Man am I ever a flake sometimes. I put together this basil, smoked mozzarella and tomato salad the other night. It was late. I was tired.  I wasn’t thinking clearly. Last minute I thought I should throw in some whole wheat couscous to make it more substantial. Did I remember that the couscous that I had in my cupboard was not local? Nope.

I just realized right as I was posting. Oops.

It was still mostly local. The cheese, tomatoes, string beans, basil, and olive oil were all local. So were the blueberries and cherries. Oh well, do I get points for trying?

I took a women’s brewing class today held at the local brew shop which is just a five minute walk from our back door. Good thing too, because it was already hitting triple digits by the time I was walking over. I almost broke a sweat on my way there, but I’ve found that I stay drier longer if I keep thinking about iced tea or ice cream and cool breezes, and it worked! Mind over reality…

The class was great fun. The two teachers had both been brewing over 10 years and were already seasoned judges for various beer competitions. One even started her own contest, “The Queen of Beer” competition (which our class was preparing for). I’m wondering if I can manage a decent brew by September. I really would like to, but I don’t handle criticism very well. I’d like to think I do, but deep down, I let things bother me too much. Could I handle a professional critique? Three of them?

Either way, the class was fun and I’ve learned a lot of little things that would make the brewing process easier (like tempering the malt! why didn’t we think of that?). I also got to sample more beer than I normally drink in a month or two! And you know what mixes really well with beer? Heat….lot’s of dry heat.

Can you sense the sarcasm here?

Just a few days back, our weatherman estimated we’d be happily in the 80s today. Perfect for brewing outdoors. But what did I feel when I stepped out of my house this morning? Not nice, cool 80 degree weather. No no no. More like miserable 100 degree weather, with rain. Yeah, you read right. It rained today too. Not a bunch, and it didn’t even stay long on the pavement it was so hot, but it rained! I know other states get rain when it’s hot, but it’s also really humid in those areas. It felt dry as a bone here (as usual) so rain was the furthest thing from everyone’s minds today. What next? Puppies falling from the sky? Okay, that’s a bit of a leap, but you get where I’m goin’ here. Weather has been getting down right weird!

This was meal #2 of my One Local Summer challenge. I found locally made pasta! They had a great lemon-chive fettucini that I combined with local chicken, olive oil, vinegar, garlic, and chives.

The drink was homemade ginger ale with local ginger.

*vegetarians: look away now*

Yum yum yum.

I’ve signed up for the One Local Summer challenge this year, although I found out about it last summer. For one whole summer, I will eat one meal a week which will consist of all locally produced food. This is in an effort to not only reduce the energy normally wasted by transporting goods long distances, but to have the freshest foods available. Because I live in Northern California, this challenge should be easy for me, so I’ll try not to complain too much here. I can find a lot of locally grown and raised foods here. I have to keep in mind the other participants who don’t have as long of a growing season.

This was the first week, so how did I do? I’d say I could have done better, but I did manage a to eat a darn good local meal along with quite a few tasty local snacks.

Here’s the run-down:

- Barbequed chicken wings and grilled corn on the cob

- strawberries and vanilla quark (yes, locally made quark!)

- blueberry, honey and vanilla goat’s milk yogurt smoothie (yep, local goat’s milk yogurt!)

- I haven’t used it yet, but I even found out that we have a multitude of locally produced olive oil (as well as rice).

Despite such variety, I’m still having trouble putting a whole meal together that consists of entirely local foods. I enjoyed locally made pita bread this week bought from the farmer’s market and homemade hummus (with local tahini), but the chickpeas weren’t local. I can come close, but get hung up on some crucial ingredients because I can’t find a local source for them. I need to learn to be more creative. Instead of having a recipe in mind and looking for necessary ingredients, I need to find ingredients first and shape a recipe around them. That skill eludes me still. A few weeks ago when I signed up for this, I had visions of homemade pasta, but I still have yet to find a local flour source. Can I somehow make rice flour out of my local rice? Rice pasta? Hmm…

This week’s meal wasn’t quite up to my expectations. Joe made the chicken wings and corn on the cob dinner for us. It was great (of course!), but it was nothing new. We usually eat this for dinner, but I didn’t even know it was a local meal until we had to start paying closer attention. This coming week I’ll try to venture into new territory.

I wonder about this new rage to take care of the earth.

The motives behind it all are what’s got me down. It’s upsetting to me that everybody had to be scared out of their minds with impending doom (Al Gore, I’m talking to you!) before they decided that having a dependency on oil, pesticides and cheap products that were made in sweatshops from far away countries might not such a good idea.I’m not very afraid of the climate changing, and I know it will, but our planet is old and it’s dealt with a lot. I also know that the people who do nothing to change our current bad habits also feel this way. They have a point and it’s hard to argue with. 

So I want to explain my argument for living a more sustainable life. 

The rise of the industrial and technological revolutions were one giant attempt to live more efficiently, with more productivity. Those things are great. Living efficiently is something to admire. Waste not, want not right? But I think all these years we’ve been a bit mislead with what efficiency really is. 

Forcing a cow, who naturally gets its nutrients from grass -a plant that created nutrients from sunlight (how much more efficient can you get?) to feed on corn (a very unnatural food for a cow) that must be transported from miles away and use up more gasoline (corn which farmers actually lose money on and only continue to grow more of because of government subsidies). This unnatural feed causes the cows to become weakened and ill, forcing ranchers to use loads of antibiotics and growth hormones to get the cows to live long enough to make it to slaughter (which by the way, isn’t very long anymore) or well enough to produce unnatural amounts of milk. 

Feeding cows corn is slowly acidifying their naturally alkaline stomach fluids which is helping e.coli that lives there to become more acid resistant. SO… when you eat beef, along with the acid resistant e.coli, your stomach acids no longer can protect you from infection. See what happens when you mess with Mother Nature? She screws you over.

Ultimately, this system seems highly inefficient to me and against the whole point of the industrial and technological revolutions. These were just a few tiny examples in our huge wasteful industrial food system.

So if you don’t like the idea of hippies and world peace or you don’t care to hug a tree, I hope I’ve at least appealed to your common senses and convinced you that operating in a more natural (non-industrial system) is a much more efficient and reasonable way to live your life.

Happy Earth Day.  

It’s grey outside again. The past week was full of sun and before that I had told myself that I wasn’t yet ready for spring to come. I was having too much fun wearing stockings and scarves and pretty coats. But now…well now that I’ve got to hang out with Joe during this past long weekend, our time was spent lounging in the warm sun reading books and going on walks. I forgot how fun that can be. But the rain is back, I don’t know for how long, but I won’t be too upset to see it go. I don’t mind that it’s here either. I guess I like any sort of weather as long as it isn’t unbearably hot.

Here are a few things that I’ve been enjoying:

-chocolate chip oatmeal cookies- this song- this book- turkish coffee-my own coffee roaster- this other song- an old friend’s 9 month travel adventures 

Today Joe and I celebrate four years together. Four. long. years….hah! I kid! Really I feel cheated that I only get to tell everyone that we’ve been together for four years. It feels like we’ve been hanging out together for much longer. Despite my general whinyness, he’s put up with me like a champ. He’s always trying to make life easier for me when I really don’t deserve it. For example, I called him today in the middle of a nervous breakdown because I couldn’t for the life of me understand how to work my new film camera and couldn’t complete my photography class assignment. Today was my last day to complete the roll of film and what little light left was quickly fading away. It had been raining all week, making completing my assignment extra annoying. I don’t know why, but the combination of not being able to see if my pictures turned out and knowing that those snotty photography majors in my class will get to witness whether they turned out at the same time as me is just highly frustrating. If you knew me, you’d know when I get frustrated, I like to give up and avoid the trouble altogether. Well, Joe took off of work early and rushed home to explain to this frantic loon what the relationship of the F-stop and shutter speed were (can you believe that I really wasn’t that sure?) and supervised me while I took dorky pictures of whatever I could find that was nearest a window, like that lamp in the picture above. How can he put up with me? And how lucky am I to have him? Super duper lucky.    I love you, Monkey.

Just wanted to pop in and say that all is well in our camp. We had a good New Year’s Eve with Erin. We played Rock Band on Joe’s new PS3 and had a great round of Trivial Pursuit (I came in last place as usual, but I did my best yet!). I’m sure the neighbors were glad to hear clanking drums and singing that was closer to a cat in heat than any song the game was having us sing. I really should not have been singing in the first place, but I also have a cold, so not only was I off key, I was nasally!

We are still battling ants, but they haven’t been near as bad as the Christmas tree episode. Despite the ant problem this winter, living in this home the past year has been great. We hope 2008 will be even better. I believe this is the first place that really feels like home since I’ve moved away from my family. I have a nice kitchen with enough cups, mugs and plates to go around. I have extra blankets to curl up on the couch with and enough yarn to last me until well into 2009. Oh yeah, and I still get to live with my favorite person- Joe!

I hope you all have a fantastic year (maybe even complete a few of those New Year’s Resolutions, but you know, no pressure!).

I want to wish everyone celebrating a Merry Christmas. My plans for this holiday aren’t quite going as I’d hoped. I’m really wishing to wake up tomorrow morning and open presents under a pretty Christmas tree, but we had to take down the ornaments and haul our tree out to the trash bin today after discovering the ants that we had been battling for control over the house this past month (and thought we’d won) had moved from our bathroom and office to our Christmas tree. They made themselves right at home in our tree stand (plenty of drinking water there you see). I think the ants may have won. We’ve tried everything. We don’t leave a speck of food out (strangely they haven’t touched our kitchen), we’ve tried Terro traps and vacuuming them up and squashing them and finally a ‘non poison’ spray. Nothing deters these guys! I can handle a few ants here and there, but they seem to really want to build a nest in here. It’s bizarre.

So tomorrow we’ll have a Christmas with no tree. I know, not the end of the world by any means, but I really liked our tree! I’m glad I snapped some pictures a fews days back so I have something to show you.

Anyways, a few thousand ants can’t ruin my Christmas! I still get to spend it with Joe and the presents! I still get the presents! Hah!

Merry Christmas!

It has been almost one year since I unwrapped my Gocco machine for Christmas and last night was my first time putting it to use. I’d constantly think of possible designs to print, but nothing ever seemed good enough and really, I never had a good enough reason to use it. Not until now.

Joe has completed his Masters project on cryptographic hash functions and we are due for a graduation party on the 21st of this month. Usually we wouldn’t bother with invitations, most of our get-togethers are just close friends and relatives. We just call them up and say ‘hey, come over! we have food!’ and that usually does the trick. Now though, a bit classier type of people (by classier I mean, Joe knows them on a professional basis only.) will be on the invite list, so we needed something more official.

I began my search for invitations on Etsy and found some cool silkscreened IBM punch cards. They weren’t really meant to be invitations, but I showed Joe and he suggested we just make our own. I thought ‘ooh! a chance to use my Gocco!’. So 15 minutes later, we had ordered a stack of old IBM punch cards from eBay. Last night Joe finally made me pull out the Gocco and get to work, but I had no idea what I was doing. The Gocco instruction manual wasn’t the greatest help. Thanks to Joe for figuring absolutely everything out, we managed to come up with some pretty cool invitations.

We used a pretty tree design from the classic computer science manual- Donald Knuth’s The Art of Computer Programming and an old school typewriter font for the design. We only had three colors to choose from for the Gocco machine, so we stuck with black, which ended up being fine. I like it’s simplicity.

The party is drawing nearer and I’m hoping to get the living room painted, tree up and decorated (along with the rest of the house) before then. On top of that, my grandmother calls today telling me the family is driving up to visit this weekend. Not that I’m not psyched about that, but there goes some precious painting time! Maybe I can enlist my family to be my paint crew?