Quip o' the Week

Back story: I drink a swig of apple cider vinegar five to ten minutes before each meal, as a digestive aid (part of the ongoing SIBO journey). I drank it diluted for a while, but I like the taste of vinegar in general, and I got used to ACV pretty quickly, so now I just drink it straight out of the Bragg's bottle.

Last week, I grabbed the bottle, took a big swig, and put it back in the cabinet above the stove, while I was cooking dinner for John and his sister.

My sister-in-law goes, "Whoa, did you just drink that straight?"

I say, "Yeah," and start to explain.

She cuts me off with an admiring and disbelieving head shake. "It's good to be a gansta."

Climbing uphill

Health-wise, I'm walking uphill, getting better, back to normal, my usual peak - but I'm walking extremely slowly. I have a three-day weekend and my biggest ambition for it is to catch up on laundry, and try to see Philomena. I'm not pretending I'll feel 100% come Tuesday; I'm being realistic. Maybe this is what happens when you've been eating mostly simmered meat for seven days.

But today! No more simmered meat! I sautéed it in ghee! And finished it in a hot oven. With some spaghetti squash mixed with sauerkraut, and half an avocado, it was the greatest meal of my life. Well, not quite. That was probably here. But it looked like a real meal - colors! textures! And it tasted like a real meal - flavors! Different from each other!

I forgot that yesterday I ate two boiled shrimp with my bone broth and simmered meat. Today, I ate three. Sweet as sugar.

Tomorrow, I will add a little bit of carrot juice! And cold olive oil, and by late in the day or Sunday, I'll try baking almond meal bread.

It's hard to describe both why I'm committed to this, and how I'm actually able to stick with it. It's very unlike me. That I've completed seven days, and am planning to keep going, is about as unlike me as a weeklong backpacking trip, or a weeklong vacation without any email.

But somehow - I'm doing it. Maybe it is taking the antibiotics each day, five times a day, that make me think that a Chips Ahoy, a tortilla chip in bean dip, a Twizzler, or any other of the million snacks that sit out at work, in beautiful glass jars, aren't worth it. Maybe it's my theory that sleep begets more sleep; discipline begets more discipline, on and on. So in this case, each day that passes successfully in turn strengthens my resolve to stick to the diet's rules, with even more commitment. Maybe it's that despite physical exhaustion, I feel an incredible mental clarity without sugar or grains or, sigh, chocolate. Maybe it's that somewhere in the soft, quiet, deep self, I know that this will heal my gut and I'll be able to enjoy a renewed healthy relationship with all kinds of food.

As I embark on a weekend of sweet, sweet rest - here's to hoping!

Tender

My word of the year is Nourish. (What's your word of the year? Any time you're faced with a decision, you just plug it in. What could do I right now that would be the most nourishing choice?)

But the word of today was Tender. Feeling tender hearted, tender spirited. I've been making big batches of beef broth - which is fatty, messy, and smells gross for a while and then turns into smelling amazing. So today I had beef broth and the soft meat and gelatinous parts off the soup bones for breakfast. I had a beef broth, broccoli and onion pureed soup for lunch. And I'm going to have a simmered pork soup for dinner, with bits of mushy butternut squash. I'm not certain the squash is allowed, but I'm dying for it.

My snacks were: one cup of plain, lactose-free, organic yogurt. Three big sips of the juice that my live sauerkraut is sitting in. And three small sips of lactose-free kefir.

And a lot of chamomile tea.

Tomorrow will be identical, in terms of what I am directed to eat. I'm making chicken broth, too, to have something a bit lighter in which to stew my butternut squash, onions and carrots down into mush. Oh, and I can add garlic to all this too! Excuse me one minute.

I keep thinking how this will be in five, fifteen, fifty more days - and I keep trying to stop myself. One day at a time, and who knows how quickly healing will happen? And who knows how I will feel off of sugar for that long? That's the intriguing motivation of this lone day. I'm intrigued to know what it will be like to have no sugar, no fake sugar, no maple syrup, nadda, for a few weeks. I can't imagine I've gone more than two or three days without sugar in my entire life, after the age of about 11 (when I could get my own hands on cookies). What will it feel like? And is that enough to keep me toeing the line for as long as it's going to take?

July 30: Recovery in Pommern.

(As written in my journal that day; grammar and minor edits only. Italicized portions are additions written after the trip.)

My day of rest. I sleep deeply for most of it - with a few little breaks, starting with chamomile tea (oh, blessings on the volunteer who brought it!), dry toast and the other two oh-my-god-I-am-beyond-glad-I-brought-it chicken noodle soup packets.

Today is the first cloudy day we've had in Pommern, and I can feel a rainy day restlessness set in - I wake off and on to hear the kids constantly nitpicking, arguing, sticking things in the fire - and then getting yelled at for it. Joann has come down with a terrible cold - later I learn she is 74!  I get up at one point to brush my teeth and it's enough effort to prompt a nap. I obsess all day, at any point I wake up, about the need to feel better soon - now - faster - there's only tomorrow and Thursday left! We leave Friday for Dar. Saturday night we fly away.

I read a little bit, finally finishing up with Paul, and I am happy to be done with him. At least I like when he says, "The best writers are scrupulous and pitiless observers." I've long known that "not much gets past me" but it is nice to hear Paul speak of that as a common trait among the writerly species.

The smell of cooking fires has already been a little gross to me - and today I can't take it. The smoke drifting in, and the oil I experience as rancid-smelling, though it's probably not - there were fried doughnuts for breakfast, more greens stewed in it for lunch. I've moved back into my little solo room which is great - but it is also closest to the cement-room kitchen, where cooking is half inside and half in the backyard. I think of Kimi and Bradley, and how tired of oil they are after two months in India each time, something I couldn't truly understand before - and now I can't imagine more of this, much less another six weeks. Every wafting wave of smoke or oil turns my stomach.


Mamatony brings in some mandazi at one point. "Eat! You need to eat." I want to scream at her - get that oil-soaked dough out of my face! I say, "Oh, no, Mamatony, I'm ok."

"No, no, you need strength. Eat - eat." She pushes it at me. I point at my dry toast and tell her I'm starting with that and soup. She looks at my powered soup very skeptically. I tell her that American stomachs always heal with that kind of soup, and I promise I will eat her food when I feel a little stronger, but I need to start here.


Marie gets me a Sprite from the little pop stand up the dirt road, and it is the best thing I've ever tasted. (She gets me a Coke too; also freaking delicious.) I manage to get up for dinner - a feat! - and thank god Mamatony has included plain white rice on the menu tonight. Although nothing is really plain - there's some margarine or cooking oil in this, I can feel a little sheen. I can't stop thinking about Shelly's Vegan Wrap from Elephants Deli in Portland - something tart and vinegary, with sweet grapes and crunchy apples. I lean against the wall during dinner and am happy to get back to bed - with high hopes for tomorrow.

And because if you're my mother, or happen to be someone else who is wondering... no, I didn't attempt a sun shower. So I've been lying in the same outfit, with the same dried sweat, since 4 PM on Monday, and it's now 9 PM on Tuesday, and I'm just going to ride it out until tomorrow.

July 27: Night in Ruaha.

(As written in my journal that day; grammar and minor edits only. Italicized portions are additions written after the trip.)

As an aside, we'll be the only people who leave Africa fatter than when we arrived. Margarine, peanut butter, honey, jam - all this to go with our bananas, white bread, sugared oatmeal. Our lunch in Ruaha today? A boiled potato, a roasted plantain, a pretzel bread roll, 3 carrot sticks and 1.5 ounces of chicken (hey, I'm two years valiantly attempting Weight Watchers - I can spot 1.5 ounces of chicken across the room!).

Dinner featured rice and spaghetti. We're happy to have enough to eat; almost everyone around doesn't. But blessedly having enough doesn't equal having anything healthy; we still only have what there is - and I understand "protein starved society" now.

Most of us honestly notice tighter pants already, and I laugh tonight that we'll look Tanzanian women - nearly all of whom are larger than the men, softer, rounder, plump, bellied. It is a compliment to the man who provides for her - so we'll fit right in! 

First world problem in the third world today: Sure would be nice to have that stargazer app up and running on my phone so we could ID some Southern Hemisphere stars!

July 22, Iringa to Pommern/Pommerini/Pommerine/Pommerin.

(As written in my journal that day; grammar and minor edits only. Italicized portions are additions written after the trip.)

The road out of Iringa is, at last, this "real Africa" we keep being told about by Edward. Within minutes of turning off the main paved road, the huts change. They are still stick-framed and mud-walled. But unlike the slums of Dar, they look built to last. Heavy walls and decent window openings. Thick thatched roofs. And children, everywhere children - so many I get overwhelmed. I wondered if I'd want to adopt when I saw all these kids, but I don't feel that at all. That would save one of, what?, four million? And effective 0% savior rate while taking a child of Tanzania away, maybe considered a net loss to the people living here. It might, however, be pushing me toward adopting in my own city or country, but interestingly pushes me away from international adoption thoughts.

The sky really opens up once we leave Iringa; maybe it is the anticipation of life in the village, but the air feels cleaner and thinner at the elevation. It is so dry, and the red dirt we've heard about makes its first appearance. 

The 1.5 to 2 hour drive on dirt roads from Iringa to Pommern looks like this...
Buildings that have more substance:

Stick frames, that will be filled with mud and topped with thatch:

An enormous sky, and room to breathe for the first time:

Red dirt... which will be ground into our heels, between our toes, in our beds, our eyes, our teeth, soon enough:

And dried corn fields - where corn only has one ear per stalk, and it sounds like a Halloween sound track in the breeze, all the time we're there...

Then we arrive in Pommern! The reason I gave it three names in the title post here is that there is no agreed-upon pronunciation of the village name. Pommern, like Pom-urn, is a German name from the German East Africa Lutheran missionary days. But the local people call it Pommerini, also the demonym for residents. They sometimes also call it Pommerine - rhymes with tangerine. Or, some call it Pom-er-in. The sign posts spell it "Pommern" but even many people over in Iringa were not sure where this village is. There are 4,000 residents - and the census a couple years ago showed roughly 53% of that 4,000 are ages 0 to 18. 

How John would laugh at our bedding! Twin beds with a thin sheet stretched over the "mattress" and wood frame mosquito nets... and each one with a lumpy pillow and a thick, warm, polyester animal print blanket. 

The EXACT type of blanket that John once had... called the tiger blanket because of the print... that I despised. It always felt damp, and even though it was ridiculously warm, it just grossed me out. Having these exact same disgusting-but-warm blankets makes me laugh.

Living out of a suitcase, all my gear uber-neatly organized:

The dining room table; the only place to sit in the mission house other than our beds:

This gives a sense of the house; very worn, indeed. Cold cement floors that made us grateful each night for a fire in the fireplace, even if it made us smell like campground residents all the time! The yellow basket is the trash can (there are no plastic bags to be found, and nowhere to purchase any).

The beloved tea table... tea, instant coffee (Africafe), powdered milk, powdered hot cocoa, hot water, sugar (and hot sauce, margarine, peanut butter and jam)... out 24/7 for us to get a hot drink or little snack. And hot drinks we needed! We continue to be shocked how chilly it is when the sun goes down, and well into the morning, until 11 AM or noon.

The wall of water... bottled water for all drinking, tooth brushing, and it only took about three days before we busted out the little flavor packets (Crystal Light, Mio, etc.) that it was recommended we bring, to spice up the pathetic American palates that grow bored so quickly.

Dinner tonight is chunks of stewed beef or goat, with bone and tendon still attached, in a spicy sauce and served with white rice, toast, a few canned green beans, a few slices of watermelon and some boiled greens (much like frozen spinach). The greens are "local cabbage" we're later told; it looks like a kale growing in the backyard garden (the only thing in the garden), but with less flavor and less bulk - it even tastes thin and low in vitamins to me, though it's something green and that's warmly welcomed, even if we each only get about a quarter cup that first night. Later, more is cooked each night, as the cook realizes we all crave greens and pile our plates with them, all the drowning in cooking oil be damned!

Our cook is named Mamatony; Tony is her first born, and she's been known by this name for over 20 years. It's a little weird to know there will be a cook; but on the other hand, with no electricity or refrigeration in the village, cooking is done over open wood fires. Peeking into the kitchen, with just a couple pots and running water from a gravity-flow-tank system. I can't imagine ensuring everything gets boiled and sterilized and cooked safely, all while keeping the wood fire at the right heat - and making sure dinner for 14 is on the table at (roughly) the appointed time. The guilt of being cooked for is outweighed by the challenge it would present to any one of us (it would be our full time job). And, this is why there was a program fee, I think, and why our support network pitched in to help get us here. For us to be able to go out into the village, ok, yeah - we will need a cook. 

After a few days, I see that Mamatony has more variety of clothes than other people around us. She has earrings, she has a nice coat - so this is a lucrative gig, and it's interesting to know that her salary, which we pay, is probably supporting a family (and how odd here that a woman's salary supports others!).

Edward tells us what to expect tomorrow, our first full day in the village. It is touring and introduction day; no official work. Much like meeting the General Secretary today, we need to meet all the important people in the village tomorrow, to show respect and ask permission to begin working. We're reminded by Peg, the volunteer who was here last year, that no villagers are allowed in the house. 

Edward uses a pen on the table as an example to illustrate why. This pen, he says, is nothing to you. You'll set it down, and if it's not there when you come back, you might not even think about it. But that pen would mean so much to someone who has nothing, someone who works to save a few pennies, all month long, just to buy a small supply of salt. He extends this story, then, to iPods and phones and books and clothes - things we do value that someone who has nothing literally cannot resist taking, to use, or perhaps, to sell. By having the rule that villagers cannot enter the mission house when guests are residing there, we will be able to set anything down at any time, and expect it to be there when we return. On another day, Edward says that he and Mamatony and Mohammed only use their eyes, not their hands, in the house. This is true; no one ever loses a single item, nor do things even get moved more than a foot or two.

I feel for the first time today, a long emotional day with the ever-present poverty in my face, but now growing from urban filthy poverty to a drier, starker, thinner and more dangerous feeling rural poverty, that it is OK to be a wealthy Westerner who loves having baby wipes with me, my pretty pink hoodie, my headlamp, my earrings, my comforting gear. Edward's speech about the wide gulf between his people and us visitors makes me realize it's neither my fault nor theirs that this grinding poverty stands between us. That my unearned, unfair, imbalanced wealth exists, and that their desperate lack of any material items, much less wealth, exists. We're all in this system together - is it the system of reality? - and there may be ways we need to protect each other - but faulting each other (for wealth, for theft) is like faulting the dog for his spots. 

Tonight, my first Pommern sunset: 

July 21: Dar Es Salaam to Iringa, Part 1.

(As written in my journal that day; grammar and minor edits only. Italicized portions are additions written after the trip.)

6 AM. Alarm. I've decided this morning that every single thing that happens is part of my spiritual journey - even feeling rundown, like I do, and having flare-ups of some of my normal digestive and skin issues. All I want is to feel 100% healthy, but I don't. I admit to myself and Meggie that I'm in a vulnerable state. I feel fragile, whether I like it or not - so I think of Pema and decide to make a choice: to start where I am, here and now.

Breakfast at 7. I'm anxious about the seating arrangements for the car ride. It turns out we are too many for just one van, so the family is put in a Jeep and the rest of us are in the Global Volunteers van - and we each get a window, no one is relegated to a middle seat! Sweet, self-centered, Western relief. It won't be 10 hours of misery on tap.

If I were Peggy on Mad Men, I'd be writing a commercial for Bonine by the day's end, as I journal this. It IS as advertised! Non-drowsy and not a moment of car sickness all day. And this was a test of all possible car sickness causes - no AC, windows open with hot and dusty air blowing in, ripe with smells and endless cooking fires, swaying and swerving of a many-passenger van, inconsistent road quality and unskilled drivers in a developing country, plus driving on the left! I felt I could almost read; that's how powerful the Bonine was. But poor Meggie, who felt much more rundown than I did this morning, pale and sweaty and nearly threw up her breakfast at one point this morning before piling in the car, took her first Dramamine instead - and promptly slept for almost 4 hours. It knocked her out and she missed the few hours of tin-roof slums as we crawled out of Dar.

We drove first to pick up the solar water heater repairman (whose task in the village we're all very interested in, needless to say, as we are on tenterhooks to know what our living situation will be!), who will join us for the long drive - but he's not there (and really - how did we not expect that?). So we arrange to meet him by the side of the road at some place that Mohammed, Global Volunteers driver and employee, know about and then we drive to the airport.

Leslie, one of the women from Denver, still does not have her luggage. She has handled it with so much grace - an inspiring grace. Meggie and I told her we'd be in tears without our luggage but Leslie, probably around 60, is all calmness and resignation. After all, what else CAN she be? I get a sense she's lost more than her luggage before and while she is not happy, and jokes about how tired of her red plaid shirt we'll all be in another two weeks, she amazingly does not take it out on anyone. As Nick Hornby would write, now that's character.

We bump along, driving alongside the dala-dala public buses, fully and unsafely crammed with people, and I remember Edward saying last night that one's name, in his world, morphs over time into "Father (or Mother) Of". So in our group, Joe would be Papakathy, as she is his firstborn. I laugh out loud when he says it and try to hide it. Would I be nameless? And also because as the "simple forest people" my father is fond of calling the Scandinavian side of our ancestry, we are known by our father's name, not our child's (we're the sons of Anders, the Anderssons, and we're the sons of Lars, the Larssons)*. I don't want to belabor the point but how incredible is this difference? As a society, do we owe our fathers or do we serve our children?


More hot, dusty, windy, smelly slum. They get worse - packed tighter, faces more somber. As first I am intensely curious and almost want to stop to watch the activity in one place for a full cycle - open fires, cooking, laundry, babies. Then, as the kilometers pass, I become overwhelmingly weary. Weary for the women whose work looks boring, repetitive, full of drudgery. How dirty to cook over an open fire. How hard to control the heat. And how to keep caring about the baby getting dust in his eyes or in the spittled corners of his mouth? The bags of charcoal for sale by the side of the road are enormous - and how long do they last when you're cooking nearly all day? Life must be an endless stretch of predictability - or is that just my own fear?

Before seeing this poverty with my own eyes, I thought feeling small and helpless and powerless to fix/change/help/cure such problems (which I absolutely feel) would send me home wanting to turn in and BE small - to take good care of my small world and house, and maybe even want to have children and just stay home with them. To be mistress of one small domain as a reaction to the global scale of suffering that I can't impact.

But watching the endless basics of cook, clean up, cook, clean up, stoke the fire, change the baby, cook, clean up, sleep, do it again - I feel the opposite. Let's be realistic here - these women are going to live and die in this life and they're not going to get educated and discover themselves, change their community, and become self-actualized. This is their actual. And it's all it will be. So my intense interior reaction, as I sit calmly and appear unmoved in my seat, is that when I get home, I can't pull back into the small world of my self and family. I think, holy fuck. I owe the world. I owe it the biggest presence I can give - I owe the extension of my energy and skill to as many people as I can possibly reach.

And in this moment, that means not having to save the world - not having to be Lincoln or Marie Curie or MLK, as it feels at home. Back there, it's an overwhelming shame and guilt that I didn't become a lawyer and fix all of immigration law, both U.S. and global. Or that I didn't become a professor of feminist studies whose fine work resulted in universal day care, two years PTO to share when new babies arrive, and a fundamental shift that perfects male-female understanding and balance in the home and on the job. Oh? I'm sorry? Too high a bar, you say? Then you must not be a perfectionist, or you must not have the Baron for a father, or you must not have grandiose mental tendencies. I know that all sounds crazy - but the mind is a bit crazy, no? It looks crazy all written out, but it feels perfectly normal on the filmstrip inside my head.

That's not what is happening right now, though. Instead I am thinking that any reach is good reach - any reach is still more than the reach these women can have - and what if they want to have more, how awful,  but can't? So I owe it - but not resentfully or as a burden. I owe it to be in balance with the world, like Edward and I laughed about last night.

The slums thin out, we pass the main public bus transfer station - waiting areas labeled "Dar" or "Upcountry" - and I think for the hundredth time of my brother and his fiancee. They wouldn't be in a private van! They'd be on that public bus. It's hard to admit to myself that that isn't for me. Could I do it? Sure. But I'm not willing to. And that's what is hard to admit; I don't, some of the time. But I have to be OK with that because I'm here, living the choice and plans I made - so! Ha! I better be OK with it! I laugh as I write this.

After a while, the slums don't shock me anymore. The thing that takes my breath away is - Masai! Real Masai - in flip flops! Carrying a stick, herding cows. Later - more Masai! This time on a bicycle... and using a cell phone. Ahhh. It's too much.

Skinny cows everywhere, swinging their giant, hungry heads and their clear eyes are peeled for anything to eat.

* I know that I would be Andersdotter or Nilsdotter, not Andersson or Nilsson. But the Ellis Island employees made -son much more popular than -dotter, so I use it incorrectly to make the point simple.

Thanks, Ina!

I made sole meuniere this week - based on Ina Garten's super-easy version - and it was wonderful! I'm sure the fresh-never-been-frozen Oregon sole was doing most of the heavy lifting, as great ingredients are wont to do, but it made me think... I should make a list of 50 things I'm too scared to cook and then cook my way through them. This one was pretty dang easy, all things considered (if a little sloppy and hurried to get it all not-over-cooked and still warm when set on the table), and inspired me to tackle some other recipes.

What did you make this summer for the first time? And was it a success?

CRACK

It's official. Smitten Kitchen's posts are taking over my baking life and I. Need. To. Stop.

Stop baking her recipes, stop reading her charming posts, and stop sharing her gospel with others. It is no exaggeration that THREE people have now described her cocoa brownies (which I have baked for them and forced them to eat) as addicting to the point of being like crack, and so if you know what's good for you, you WON'T click on that link.

The most recent success is the honey cake. Good thing Rosh Hashanah is months away, so I won't have to make it again until September because it is, as described, moist and majestic, and it was, as expected, freaking delicious. (At least I was able to send it all home with guests and not a crumb remains at home.)

Must stop, must stop, must stop. Well, maybe right after I try the Sally Lunn bread... it has been calling to me for weeks... Hey! I'm making it without the honeyed brown butter! That's controlling this problem, right?

At the end of a non-WW weekend...

Today, after four days of glorious eating, drinking, wine tasting, staying up too late, visiting with friends and going to gatherings... not to mention cooking and hosting my very-first full-on Thanksgiving dinner at home!... it is back on the wagon.

The Weight Watchers wagon.

But at the end of the weekend, while the homemade rolls (Rouse family easy bread recipe to the rescue!) were delicious slathered in butter, and the pumpkin pie made by my sisters-in-law was a triumph (all from scratch including real baking pumpkins) with ice cream AND whipped cream, and the smoked turkey that John masterfully BBQ'd (in the rain) on Thursday afternoon was the last word in moist turkey meat, the best part, the very BEST part was: the stuffing.

I love stuffing. But I don't love celery, and I don't love undercooked onions, I don't love bland bread and I don't like garlic in there. And so, for the very first time ever, I made stuffing precisely the way I like it, with all the parts from others' stuffings that I admire in one big dish... and I ended up with such a success that 2 hours of dishes didn't even matter, because now I know what my very own Thanksgiving stuffing will be, year after year!

So in case you're wondering: Mrs. Cubbison's cornbread stuffing with a lot of onion slo-o-owly sauteed in even more butter, with a big pile of fresh sage and dried thyme, and water chestnuts. It all marinated for 2 hours in the fridge and then I stirred in the liquid (just water, not chicken broth, for the non-meat eaters) and baked it for 40 minutes in my mini-casserole dish. Perfection!

Seasonal

In Portland, every restaurant serves things local, sustainable and seasonal. Even the local fast food chain! (Remind me to go get some Walla Walla onion rings, by the way...)

But sometimes, even in the middle of berries and green garlic and new fingerling potato side dishes, you want a Brussels sprout. So learn from me - it's not just the tomato in January that is awful. It is the Brussels sprout in July, too, that is all food porn: looks good but never delivers; the right color but you can't touch it without getting in trouble.

5 Things I learned this week.

1. "Kumbaya" is a distortion of an old spiritual called "Come By Here", a praise and plea to God.

2. I can skip reading BlackBerry messages until Monday if they are identifiable by subject line as a thing I can only work on while in the office. This saves me an evening (or a weekend) of stewing about a piece of casework, for example.

3. Toothpaste can treat and heal burns, polish old tennis shoes, fix car scratches and more!

4. If you make $34,000 a year, you pay $10 a year in taxes toward public housing, 24 cents toward funding for the arts, $1,040 to Social Security and $11 to Head Start. You pay $46 in foreign aid and $230 toward combat operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

5. This is the time of year for Delicata squash; go get yourself one, quick! They're incredibly delicious.

CSA! CSA!

With the exception of thickening up the sauce a bit (one can of organic tomato paste), the use of Dave's Killer Bread crumbs, and a small sprinkle of cheese, John and I made an eggplant (almost)parmesan entirely with ingredients from the CSA and our garden! Eggplant, an insane variety of tomatoes, basil, oregano, garlic... all grown within 50 miles of here (or less). A wild, wild weekend night, I know - but delicious!

This brings me to thinking about using food as a reward -- in a healthy way. I have a terrible, terrible lifelong habit of using food to reward myself. Been a long day? Get takeout. Been a failure of responsibilities at work? Get a milkshake at lunch. Achieved a great goal? Pizza! Need to celebrate a birthday or accomplishment (of mine, or a friend's)? You get it.

So the CSA cooking was a reward for a long week spent out of the house every night for work... use the summer abundance to reward myself for staying in. But I think I'm figuring out how to make that reward a little healthier. We joined a CSI this year too: Community Supported ICE cream. (I said a little!)

A tiny, local, amazing chocolatier here in town wanted to buy a fancy European ice cream making machine, but didn't have the money. So they got 30 people to pay $150 to get ice cream every other week for a year. Money up front for them, and a year of ice cream for us. You pick from chocolate, vanilla or a seasonal fruit sorbet, and pick up to 4 mix-ins from their list... Marcona almonds, brownie bits, candied ginger, etc... and pick it up the 2nd and 4th Saturdays of the month.

Now, I do not need decadent ice cream every other Saturday, clearly. So we split it with some very good friends; ice cream once a month? Perfect! And the pint is ideal: enough to last 10 days or so, enough to be excited waiting for the next month's installment, enough to keep the ice cream special. We think about it a bit, order it by the deadline, go pick it up on one day a month, and savor it. It's made by a local business and feels like a one-of-a-kind treat.

Could I never buy a pint of Ben and Jerry's again? I'm thinking about it. It falls into a food rule I love: if you want to eat it, eat it. But you have to make it. No drive-thru fried chicken. No Burgerville milkshake. No PastaWorks pasta.

I'm not committing; I'm just thinking about it.

It's official. I'm spoiled.

It's been fun, a bit of a novelty, to be living for the past four days with one pot, one pan, three plates, one bowl, a few pieces of silverware, a couple mugs. Everything else is packed so that we can dash out of here at 8 AM Saturday with the help of movers.

And no, the movers are not why I am spoiled.

I have realized how spoiled I am because with these very few dishes, I have to wash them after two - only two! - meals cooked at home each day. And MAN is a dishwasher nice, as is a half week's supply of dishes to fill it up with. First world problems - I got 'em.

The CSA is back, baby.

We joined a CSA again this year. (A different farm from last time, and in fact, the very one recommended to us in the comment section of that post! No nameless farms this year; Groundwork Organics already rules!) And Friday was their first day of local, organic, fresh bounty. Whoop!

I know we all - myself especially - like to think we are these unique beings, who choose our culinary, fashion, music and literary consumptions carefully and will not be swayed by advertising, marketing or ginormous social influences. But really, we all have a healthy dose of being "sheeple" and in the case of our CSA, I embrace it!

It's true, it's true... seasonal, fresh, organic, local produce tastes nothing like the canned or frozen or ethylene-gas-ripened tomatoes you find in January. But I did not make this discovery on my own; I made it through the influence of friends, the food and locavore culture of Portland, and the media I consume preachin' it to me.

But all that aside, if five years ago you told me that a big bin of fresh veggies was going to the very highlight of my weekend... in the form of some steamed baby turnips with butter, some sauteed bok choy, and some new potatoes with thin delicate skins (roasted in olive oil and tossed with my very own parsley growing in the deck garden!)... I would have never believed you.

I see some of the heavy cooking of the past few months receding, to be replaced with the delicate, sweet and whole food of summer in Oregon.

Though in the interest of full disclosure... we didn't do a totally veggie meal last night. There was a big fat steak on the plate too. You can't change me into a TOTAL hippie all at once!