Author Archives: Melissa | Growing Green Nutrition

Craving

Wild mushroom tamales with an adobo cream sauce

Oh, Fresh Gatherings, why must you tease me this way?

The Nutrition and Dietetics department at SLU runs Fresh Gatherings — they source much of their food locally and make delicious, healthy dishes.  In a past life, I could easily walk there for lunch.  Now, lunch there is pretty much out of the question, since they’re only open on weekdays.  I torment myself by continuing to receive their weekly menu emails.  Excuse me while I wipe the drool off of my keyboard.

Carbon pawprint – link correction

Howdy.  According to the little fairies that live inside the internet, someone tried to access the article that I linked to in my “Carbon Pawprint” posts, and the link was bad.  Here is a link to the same article on another website for your reading pleasure!  My apologies for the bad link — rest assured that I will punish it accordingly.

Never too early

Think gardening only happens a few months out of the year?  Think again!  We (and by “we,” I mean my husband) planted seeds starting at the beginning of January.  That timing means that we had, at most, two months without garden-related activities (assuming you don’t count eating garden produce).  We now have little seedlings sprouting and growing under the grow lights in our kitchen.  These include the usual cool weather crops, such as broccoli, cabbage, and cauliflower, as well as spinach and onions.

In addition to providing moral support, I contributed by reading part of a book on bio-intensive gardening.  Ecology Action developed this high-yield, environmentally sound method, and it sounds pretty cool.  Consistent with last year, I wish that the garden could be in our backyard — that would increase my excitement level considerably.  Some day, right?

Days like this

I retrofitted one of our trunk bike racks, engaged in extensive planning, drove on a day I was scheduled to be a passenger in the carpool . . . all so that I could do some bike scouting for work yesterday.  All of this effort, and I arrived at the location, parked the car, and realized that my bike key?  That thing I needed to unlock my U-lock and free my bike from the bike rack?  I left it in my office, twenty miles away.

Oh, was I upset!  Thinking, “I won’t need my regular set of keys since I’ll be driving a department car, instead of my car,” I oh so cleverly left behind that one little thing that would have made all my planning and preparation fruitful.

To make matters worse, since I had planned to do my assessment by BIKE, I wore my bike shoes, which are not particularly conducive to walking.  Instead of spending my afternoon cruising around on my bike, getting a bike-level perspective of the surroundings, I spent the afternoon cruising around in a car — blah!

I recovered from this frustrating setback remarkably well, if I do say so myself, and managed to make it a productive afternoon.

My resilient attitude may have been due in part to anticipating our dinner date at Pi.  We visited their new location in the CWE for some delicious veggie pizza, a nice salad, and a great dining experience.  We don’t eat out often, but Pi — with their commitment to the environment, smoke-free policy, and great food — ranks up there with our favorites.  Day saved!

Locavore in winter

It’s been awhile since I’ve written about food, but have no fear — we’re still eating!  All of the work cleaning, cutting, blanching, and packaging vegetables and fruit really pays off during the winter.  We have frozen fruit and basil (oh, the basil!) to last until late spring (and we’re still getting local apples!).  We’re rapidly eating our way through the frozen vegetables (we knew we would not have enough to get us through the winter), but we still have a lot of butternut squash.

I highly recommend the butternut squash because it requires approximately zero effort to store — just hang it in mesh bags in the basement (to reduce the bruising that would occur if you just placed it on a shelf), and you’re good to go!  Locally grown dried beans, local eggs, and our canned pasta sauce round out the stock piles.  Oh, and the potatoes, I almost forgot the potatoes.  We have made a big dent in the 200 pounds of potatoes we harvested, but we still have some left.  At this point, we’ll be able to plant some of them as seed potatoes for this year’s crop.

Obviously, we’re not eating everything local.  I shop at the regular old grocery store for grain (including flours, pasta, etc.) and soy milk.  We finished our local onions, so those are a grocery store purchase, also.  We’re looking into a source for local, organic, pastured cow’s milk.

We continue to enjoy the monthly winter farmers’ markets.  At the January markets, we found unexpected windfalls of fresh spinach (thanks to tunnels, hoop houses, or something of the sort) — this has to be some of the best spinach ever!  Anything fresh, green, and local in the middle of January qualifies as special — bring on the salad!