Sculpin

The Three Bears Norse, via Cissa. Fantastic.

It all hit me today — the bicycling, the shoveling, the Pilates. I’m limbering up now, but I was stiff and sore from jaws to knees. It was a magnificent soreness, a big big ache I could be proud of.

So instead of getting things done today, I dinked around on the net. One of my favorite places to dink around is Spy’s Spice — so many beautiful and striking and strange things there.

Ben thought that Josh and I should have gotten married in a cold, abandoned warehouse. But no, I wanted to get married somewhere pretty with reasonably comfortable chairs. I guess I could have compromised. Just as well, really, that I didn’t.

And I played the quotation game that’s been going around. Here are my five favorite quotations from the Random Quotation page:

The best way to realize the pleasure of feeling rich is to live in a smaller house than your means would entitle you to have.
Edward Clarke

The one thing more difficult than following a regimen is not imposing it on others.
Marcel Proust (1871 - 1922)

I cannot call to mind a single instance where I have ever been irreverent, except toward the things which were sacred to other people.
Mark Twain (1835 - 1910), “Is Shakespeare Dead?”

Doing a thing well is often a waste of time.
Robert Byrne

My definition of a free society is a society where it is safe to be unpopular.
Adlai E. Stevenson Jr. (1900 - 1965), Speech in Detroit, 7 Oct. 1952

(Too bad, no Horace in this batch. I have a soft spot for Horace.)

Josh and I had a bike adventure to celebrate our third anniversary. We went up to Log Boom Park in Kenmore, stopping off to see the permaculture beds near the Meadowbrook community center. The beds are kind of overgrown, but still awesome. You can pick fruit there, and they have the most marvelous grapes. Coasting down the gentle slope of Ravenna to Hale is a fun ride; the tandem was really picking up some speed.

Log Boom Park was closed. Boo! So we headed back down the Burke-Gilman trail and had a picnic at Matthew’s Beach. I hadn’t been there since I was about eight years old. Then back down the trail to the UW and then to home. Total mileage today: 23.75 miles. Fastest speed: about 25.5 mph.

Man, are we ever sore. That’s very significantly longer than I’ve ever ridden before. It was pretty tempting to leave the bike at Josh’s office and take the bus back, but we persevered. I cranked down my heart monitor’s limits to be extra-cautious, and it seems to have worked: I’m groggy, but not totally zonked out. Poor Josh forgot to wear padded bike shorts; he was pretty thrashed in the rear by the time we got to Matthew’s Beach. Heck, we both were — I sprawled out on top of a picnic table there, prone, enjoying my sit-bones’ lack of compression.

As we were heading out of the Meadowbrook community center’s parking lot, a little kid shouted after us, “That is so cool!” Yay for tandems.

Yesterday I put in some time digging out the new bed. I’d dumped some extra compost there when I’d bought several yards, so I carefully lifted up the good stuff and moved it to a prepared bed. Then I started excavating down through the native dirt; Josh wants it down about a foot before he puts the sides up. I got about six square feet dug out before calling it off for the day.

I am always amazed at how tremendously crummy the soil is, if I can even call it soil. It’s many different kinds of crummy at once: a mix of clay and sand, with almost no organic matter, packed down pretty hard and full of rocks. I’m too light to get through it with a shovel. I’ve been out there with a pick-axe, levering out rocks as big as both my fists put together and sifting out gallon after gallon of pebbles. (Fortunately, I have a use for those pebbles, so it’s like I’m going prospecting for rocks.)

Some of you know that I’ve been persuaded by the arguments of Peak Oil proponents. I won’t pretend to forecast the future, but it seems pretty likely to me that trouble is coming; my hunch is that the market economy will produce some small ameliorations, but not swift, complete solutions. If you have any thought of growing a vegetable garden against difficult times, and you have a place to do it, start it now. Do it before the fuel surcharges on delivered bulk compost go high, if for no other reason; if you’re in Puget Sound, you probably have crummy soil too that would do well with a good deal of compost just to get things started. Do it now because unless you are a buffed-out professional landscaper, it takes longer than seems reasonable to turn lawn into vegetables. Much longer. And there are a lot of mistakes to be made.

Today Josh and I went a little over five miles on the tandem, stopping by Bagel Oasis on our way down to Ravenna Park. I’m still marvelling at the fine work that’s been done to spiff the place up. It turns out to be a pretty easy ride down through the park from 20th Ave all the way to 55th St; I like it a lot better than the alley that parallels Ravenna, even if it is mostly gravel paths. From 55th we took the main trail to Cowen, stopping for a snack beside the stream, and then had a little picnic in Cowen Park. I only wish I’d thought to pack the steam-powered toy boat I’d bought for Josh as an early anniversary present.

We tried 25th for the first time, figuring that a quiet Sunday would be a good time to give it a try. I didn’t care for it, but it wasn’t awful. There were a lot more potholes than I thought there’d be, though.

I said to Josh, “I may need to turn in my Introvert Card.” And it’s true — I’ve been enjoying chatting with the other bicyclists who come over to investigate our bike. Bicycle people are the friendliest, most pleasant people I’ve ever met.

I meant to have cooked, but it’s hot and I’m tuckered out. And so, for my local food entry this week, my breakfast of the last few days: each morning a single, perfect organic Redhaven peach (reverently and gently placed in my hands by a sweet pigtailed girl at the farmers market) cut up and topped with a little Port Madison Farms yogurt.

In other food news, I’m getting pretty decent at making flour tortillas. After a few more batches, I think I’ll really have the knack; after that I’ll start experimenting with adding chile powders and whole-wheat flour. The secret, my friends, is lard. Lard is good. (And available locally from the Samish Bay cheese people.) The other secret is to roll those proto-tortillas thinner and wider than you’d think possible; they’ll contract as you pick them up, so stretch them slightly just before putting them on the griddle. I actually measured them out to the recommended 9 inches. That is about right, but it seemed ridiculously thin when I first started.

A few months ago, Josh and I watched an episode of “Gardening with Ciscoe” in which Ciscoe Morris plants potatoes in a big garbage can. He suggests that you put good potting soil on the bottom, mix in some organic rhodie fertilizer, and plant the potatoes way down in the bottom. As the vines come up, he said, you keep dumping in wood chips, or shredded leaves, or bark, or what-have-you. Supposedly the little potatoes will form all along the vines throughout the whole garbage can. We had a lot of shredded bark on hand, so we used that.

Well, with all due respect to Ciscoe, it didn’t work worth a darn for our Caribe potatoes. We got a potato or two on the vines in the bark, and a few more down in the potting soil. But the overwhelming majority were right where soil met bark. That’s not a lot of space, and we did not get a lot of potatoes. They’re still good, but it wasn’t exactly cost-effective.

Next year, we’ll try it with dirt like normal people. Live and learn.

Today Josh and I made it to the farmers market on the tandem and back. Hooray! That’s around five miles round trip, through slightly busier streets and more difficult intersections than I’ve been becoming used to. More wind, too, which sometimes made communication tricky. Packing organic vegetables from the farmers market into Oyster Buckets on the bicycle, I felt that I was surely qualifying for some sort of Granola Scouts merit badge.

I had to take a breather on the way back to let my heart rate settle back down. Oh well. No hurry, and I got to hang out with a very nice dog. (There are a few, I guess.) After the ride, I was tired, but not quite tired enough to conk out fully.

I’m starting to think that I should look into some additional exercises for bikers. I’ve been pretty sore in the lumbar lately — like somebody whacked me with a rubber mallet the size of a frying pan. (I see many Epsom salt baths in my near future.) I’ve been flaking on my home practice these last few months. But pain avoidance is a pretty good motivator.

[Unless something particularly noteworthy happens, the rest of the week’s bike notes will be in comments in this post.]

My One Local Summer meal for this week is a little earlier than usual. I made a Lebanese green bean dish called “Lubyi bi Zayt”, “green beans in olive oil”, based on this recipe from Dove’s Eye View. I wussed out on the olive oil, using only about 1/4 cup, and used extra garlic. The green beans and garlic were from my own garden.

It was really good, but it would have been even better with some sort of flatbread to accompany it. Maybe next time.

I remember the soggy canned green beans of my youth, all grey and awful and dispirited, without even a dressing to hide their miserable nature. These are not like those. Still, I always think twice before cooking green beans. It takes me a moment to remember, “No, I like green beans, even cooked.”

To keep the day’s eating geopolitically balanced, Josh and I took the tandem down to Leah’s Bakery, but it was closed unexpectedly. So instead we had dessert at Hot Dish and toddled down to the Boulevard Grocery for a soda. Some numbers: 3.5 miles (furthest ever), top speed 22 mph (fastest ever), and 64th St. (steepest and most potholes ever).

This is not quite the recipe I used — it’s the one I’m going to use next time, with proportions tweaked from the original. (Even Josh agreed that it needed more tomatoes.) The version I made was, alas, only mostly local — I had some not-so-local yogurt to use up. Except for the ginger and dry spices, though, it’s eminently doable in a more purist local-eating form.

Matar Paneer

butter, oil, or ghee
8 oz paneer
1 small onion, chopped
scant 1.5 cups green peas
1/2 cup yogurt
1 1/2 cup chopped tomatoes

Spices:
cayenne pepper to taste
1 teaspoon chopped ginger
1 teaspoon chopped garlic
3/4 teaspoon turmeric
1 teaspoon garam masala
salt to taste

Cube the paneer and fry it in a few tablespoons of ghee or oil until it’s golden brown. (I used a mixture of butter and oil.) Remove it, and fry the onions until they’ve started to brown. Add the spices and stir briefly. (I never have any ready-made garam masala hanging around, so I use cumin, coriander, black pepper, cloves, and cinnamon to taste.)

Add the tomatoes. To satisfy the prejudices of the household tomato-hater, cook until they are an indistinguishable mass. Stir in the yogurt, and simmer for about ten minutes. Add the peas and paneer.

A note about the paneer: it’s available from Appel Farms in the farmers markets, and it’s also easy to make your own with milk and lemon juice or vinegar. If you make it yourself, press it or twist the cheesecloth for a good firm paneer, or the cubes’ll fall apart on you.

A note about the ginger: I peel mine and preserve it with sherry in the fridge. Adding a little sherry to this dish with the tomatoes gives an extra shot of gingeriness and also brings out some flavor in the tomatoes.