Old Food

For lunch today, I dolloped kim chi onto egg-roll wrappers, rolled them up and fried them. I made the kim chi myself. This evening, I jarred and refrigerated sauerkraut that I made myself and I pickled some fresh beets. One jar of beets I am pickling with vinegar, sugar, and spices. The other, I am pickling with whey. I "made" the whey myself from yogurt. Typically, I think of whey as a byproduct of cheesemaking, but in this case the cheese was the byproduct--a tangy cream cheese. Before going to bed, I set some black beans to sprouting.

So, what's going on?

Well, for most of my adult life, I have enjoyed cooking and food prep. and I have always felt like the way we buy and prepare food around these parts is pretty disconnected from they way most humanity has and does handle food. I am grateful for the grocery store and that is still where the majority of my food comes from. But I do think that, when the way we approach food is radically different than most of human experience, we have to be somewhat alienated from that experience and the humans who are part of it. As someone who values tradition, I really want to better understand food traditions.

So last year, Skylar and I started a garden. This year it is about double the size but still pretty small. We also got off to a bumpy start with the summer crops, so while dad is Tweeting that he has green tomatoes on the vine, we are thrilled that our plants have cleared eight inches. However we did plant early and late spring crops this year, which is progress.

But the whole preservation and fermenting kick comes from my recent read of Nourishing Traditions (subtitle excised because it is self-contridictory and embarrassing). This is where have learned about fermentation in the history of food culture. So far I have fermented carrots, cabbage, and beets. I look forward to cucs (pickles), tomatoes (ketchup), mushrooms (mushroom ketchup, if you can imagine), and just about every other vegetable I can get my hands on.

Also, we are kombucha-brewin' nuts now. I don't know where I first heard about this fermented tea, but Nourishing Traditions talks about it and I educated myself on the Web. Coincidentally, cousin Zach took a class, so a got a starter culture from him, have multiplied that, and now have three gallons fermenting on staggered schedules.

We bought a dorm fridge at a pawn shop to hold all of my glass jars of fermented/brewed stuff.

Sprouting nuts, seeds, and legumes is apparently another traditional way of getting max nutrients from those foods.

There is a method to my madness. Jaime has a crazy digestive system and it seems that Simon may have inheritted some of it. We have verified via testing by a gastroenterologist that she has an over abundance of some sort of bad flora in her gut. She had begun a regiment of heavy-duty antibiotics to kill this off, but had to stop it due to other health issues. Well, fermented foods are a benifit here in a couple of ways: fermenting using the methods I am learning is pro-biotic. Fermentation increases the growth of the bacteria that are beneficial to your digestive system--some of the same bacteria in live-culture yogurt. Additionally, fermentation is, essentially partially pre-processing food, making it easier for your system to digest.

Anyway, all that stuff is out there on the nets and in various books. Fact is, I love the taste fermented foods like kim chi and kraut and I love making stuff from scratch as much as possible. I am spending scads of time in the kitchen, but I find it very satisfying.

Then of course, there is bread making, which has actually slowed down for me since determining that really great tasting bread requires long rising times. I need to work out the best way to work my schedule with that.

I dream of a life of growing things--vegetables fermenting, kombucha brewing, cheese aging, bread rising, and beer brewing in the house and fruits, vegetables, chicken, rabbits, and whatever else growing outside. Children and grandchildren growing both in and outside (but mostly outside). I have been reading Sharon Astyk's blog and would love to have something similar, but in town. Whether or not I realize that dream, anything I do to grow/make my own food is incredibly satisfying.

I'm hungry now.

I had a farm in Africa

Tomorrow, David and I leave for Wichita for the 2009 Parish Life Conference of the Region of Ambiguous Status formerly known as the Diocese of Wichita and Mid-America. I'll spend my day doing grown up things, like listening to annual reports, while David goes to the Zoo. He was feeling nervous about it because he thinks that he is afraid of crowds of people he does not know. Nevermind that you can give him scads of examples where he OWNS crowds of people he doesn't know. I finally pointed out to him that he is just feeling nervous--that his chest is a bit tight and he has a weird feeling in his stomach, but that is not the same thing as fear. I told him that the game is to see how long it takes for that feeling to go away. He was certain it would take ten years. I estimate 10-15 minutes. Plus, I told him he gets to ride a bus, which cheered him right up.

Jaime and Simon, meanwhile are going to Kansas City to drop in on Friends.

Then, David and Head back here Friday night, hook up Simon and the Esteses and head to the Next Annual Smoky Hill River Festival.

I am not taking a computer with me, so beyond what I can Tweet, I will not be updating. I know, what are you going to do without daily updates, right? It'll be like the bad ol' days earlier this week. Instead I am taking a book to pass the down times. The Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library mailed me a copy of "Out of Africa." Apparently, I requested it. I don't recall doing that. But they sent it to me right on the heals of a notice that I have about 15 overdue items. Enabling, that is all I can say.

Also, my camera is broken, so I won't be documenting anything that way, either.

Priorities

What does it say about us that Jaime's Amazon.com wish list combined with mine still contains fewer items than our Netflix cue?

busta rhymes, sunbeam

Back at Christmastime, Granny Great gave David a book of children's Sunday School songs that includes a little electronic music box. It has buttons for each song and plays them in that high-pitch mobile-phone ringer timbre. He enjoyed it mildly at the time, but about a month ago, it became his most favorite book ever. So, we spend a portion of our bedtime routine running through the songs that I first learned in the basement of West Side Baptist Church. All except "Jesus Wants Me For A Sunbeam." I had heard of this song before, but I hadn't ever actually heard it. In my humble opinion--and I think Jesus would agree with me--this is a terrible song. Equal parts half-boiled sentimentalism and neo-gnostic-cabalistic mysticism set to a tune so catchy that I need a drill to get it out of my head.

So, I won't sing it.

So, it is David's favorite.

He attempts to push the "Sunbeam" button over and over while I block it with my thumb and insist that I won't sing it. Eventually, he gets past my thumb and pushes it. The music plays, he prompts me "sing daddy," I remind him that I refuse, and sit in silence. I suspect he loves this game. Someone has been singing it for him, though, because he knows most of the words.

The high point is "Jesus Loves Me." I will concede that, as poetry goes, this is not a great hymn, but I learned it just moments before I learned to be critic, so it falls into the sacred realm of "good because of nostalgia" along with the Thompson Twins. In David's mouth, it becomes the hymn of the Angels. He still doesn't have much sense of tune or rythm, so he provides a churchy, hip-hop, Orkish-war-cry interpretation. This morning, I was putting my shoes on, getting ready to leave for work when I heard him get out of bed upstairs and pad across his room to the song book. Then, the "Jesus Loves Me" ringtone starts and I can hear him singing/rapping. It's no St. Symeon The New Theologian, but it is more praying than I did this morning.

But "Jesus Loves Me" is not his only rhyming. I recently picked up a copy of Mother Goose rhymes, which is now the other half of his bedtime routine. His favorites are the songs like "Three Blind Mice" and "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep," as well as "The Man in the Moon," "Humpty Dumpty," and the one that ends "How do you do, how do you do, how do you do again." When we get to "Jack be nimble" he always points to the picture of Jack and asks what he is doing, then I read the poem and he asks again, and I read the poem, and on and on until I decide to turn the page. Most of these he knows partially or completely and we can recite them together while playing.

As you know, I am a language-development fan, so it thrills me to hear David tackle these little ditties. Additionally, singing with David and reading Mother Goose (he calls it "Another Goose") fits that idealistic vision of parenthood that I held before becoming a parent. Most of those dreams get dashed by inconvenient reality, but any frustration simply melts away when I hear my two-year-old work out the line, "With supping cold plum porridge" while sitting on my lap in a rocking chair at sunset.

later, sunbeam fans