Melissa | Growing Green Nutrition – Page 23

Creamy celeriac soup

Nothing says fall is here like beautiful (or slightly funky, in the case of celeriac) root vegetables and chilly weather that invites turning on the oven to roast said veggies.

This recipe started with a desire to make a creamy soup based on celeriac (AKA celery root). Celeriac is a rather humble vegetable.

Beneath the dirt and gnarly exterior is some good stuff. (We sell a lot of our celeriac to Five Bistro; it’s on the menu now, in fact!)

You can always chop up veggies, boil, and puree them, but basing the soup on roasted veg really amps up the flavor. I discovered that starting with a covered dish for the first twenty minutes of roasting, followed by spreading the vegetables in a single layer on a baking sheet and roasting for an additional 30-40 minutes, worked really well for both celeriac and carrots.

I used a fairly generous amount of oil for roasting and generous butter for sauteing the leeks. This approach yielded a rich, creamy soup without actually requiring cream.

CREAMY CELERIAC SOUP
Recipe by Melissa
Serves 4-6

Ingredients

2-3 celeriac, depending on size
8 carrots (you won’t use all of these in the soup, but you won’t regret having extra roasted carrots, trust me!)
1 large leek
4-5 small potatoes (or equivalent larger)
1 bay leaf
butter and/or olive oil
salt & pepper

Directions
Preheat the oven to 425° F. Prep the celeriac by cutting off the tough outer layer, then cutting into large chunks. In a large, lidded Pyrex baking dish, toss the celeriac chunks with olive oil and salt. Bake in covered dish (use a baking sheet set on top of the pan or aluminum foil if you don’t have a lidded dish) for about 20 minutes.

Prep the carrots by cutting into carrot sticks. Wash and chop the leeks.

Once the celeriac has roasted in the covered baking dish for 20 minutes, use a slotted spoon to transfer to an oiled baking sheet (minus any accumulated liquid in the pan). Roast on the baking sheet, uncovered, for 30-40 more minutes, stirring once.

In the same baking dish you used for the celeriac, toss the carrots with some olive oil, cover, and roast for 20 minutes. After 20 minutes, follow same procedure for transferring to a baking sheet and roasting, uncovered, for an additional 30 minutes.

Chop the potatoes (large chunks), and cook with a bay leaf and 5-6 cups of water, and 1 t. salt.

Saute the leeks in butter, over low heat.

Once your celeriac and carrots are roasted, potatoes are boiled, and leeks are sauteed, you’re ready to blend. For this soup, I pureed all of the potatoes, most of the celeriac (reserved some to chop smaller and add to the soup as chunks), most of the leeks (again, reserved some to garnish the soup), and about 1/4 of the total carrots I roasted. Use the cooking water from the potatoes as your broth (just remember to remove the bay leaf before pureeing!).

Working in batches, blend until you have a nice, smooth, creamy soup. Add more or less of the broth (or additional water) to reach a consistency of your liking. Salt and pepper to taste, and add the reserved leeks and celeriac chunks.

We rounded out the meal with a side of greens and [whole wheat] bread spread with roasted garlic. Oh, and some of the extra roasted carrots!

Raising a child in an apartment

There must be thousands (millions?) of people raising kids in apartments, but among my friends and acquaintances, we’re somewhat of an anomaly. I can think of exactly one other apartment-dwelling family-with-kids that we know in St. Louis. Other than that, it seems that by the time children enter the picture, there’s a house involved. While in many ways, I’m in no hurry to buy a house, raising a kid in a multi-family building presents some challenges, mainly involving noise.

We live in a two-family duplex/flat with wood floors. We intentionally chose a second-floor space, in part because it tends to be quieter on top, compared to living on lower levels with people walking around above you. That said, there is very little up-down sound insulation, and sounds carry both ways.

In the beginning, when Gabriel was younger, the challenge mainly came from noises below, and my concern that they would wake him. As he’s gotten older, the noise he makes being an energetic little person — walking, marching, running, jumping, dancing, knocking down blocks — has become an increasing issue. The sounds don’t bother me at all, and would be a complete non-issue in a house, but I totally get that, for our neighbor downstairs, they are loud, unpleasant, and annoying.

The question is what to do about it. We ARE actively looking to buy a house, but given our land and location requirements (and the fact that we’ve already been looking for years, since before G was born), it doesn’t seem that that will happen anytime soon.

We could look at rental houses, but I imagine that a rental house that is similar size and quality as our apartment would be out of our budget (and the cost and hassle of an extra move — oof!).

If the noise downstairs is really as bad as I imagine it to be, I’m somewhat surprised that our neighbor hasn’t moved, but that would not solve anything for us, because there would just be another tenant.

Measures to minimize noise

Using area rugs might help somewhat, but they’re not going to cover everything, and I don’t want the hassle of keeping them clean (cleaning wood floors is soooo easy). So we probably won’t go this route.
We’ve been trying to keep Gabriel out of the bedrooms (which are above our neighbor’s bedroom) in the morning, especially on weekends.
Now that it’s cooler, we’re encouraging Gabriel to wear his slippers, which might offer some sound dampening.

Kids will be kids?

While we discourage blatantly loud, unnecessary activities, like repeatedly banging his wooden blocks on the floor or shouting inside the house, we’re not willing to suppress or discourage the normal sounds that come with being an exuberant, happy, active child.

Focusing overly on the noise, e.g., asking Gabriel to walk quietly, is stressful for us, and it often seems to produce the opposite behavior. We try to explain that we’re doing this “to be respectful of our neighbor,” but at three, he just doesn’t quite get it.

Still stressed

Overall, our neighbor has been patient and understanding (and we try to respond in kind to sounds that travel up to us). We’ve talked with her about the accommodations we’re trying to make. Still, the ongoing worry about the noise we’re generating makes me feel stressed and “yuck.” The fact that our neighbor is being bothered by sounds that we can’t totally eliminate also creates a dynamic where it’s very hard for us to bring up reverse concerns.

Having a little person means that we are not ideal neighbors. I wish I could magically create a sound barrier between the first and second floor units, but short of that, I guess I’ll just have to make my peace, as best as I can, with the situation.

I’d love to hear from others who have been in similar situations, whether you were the one with kids or the one living with sounds from other kids in the building.

Growing big, beautiful onions

I must say that, as the end-user, the larger onions Matthew grew this year are fabulous. It’s a lot easier peeling one big[ger] onion than lots of tiny ones — this chef is very happy! Now on to the guest post by Matthew . . . .

I’ve been trying to grow an onion that I’m satisfied with for years. I kept getting small onions. Finally, this year, things went well. I started last December by planting four seeds per 1.5″ x 1.75″ soil block. I believe this careful regular spacing was important. Previous years I scatter-seeded and wound up with plants too dense to grow well. This year I got nice thick pencil-sized of onion starts for transplanting.

I grew Aussie Brown, Stuttgarter, Brown Spanish, Red Amposta, Bronze Amposta, Valencia, and Sierra Blanca. The Bronze Amposta, Valencia, and Sierra Blanca are sweeter onions without a lot of storage life, but they produced very well for me. The Bronze Amposta is supposed to have a 3-6 month storage life, so that’s probably my best bet of the bunch, and what I focused a lot of production on this year.

This year was also complicated by a trip out of town right when the Ampostas and the Valencias were wanting to finish growing. I compromised and harvested most early, to avoid risk of them rotting in the ground, but I left a few Valencias to see what happened, and, wow, did they bulk up in that last two weeks the others didn’t get. Granted that could have also been all the extra space they had, but I expect it was mostly the time . . . .

As you see, my Valencia late harvest was the champion. The Bronze di Amposta may have rivaled them had I let them keep growing. The Sierra Blanca mostly grew to maturity, so I think that is about the size I can expect.

I’ll probably keep brown Spanish in the mix as a longer storage onion (10 months), and do a very few of the others I grew this year to repeat the experiment, but I think I have my primary four onions I’ll be growing unless any other onion wows me.

These were transplanted out at 6” spacing, kept well weeded, and heavily mulched with leaves as soon as they were big enough. I think I might mulch first and plant through the mulch next year.

I’m also growing leeks, shallots, Egyptian (top-setting) onions, and potato onions (from SESE). Leeks and Egypt onions for greens are certain keepers. So far the shallots and potato onions are looking pretty good, too.

Mindfulness Part II

When I wrote my initial post on mindfulness practice, I was a little over two weeks into the 6-week program at Masterpeace Studios. Our group, which meets for two hours on Monday nights, has now met four times. We took a week off of meeting between the 3rd and 4th weeks due to a conflict with the instructor’s schedule.

This break was nice for two reasons. First, it just happened to fall during a very busy week, when I was prepping for and teaching CyclingSavvy and Matthew had a couple of other weekday evening commitments. Second, the break effectively added a week to the workshop, building in an additional seven days to be held accountable for practicing.

Of course, no one is judging you, other than perhaps yourself, if you don’t practice (and you shouldn’t be judging yourself because mindfulness is all about nonjudgmental awareness), but having the workbook to record daily practice, and knowing that I am doing this as part of a group, is quite motivating.

That extra week was also the most challenging to my daily practice, given the previously mentioned busyness, but I made time for some kind of formal practice every day.

Observations
In general, I find formal practice, i.e., sitting down at a specific time with the intention of practicing, much easier than informal practice (e.g., being mindful during an activity of daily living, such as brushing your teeth or washing dishes). I picked flossing my teeth as my activity for informal mindfulness, and it’s really hard to reign-in my mind (maybe a time of day issue?).

My work situation, both working part-time and working from home, makes it fairly easy for me to fit formal practice into my day during 4/5 of weekdays. Mid-morning and mid-afternoon are pretty good times for me.

The days when I am home with Gabriel (Wednesdays and Sundays) are more challenging. On Sundays, I can get some help from Matthew during the day. On Wednesdays, I’m limited to nap time or the evening, after G is in bed.

For mindfulness of breathing, I really like guidance (i.e., listening to an audio track) to get started, but I’m finding that after 2-3 minutes, I’m ready for silence. Most guided tracks have talking (i.e., guidance) interspersed with moments of silence. To have the best of both worlds, I’ve been using a meditation timer along with the “Mindfulness of Breath” track on the CD.

Screenshot from OnlineMeditationTimer.com

I set the meditation timer for the total time I want to practice (10-15 minutes usually, at this point), start the track, and then, when I’m ready, stop the track and sit in silence with my breathing until the timer chimes.

Looking ahead
I’m not sure how I will do when the class, and the external incentive to practice, ends. Keeping a log of my daily practice seems helpful, so I plan to continue that. I’d welcome any tips or suggestions from those of you who have had success in incorporating regular meditation (mindfulness-based or otherwise) into your daily lives.

Resources
For a timer, I like OnlineMeditationTimer.com (also available as an app, if you have a phone that’s smarter than mine). Here is a link to an Awareness of Breath Meditation that is similar to the one I use. I also like this Standing Mindful Yoga sequence.

CyclingSavvy firsts

Despite the gloomy forecast heading into this past weekend (and the current, continuing rain), the weather cooperated on Saturday.

Matthew and I co-taught the on-bike portions of CyclingSavvy (Train Your Bike and the Road Tour) for the very first time. In over three years as instructors, we’ve taught the on-bike portions with other local instructors, but never together.

Big Blue also participated in CyclingSavvy for the first time (since I still haven’t, ahem, gotten my butt off the fence about a certain decision).

Big Blue proved up to the task, though we knocked over a cone on the cone weave drill (were it not for the loaded bag, we would have cleared it), and Matthew demonstrated most of the more complicated drills on a “regular” bike.

My original plan was for a picnic lunch in Tower Grove Park on a beautiful fall afternoon. Given that it wasn’t exactly a beautiful fall afternoon (pretty decent really, but chilly and damp, even though it wasn’t raining), we moved the lunch party to Sweet Art.

Six bikes would have completely blocked the sidewalk, so we created our own, impromptu on-street bike parking. A couple of our students had never been to Sweet Art before; it was fun introducing them to a local business that we enjoy.

After lunch, we finished the day with the Tour of [a small part of] South City.

Nothing quite as satisfying or tiring as a day of on-bike teaching! We finished at the church parking lot where we did the bike drills in the morning, and, in my head, there was a car waiting to take us the three miles from the church back to our house. Of course, we had biked to class, and said car was, in reality, already parked at our house. Matthew and I paused in the park for a quick snack, then tackled those last three miles.

That night, I made it to eight 0’clock, but not much later, before I passed out on the couch.

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