Lifescapes

First Frost & Green Tomato Pie

The temperature dipped to around 31 degrees ("around," because it varied from place to place in the garden) early Saturday morning, with the colder air at ground level. I covered the tomato vines but also took the precaution of bringing in the larger green tomatoes. I baked our annual "first frost" green tomato pie, which always signals the end of summer for me. It's my mother's recipe, slightly revised--I always think of her as I make it. The pecans are from Bill's harvest (a big one this year), so the major ingredients are from right here at Meadow Knoll.

Mom's Green Tomato Pie

5 c. peeled and sliced green tomatoes
3 tbsp. butter or margarine
2 tbsp. lemon juice
1 c. sugar
2 tbsp. cornstarch
1/4 tsp. salt
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. nutmeg
1/4 tsp. cloves
1/4 tsp. ginger
1/2 cup chopped pecans

Saute the tomatoes in the butter and lemon juice until just tender. Combine tomatoes with sugar, cornstarch, salt and spices. Stir in pecans. Let cool. Line 9" pie pan with pastry, pour in filling, dot with butter and cover with top crust. Bake at 450 degrees 10 minutes then reduce to 350 degrees and bake until crust is brown (about 35-40 minutes).

I wrapped the rest of the tomatoes in newspaper and stashed them to ripen. Last year, I ate the final fall tomato on New Year's Day. The summer squash are a different story. The frosted vines have gone into the compost and we're finishing the last of the crop in a fritatta tonight. But there are still beans to pick (snap and dry). And the Amish pole peas are going crazy. The temps are warming (88 forecast for today), and with luck, the next frost is 2-3 weeks away. So we're looking forward to good garden veggies for several more weeks.

Reading note. Of the tomato or love apple, I know very little. It is chiefly employed as a sauce or condiment. No one, it is believed, regards it as very nutritious; and it belongs, like the mushroom and the potatoe, to a family of plants, some of the individuals of which are extremely poisonous. Some persons are even injured, more or less, by the acid of the tomato.--The Young House-keeper, by William Andrus Alcott (1846)

Food from the garden: green beans

We love green beans, especially these McCaslan beans, which seem to have more flavor than the Kentucky Wonder I've grown in other years. These seeds came from Southern Exposure. I planted them the third week of August, and they're bearing heavily now. The story goes that this variety was grown by the McCasland family, in Georgia, well before 1900. They're good as green snap beans and as shelly beans, and what we don't eat fresh, I put into the freezer. (Blanch three minutes, cool fast in cold water, freeze.) The plants are open pollinated, so I can save seeds and plant again in the spring 2011 garden.

Tonight, we're having these cooked with ginger, garlic, and onions. Bill always likes his beans cooked longer/softer than I do, so I scoop mine out of the sauce and let his cook a bit longer.

1 pound fresh green beans
1 tablespoon vegetable oil
2 tablespoons minced fresh ginger or 2 tablespoons candied ginger
8 cloves garlic, minced

1/4 cup chopped onions
1/3 cup chicken stock (boullion okay)

Wash the beans, trim the ends, and cut into 2" pieces. Arrange beans over vegetable steamer and place over boiling water. Cover and steam 5-6 minutes, until the green beans are tender crisp. Drain beans and set aside. Heat oil. Add ginger, garlic, and onions, and sauté until onions are translucent. (Watch: garlic burns easily.) Add chicken stock, stir. Add beans, cook 4 minutes stirring occasionally. 4 servings.

Reading note. Weather means more when you have a garden. There's nothing like listening to a shower and thinking how it is soaking in around your green beans. --Marcelene Cox

Blog Action Day: Water

Today is Blog Action Day. Around the world, bloggers are posting about one of our most important environmental and social challenges: water depletion. I'm joining the effort.

In my garden, this is my connection to water. And of all my garden tools, the hoses--and the well and the electrical water pump they connect to and the aquifer that flows underground--rank right up there as my "most useful" tools and resources. Without them, it would be harder to water my garden beds. (Buckets of water are heavy. The creek is about 100 yards away. In the summer, it is usually dry.)

And since we live on the 98th meridian--what Walter Prescott Webb called the "institutional fault line" between the well-watered east and the arid west--we get only about 30" a year of rain: green water, ecologists call it. Here in the Hill Country, most of our rain comes in November/December, when I'm growing winter table greens, and again in May (if we're lucky) when the spring garden is coming on. The rest of the year, I'm using blue water--water from the Trinity aquifer, which flows about 400 feet underground. The water it carries is mostly fossil water, stored over millenia, and only a little (5%) from recent rains. It flows slowly and recharges slowly.

And the Trinity is in trouble. In the 25 years we've lived here, we've seen changes in our water level and availability. If we pump too much, the pump stops until the area around the bottom of the well-pipe refills with water. We've learned how to be water-frugal, how to conserve, how and when to water the garden and Bill's pecan trees. We've shortened our showers and we never, ever water our grass. I've gotten rid of all those water-hog exotic landscape plants, too. What we have now is a native xeriscape. The plants make it or they don't. If they don't, they're replaced with something that will survive on green water.

But we're not the only ones using this precious bluewater aquifer. Over the next 50 years, the Trinity is projected to be one of the most stressed aquifers in Texas, with large areas seeing steep drops in water levels. As more development occurs, more households and businesses are pumping Trinity's blue water. There are (gasp!) swimming pools by the 100s in upscale housing developments here. There are spray irrigation pumps for golf courses and lawns. People are using this resource without understanding it, and they are overusing it. Like other depleting resources here in Texas (oil, to name the most significant), our aquifers are dwindling. Texans need to know this. We all need to know what's happening and why and what the consequences are.

Which raises these questions. Do you know where your water comes from? Do you know what happens to it after it goes down your drain? Do you know whether it is an endangered and depleting resource in your area? If so, are you doing what you can to conserve it? If you can't answer these questions, it's time you did some research and took the appropriate personal action. Today is a good day to begin.

Reading note. To people who think of themselves as God's houseguests, American enterprise must seem arrogant beyond belief.  Or stupid.  A nation of amnesiacs, proceeding as if there were no other day but today.  Assuming the land could also forget what had been done to it.  ~Barbara Kingsolver

 

Monarchs in the woods

The monarchs are visiting our woods this week, and I thought I'd share an entry from my new book, An Extraordinary Year of Ordinary Days. This is the entry for October 12, 2008.

Bill called me to follow him into the woods yesterday evening to see an extraordinary sight: a chokecherry tree full of monarchs. This is the butterflies’ migration season, and we’re lucky to live along their flyway. In the spring, the adult females lay their eggs on the milkweed plants in our meadows. In the fall, when the temperatures up north begin to drop, a new generation flies south to a winter home in Mexico, to a place they’ve never seen, a tiny, sixty-square mile space on the face of our planet, navigating (scientists think) by the angle of the sun.

For the past few days, the woods have been full of drifting patches of bright colors, sifting like cheerful autumn leaves through the branches. Now the butterflies--delicate, fragile, yet powerful enough to fly two thousand miles--are asleep in the chokecherry tree, hanging silently and motionless, orange wings folded, clustered thickly as if for protection or solace. An oddly moving sight, so many vulnerable creatures clinging together. I think of the perils they’ve survived already: agricultural chemicals, Bt-laced corn pollen drifting onto the milkweed they eat, the moving vehicles they collide with. I think of the long journey ahead of them and measure that almost incomprehensible distance against their fragility, their tiny size, and am awed.

 

Reading note.  I have read about butterfly trees, these ancient inns that mark the migration routes of the monarchs . . . The butterflies hanging on for dear life . . . have never seen the Michoacán mountains, and they probably never will. And yet, that one high valley in Mexico is their alpha and omega, the reason for and the meaning of their brief tenure on earth. Chances are they will never know why they do what they do, or how their part fits into the whole. Just like us.--Anne Batterson

An Extraordinary Year

People have been asking me about this book--what it's about, why I wrote it--and (they don't say this, but I'm sure they're thinking it), why they should read it.

I've been journaling since 1968, when I moved out to Berkeley to go to graduate school. I've journaled in notebooks, on the computer (after 1985), in dream journals, garden journals, exercise journals, reading journals, and more. For many years, journaling was an obsession. It has always been a friend and companion. In 2008, after I finished writing my memoir, Together, Alone, I looked around for a new nonfiction writing project, and decided I'd keep a journal for publication--which is different (by far!) than keeping a private journal.

An Extraordinary Year  is the result. It's a full year of entries: what I'm doing, writing, reading, thinking. It's about my book travels, my fiftieth high school reunion, my garden, our terrible drought. In many ways, 2008 was a landmark year for me. I was entering my 69th year, and when I began the journal, I thought it would be mostly about growing older, coming to terms with my age. But that isn't what happened, for 2008 was truly an extraordinary year--not just for me, but for you, and for all of us. There was the presidential election, of course, a huge excitement. But there was also the not-so-thrilling stock market crash, the bursting of the real estate bubble, and the shrinkage in our retirement accounts. (Remember?) We were fighting two wars, and a third war, on "terror." (Whose terror?)

But for me, what really made the year extraordinary was my growing awareness of the looming crises of climate change and resource depletion and the impact of these things on our industrial, fossil-fueled food system. You can track that awareness in my reading, which I've catalogued by month, and in an appendix at the end of the book. For me, that was one of the most important outcomes of my extraordinary year--and I have to wonder whether I could have captured it, and its impact on my life, if I hadn't been keeping the journal.

In a postscript written six months after the end of that memorable year, I write this: "Life isn't a novel with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Life just keeps on keeping on, smuggling in new beginnings, muddling the middles, and offering counterfeit conclusions that don't resolve much of anything." In other words, you can't really mark off a year and say, "Wow. This is it. This is a STORY."

But my journal for 2008 gave me an extraordinary sense of being a witness to a huge story, to what may be the most important chapter in the history of our species: beginning to realize that our resources aren't infinite, that our planet is very small, and that we are as capable of destroying it as we are of redeeming it from the destruction we've already begun.

What a year. What an extraordinary year, what extraordinary realizations. And for me, in my own life, eternal questions: What does it mean? And what ought I to do about it?

 

 

Carrot seed-strips

Dunno about you, but planting teensy seeds is not one of my favorite gardening chores. I either sow too thinly or too thickly. Seed strips are the best way to plant carrots and other small-seed veggies that I have found. And this chore (part of it, anyway), I can do at the kitchen table.

I cut strips of single-ply paper towel, drop blobs of cornstarch "glue" on the strips, drop on the seeds, let dry, and plant the strips. The glue: mix 1/2 cup water and a heaping spoonful of cornstarch in a measuring cup, zap for about a minute in the microwave, stir and let cool. It'll be glue-like, but water soluble.

When I plant the carrot seed-strips, I cover them lightly, then cover the row with a strip of burlap. The burlap helps to keep the soil moist while the seeds are germinating and is easily removed when the plants begin to emerge.

We like our carrots sliced, steamed, and seasoned with butter, candied ginger, and a bit of orange marmalade. Yum. And there's nothing sweeter than carrot cupcakes! (Scroll down the page for the recipe.)

Nuts!

Bill didn't expect a large pecan harvest this year, because the trees typically bear in alternate years. But the drought must have thrown their calendars out of synch, because it looks like we're going to get about fifty-sixty pounds. He has about 30 trees, of five different varieties (Kiowa, Choctaw, Goertz, Dobie, Desirable). The shucks are beginning to split, which means that harvest is about two weeks away. The nutcracker is his favorite of the 70 antique crackers in his collection: a Potter cracker, made before 1940 in Sapulpa OK.

I definitely see pecan pies and spiced pecans in our future.

Spiced Pecans

4 cups pecan halves
1/4 cup butter, melted
1 teaspoon chile powder

1 teaspoon worcestershire sauce
2 teaspoons garlic powder

1 teaspoon onion powder

1 teaspoon salt (can be omitted)

Preheat oven to 325:F. Mix all ingredients and spread on cookie sheet. Bake 20 - 30 minutes, stirring once or twice. Drain on paper towel.