cut out to do that for us.

Today, like many days the plan I'm making is to be more fit, to control my gluttony and work out more regularly. I live such a sedentary life. Eight or nine hours for five days a week barely moving from my chair at work, pulling cookies out of my desk drawer when I just can't take the brain drain of work anymore.

If I'm good, I go to the Y after work, get sweaty and gross or chlorinated in the pool for an hour. I'm often not good and go straight home.

Then I eat, and if I'm good it's full of vegetables and few carbs and meat, but someitmes I'm bad and it's nachos. Mmmmm, nachos. Lately there is always ice cream, which is often paired with chocolate cake. Don't judge me--it's all homemade and gloriously irresistable. I like to think that even if I'm indulging in too much fat and sugar at least there are few to no preservatives.

This eating takes place at the coffee table, in front of the computer or the TV (often both). I might spend the evening reading with my laptop ready should Chris pop in to chat, or watching my latest television show, rarely remembering to justify it by crocheting.

In other words, I go from glued to a desk chair all day, to glued to a couch, and then I sleep, glued to my bed. I don't move. I may grow moss soon, and while I like the image of me starting to take root, turning tree-like, growing moss, sprouting leaves, and generally becoming covered in vegetation, in reality I know that what's happening is my metabolism is slowing, and my blood pressure is lowering, and I may start to build up fat in my system even though I look pretty healthy, on the thinner side of curvy. This misleading appearance may be the bain of my motivation to actually be fit.

I need a non-appearance related goal that is also not tied to a fitness routine (I will fudge a fitness routine), so my goal is to get back to the weight I was when I know I was healthy, when I worked out twice a day, ate five snacks instead of three meals, and counted my calories. I was in such incredible control of my food intake and my fitness, and I locked in to a weight range about ten pounds lighter than my current range. I never got below that, I just stayed there no matter what I tried to do, so I'm going to try to get back there. Although given the lapsed time since then, perhaps my current weight is the new minimum. Female bodies are known for such shifts.

Now that that's all planned, I'll probably go read in the bathtub and dream of a small house with no extra space. I want a backyard with a garden (which in reality I would have a patch of ground where nothing comes up and things that did would be withered), a big lazy adoring dog, and perhaps some chickens for fresh eggs. This house should have a little garage on the side where I can park my car and do some creative projects--refinish and reupholster furniture. That's the dream, but it's entirely unrealistic at the moment.

Beets, Beets, Beets

I have always eaten beets from a can, and I like them. They turn my fingers pink, and taste sweet and earthy. Not to mention eating something straight out of the can is so easy and convenient. Except, I always feel so guilty for eating any food that comes in a package. It is sooooooooooooo wasteful.

So I bought beets at the farmers' market in part because my boyfriend who lives far away got some in a produce basket he receives weekly, and he hated them. I am determined to find a way to perfect the eating of beets so that he will love them. (He lives far away, so I was not a part of his initial experimentation with beets.) I also bought some carrots. It was a weekend for purchasing roots, I guess. I will probably cook up the beet leaves the same way I do Swiss chard. I'm not sure how I will cook the actual beets.

One plan is to shred a beet with some carrots to eat over salad.

I also plan to roast some beets with cumin, lime, and mint--as recommended by a recipe card I received from the farmers' market. I may post the recipe and more detail on how this adventure goes when I do it.

Finally, I am contemplating a good mole-fashioned deeper'n'ever-turinip'n'tater'n'beet-root pie. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you clearly never read Brian Jacques Redwall series as a child. I have made this long-monikered pie out of the Redwall Cookbook (the stories were originally written for blind children, so they feature a lot of food talk to engage alternate senses), but it didn't include beets in it. The beets were served on the side. I wonder if that's because of a conflict of flavors or an issue with color.

Regardless, once I have roasted a few beets and get a sense of how I can blend them with seasonings, I will probably tackle developing my own deeper'n'ever-turinip'n'tater'n'beet-root pie. The cookbook's version is pretty bland and required a lot of salt and pepper. Its carrot layer was definitely the best part, but there are no carrots in the name. I can't remember if they were in the description. I may or may not include carrots in my version. We shall see.

You should eat beets, too. I will argue that they are good for you because beet juice and beets were included in a colon cleanse I did with my mom a few years ago, though my friend Molly warns that eating raw beets in large quantities can be dangerous because it is a blood cleanser. She also overshared that your pee can turn pink. That's never happened to me as a result of eating canned beets, but I suppose my adventures in farmers' market beets my have a different result.

Olive Oil and Salt Dessert

So I have another vice.

While driving home from Omaha, I was listening to The Splendid Table, and a guest recommended putting sea salt on desserts. One particular image she conjured up was of a chocolate torte with sea salt sprinkled over it. Yum!

She even recommended using olive oil in chocolate cake and drizzling it on vanilla ice cream. (I wasn't so sure about olive oil on ice cream.)

So what did I do?

I made homemade vanilla bean ice cream. Then I made a chocolate cake with olive oil. Then I put them together, drizzled more olive oil over the top, sprinkled it with sea salt, and ate.

End result?

Well...I better start working out more. It was fabulous!

Catholic Priorities

As a Catholic, I have been asked to set aside all other worthy aims and vote for Republicans because they tend to be prolife. Saving the unborn trumps all other causes. I still think it's a worthwhile fight but I'm sick of the attitude that all other battles are moot.

As a Catholic I care about a lot of other things. Adam and Eve were supposedly put on this earth to tend a garden, but we're not being very good stewards of the Earthly garden we live on. We abuse it with mining and pollution, with short-term industrial aims. As a Catholic, I'm a steward of the Earth, and I'm tired of Republicans not caring.

As a Catholic, I have been told to be pro-immigration. I take this to heart, and I think too many other Catholics ignore it in favor of only taking care of people in this country. Does our charity end at our borders?  As a Catholic, I care about all people, and I don't discriminate based on country of origin.

As a Catholic, I'm supposed to follow the example of Jesus. You know, the guy who was charitable and kind to the heathens, and scolded his own people for their legalism. He didn't take political action and try to change the Roman law for the benefit of his own faith. He was kind to those who were different so that they would openly choose the Christian faith.

If I force you not to sin does that save your soul? Nope, I'm pretty sure that requires a change of heart. And what oppressed, belittled person is going to embrace their oppressor?

My faith does not extend into creating laws that force women to adhere to my religious values. My faith does give me any rights to prevent you from expressing your faith. My faith does not provide me with grounds to deny housing or marriage to same-sex couples. My faith does not give me any rights to treat other human beings with less than perfect charity.

So if I ask myself which party embodies the principles of my faith more, I can look to the Democratic Party. As an economically moderate conservative, I have HUGE problems with how they handle things, but as a Catholic, I genuinely believe they have principles I believe in--principles based in charity not finances.