Sculpin

I was all set to have my first One Local Summer meal be spectacular. The plan was to go to the farmers market on Thursday and get everything I needed, and then have some sort of grand cookery day today.

That was the plan. And here is the problem: I had a tetanus shot on Thursday. (I was a couple years overdue, and I’ve been wanting to try needle felting, which means that I will almost certainly stab myself many times with a barbed needle.) This time I was in the minority of people who have unpleasant side effects other than plain old soreness. At first it wasn’t too bad — some extra fatigue, a tiny fever — and I thought I’d get through my day with no problems other than a little bit of extra loopiness.

But at the market, a wave of dizziness hit me like a Mack truck. I could feel the blood draining from my face. I barely managed to get to a bench where I could lie down. Somehow I dragged myself the three blocks to the bus stop, sitting down about once every block to gather myself up and mutter, “I can do this, I can do this…” Then the bus ride and another two blocks home from the bus stop, with more sitting down and psyching myself up. I wish that I’d thought to ask somebody to call me a cab, but I was too far gone for common sense. I got home, whimpered at Josh for a while (he’d just gotten home), and then fell face-down in bed and slept for three hours.

Still better than tetanus, though. I’m well supplied now with snacks and silly books, and I’m just going to take it easy for the next few days.

So forget cooking. Instead, I’m popping open a can of local tuna fish and having a wintered-over local pear for dessert and calling it good. Oh, and some of the sugar snap peas I got from Willie Green’s before I fell over. Hey, that’s not a bad dinner after all.

I don’t generally mention books I dislike by name, lest their authors show up around here and whine at me. But this prose is so purple, I can hardly help but share it. The book is Pomegranate Soup, and it’s dreadful. It’s a first novel; someday the author will look back and wince, and in that she has all my sympathy. Occasionally a description of food will rise to plain competence, or even a little better. Overall, though, the writing is as subtle and elegant as a brick to the head. I slogged through the first couple of chapters and then started riffling around to find out whether it got any better. No, but it did get sillier:

Layla was indeed still in the throes of a hiccup fit, but she was nowhere near suffering. The young girl was lying upstairs on the mattress the three sisters shared, splayed out like a star fruit with soliloquies of love-struck Shakespearian heroines running across her muddled brain. The image of Malachy’s sapphire eyes sent tremors through her body; the hot node below her belly tingled and sent waves of pleasure down to her toes.

So this was how love was supposed to feel, Layla thought, like the ecstatic cries of a pomegranate as it realizes the knife’s thrust, the caesarean labor of juicy seeds cut from her inner womb. Like the gleeful laugh of oil as it corrupts the watery flour, the hot grease bending the batter to its will and creating a greater sweetness from the process — zulbia, the sugary fried fritters she loved so. Falling in love was amazing. Why hadn’t anyone ever told her so?

I can’t imagine why nobody’d ever mentioned the shouting pomegranate of love to the poor girl.

All that said, I know of a woman who would go absolutely gaga over this book. There’s no accounting for taste.

Last week the temperature wasn’t even hitting 70 F, so I put wall-o-waters around some of the pepper plants. I’d heard of people in the area using them year-round on their hot-weather vegetables, and thought I’d give it a try.

Today it hit somewhere close to 90. It’s hot, all right. (Some friends in 100-degree Portland are probably grumbling, “Whiner!” at this point.) How hot is it? So hot that one of those wall-o-waters lost structural stability as its plastic softened. It crumpled smack onto its pepper plant. Damn. Next time, I’ll reinforce them with tomato cages.

I’m starting to harvest the first baby carrots of the year. Purple Haze is, at this age at least, not as purple as I’d hoped. Mokum is pretty good, with a nicely developed root; good germination rate, too. No opinion yet on Nutri-Red.

Another Eat Local Challenge has gone by, and again I’ve sort of felt like maybe it would be fun to join in. But I’ve never quite taken the plunge.

But One Local Summer I can do. Every week, one supper made with local ingredients? Heck, I did that last night, if you count gorging on fresh snap peas until I was too stuffed to eat anything else. Instead of a 100-mile as-the-crow-flies radius, I’m choosing 200 miles of travel — the Cascades make a simple radius seem a little goofy to me. Why 200? Because it lets me get wheat from Bluebird Grain Farms and peanuts from Alvarez Farms. For everything else, close-in farms can have priority.

And hey, if this works out this month, I might tinker with it: tighten up my personal rules, or have more local meals.

To compound the trick, I’m going to do it without a car. No driving out to Woodinville for apple cider or scouring the countryside for some local equivalent of Joel Salatin. That’s the plan, anyway: just local stuff easily available to a carless resident of northeast Seattle. Though I might cheat and ride with Josh in our cranky rustbucket down to the U District market if my knee does not improve tomorrow morning.

I took a yoga workshop on supported backbends a few weeks ago, and it was more vigorous than I’d hoped. That particular instructor has a good eye for alignment and is a beautiful practitioner, but she drives me up the wall with her smirking and her craptastically visually-oriented teaching style. (This is the chick who last year inspired my hope for an Experiential Learning Center for Disabilities Awareness, the one in which learning is facilitated with lead pipes.) I was taking the class to try her out again and find out if she’d matured as a teacher. She has come a long way, but she still makes me grit my teeth hard.

In my grim exasperation, I wasn’t listening to my body very well at all. A few hours after class, my right knee had a garland of bruises and started becoming stiff; a few days later, it was buckling under me with sharp pain. (Weird.) It’s better now, but not 100%; I challenged the knee a little today, and it’s complaining a bit, so we’ll just see how it goes tomorrow. Knees are tricky.

If you love poppyseeds (as I do), and live in Seattle or Edmonds, stop by the Fleissig Bakery table at the West Seattle, Edmonds, or Lake City farmers markets some time. They make a wheatless poppyseed torte that’s just incredible. Oh my. Not too sweet; just right, with layers of flavor.

The ingredients, since I don’t see them on the website: ground poppy seeds, ground almonds, organic eggs, organic butter, organic sugar, powdered sugar, cinnamon, and cloves.

The photos on their website are awful, though. Some enterprising local photographer ought to offer to swap his or her food-photography services for goodies.

I’ve almost done it. I’ve gotten all the pebbles out of the path between the two original raised beds, as I’d hoped; there are just a few left scattered around the outside of them. I’ve almost finished levelling that path and another one, and I’ve roughed out an additional bed. It’s all starting to come together. And did I mention that I’ve moved 2500 pounds of large rocks, dung-beetle fashion? Yowch. I’ve been spending a lot of time in the bathtub soaking in an Epsom salt solution.

With the new bed in place, I’m starting to get a sense of how the whole yard will look when I’m done. I’m still not sure where I can put a large compost bin; there’s one reasonably good spot, but I suspect we’ll be putting a bicycle shed there instead. I really do want to snag the fabulous compostables from Espresso Ulysses, but where they’ll go, I couldn’t yet tell you.

About half a decade ago, my friend Jim in San Francisco introduced me to the exboyfriend I like the very least. That guy had some sort of roaring Angel/She-Devil complex, and after we (fairly swiftly) broke up, he yowled to everybody he knew, not excepting Jim, that I was evil incarnate. My villainy has become a running joke between Jim and me. Gardening is not exempt from my wicked tendencies. The new garden bed, built on the corpses of innocent plants, will grow winter vegetables, the vegetables of evil: kale, chard, maybe some kohlrabi. (I am just about desperate enough in mid-winter to eat kale.) Maybe some walking onions. Or perhaps I’ll relent a bit and just plant four kinds of garlic. That could be its own kind of evil, I am sure.

Though it’s not exactly a half-flooded underground lair with an army of giant robotic amphibious badgers doing my vicious bidding; oh, well, a girl can dream. Start small, work my way up. Maybe next year I’ll plant Bloody Butcher corn and La Ratte potatoes.

In flower: Alderman peas, peonies, roses, mock orange, pansies, volunteer sweet peas. Forming buds: eggplant, All Blue potatoes. Ready for harvest: Tom Thumb and freckled lettuces, arugula, Cherry Belle radishes. Growing slowly: all the carrots. (Grow, damn you!) Unhappy: dill. Taking over everything it can reach: wisteria, horehound.

Today I watched Josh — and helped a little — as he stripped down my old Marin in preparation for putting an Xtracycle hitchless trailer on it. (I got the Marin in trade for something-or-other, years ago, but getting smacked out of a crosswalk put a dent in my riding plans for a few years. Put some dents in me, too.) There was a lot of unscrewing this stuck bit out of that, and spraying whatsits with WD-40, and gleefully exclaiming, “Ewww!” at particularly good bits of corrosion and nasty old grease. The bottom bracket was a total mess. I was semi-useful as a spare pair of hands, I think, and I had a great time.

When it comes to bike anatomy, I’m starting from near-zero here, confirming basic information and asking basic questions. “Okay, that is the top tube and that is the head tube — and is this whole thing the stem, or just this bit? And what’s this thing that looks like a spider?” (Answer: it’s called a “spider”.) Josh answered all of my questions with tremendous patience. I did get to learn about some mildly oddball stuff today: the Marin came with Biopace chainwheels, weird-looking off-round critters. They’re not widely loved, these things, but having read Sheldon Brown’s defense of Biopace, we’re going to give them a shot.

I’m not a mechanic or even really a bicyclist, yet, but I could see getting hooked. It’s mighty cool that a home mechanic can do so much on his or her machine, and I loved seeing how it all comes apart and goes together. (It’s a little like animal dissection, but the thing works when you’re done with it.) But to tell you the truth, it’s the smell that hooked me. All that solvent made the bike smell kind of like a letterpress shop, and to me, that’s the most nostalgic smell in the world. Carcinogenic? Oh, probably, but absolutely marvelous. That smell makes me want to sit out back and mess with bike parts all summer long.

No, it’s not a description of cauliflower’s mental abilities. It’s what I made for dinner last night. The original recipe is from Mangoes and Curry Leaves, another beautiful (and heavy) coffee table cookbook from Jeffrey Alford and Naomi Duguid. Below I’ve rewritten the instructions to suit myself; Alford and Duguid write much longer and more detailed instructions.

It’d probably be pretty easy to adapt this to a less caloric model by roasting instead of frying the cauliflower and using less fat in the spice paste. And I think you could finish it in a solar oven. The general method is a lot like that of Eggplant Oop. A heavy enameled cast-iron pot is perfect for this.

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In my constant urge toward more eco-friendly living through accessories, I’ve acquired a clothesline and some clothespins.

But here’s a dumb question: how do you choose where to hang up a clothesline? Do you hang your clothes in the sun so they dry faster, or do you hang them in the shade so they don’t get sun-bleached?