Eat Close To Home

I have learned, much to my surprise, that I am drastically allergic to most dried beans, especially lentils and chickpeas. Geez, after all these years of finding ways to work beans into my diet, learning to love Indian food, eating frequent vegetarian meals I find out that I’d actually been doing my body a turn for the worse by eating all those beans.

Here’s my dilemma: I know I function much, much better on a higher-protein, lower-carb diet. However, for a whole host of reasons, I’d rather not sit down to a big slab of meat three times a day. My strategy in the past has been to stretch the meat with beans – instead of a pound of ground beef, I’d use half a pound of beef and a can of beans (1 lb cooked).

Can you think of anything else I might use to stretch meat? I don’t want to just add more starch – the meal will already have rice or another grain – and it can’t all be soy (I’m somewhat allergic, though nothing like the lentils). I’m also allergic to milk, so cheese is not an option. I can have black-eyed peas and lima beans, though it’s not clear if I can only have them at the “shell bean” stage or if they’re ok dried, too. Maybe diced rutabaga? I’m rather stumped and would love your input.

I was pretty disappointed by Disney’s Earth. I like anthropomorphic animals as much as the next geek, but I want them animated. I prefer my nature films to be documentaries, thanks.

High crimes:

• Referring to every animal as either “Mom,” “Dad,” or “the baby.”
• Suggesting through clever editing and James Earl Jones narration that all animals have a nuclear family where Mom and Dad take care of the baby.
• Overly dramatic music
• Setting up everything as a life-and-death struggle, except the life-and-death struggles

If you took this film as a documentary, you could leave with the following misinformation:

• Whale and polar bear moms make radical sacrifices and heroically starve themselves for the good of their babies. Corollary: All animals are starving to death or dying of thirst, all the time.
• All water in the Kalahari comes from snows in the Himalayas.
• Daffodils are native flowers in the northern forests.
• Predators are evil.

Things I wish the movie had:

• Labels. What were those amazing fungi in the tropics? The one that generated its own geodesic dome, and the pulsating orange one (a slime mold, maybe?)
• Maps. What are those migration routes? Where is the Kalahari Desert?
• Diagrams. How is a six-plumed bird of paradise constructed? Are those its wings, or some other feathered structure? And was it really designed by Apple?

Things the movie did really well:

• Time lapse photography. Absolutely amazing shots of a mountainside changing color with the seasons, the succession of spring blossoms, the growth of a slime mold, etc.
• Rather astounding footage of a great white shark catching a seal snack. Four times in a row…
• Um…

I don’t remember the actual series having this much…Disney-fication. So, if you want a live-action Disney movie, give it a try. Give me a good documentary any day and keep the fuzzy happy plot.

Easter may have been my favorite holiday as a kid. Living my whole life in Michigan, I’ve always keenly felt the need for a celebration of rebirth after a long, deadening winter. And we had Easter holiday traditions that were pretty unique to our family. One was the egg hunt – mom and dad would hide dozens of plastic eggs all over the yard. There were a couple traditional hiding spots – tucked between the ties under the rail of the train tracks that went past the house – and there would be a few real eggs that we’d dyed. A couple of pantyhose eggs (remember those??) would often have candy in them. There were little gifts, too: a balsa wood airplane, bubbles…little fun trinkets. Enough of a gift to be a gift but not enough to set off my overdeveloped sense of guilt at always having better gifts than my friends.

The Easter baskets had their own unwritten set of rules. The basket was rarely a basket at all. Usually it was something vaguely bowl-shaped. Baseball caps and gloves, a colander, and (in later years) a margarita pitcher stick out in my mind. Each person got their own, and it was filled with their favorite candy. (Easter was one of the few times Dad got Good-n-Plentys.) I loved making baskets as much as I loved receiving them. There’s a great satisfaction to expressing creativity within a known set of parameters and doing it really well.

I’ve been craving Easterness this year, so I decided to revive one other Easter tradition: the Easter Tree. As a kid, this was a branch of a shrub from the back yard, cut before it leafed out. We propped it in a flowerpot of sand or plaster and then hung decorations on it – mostly dyed eggs (blown out and washed first) and tiny rabbit-and-spring-themed wooden ornaments.

I didn’t have time or energy to dye eggs this year, but I did happen across a couple dozen naturally-colored Auracana eggs this spring, and there was some copper wire kicking around. And I knew there would be  a vendor at the market selling curly willow…and that it will sprout leaves if you put it in water. So I created my own version of the Easter Tree, a little less with the red dye #3 and a little more with the life-from-dead-sticks. It’s in the yoga room, and I get to exercise in front of it every morning as the sunrise streams in the east-facing windows. It’s my family tradition, but even more “me” flavored, and it’s just the thing this spring.

This is too much stuff. I can’t do all of this. I can tell because I’m getting really snappish and saying things I don’t mean. To the point where I can’t believe I even said them because they were so far off from what I meant. Sometimes they’re dumb, and sometimes they are even unkind. Not good.

This has brought a few things into perfect clarity, though. In my life outside of my job, there is work that I’m passionate about, and work that I’m doing only for the money. The work I’m passionate about – local food systems, Preserving Traditions, and the like – feeds me. I’d do that work even if no money were involved (and there usually isn’t). I can’t wait for an evening or weekend off so I can work on it. It energizes me to do it.

Then there’s the work for money. I drag my feet; I delay by asking the client questions I know I’ll end up having to answer for them, anyway; I dread the work as the dose of medicine I have to take before I can go play. When I started working full-time again (after 5 years working for myself), I quit taking outside work. It felt great. Time is such a great luxury, and I was learning to use it for interesting and fulfilling things. At some point, we needed cash for…something. I don’t even remember what. So I did some web site redesigns and took on some instructional design consulting. It was ok, but I either hated it (web stuff) or it was just more of my day job, spilling over into my gardening time (putting courses online).

A couple similar jobs have come along recently, and I really dithered. We don’t, strictly speaking, need the money…but in this economy, why would I turn it down? So I took the jobs, and now I’m regretting it.

This work for cash I don’t really need makes me crazy, and it means when work I love comes along (as it has), I can’t pick up that project. And that very thing has happened. I spent much of the day in a tizzy, trying to figure out where to start. I finally stopped and admitted to myself that this is too much stuff to be doing, and I can’t do it all. And since I can’t get out of the contracts I’ve already got going, I’m going to have to finish those and pass on the one that I’m really excited about.

Being an adult sucks sometimes.

In related news, I cleaned the kitchen today. This included sorting a huge stack of mail, filing stuff, finding homes for the random crap that always accumulates on the dining table. And there weren’t even guests coming over! I also found myself planning meals around which condiments I could use up and which pre-cooked items in the freezer I could eat and thus get rid of. Use it up, move it out.

Having “extra” only makes me feel good when I’m scared. Having “extra” when I’m feeling inclined to trust the Universe really weighs me down. Food storage…stocking the pantry…buying half a pig…having extra toiletries…buying a winter’s worth of firewood…it feels good in some ways, but in others, it’s a burden. A responsibility. (Are the squash getting mushy? Do we actually need turmeric? [The answer there is a resounding NO, but we are out of garlic powder...]) I could see clearly today that this is true of extra money, extra food, and probably even the extra weight I carried through our transition years when my sweetie was in grad school, when we had 2 mortgages and no steady jobs, and the first years at my new job. A little extra padding to soften the jolts, or something.

So now I want to trim, clean, weed and prune. Out with the dead weight.

Am I feeling fearless? Is that a good thing? Am I hopeful, or complacent?

Or just tired?

Whew. It’s been a busy time for me the last couple weeks! And while I’ve been frequently doing that blogger thing of pausing in the middle of a great experience and thinking, “How am I going to blog about this?” I’ve not been carrying through and actually doing the writing.

So here’s what’s been on the table latley (literally and figuratively). Hint: there are tigers and kormas and stones and summits… Read the rest of this entry »