The First Priority Herb Garden

One of our first priorities, upon settling into our new apartment, was to plant an herb garden.

Obviously, different people have different priorities when 75% of them move cross-country (or mid-country) with only 5% of their belongings. Some might think first of indoor furniture, like, say, a couch or a bed. Others might instantly shop for appliances and electronics, already missing their toaster and their television.

 

I'm not saying we don't have a toaster. I'm just noting that the first furniture we acquired may have been a pair of bright teal balcony chairs on which to sit while eating dinner, and that a balcony herb garden may have been at the top of the first page of our shopping list. And that technically, we don't yet have a couch.

Now, to plant an herb garden, one needs a few essentials. For example, herbs. Fortunately, with Family Tree Nursery only minutes away, we had easy access to Essential Herb Garden Ingredient #1. The problem came when we had to select which herbs we wanted. Because unlike our local nursery back in sleepytown California, which might carry four or five different types of basil and two different kinds of oregano—a selection that used to seem pretty fancy to us—Family Tree Nursery takes its herbs Seriously with a capital S.

There were, to be specific, eleven varieties of basil. If you wanted Thai basil in particular, you still had three options. There were at least eight types of rosemary, complete with notes on flavor profiles and optimal growing conditions. There was a full buffet of sages, oreganos, and thymes, and side tables full of mint, lavender, dill, tarragon, parsley, and lemon verbena. There were, in other words, choices to be made.

The reason that we had to make choices was because our careful calculations revealed that technically speaking, the entire variety of herbs would not fit into the interior dimensions of our car without violating some basic laws of physics and geometry. Also, we had just the one planter on just the one balcony, although if our car had been bigger, I'm not sure this would have stopped us (the neighbors don't seem to be using their balcony, after all, so surely they wouldn't mind if we climbed on over there and planted a flag...and thirty-five different herbs...on behalf of our expanding culinary kingdom).

But, because the husband irrationally refused to consider my entirely reasonable suggestion trade in our small hatchback for a nice, roomy SUV-herbobile, we had to carefully whittle down our selection to a mere eleven plants (including only three varieties of basil). I can only hope that we do not spend the next year regretting the glaring absence of Thai Siam queen basil and Tuscan blue rosemary from our lives, since all we have now is African blue basil, Thai magic basil, bush basil, and Lockwood de Forest rosemary (not to mention French thyme, flat leaf parsley, variegated oregano, garden sage, and some calibrachoa for color. Oh, and a fuchsia, just because).

Thusly and herbilly endowed, we made our way homewards, where we already had our planter and potting soil waiting for us (for any fellow aspiring balcony farmers out there, you may want to consider a self-watering planter, like the ones you can find here, which save you from having to douse your planters daily by continuously moistening the soil from a reservoir you refill once a week or so). Whereupon we planted ourselves a balcony herb garden.

Plus an auxilliary herb pot. Just in case.

In Defense of Dandelions

This just in: We've been Breeding the Nutrition Out of Our Food. Oops.

(Antidotes here, here, and here. Or track down some arugula or purslane at your nursery and start a planter full of phytonutrients to toss in your summertime salads).

Making Time for Taste

All right. Just because I've fallen off the face of the earth doesn't mean you shouldn't have something good to read. So try this: The Science of Savoring. A good reminder to put down the work, back away from the computer, and cook something to eat with family and friends.

 

P.S. Back soon, I promise...but in the meantime, keep cooking!

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Science. Also Chickpeas.

This just in: Put down the low-fat chips, and step away from the uber-processed diet food. According to recent animal research published in Behavioral Neuroscience (and nicely summarized here), laboratory rats that were fed potato chips made with a fat substitute later gained more weight, compared to otherwise identical animals that ate the regular, high-fat potato chips. The researchers point out that our bodies use taste as a cue to expect calories. When those calories don't arrive (because the food has been made with fat or sugar substitutes), it can short-circuit our bodies' natural ability to regulate caloric intake, resulting in overeating later on.

Just the latest in an ever-growing body of research supporting the basic thesis that we're built for eating whole foods.

Speaking of which, we found fresh chickpeas in our CSA box a couple of weeks ago. You may recall my surprise last year upon discovering that home-cooked chickpeas were so much tastier than their canny cousins. Well, this was kind of like that. In the sense that, if you ever find fresh chickpeas, you should immediately do the following:


1. Get them.

2. Shell them. (This is easy. Nothing like fava beans.)

3. Cook them. (Because they're fresh, rather than dried, they cook quickly, in just a few minutes. We cooked ours with spinach, a little garlic, cumin, paprika, rosemary, and thyme, adapting one of our favorite Spanish recipes from a Penelope Casas cookbook).

4. Eat them.

5. If necessary, use your fork to defend your plate from any greedy dining companions.

Excuses, Excuses

I have heard, through the grapevine, that certain readers are politely wondering what the devil I've been doing slacking off my posts in the last couple of weeks, and to you I say:
...well, I hadn't figured out what to say yet, really, because I'd been sorting through my excuses trying to figure out the best one. Since a favorite hasn't emerged yet, you're stuck with the whole list:

1. I was in Oregon.

2. On the way back from Oregon, I was inescapably confronted with a packet of Northwest Nibbles when a flight attendant chucked them onto my tray table and refused to take them back, and I lapsed into a deep depression over their continued existence.

3. Because of #1, we missed our CSA box last week, and so we have since been lacking our usual heaps of inspirational produce.

4. We have been revisiting old favorites.

5. I have developed an unholy and unshakable addiction to cara cara oranges, which are amazing and delicious and so juicy that it would be imprudent and irresponsible to type while one is stuffing them in one's face.


 
While you're waiting for me to run out of oranges and cook something, read this. It's excellent. Kind of like a cara cara orange for the brain.
(Have I mentioned that I may be slightly obsessed?)

Ew.

This has to win some sort of prize.

I have, in the palm of my hand, a small, silvery, innocent looking packet of snack mix, obtained on a Horizon Airlines flight.

It is called Northwest Nibbles (first eyebrow raised) and is manufactured by some corporation called Delyse. The back of the packet has a little metallic pink fleur-de-lys, next to which is printed in cursive: "J'adore Delyse" (oops, there went the second eyebrow).

It contains -- are you ready? -- no fewer than forty-four ingredients. That's counting the ingredients-within-the-ingredients (the parenthetical ingredients, as it were) rather than what I guess you would have to call superordinate ingredients (the things that the ingredients-within-the-ingredients make up). For example, one superordinate ingredient is Ranch Rice Triangles. But obviously that's not an actual ingredient, so they have to list the actual ingredients within that ingredient, like so: "Ranch Rice Triangles (Rice Flour, Yellow Corn Masa, Safflower Oil, Ranch Seasoning (Buttermilk, Salt, Dried Onion, Garlic and Tomato, Partially Hydrogenated Soybean Oil, Toru a Yeast, Corn Syrup Solids, Nonfat milk, Whey, Soy Grits, Dried Cheddar Cheese (..."

I had several thoughts while transcribing that small portion of the ingredients list, which I put below in chronological order of occurrence. I would have put them in parentheses as I went, but there seemed to be a run on that particular punctuation mark at the time. Speaking of which:

1. I'm pretty sure you're supposed to close the parentheses, once you open them. You can't just keep parenthetically listing subingredients for all time. It's unfair to the grammarians of the world, and to the expectant reader who continues on, word after word, in increasing confusion about which sub-sub-sub-subingredient is being listed now. I thought there might be a collection of lost closing parentheses at the end -- something like "...Disodium Inosinate, Disodium Guanylate, Salt) ))))" -- but there was nothing of the sort. I feel disoriented and linguistically distraught.

2. This thing must fail every single food rule that Michael Pollan has in his book of that name. It is like the Anti-Pollan. I wonder what would happen if they collided. Possibly a new project of interest for CERN.

3.  I'm not generally prone to paranoid thinking, but why does the internet disconnect whenever I rest the packet on the edge of my laptop?

4. Why is "Garlic and Tomato" one ingredient?

5. What in the world is Toru a Yeast? Surely that must be a typo? A typo for what?

6. Why does Corn Syrup Solids merit capitalization for every word, whereas Nonfat milk only gets a capital N?

7. They still haven't closed the parentheses??

8. Ew.

One More Reason to Eat Local

The egg recall this week underscored for me yet one more reason to eat local. While the headlines blared with long lists of brands and plant numbers that might have been affected, and readers from coast to coast went to check whether the eggs they bought in a nearby supermarket that were labeled Lucerne, or Albertson, or Farm Fresh (that one is particularly ironic), or Dutch Farms, or nine (nine!) other different brands could have been affected by a salmonella outbreak all the way over in Iowa, I thought about the eggs I ate that morning and how they came from a farm in Orland, CA, about 90 minutes away from where I live, and went on to read something else in the newspaper.

In fact, I can look up the farm where our eggs are laid on Google Maps and see the grass where the chickens are pastured. Given that an increasing number of industrialized egg producers are starting to market one or two of the many brands they produce to appeal to the organic/health-conscious crowd, plastering buzzwords like "free-range" and "all-vegetarian feed!" on the outside of the carton (which doesn't mean much of anything -- you want to look for the word pastured), it's nice to be able to look up the actual farm and see actual grass. (In contrast, it turns out that many of the seemingly-small-farm egg brands sold around here come from one centralized, industrialized plant with a few big chicken warehouses and no grass in sight, including "Judy's Family Farm" organic eggs and Uncle Eddie's free-range eggs and several others that pretend to be local, family-run enterprises. Eatwild.com is a good resource for tracking down real local farms and ranches in your area that produce grass-fed meat and poultry.)

It's not that eating local protects you from ever possibly getting contaminated food (although as the film "Food, Inc" points out, a number of industrialized food practices do increase the chances of disease, either for the animals or for the people eating the food or both). But it seems kind of crazy that a contamination problem in Galt, Iowa, could affect half a billion eggs sold nationwide. And according to this article, the huge livestock firm that may be responsible for the outbreak has already been associated with an array of charges from violating environmental laws to mistreating female workers. How insane is it to think that the store-brand eggs you can buy at a nearby supermarket might come from 2,000 miles away, and that buying those eggs sends your money to an immense and almost invisible firm that has a record of mistreating employees and the environment, not to mention its animals?

I would never in a million years hand my money to people who were known to do things like leave chickens to suffocate in garbage cans, fire employees for their (lack of) religious beliefs, maintain a work environment that a Labor Secretary called "as dangerous and oppressive as any sweatshop we have seen," and sexually assault their female workers. But apparently, up until just a few weeks ago, I was doing exactly that.