Author Archives: Melissa | Growing Green Nutrition

Weekend: Muny by bike and Sustainable Backyard Tour

Nothing like spot thunderstorms and showers to make summer outings interesting, but we didn’t let the weekend weather dampen our plans.

We kicked off the weekend at the Muny.  I biked over and arrived at the crack of dawn 5pm to get in line for free seats.  I felt a little silly when I pedaled up and saw next to no one in line, but I did achieve our goal of having a pick of the free seats, as well as a fairly shady spot to wait.  I needed the shade because it was HOT, especially after biking.  I’d finally started recovering from my ride when Matthew joined me, followed by a friend who’d planned the outing.

Our picnic dinner consisted of a little bit of this, and a little bit of that — leftovers that needed to be eaten and that worked well for chilled or room temperature dining.

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Clockwise, from top left: fennel mozzarella bread salad, [homemade!] soba noodles with cooked greens, broccoli salad, and a summer fruit medley (served with whipped cream).  It felt like a ton of food for two people (we shared some with our friend), but it was none too much over the course of the evening.

By the time the seats opened at 7pm, we’d just finished our dinner, and dark clouds were threatening.  We staked our seats and went back to catch the pre-show, just a big, fat raindrops began falling.

If you’re familiar with the Muny, you know there’s not a lot of cover.  We huddled under the roof at the top of the theatre, and waited out the storm (unfortunately, there was not cover for our bikes, and it was Roadrunner’s first drenching; even though we ride in the rain, I prefer to keep the bikes dry).

The skies finally cleared about twenty minutes before show time, allowing the stage crew to make everything dry and safe for the performers.  We dried our seats as best we could, and settled in for Billy Elliot.  It was a great show, though, as always, it made for a very late night for us early-birds — worth it sometimes, but probably not a weekly occurrence.

Saturday was a standard Matthew at garden, me doing stuff around here day.  I made big batches of bean burgers and English muffins.  We’re out of our homemade bread (and bread-baking is Matthew’s bailiwick — it still intimidates me), but I can do English muffins!

Sunday brought the Sustainable Backyard Tour.  Our garden was on the first annual tour in 2011 (mentioned briefly here — I looked a little different then!), but we skipped both 2012 and 2013.  It was fun to host visitors again this year.

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(photo credit to Mackenzie — I had good intentions, but didn’t get a single photo)

Of course, the weekend and tour would not have been complete without another spot rain shower.  I dashed to rescue our sign-in sheets and roll up the car windows.  Some guests dashed for their cars, while others huddled with Matthew under a big tree and managed to stay fairly dry that way.

We had 80 people on the official sign-in sheet, and we think out total number of visitors was probably close to 100!  Most frequently asked question: “Do you eat all of that food?

Recent eats and recipe: Lentil Fennel Soup

The garden is bountiful these days: loads of red and black raspberries, bunches of greens, big bulbs of fennel, and sweet, crunchy sugar snap peas.

I love eating the sugar snap peas as-is (and so does Sir), but we have enough that I felt like experimenting, so I tried this sugar snap salad recipe.  Fortunately, I had grabbed some mint from my MIL’s yard, so I was good to go (I didn’t have shallots, so I just substituted some onion).  It was a snap to make and tasty, too!

Next up, marinated fennel.  I started this on the same afternoon that I made the pea salad, planning to give the fennel a nice long marinade before using it for the next day’s dinner.  It just so happened that the fennel marinade in the recipe I wanted to try was almost identical to the dressing for the pea salad, so I just made extra and tossed it on the fennel.

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The next night, the marinated fennel paired with fresh mozzarella and grilled bread for a satisfying, summery sandwich (recipe here), shown above in a deconstructed, bread salad version that I tossed together for a picnic dinner later in the week.

We’re awash in fennel right now, so I created a lentil soup recipe to make use of the fennel, as well as some greens.

LENTIL FENNEL SOUP WITH WILD RICE
Recipe by Melissa

Ingredients

One large bulb of fennel
1-2 T. butter1-2 T. olive oil
Chopped garlic scapes or minced garlic
Oregano (dried or fresh)
1/4 t. tumeric
1/2 t. onion powder
1 t. salt
1 c. dry lentils
1/2 c. wild rice
3-4 c. loosely packed fresh spinach, washed and chopped

Directions

Cover wild rice with 2 c. water.  Bring to boil, lower heat, and simmer for 60 minutes.

Cook lentils in 4-5 cups water.  The extra cooking water will become part of the broth for the soup.  Once at a boil, simmer for about 15 minutes until tender, but not mushy.

Meanwhile, quarter fennel (discarding tough core, if present), then chop into bite size pieces.  Sauté fennel in butter and olive oil, with a bit of salt, about 10 minutes over medium heat.  Add the garlic or scapes and sauté an additional minutes, then turn off heat.

Puree about 1/3 of the cooked lentils and 1/3 of the cooked fennel with some of the extra lentil “broth.”  Combine puree and all remaining ingredients in a large pan.  Check salt and seasoning level, and adjust as desired.  Simmer 2-3 minutes to wilt spinach.

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This was good the first night, but, as is the way of soups and stews, it tasted even better for lunch two days later, after the flavors had time to meld.

 

Drive until you qualify

When Matthew returned from hell suburbia with the refrigerator, he commented that he didn’t understand how so many people could afford to live in houses like that.  Out of curiosity, I consulted Zillow to see just how much the refrigerator seller’s McMansion cost.  Here she is, in all her sprawling, conspicuous consumption-filled glory:

DevilsLair

First, SEVEN bathrooms?  SEVEN?!?!  Assuming that these people could not be bothered to have their children share a bedroom, and assuming a traditional family unit (two parents plus kids), there would be, AT MOST, six people living in this house.  Six.  Yet there are seven bathrooms?  God forbid anyone have to share a toilet.

Second, I would not live in this house, in this location, if you PAID me half a million dollars.

Third, the sellers were asking $200 for the 8-year-old, albeit very lightly used (if they were telling the truth), refrigerator.  I offered $150, partially to factor in the cost of renting a truck to pick it up.  The seller said $175 was the lowest she could go.  Really?!?  You live in a half-million-plus dollar house and you need to squeeze me for that extra $25?

Aside from that, the phrase flashing in my head was “drive until you qualify.”

“Drive until you qualify” is a real estate phrase, based on the historical trend of real estate prices being generally higher in city centers, with decreasing home prices with increasing distance, or “[a phenomenon] whereby potential homebuyers travel away from the workplace until they reach a community in which they can afford to buy a home that meets their standards” (source).

This post on “The Creation of a ‘Drive to Qualify’ World,” explains how this happened:

. . . the connection between suburbia and cheaper housing is not a law of nature: to the extent that it is true, it is true because of public policies.  Throughout America, on both the Left and the Right, it is an unstated assumption that of course, energy and transportation should be cheap, while housing should be more expensive every year.

The most obvious public subsidy to transportation is the use of general tax revenue to support new roads and public transit systems that extend into suburbia.  In addition, government tries to keep energy cheap- not just by failing to tax externalities of energy use such as pollution, but also by encouraging energy production . . . . Even though gasoline costs have increased over the past few years, they are still cheap enough to make auotmobile-dependent suburbs affordable for many.

For comparison, I searched Zillow for some similar homes (5+ bedrooms, 5+ baths) within city limits:

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To be fair, this is a VERY desirable part of St. Louis City (and one of the only neighborhoods in the city with this concentration of highly priced real estate), but you can see that for my CL seller to have a similar house in an urban, rather than suburban area, it would likely cost more than twice as much (though the historical homes mapped here are also much more home than the subdivision houses will ever be).

The hundreds of 4000+ square foot McMansions in these south county subdivisions can’t possibly all be housing big families.  Most probably have four or five (at most six) occupants.

The people who live in these subdivisions require motor vehicles to get anywhere of note (my seller had three late-model luxury cars — yay for her!), yet “people with longer commuting time report systematically lower subjective well-being” (source).  Not to mention the real physical health costs of a long car commute.

Despite the perceived notion of suburban living being “cheaper,” that is often not the case, once you factor in the cost of owning and operating a motor vehicle (see “Why Your Daily Commute is Making You Poor“).

It makes me sick that these types of developments were allowed to occur in the first place, given the up-front and on-going environmental costs, but they’ve clearly been driven by consumer demand for these showy, excessively-sized houses.

This seems nothing short of shameful, given the number of people living in poverty.  It highlights the growing economic gap, as well as a disconnect with the reality and impacts of our lifestyle choices.

——–

In case you missed it in the comments on yesterday’s post, EcoCatLady shared some uplifting development-related news.  Perhaps all is not lost . . . .

Lost in hell

The refrigerator saga continues . . .

After cleaning and some airing-out time, we decided that the second-hand smoke contaminated refrigerator we bought in April just wasn’t going to cut it.  I reposted it to Craigslist, and we sold it at a small loss (actually $5 more than the $80 we paid for the fridge, but we also paid $20 for delivery).  I was just happy to have it gone (just in time to put Roadrunner in the garage!).

Of course, the fact that it didn’t work out meant that the search continued.  I hunted through CL adds over the weekend, and found a promising option in South County.  Last night, I headed down to check it out, knowing that if it was a go, we’d have to return another time with a rental truck (despite the extra trip, we didn’t want to rent the truck not knowing if we’d buy it).

I had the address and looked up directions ahead of time, but my notes and small, rough sketched map were no match for the suburban subdivisions.  When I reached a fork in the road, I chose the left (and ultimately correct) fork, but, after driving about a mile on a hilly and curvy road, not seeing my turn-off, I decided that I should have chosen the right fork, so I turned around and back-tracked.

I repeated the hilly, curvy mile thing on the right fork, and came to a dead end.  I partially retraced my path on that road, then pulled over and called the seller.  After she figured out where I was, she told me that I needed to go back to the road that forked to the left (yes, the one I started out on), and go just a bit farther than I had initially.  Grr!

At that point, I just wanted to be done.  I didn’t want to retrace my route, and I most certainly didn’t want to return another time with a truck.  I called Matthew, teary eyed, and told him he needed to talk me out of just throwing in the towel and heading home without even seeing the fridge.

I finally decided that even though it was annoying as heck, I’d already gone most of the way to this house, so I may as well see the stupid fridge.

Hell

The entire time I was driving around this place, I couldn’t imagine who in their right mind would want to live in a place like this: no connectivity, ugly McMansions, cars required to go anywhere.  Ick. Blech. Blah.

I was also amused by the yard signs reading “No cell phone towers in my neighborhood.”  People, the picture above is not a “neighborhood,” and, if you hadn’t chosen to live out here, you might not need a cell phone tower.

Anyhow, I finally found the correct road and arrived at my destination (my gas light was starting to flicker at this point, not helping my mood any).  I took a quick look at the fridge (including sticking a thermometer in to make sure it was, in fact, cold), and told the seller we’d think about it and get back to her.

I was never so glad to leave that subdivision behind, and, later, when I crossed back into city limits, I almost cried tears of joy and relief.  The River de Poo never looked so good!

Once home, I informed Matthew that if he wanted to rent a truck and go back out there to get the refrigerator, that was fine, but I wasn’t going near that place again!

*Purchase is pending negotiations with the seller.  If Matthew does go to get it, I’ll give him very good directions — I’m actually fairly decent with directions (and quite good with nice, normal grid systems), and now that I’ve done it correctly once, I know I can do it again, I just have no desire to return to hell.

Full moon, fireflies, fennel

We kicked off the weekend with an evening bike ride on a gorgeous (slightly chilly!) June night.  Our plans were a bit up in the air — zoo music or no, gelato before or frozen custard after, was it too early [in the year] / too cold for fireflies?

We decided to save the frozen treat for the end of the night, and by the time we reached the park, it was after eight — too late for zoo music.  We did pause for a tiny bit of Shakespeare on our way to the firefly prairie, since it was still way to light for fireflies at that point.

We reached the prairie area around nine o’clock, and it was still pretty bright outside; the fireflies were just starting to flicker.  We walked around for thirty minutes as it grew darker, but then the full moon started to rise.

The fireflies put on a decent show, but not nearly as amazing as the first time we went, a number of years ago.  We’re thinking our first viewing was some combination of a particularly good year for fireflies, plus a darker night.

We left in time to make it to Ted Drewes before catching a small, local fireworks display, but when we arrived, the line for frozen custard was INsane.  If not for the fact that we were on bikes, I’m not sure we would have made it into the parking lot.  We decided we didn’t want frozen custard that badly, and continued on to the park . . .

. . . only to find that we were one night early for the fireworks.  Oh well, home and bed!

Saturday morning, I was in charge of delivering fennel to a neighborhood pizza place (their first time buying from us).  It looked something like this.FennelDelivery

Much easier on Roadrunner than trying to wrangle that load onto a standard bike!

Sunday morning, we were up and out early, to fulfill Matthew’s Father’s Day request — a visit to Shaw Nature Reserve for some outdoor time.

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Despite being relatively close (about 45 minutes in the car), it’s been years since we’ve visited, and we found some fun new features, including the Tree-mendous Bridge (above), and some lovely gardens near the old manor house on the property.

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It was a beautiful morning, and it felt like we had the place to ourselves.  We headed home for lunch before the temperature climbed too much.  (We did not envy the people sitting in the traffic jam at the Six Flags exit!)

Naps for all and a low-key afternoon and evening followed.  The garden provided much of dinner — broccoli soup, salads with shaved fennel, and pasta with carmelized fennel.  And now the week begins!