Summer rain

Lots of rain lately. In a good way though.
Haven't had to water in weeks. We get lovely night time rain, daytime sun, skip a day, and then a little more rain. It's been nice rain-- the kind you want to sit on the porch and breathe in.

The garden pic is the plot in the middle of the yard. The other 3 plots are doing really well too. That particular one contains all of our potato plants, brussel sprouts, broccoli, beets, carrots, swiss chard, kohlrabi, basil, cilantro, salad greens, butter leaf lettuce, eggplant, caraway and sweet potatoes.

The bottom pic is the kids at the botanical gardens this past cloudy Sunday. Oddly enough, we don't often go to the gardens in the summer. Usually make a trip in the winter, around February when we're all desperate for green and can hang out in the tropics room.

All right, off to bed. Attended a lovely water birth this morning, but have been called at around 3am for the last 3 days. It's like some bizarre swing shift of sorts. Have to go back tomorrow at 9am for a postpartum visit. Off to sleep!

What have we been eating?

This is a picture I found somewhere on the internet, sometime last year. I'm sorry I can't credit the photographer, but do know I love it.
For those of you who don't know, that's a chicken water birth.

I laughed so hard when I first saw it.

Life has been busy with lots of prenatals and babies being born (and trying nightly to be born but putzing out come sunrise...) thanks to crazy weather systems and possibly the full moon that is now waning.
I've not been able to post pics or any bloggin about life lately.

I've been battling a ground hog who eats all the leaves off of my broccoli plants and beets. Hadn't seen any signs of his night time, Supper Club Buffet as of late, until Saturday morning. Grrrr! I'm always so shocked by how absolutely pissed off I get when I see my lovely 8 inch plants resembling stalks and not the leafy green things they were when I last looked at them. G suggests I get a shotgun and lay on the roof all night like a sniper to shoot the varmint.
If I weren't so on-call, I'd seriously consider it. As it stands, I just don't have time to play sniper on a hot Ypsi roof.
So we're still trying to catch the groundhog with a live trap that he clearly is too smart for. Apples and fresh greens just compost away in there...

At any rate, we've been eating well enough.

I'd never thought I'd say that I'm desperately sick of asparagus. My after-dinner pee has smelled like burnt rubber for 3 1/2 weeks. Steamed, buttery, garlicky, pureed, topped with stinky cheese...no more asparagus til next Spring, please.

Had yummy Polish sausage from the woman at the A2 farmer's market. Lots of fresh salad greens.
Made fresh mozzarella for Father's Day. Made the dish with moz slices, tomato slices, fresh basil leaves, olive oil and lots of salt and pepper. Sheesh, isn't it a Caprese Salad? It's totally gone from my head right now. At any rate, it was really good. It was so easy and fun to make the cheese. I did invest in rubber gloves because it's really hot when you're squeezing all the whey out.

Lots of eggs, toast and strawberries lately. Mama has been gone a lot again. Daddy-O is camping and Grandma has been helping with the kids again. Easy stuff to eat.

We have maybe 5 pounds of jasmine rice from the Indian grocery that I bought last year. I usually prefer brown rice but we're out. Now the jasmine rice seems like treasure. Using it sparingly(as opposed to our normal 3-4 times a week for rice consumption). There is no rice grown in Michigan. I have heard stories of wild rice growing in the U.P., but then someone else said they heard only American Indians can harvest it. Doesn't matter, I'm not going to the U.P. to find rice anytime soon.

But what's a girl to do for starch?
There are some very teeny early red skin potatoes for sale at market, but they're pricey and very small. I thought of digging up one red skin potato plant of ours, but I'd be so mad at myself if they were teeny tiny.

I got a really yummy cold cereal recipe from a farmer that specializes in heirloom corn (for eating and cornmeal), spelt and wheat flours. He has a grist mill and farm in Nashville, MI. The spelt flour was really tasty. The recipe is essentially batter for two 9 by 13 cakes. Bake them, let them cool, crumble them up, and then let them dry out in a 250 degree oven until the crumbs are crispy. There's you cereal!
S calls it Crumble Cake Cereal. It stays crunchy in milk, but not break-your-teeth-tasteless like Grape Nuts. Not terribly sweet either, but just right.
When I'm not so tired I'll try to post a link to that farmer's site. He's traveling to different farmer's markets around the state and it doesn't look like he'll be back around here again this summer.

All right, I have to go wash my Arbonne Sea Mask off my face. That seemed like the perfect thing to do when I'm very tired and expecting my phone to ring in the middle of the night---again.

Eating Local with a Job?... Mrs. Kingsolver?

So I have quickly realized that living up to Animal, Vegetable Miracle and Plenty
can sometimes be a little difficult. I don't remember either book discussing whether or not they held jobs besides being free-lance writers.

This past week I was pretty much away from home for 3 straight days attending two births. The day I returned home I was starving. I was so tired after finishing up birth #2 that I just needed to come home instead of eating something at the folk's house. So I came home and declared we needed to go to Sidetrack for a bowl of chili. I wolfed that down, came home and slept for 5 hours. Woke up at 7pm, ate some scrambled eggs and went back to bed at 9pm to sleep through the night.

Since I'm the more at-home parent around here (but one that could be called away at any time), I'm in charge of meal planning and daily bread making. When I'm not home, meals usually turn into scrambled eggs (always at least 6 dozen in the fridge at any one time)and local bacon on toast (if there's any bread left over).

My mom helped watched the kids during my absence this week, so they ate a lot of Flavor-Ice popsicles, hot dogs and beans, lemonade, etc.

I was feeling like a sellout for already being so lax when uber tired, but I can't be hard on us. Eating out here and there is forgivable, in my book. I fight feeling guilty about a lot of other things in my life, what I eat isn't going on the list, damn it.

In the meantime, on the good days where I have had more than 2 hours of sleep, the food is local and very, very tasty.
This weekend at the Farmer's Market, I realized that the real-deal farmers with greenhouses already have items for sale that won't be ready in my garden for at least another 6 weeks. Things like gorgeous tomatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, baby onions and baby garlic. Other things that are ready now without the help of a greenhouse are sugar snap peas, strawberries galore, every green spring green imaginable, rhubarb and more.

Last Monday, G, little E and I went strawberry picking. The strawberry farm also had sugar snap peas for picking. We picked a bushel of peas and 40 pounds of strawberries. Very yummy, sweet strawberries. My daughter made a slightly snarky comment about how small they were in comparison to the big ones that are shipped to Michigan from California that are commonly sold in grocery stores here.
Then she tried one and noticed how amazing they taste. So different from the big ones that are always hollow; pretty and red, but hollow and tasteless.
The strawberries picked from the next town over are small, red, and so sweet. We used to going picking when I was a kid, but I haven't been since that time. It needs to become a yearly trip for our family.

The sugar snap peas were also yummy. So sweet and crisp! The only problem was picking up the strings and stems all over the house and back deck as the kids ate them and put their left-overs where ever they happened to be ("I was gonna throw it away later Mom!").

We froze a lot of the peas and strawberries. I attempted making strawberry jam, but I don't think I let it cook down enough. It never thickened up like jam should. Instead I have 9 jars of really tasty strawberry syrupy stuff. We've been using it on pancakes, waffles and on our strawberry shortcake. (Bought an awesome angel food cake from some Amish kid on Saturday at market. Again, I'm sure their ingredients weren't 100% local, but I wanted that cake and I'm allowing these sorts of things from the farmer's market.)

Other things bought at the market: bacon, ham steak, Polish sausages, spelt flour (locally grown and milled), broccoli, cauliflower, tomatoes and that awesome Amish angel food cake.

Alright, they kids are awake and I need to make our daily bread, literally.

Tuesday Market

Went to the Tuesday afternoon farmer's market with little E on the back of the bike.
It always amazes me how I will spend exactly what is in my pocket whenever I carry actual cash. I always spend less when it's taken off my card, out of my checking account.
At any rate, for $30 I bought: a dill plant, asparagus, spinach, raw milk goat's feta (local), green onions, apples (sign said they were grown in Michigan, but they looked too good to have been wintered over- didn't have the nerve to ask and little E really wanted them), coffee (clearly not locally grown, BUT it was locally roasted)and a mason jar of BBQ sauce. I'm not as hardcore as Barbara Kingsolver. The ingredients in the BBQ sauce are not local, I'm sure. But the old woman selling it was super sweet and our daughter really loves BBQ sauce.

For dinner we had cube steak (which I've not had for at least 18 years or so-it was surprisingly quite good and not freaky-grisly), spinach/greens mix salad with green onions, and baked potatoes (not spring potatoes, but left-over store bought ones), with locally made sour cream, topped with more green onions. It was quite the American meat-and-potatoes meal, but it was really tasty.

I'm supposed to go the Wednesday market for bacon for my husband. He normally makes wrap sandwiches for his lunch at work using prosciutto and greens. Local bacon has to take the place of the prosciutto. He uses only one strip of bacon per wrap, so it lasts a while. Plus, it's incredibly salty making a little go a long way.

My former 7 year stretch vegetarian self can't believe I wait for Wednesdays to buy bacon or that there's half a freezer chest full of animal meat in the basement. Oh well.

I swear I want someone to make me a tshirt that says: What Would Laura Do? with a silouette of Laura Ingall's Wilder on there. Between growing our own and being a midwife, I often feel like I've got a lot in common with the pioneer girl.

We've Started

June 1st arrived yesterday, and with it, our year of eating local.

So far, our garden only has lettuce and mixed salad greens to offer.

Saturday night after walking around Argo Livery and park, we celebrated May 31st (last day of eating non-local food), we stopped off at Krogers to get marshmallows, Hershey bars, grahams crackers and sushi. We had a fine backyard evening fire pit complete with sticky fingers, mosquito bites and a shared can of Fosters. Good times, good times.

Last Wednesday we picked up our quarter cow. There's a ton of beef in the freezer downstairs! While I'm wowed by how much comes from a 1/4 cow, I still have this feeling of: don't eat it all! It has to last!

We have some lamb left too. We're up to our eyeballs in eggs, and unfortunately, one of the kids doesn't like to eat eggs (or hamburger!).

Today at Zingermans' Creamery I bought the mozzarella cheese making kit for $27. It makes 30 3/4 pound batches of mozzarella. I also bought the hard cheese making kit with sealing wax for $30. Making hard cheese is supposed to be more difficult than soft, but I figured it was worth the investment. I prefer hard cheese to soft.

So I'm sure we'll have pictures of our cheese making attempts in the very near future.