collecting tokens

Biologists the world over are expressing cautious excitement over reports of the discovery of a new species of animal life that was discovered last Friday.

Reports were received of a number of small furry creatures residing in the refrigerator of a Massachusetts family’s home. Animal control officers on the scene then reported the hitherto unidentified animals to the scientific community.

The Chenopodiaceae Beta Fuzzae, or Fuzzae Beet as it has been nicknamed, appears to thrive in the dark, chilly ecosystem of the vegetable drawer, and requires only as much light as is offered by the little lightbulb that goes on when the refrigerator door is opened. It resembles a common beet root in appearance, but with a coat of downy fur, and is believed to be part vegetable and part mammal. It was observed roaming among the piles of arugula and turnip greens, and exhibited signs of rudimentary intelligence. “One of them looked right at me, and I was sure it was going to start speaking,” said Bob Loobsteele of Animal Control, who was first to arrive on the scene.

A family of the Fuzzae Beets have been extracted from the rest of the colony their natural habitat, in order that their behavior may be studied under more controlled conditions.

The implications of this discovery are far-reaching. “With so many other species being threatened by climate change, it is heartening to find that new life is evolving,” says Dr. Frank Murgentroober, head of the Springfield University Department of Paranormal Vegetable Phenomena. “We think it’s only a matter of time before more life forms are found lingering in the depths of neglected vegetable drawers, or even emerging from pizza boxes left under the bed in college dorm rooms.”

Dr. Wilma P. Snodgrass of Large Urban University, however, is a dissenting voice among the excited scientific community. “We think this may well turn out to be a hoax, or the twisted delusions of someone who has far too many vegetables on their hands.”

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This improbable report is brought to you hot off the presses of this week’s Monday Mission, which solicited posts in the style of a news article.

I mentioned briefly that I’m going to be a bridesmaid in a wedding coming up soon. Well, that “soon” has now become “this Sunday.” Which is, technically, very soon. As is the standing tradition, in U.S. weddings at least, I will be wearing a dress chosen by the bride. As it will be an October wedding in New England, the bride has chosen fall colors. My dress is in burnt orange, a very pretty color, though a somewhat unusual one in my wardrobe. And is also often the case for such occasions, I am to have shoes that match my dress. This means that I have needed to get some dyed. I picked up my shoes yesterday afternoon. And I have to admit that I was quite startled to see them. You see, they are orange. I now have shiny orange shoes. I don’t think you can ever be fully prepared to see orange shoes.

Anyhow, this weekend I will be donning the orange, and perhaps as such, feeling a bit like a pumpkin. Hopefully an elegant pumpkin, mind you, but a pumpkin nonetheless. But seeing as it’s October, pumpkins are all the orange rage right now. And in honor of their orange pumpkiness, I bring you a pumpkin-based Themed Things Thursday.

¹ I admit that I’m recycling this particular item from my vegetable ThThTh list. But recycling is good, right? Or should I be composting, since it’s vegetables we’re talking about?

I head to the farm for my next load of vegetables tomorrow, and I fear I may be buried in tomatoes. For some reason or another, I’ve been having trouble keeping up with them. It could be that I’ve received 30 pounds of tomatoes in the past 3 weeks, and that I’m pretty much the only one in the house who eats them. I do love tomatoes, but I seem to have my limits. There were even a couple of days when I didn’t eat any tomatoes. Tonight, if I can get myself motivated enough, I plan to roast up a bunch of the smaller tomatoes with garlic, for some sort of sauce, which I’ll then freeze. I also haven’t managed to cook up my pretty eggplants, and I’l be sad if they get demoted to compost. But I’m a bit wiped out to start cooking.

I just got Phoebe off to bed, an hour and a half late. Phoebe and I went on an excursion to meet a friend, involving visiting a playground, and then dinner out. We didn’t get home until almost 8:00. Yes, I realize that in a previous life, 8:00 would be time to go out, not late to get home. But, you see, Phoebe’s bed time is 7:30. I can never quite figure out how to fit things together without messing up Phoebe’s schedule when we go out. She naps right smack in the middle of the day, from about 12:30 or 1:00 to around 2:00 or 2:30. I hate to have Phoebe miss a nap (for many, many reasons), and while she will sometimes sleep in the car, it results in a 20 to 30 minute nap instead of the usual 1 to 2 hours. So we often try to wait till after the nap to go out. But that almost invariably leads to a later bedtime. Arg. It’s worth it to get out of the house, though, I suppose.

John has just left this afternoon for a short trip to the west coast for some business, which means I get to do the solo parenting thing for a couple days. I’m cheating a bit by having Phoebe go to daycare an extra day. I have my violin lesson tomorrow, and John usually stays with Phoebe when I go to that. My other options were to cancel my lesson, or bring Phoebe (an event which I can envision, but which would likely result in a less than ideal learning experience). I opted for a fourth day of daycare, rather than switching a day. Because since John will be away, my working time will be otherwise reduced. And I’ve had a very productive past couple of weeks, and want to keep rolling with that.

Yesterday was my CSA share pick-up day at the farm, again. And like the last 2 weeks, the share included 10 pounds of tomatoes. Here they all are in their polychromatic glory:

We also got some onions, a couple of small summer squashes, eggplants (I traded in my peppers for some extra eggplants), and some more basil. Inspired by Magpie Musing’s face of last week, I have put together my own vegetable face, based on the tradition started at The Great Big Vegetable Challenge.

I have quite a bit of thyme left from last week. (Also some basil and tomatoes.) I just roasted some potatoes with olive oil and thyme. But I may have to freeze it, as I don’t think I can use all of it before it goes bad. I don’t want to waste it. (Yes, I am fighting the pun. Fighting it!)

We had some friends over on Saturday, and I was able to use some of the thyme in a couple of dishes. My guests (at least those over the age of 5) each lent a hand with some food prep, including plucking thyme leaves off the sprigs.

The problem with cooking with thyme is that it is an herb that asks, begs and screams out to be used in puns. One of my guests abruptly cut off another guest in mid thyme-pun with a “don’t!”, but then shortly after succumbed to one of her own thyme puns. (”But you wouldn’t let me!” the interrupted guest cried.) It is a devilish thing. Some of the puns were not even entirely intentional, such as:

I challenge you not to think up any of your own.

Anyhow, dinner went well, and I had a grand time. (Though I was busy cooking most of the evening.) Here’s what we had for dinner.

1. Roasted Tomato, Garlic and Chevre Frittata
   I followed this recipe from pantry permitting, and it was really tasty, and not too much work. One of the steps involved roasting tomatoes and garlic in the oven with olive oil. I roasted a big batch of tomatoes, leading to quite a bit of garlic-infused rich roasted tomato juice, which was really tasty.

And because one of my guests does not like a goat cheese, I made a second fritatta.

2. Roasted garlic and tomato frittata with monterey jack cheese and carmelized onions
   This was good, too. I basically used the recipe above, but with chunks of monterey jack cheese in place of the goat cheese, and with some onions that I browned on the stove with olive oil.
3. stir-fried basil eggplant
   I threw some sauteed eggplant in with some carmelized onions, along with some basil left from the previous week, and soy sauce. (This was very, very loosely based on a Thai basil eggplant recipe.)
4. tomato, mozzarella and basil salad
   Tomatoes, tomatoes, and more tomatoes. Cubed up with some cubes of fresh mozzarella, and tossed with basil leaves, olive oil and balsamic vinegar.
5. cucumber salad with roasted tomato and garlic yogurt dressing (that practically is the recipe):
   

   4-ish medium cucumbers, peeled (the skins were very bitter) and thinly sliced

   For the dressing I mixed (and the measurements are guesses. I don’t measure when I improvise):
   3 TBS plain whole milk yogurt
   juice and olive oil from the roasting pan from the tomatoes and garlic (about 1/4 cup)
   2 cloves roasted garlic, chopped
   thyme leaves from 4 or 5 sprigs of thyme
   a bit of fresh basil, shredded
   a splash of red wine vinegar
   salt

Dessert was ice cream. I didn’t make it. (In a previous life, I would have made 2 or more desserts, and served things up in courses.)

I wanted to show my guests how pretty the vegetables looked, but realized that I wouldn’t have time to do all the preparation after their arrival and still eat at a decent hour. So I took a photo. The round orange vegetables that look rather tomato-like are actually Turkish eggplants. The photo also includes a bowl of the roasted tomatoes, and a small bowl of the roasted garlic cloves, as well as the little bundle of thyme that I have not yet wasted. Plus a couple of little zucchinis that didn’t make it on to the menu, and which I ended up wasting. I just can’t think of any good jokes about wasting zucchinis. Certainly not any puns.

It shouldn’t come as much surprise that I have tomatoes on the brain. After getting 10 pounds of tomatoes from the CSA this week, on top of the several pounds I left from last week’s 10 pound haul, I have tomatoes in lots of places. I’ve been making lots of things with tomatoes: tomato salad with mozzarella and basil, tomato sandwiches, roasted tomatoes with garlic…It seems only fitting that I should also make me a tomato list. So, this week’s Themed Things Thursday is all about tomatoes.

1. Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe, by Fannie Flagg. A novel featuring a restaurant that serves fried green tomatoes. (I expect they served other things, too. But the title doesn’t include the full menu.)
2. Fried Green Tomatoes (1991) A movie based on the Fannie Flagg novel.
3. The Tomato Collection. An album by Nina Simone. It actually seems to have nothing to do with tomatoes beyond the title, but I love Nina.
4. The campfire song “Lord Jim”
   

   I know an old bloke and his name is Lord Jim,
   And he had a wife who threw tomatoes at him,
   Now tomatoes are juicy, don’t injure the skin,
   But these ones they did, they was inside a tin.

5. “Let’s call the whole thing off.” The song written by George and Ira Gershwin. Sometimes known as “the tomato song,” due to this bit:
   

   You like potato and I like potahto,
   You like tomato and I like tomahto;
   Potato, potahto, tomato, tomahto!
   Let’s call the whole thing off!

   Tomato, tomahto…or, as the Wikipedia tomato entry has, with somewhat dubious IPA:¹

   You like /təˈmeɪtoʊ/ and I like /təˈmɑːtəʊ/

6. Don’t like tomatoes? Perhaps this website is for you: tomatoes are evil. You can purchase anti-tomato propaganda and play anti-tomato games.
7. Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! (1978). The cult classic movie. A comedy sci-fi horror thriller romance. Oh, wait. Probably not the romance. Spawned (or sowed?) several tomato-based sequels, including one called Killer Tomatoes Eat France!² The second movie, or the first sequel, starred, of all people, George Clooney.
8. Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. (1990) A short-lived cartoon TV show featuring the voice of John Astin. (John Astin was also in all 3 movie sequels.)
9. I think the best way to end this list is to give you this: the theme song to Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!

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¹ I’d be inclined to use square bracket here, rather than slanty ones, for a start, as the slanty ones suggest a phonemic (rather than narrow phonetic) transcription., and the 2 variants of /o/ (əʊ and oʊ) are not phonemic. At the same time, the onset of that last syllabe is transcribed with a t, which seems unlikely in American English. I’d go for a flap. And I produce strong aspiration on the first /t/.
You know, you say /təˈmeɪtoʊ/, I say [tʰəˈmeɪɾəʊ].

²By the way, that exclamation point is part of the title. As someone who rations out my exclamation points, I feel compelled to insert this disclaimer.

Roll out for the mystery fruit. Step right this way.

Yesterday, John, Phoebe and I took the train into town to attend the Cambridge Carnival International, a primarily Caribbean street festival in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

We got there a bit on the early side, so things were pretty tame when we arrived. Things got quite a bit more crowded as the afternoon progressed, though. There were lots of international food vendors there, which was exciting. (The vegetarian options were somewhat limited though. We ended up getting some so-so Indian food that had probably been cooked the day before.) We mostly spent the time at the festival wandering back and forth, taking some pictures, listening to the music, and looking at people. There were lots of non-food vendors, too, mostly in stalls. I went wild and got a tattoo. Well, I went very moderately wild and got a temporary tatoo. (Anyone want to guess what image I chose?)

At some point, we wandered past a woman selling mangos and some other kind of fruit, sitting on a chair in the road median with a stack of boxes. There was a little ring of people around her, buying this green fruit. I couldn’t identify the fruit as we walked past. Later, I noticed people walking around eating this fruit, and saw some green rinds on the ground (scattered among the bits of sugar cane that people had gnawed on). Towards the end of our festivating, I walked past this fruit woman again. There was no crowd this time. I watched her crack one of the green fruits open in her fingers, and pop the fleshy fruit insides of it into her mouth. She then rolled it around in her mouth a bit. I was intrigued.

“How much are they?” I asked, avoiding trying to name them. I didn’t ask their name. In part to seem as if I knew what I was doing, in part to keep the mystery. I bought a baggie of them for 3 dollars.

I’ve eaten a couple of them, still without knowing what they are. They are sweet with a slight bitterness to them, that reminds me a bit of underripe bananas, and which left my tongue feeling slightly furry and numb. The fruit is almost all pit, explaining why the woman rolled it in her mouth. It seems you sort of suck on the pit, and chew the fruit off. They are about the size of a walnut, with a rind that comes off easily, and that resembles a lime peel.

These are photos of some fruit I bought yesterday. I have no idea what it is. It is definitely tropical. Probably Caribbean. Can anyone name that fruit?

In related news, today was farm day for me once more. Meaning I headed back to the farm for my week’s CSA share. Like last week, the share included 10 pounds of tomatoes. I have been working on last week’s tomato haul, but still have quite a few left. (By the way, my photo of last week was of only a portion of the tomatoes.)

Here are my remaining tomatoes of last week, probably about 4 pounds. (Note: the small person standing in the photo is not a tomato.):

Below is this week’s full 10 pounds. (Not including last weeks remnants.) They include a lot more yellow and orange varieties. (Notice the large, orange brain-shaped one on the right?)

I also got some husk tomatoes, which were an exciting discovery for me. They were pick-your-own, and I opted out of them last week due to Phoebe’s mood. But I went solo today, and decided to pick-my-own. We could gather a pint total of cherry tomatoes and husk tomatoes. The farm apprentice gave me the low down on the picking before I headed to the fields, including the details the husk tomatoes are ripe when the husks are brown, and the ones that have already fallen on the ground are often the best.

I decided to try the husk tomatoes first, as I was curious. (I’m always game to try a new fruit or veggie.) I tasted the first one I found, and wow! Them’s good eatin’! I decided to gather my whole pint of husk tomatoes. These are tiny little things, though they seem to grow in other sizes, too. Each is the size of a large blueberry, and is wrapped in a little balloon of husk. They taste very sweet, more like a berry or a currant than a tomato. (Tomatoes are berries, after all.) These may also be the same fruit that is known as a ground cherry, and are akin to tomatillos.

These are the husk tomatoes I picked. I put in an averaged sized regular red tomato for scale. (Note that the plate in this photo is a smaller plate than the ones used in the big tomato photos above.)

As you may know, I just got back from a 2 week trip to Europe, involving a week in Saarbrücken, Germany and a week in Paris (the one in France). On Wednesday two weeks ago we made a trip from Saarbrücken over to the town of Völklingen to visit the legendary ironworks there. The conference I was attending had a half day, giving me a bit of an opportunity for some site-seeing. John, Phoebe and I took the train over in the afternoon, leaving a bit later than we’d planned. The trains left twice an hour, making it a pretty stress-free trip, though. And then the actual train ride was only about 10 minutes, and then the ironworks was only about 5 minutes on foot from the Völklingen train station.

The Völklinger Hütte, or the Völklingen Ironworks, is an enormous relic of the boom of the industrial age. First built in 1873, and with many additions over the following decades, it was last operational in 1986. It was named a UNESCO World Cultural Heritage site in 1994, and was opened to the public in 2000.

With the listing of the Völklinger Hütte as the first industrial monument on the UNESCO World Cultural Heritage sites list a new phase begins in the history of the ironworks. It is the only surviving ironworks in the world from the heyday of iron and steel production and a unique testimony to an industrial epoch of the past.

It is really hard to grasp the enormity of the ironworks. It spreads over 100 acres, and the parts of the monument that are open to the public now contain over 5 kilometers of paths and walkways for visitors to explore.

The ironworks looms on the horizon like a surrealist matte painting from a science fiction movie, its dark, hulking presence and complex shape seeming improbable. With its domed towers and elaborate tangles of pipes and tubes, it has a nearly organic look. Up close, it becomes even more awe-inspiring. Now out of service for 2 decades, the domes and towers and tubes are all covered with a patina of rust, layers of paint from decades past peeling away, plants and even trees growing in crevices and on high platforms. I found myself awed by not only by the size and scope of the place, but also by its unexpected beauty. I was startled to find myself describing a place so forboding and monstrously large as beautiful.

Everywhere we looked was something interesting to see. The colors, the textures, the lines. The oversized machinery, enormous gears and tracks. The dangling chains, and exposed wiring. We spent a couple of hours there, but could have stayed many more. We only walked the lower paths and walkways, not having time to climb to the towers and high paths before the monument closed.

I’ve put together a selection of some photos I took on our visit, and I’ve posted a slideshow. Here’s a bit of a sampling of some of the photos:

We had some good food in Völklingen, too, by the way. There is a restaurant called Platform 11 3/4 in the old train station building, which is right next to the current train station building. The building was very cool, and they seem to have some sort of theater in it. (Possibly for puppet shows?) The staff was very friendly, and our waitress helped us navigate the menu for things we could eat. (They actually had vegetarian options marked out as “rabbit food,” or the German equivalent, which was handy.) The food was creative, and more importantly, quite good. I had vegetable ravioli served on a bed of lentils in a creamy basil sauce. John had some other pasta dish, which I’ve already forgotten the details of. We shared a salad with mixed field greens, cherries, nuts and warm goat cheese streudel.

We also had some good salads for lunch at a little ma & pa seafood restaurant we passed while straying into the town in search of food. The salads, which caught our eye in as we passed the restaurant’s glassed-in counter, had a nice selection of raw veggies, plus some potato salad (Kartoffelsalat!) and a bit of hard-boiled egg. The whole thing was topped with a light yogurt dressing. One of the vegetables was one that I wasn’t able to identify: it was a shredded, or thinly julienned, crispy white vegetable. I wondered if it might have been some sort of large radish or maybe turnip. It was definitely neither celeriac nor kohlrabi. The texture reminded me a bit of jicama. There were also some other sliced crunchy bits that reminded me a lot of bok choi, which I didn’t expect to find in a German salad.

Here’s a picture of my Salat:

Vacation’s over, and I’m back to the grind. Which in my case involves the violin and vegetables.

My CSA haul of this week featured 10 pounds of tomatoes. 10 freakin’ pounds. I’ve never had that many tomatoes before. There are quite a range of types, including some heirloom varieties, and I took a photo to document their pretty tomato-ness. (I didn’t arrange my tomatoes as artfully as jenny’s WTVG display, though.)

The most creative I have gotten with the tomatoes so far is to slice up a bunch of the little yellow ones on a plate, and pour some bottled salad dressing over them. (It was decent salad dressing, at least. Some sesame and lime stuff.) I even ate a tomato whole and plain, like an apple, while still at the farm. I’d forgotten to bring along a snack for Phoebe for the trip down to pick up the veggies, and her temper indicated hunger. I hoped we could snack on a nice fresh tomato, but while she was willing to taste it, she was not willing to ingest more than a bite. So I ate the whole tomato myself, sitting in the car, with a cranky toddler on my lap. So perhaps that was a more creative tomato experience than the slices on a plate.

The violin lesson yesterday was a mixed bag, too. I had not actually even opened my violin case since the previous lesson, 3 weeks before. Considering this, I played not too horribly. The first song came through moderately well. The second, on the other hand, led to a discussion of how my hand position needs adjusting and how I tend to overshoot the fourth finger position. I’m convinced that at least part of the problem is the way my little finger bends. I can’t move my damn pinkies smoothly. They sort of jerk and pop, and my muscle control is poor. I feel like I need to develop a workout routine for my pinky to build up its strength and dexterity. (I’m envisioning something set to the Rocky theme song.)

This is week 8 of my CSA adventure.

2 pounds of beets
1 pound of carrots (donated from another farm, as the carrot crop failed at the farm I go to)
1 pound of cucumbers
a bunch of onions
a pint of pick-your-own peas (though I just picked a half pint, as it was raining, and the pickin’s were looking slim)
1 small japanese eggplant (I traded in my bunch of onions for a second eggplant.)
1 small summer squash or pepper (I chose an eight ball zucchini)
1 bunch or chard or kale
1 sprig of thyme or marjoram
1 bunch of basil
1 ping pong ball-sized tomato

I’m feeling a bit down on this veggie business just now. I sent out an email to a bunch of local friends inviting them to come in small groups, and giving a choice of a dozen or so dates. It turns out that many of them want to come and/or are only available on August 2nd, and no one is available this week. It will be fun to have the bunch of folks, though I hadn’t intended to throw a party 2 days before our big trip. However, I actually won’t have enough vegetables to feed them all. I can save the beets and carrots from this week, but most of the vegetables don’t really last from one week to the next. And the point was to feed people farm-fresh vegetables, not ones that were a week or more old.

So I had a thought. Since I’ll be going away for 2 weeks, I thought perhaps I could see if I could pick up 2 shares worth next week. I know that lots of people go away during the summer, and there always seem to be a lot of vegetables at the end of the night when I arrive at the tail end of the pick-up. So, I asked the farmer. I didn’t know what she’d say, and knew that “no” was definitely a possible answer. I was prepared for the “no” answer.

What I wasn’t prepared for was how irritated I would be by that answer.

Her first answer was, “no, it’s not possible, because of the way the vegetables grow.” When I mentioned that other people might also be going away at various times over the summer and might want to switch a week, she said, “Oh, I see. But it would be too hard for me to keep track.” What I find irritating is that I could think of several ways off the top of my head that it would be feasible for people to arrange these things without it taking up much of her time. She writes in her emailed newsletters that she wants to encourage a sense of community, but all communication between members of this “community” is filtered through her. If there were even some sort of bulletin board, or virtual bulletin board, I could post a request that someone swap a week’s pick-up with me, and then some other member and I could communicate directly. But the answer was “no, I can’t keep track.” (Well, when I explained about the horde of people coming for dinner next week, she did say I could email her and that she’d consider if she learned of someone planning to forfeit their share for the week. But it doesn’t seem too likely this will work out, and I will feel like I’ve put her out.)

And then I’ve realized that part of my irritation was not just about her answer. It’s her farm, her business, so her decision. She needs to decide what works for her. But the trouble is, there have been a number of things that haven’t worked for me as well as I’d hoped.

One main issue is that I hadn’t realized how little of the share would actually be food that Phoebe will eat. (We’ve tried, but she’s become pickier.) There have been greens and onions and kohlrabi, radishes and herbs, garlic and bok choi. And then there was all the lettuce. (Do all the other members really not find 5 heads of lettuce a week to be excessive?) Phoebe won’t eat lettuce, and I can’t even freeze it for later. Here I’ve been collecting more vegetables each week than I’ve ever used before, and then we’ve had to buy additional vegetables for Phoebe. It seems so wrong to be buying frozen broccoli and peas when I have a fridge full of farm-fresh vegetables.

And I’m irritated that I’m trying to be all supportive of this CSA business, and spread the word, and encourage people to consider trying it out. And right now I don’t feel so gung ho. It’s been a fair amount of work, both to go get the vegetables (I even had to rearrange my schedule to be able to make it to one of the two weekly pick-up dates) and to prepare them.

I know that there’s a lot of variation in how the farms and CSA shares operate. My advisor at school is also participating in one, and the deal he gets sounds more appealing. He doesn’t go to a farm, but to a pick-up location that is in or near Boston. What he’s gotten in his weekly shares also sounds more appealing. So maybe I just need to find a different CSA next time around.

So, like all relationships, we’ve had a few bumps. I’m sure that we’ll make up again in a few weeks. I have enjoyed the veggies we’ve gotten so far, and we’re eating more healthily than usual, possibly more healthy than ever. But for now, I think I’ll sit and pout and give the CSA the cold shoulder.