Archives for posts with tag: philosophy

The Little Tree That Could: The Transformation of Maturity

August 27, 2019 //
2

Those of you who know me well will think I have a lot of gall discussing the subject of maturity. I know. But I am here to tell you about the state of my Conadria fig tree. I planted it in 2018.

After I placed it in its planting hole I gave it some compost tea. Since then I have been giving it gray water (about four or five gallons a week), and clearing weeds from around its base. It takes what it wants from the rain and sun and soil.

Conadria Fig, August 2019.

Last year it bore five delicious green figs. But look at it now! There are at least twenty-five figs this year, a five-fold increase. My new favorite sandwich is to pick a ripe fig, cut it open, put it on a piece of sourdough bread cut side down and then top it with a slice of ham and a piece of cheese. Yum. Perfect lunch food during hot weather.

I am not a person with an abundance of patience, or a person who gives the plants in the yard minute, exacting care. I love them and care for them, but they have to do well on their own to survive out there. It’s true that I ran out to prune the persimmon tree this winter when the wind was threatening to break several branches. It was the first tree I planted in our bare yard because we needed both wind breaks and shade. The persimmon has yet to fruit, although it is now taller than I am — I’m sure I’ll be doing a dance when I see its first Fuyu persimmon.

I did not plant anything this spring, busy with IRS paperwork, waiting for the rain to end, digging holes in my yard for soil testing. My lax gardening style allows plants to go to seed and reproduce themselves. This does not produce the “house and garden” look, as at any season things are growing leggy and going to seed, but it does produce a lot of free food. I can count on chard, kale and lettuce to reproduce themselves and I can have free tomatoes as long as I let them grow where they want — mostly through the squares of the patio. I also have volunteer butternut squash and a few Thai basil plants that like a spot by the north fence and come up there each year.

August tomatoes.

We are in full tomato season now. Yesterday I picked two full baskets. This morning I picked another basket three-quarters full. Then I sorted all of the tomatoes with splits and wrinkles and sun-scald, cut them in half and filled trays for the dehydrator. We will eat them in the winter and spring when there are no good tomatoes to be had.

I have many excuses for not gardening more than I do. At the moment they include practicing music a couple of hours a day and working to turn my voluminous memoir writing practices into a real book. I still cook, but I tend to cook the same things over and over and I have given you most of my go-to recipes already. I am, however, grateful and joyful when the yard produces food that we can eat.

I apologize to all readers for the ugly ads that show up in my blog posts. I have nothing to do with soliciting them, or selecting them. I would remove them all if I could. I had not seen one until I looked at my most recent post this morning. Ugh. Do your best to ignore them, please. And thank you for reading.

 

 

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Categories fruit, gardening, Uncategorized

June Transformation: Learning from Mistakes

June 10, 2015 //
7

Last time I posted here I was admiring the volunteer forest of tomatoes that had sprung up in the backyard. I even sat out there one day and tried to capture what it felt like to sit in the tomato forest. I treated it as a forest, too, left the understory on the ground. I did clip out non-bearing branches quite often, and the plants produced new shoots as soon as I could clip them off. I tended the chard, giving what water I could save from boiling pasta and washing vegetables. I watched the kale flower — I don’t care much about this kale, a gray-green variety that a friend gave me, so I was not overly concerned.

I should have been concerned. I did notice when I went out to dole out water to the chard that the kale was alive, shimmering with pests, but I didn’t care if the pests took down the kale plant. My chard was healthy and kept making new chard plants. One section of tomatoes had beautiful crowns of blossoms three feet above the ground. I began to think we might eat our first ripe tomato by the last day of May. We did. We cut it in half and had a little ceremony for the first fruits of the summer.

Later, after a rare rain and some cloudy days I noticed white specks in the tallest section of tomatoes. I thought it was mildew brought on by the damp. I hoped for sunny weather to dry it out and was not concerned.

I should have been concerned. The white specks turned out to be aphids and I am now battling to save what I can of the tomato plants. I prune them savagely, losing unripe tomatoes and blossoms with every cut of my shears. I save bath water, impregnate it with organic lemongrass soap and blast away for hours at the besieged plants. I toss the prunings into an old pot with waste water, submerging them to kill aphids and eggs. I pluck every yellow or brown or decayed leaf from the ground, clearing the understory of aphid hiding places. I was out there many hours Monday and yesterday afternoon. And then I had to take a break. I was exhausting myself and the aphids were continuing to spread and reproduce.

I looked up various remedies. I knew lady bugs ate aphids. I found out that it takes 1500 lady bugs to clean the aphids off one plant, that they usually fly away within forty-eight hours and you usually need two batches just to be sure. Lady bugs were out, unless I could buy them by the truckload.

Hard sprays of water from a hose are supposed to blast aphids off the plants. We are in a major drought here and only water with waste water. We do not have a gray water system. Using a hose is out. It’s up to me and my clippers and spray bottle. Sigh.

But then today I woke up to steady rain! Rain! Not only would it strengthen and nourish the plants and soil, but aphids hate it. After a late breakfast I found myself out in the garden with my clips and sprayer, dressed in a shift and a pair of old sandals, enjoying the rain on my skin. I worked for nearly three hours, worked until my back could take no more. I came into the house, thinking I would have lunch. Instead, I drank two quarts of water and headed back into the rain to treat more branches.

I worked again until I could work no more. I hung my soaked shift in the bathroom and put on a robe. I had a belated snack of leftover cornbread, a few tomatoes and two cups of tea. I had promised Johnny an early dinner, so I could not linger out in the garden.

Now the rain has stopped, but the battle will continue.

My mistake was in not seeing that everything is connected. The aphids that were destroying the kale would move to the tomatoes, or the conditions that were producing a banner crop of aphids that feed on kale could produce tomato-eating aphids, too. My second mistake was not investigating the first white specks more thoroughly, not turning leaves over to look. By the time I realized what was there, the infestation was in full swing.

My yard gave me the tomato plants, more than I would have ever planted on my own. I envisioned a bigger crop than I have ever had. with tomatoes for drying. for pasta sauce, for eating raw, tomatoes for my friends and family. So far, I have delivered half a basket of green tomatoes to my friend Elaine and we have half a basket of ripe cherry tomatoes on our kitchen table. There are many green tomatoes still on the vine and many months left in tomato season. There are only so many hours a day to devote to aphid warfare, however, and I don’t know what I will save.

I think of my friend Celi, a full-time farmer. She has lost animals and bees and, undoubtedly, plants as well. She is growing her own food. I am trying to grow some of mine, tomatoes and chard. I’m still using last year’s butternut squash from this very garden. I admire anyone who grows organic food successfully. I read about plants aphids hate and think perhaps I will plant mint everywhere (I have one small pot of it). Maybe I can learn to propagate mint plants from stem cuttings.

Just two weeks ago I was admiring the indefatigable tomato plants, producing shoot after shoot. I was thinking that they were teaching me how to continue in all circumstances. I could just as well admire the indefatigable aphids, who only want to live and reproduce, but I’d rather have tomatoes than aphids.

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Categories gardening, Uncategorized

October Transformation: Toward Better Self Care

October 28, 2014 //
8
Formerly green tomato.

Formerly green tomato.

I began writing this month’s Kale Chronicles on an October afternoon, following a morning of rain showers. The rain is a major blessing in drought-stricken California. My thirsty vegetable and mint plants drink in the rain, as they have drunk in the abundant sunshine of October. The two-tone green tomatoes have unexpectedly turned orange and are on their way to red. The poblano peppers on one plant continue to grow, while the other plant is forming fruit as its blossoms die. A few tomatoes that fell before they were fully ripe are ripening on a windowsill in the breakfast room. I will have a small harvest from my seed-grown vegetables.

With the return of damp weather to punctuate a bright autumn, my thoughts turn to butternut squash soup. I originally published this recipe for kabocha squash soup in 2011, an adaptation of the soup I usually make from butternut squash, my absolute favorite of the winter squashes. I start making this soup each year when the weather gets cool and continue to make it until spring warmth returns. Butternut squash keep a long time on the counter or in a cool garage or cellar and one large or two small ones will make a lot of soup. All you need else is water, onions, fresh ginger, tamari, a bit of thyme and dairy or non-dairy milk to suit.

Poblano and flower.

Poblano and flower.

My personal lesson for the summer and fall parallels the experience my friend Saundra wrote about in her Wonder Woman blog post: that in times of trouble I must make self-care a priority, whatever form it takes. In my case, I must meditate, seek conversations with friends, practice music, attend 12-step meetings, do spiritual reading, attempt to get reasonable amounts of exercise and sleep. A surprising outcome of taking better care of myself is that I draw all kinds of gifts into my orbit: a friend offers to make a performance video that I can put up on YouTube (Stay tuned! I’ll tell you when it is done). Another friend sends me a music CD that I want in exchange for feedback on the CD. Even the passers-by at my busking gigs buy more CDs and increase their tips to me. And I hatch an idea for a new short-term music project: next month I will go into the studio to make a three-song E.P. (short CD), recording the songs I wrote in 2012. It will be called “Clueless” and I hope to have it for sale by the end of next month. I am only manufacturing three hundred copies to start so be sure to let me know in the comments field if you would like one for yourself or for a Christmas or Chanukah gift (Manufacturing a small run makes it possible for me to make new music available without incurring the large costs of a full-length project). I continue to busk and offer full-length “Paris” CDs for sale at CDBaby, Down Home Music and via email.

My daily experience continues to be that people are kind to me and supportive of my projects and of my efforts to improve my life and relationships. Oh, sometimes there is push-back, but there is often a way to step out of the conflict by focusing on what I need and not what the other person is doing.

I am continuing to seek what Buddhists call “right livelihood,” ways to earn money that are consistent with my gifts and ethical stance. For inspiration I am currently taking an expanded version of Maia Duerr’s course, Fall in Love with Your Work. In the spirit of generosity, I have created a new page on The Kale Chronicles called “Writing Prompts.” Look for the page link up in the left-hand corner at the top of the blog post. Each month I will feature some of the prompts or writing topics I learned to use in fifteen years of work with Natalie, plus prompts inspired by the current season (sort of like your serving of writing fruits and vegetables for basic nutrition). I will be glad to answer questions about writing practice and grateful to have referrals to students in the East Bay who desire to learn Natalie’s deep teachings.

 

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Categories gardening, home cooking, seasonal recipes, soups, Uncategorized

September Transformation: Old garden, new garden and cultivating awareness

September 30, 2014 //
9

This September there have been a couple of sightings of my old vegetable garden in San Leandro. First I heard that butternut squash had taken over the entire yard. I asked about the beans, but my informant hadn’t seen any beans. Then I got an email from someone else, explaining that my garden had fed her all summer, that she had eaten green beans and tomatoes and butternut squash and given beans and squash away to neighbors of hers. I am happy that people were able to eat the produce I grew since I could not eat it myself. I still longed for some of those butternut squash and put in a call to my former landlord to ask if I could pick some squash (Johnny is away for the time being).

Poblano peppers.

Poblano peppers.

Meanwhile in my new container garden here in foggy Kensington one of the poblano pepper plants has finally fruited and a single principe borghese tomato is slowly turning red in the sunny days of September. The other tomato plants are full of pale pink and green Amish paste tomatoes and more borgheses and a mystery tomato from my sister-in-law’s Vallejo garden, currently a two-tone green job. Will the tomatoes ripen before the plants die? Before it rains? Will I bring the green tomatoes inside to ripen? Will I make a green tomato chutney? Stay tuned for the October tomato and pepper report.

The landlord called back. He said, “I know who planted that garden” and granted me access to pick produce there. When my friend M. and I drove out we found the wildest of gardens: all of the hard surfaces had been obscured by foliage. Squash vines snaked everywhere: from where I had planted them along the back fence line they had crossed the entire yard and begun to climb up the back stair. All paths and spaces between rows had vanished and I had to step carefully through unripe squash to remove ripe squash from the vines that also bore squash blossoms, tiny green squash and full-sized green squash.

Buried beneath green leaves ripe principe borghese tomatoes crept along the ground close to the house while ripe Sun Gold cherry tomatoes lurked in the understory and green ones grew through the side fence. Some of the weeds I had worked to eradicate found new openings where the green beans had been. I cut the three small heads of purple cabbage that I had planted in February, but left chard and kale growing by the back fence. I did not find any Amish paste tomatoes or basil or pepper plants in the tangle, but I could not reach large portions of the yard in the amount of time I had. I did find some dried bean and pea pods, picked what I could and shelled about half a cup of mixed black-eyed peas and pinto beans while I waited on the BART platform to go home. M. hauled most of the butternut squash we picked in the trunk of her car, but I carried a token specimen in my backpack. along with a Tupperware container of tomatoes and the shelling beans.

Butternut squash.

Butternut squash.

As I write this, I am roasting principe borghese tomatoes in the oven with olive oil and a little garden mint*. Pinto beans and black-eyed peas are soaking together in a big pot. Small slices of peeled butternut squash share the oven with the tomatoes. I propose to make a soup to honor my gardens, here and there, the honorable labor I did, the lovely San Leandro sun and fertile soil, the strong heirloom seeds that survived my inexpert care and the lack of rain,  the compost of coffee grounds, egg shells, tea bags and the occasional chicken head. I will flavor the soup with chiles to honor the poblano plant and its late-borne fruit.

The local library has recently yielded up treasures, including The Art of Practicing: A Guide to Making Music from the Heart and The Heart of Zen: Enlightenment, Emotional Maturity, and What It Really Takes for Spiritual Liberation. I read them and write about them and work at becoming aware of my habits and my reactive emotional patterns, watering my life with sitting meditation and compassion meditation in the hope of bearing sweeter fruits from new seeds while extracting learning from the old bitter ones. I begin to advertise writing practice classes again — perhaps this time I will find more students. I continue to practice music and to busk in the BART station and Farmers’ Market, practicing gratitude and patience, saying with Leonard Cohen each day, “And even though it all went wrong, I’ll stand before The Lord of Song with nothing on my tongue but ‘Hallelujah.'” I wish you all a fine fall.

Principe Borghese tomatoes.

Principe Borghese tomatoes.

* This is the first year I have raised this variety: they are very pretty, about the size of cherry peppers, but I don’t especially care for their flavor, either eaten raw or oven roasted — they are not sweet enough to suit me, but they are a drying tomato so I will dry some and report back about that next month. It may be that I just have not discovered their secret(s). I had wanted a paste tomato, a drying tomato and tomatoes to eat raw and chose accordingly from recommended heirlooms. Plus, I had to have the Sun Gold hybrid cherry, the most delicious tomato I have ever tasted (Those I grow every year).

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Categories gardening, home cooking, philosophy, seasonal recipes, soups, Uncategorized, vegetables

August Transformation: How Cooking Informs Character, What Happens When I Practice and a Vegetable Update

August 31, 2014 //
12

One Thursday evening and Friday afternoon this month two different neighbors dropped by with gifts of pears from their trees. I said thank you and put them on the sideboard. Pears do not keep long unless they are picked green, so Sunday morning after breakfast I started peeling them and cutting them open, cutting out bad spots. Some of them had rotted from the inside out and went directly into the compost can.

On Friday I had pulled a few recipes from the pear section of the huge recipe binder on my bookshelf. Depending on the state of the pears, I could make clafouti or pear tart tatin, but I had my eye on some pear pecan muffins, which would also use the last of the pecans in the shell I had sitting around. I have been eating said pecans at the rate of two a day, cracked and broken and stirred into my favorite summer breakfast of polenta with fresh peaches, mostly because of the time it takes to crack them and pick the meats from the shell and cartilage. Making the muffins gave me the excuse I needed to cover the breakfast room table with newspaper and crack all of the remaining pecans.

I had researched methods of shelling pecans on the internet. Some people boil them. Some people take the to other people who shell them. Some people use side cutters and pliers or build machines to crack the shells. What I learned was that I had been using a nut cracker incorrectly my entire life: I always put the nut in and squeezed as hard as possible —  generally, hard enough to break nuts in half. Instead, a couple of online sources suggested rotating the nut several times and applying just enough pressure to crack the outer shell without damaging the nut. Oh. I was intrigued.

I tried the new method, concentrating on cracking the ends of the nuts — one YouTube video presented removing the ends as the key to easy shelling. I had limited success with this maneuver, usually ending up with the ends of the nuts breaking in the shell. What did happen, though, is that I got absorbed in the task of shelling the pecans, forgetting about time as I turned the nuts, cracked off pieces of shell, pried nutmeat from shell with a curved pick. I forgot my coffee. I forgot my thoughts.

When I finished shelling the nuts and had moved on to another kitchen task — measuring flour, perhaps — I had the thought that if I would take the care in dealing with people that I took in shelling pecans, my relationships would go better — if I retained an open, curious attitude about what would work best and tried to do things gently so as not to hurt anyone. I heard my teacher’s voice, or her teacher’s voice, reminding me that anything you do can take you deep.

Naturally, this insight was fleeting. As I looked for the millet that I wanted to add to the muffins I came upon difficulties: I had to look in a cardboard box that was balanced precariously on some glass jars. The box itself contained other glass jars. Trying to keep it balanced while sorting through its contents, while standing on a step ladder, proved impossible. My mother informed me that the glass jars in the box only contained beans and suggested another location in the cabinet. I looked there with no success and then moved the ladder across the kitchen to look in a bin in another high cupboard. Because I could not see into the bin I had written a list of the contents on a post-it and stuck it on the side, but, when I climbed up, the post-it was gone and I had no alternative but to reach over my head to lift the heavy bin down to see what was in it. I found this irritating in extreme, that my contents label was gone. And, of course, the millet was not there. I said a few words about how I had tried to find a solution and someone else had undone my efforts.

This happens everyday, of course. Someone undoes my efforts and I undo someone’s efforts, each of us not knowing what we are doing that is messing with someone’s solution or desires or plans.

Eventually, I found the millet and put a half cup of it into the muffins. I have never cooked with millet before and it provides a satisfying crunch.

A few days ago, after two months of searching, I found some guitar lessons on YouTube that will help me improve my guitar playing. After nearly two years of busking I am bored by the sameness of my arrangements: because I play many of the same songs everyday I have started to hear what I am doing and to long for other options. Anyway, I finally found lessons and exercises from three different teachers that feature Travis picking, a style that I never studied formally or extensively. When I first found them and played through the exercises as best I could I was ecstatic: the exercises were challenging for me, I had to take them slowly and work to get them right. In my initial enthusiasm I researched tips for successful music practicing and learned that it was more effective to practice twice or three times a day for a shorter amount of time than to use the long sessions I had been using. I also learned that it was good to practice every single day, even for only ten minutes.

Following this advice, I divided my practice sessions. The first time I tried this I was late getting home from work and had to jam one practice session in shortly after arriving home so as to get it in before dinner and have a break before session number two. That evening I worked rigorously on the exercises in session one. What I noticed when I began session two is that I wanted to play, but I did not want to practice the exercises, that, in fact, I wanted to play anything at all as long as I did not have to play by any rules. Hmm.

Today, I was back at rigorous practice in session one. And during session one I noticed the comments of voices in my head. The loudest one wants to tell everyone I know how hard this practice is for me. She wants someone to listen to her. Another one calmly reminds me that I chose this set of exercises and this practice routine to improve my playing and relieve my boredom and give me more choices of how to play. The third voice gently suggests that I take breaks. The last one cautions me to be patient and to pay attention to what I am doing so that I do not practice mistakes.

All during this period from June to now as I transition into a new life back in my old location I have been nursing a few tomato plants and three pepper plants that I started from seed back in March, April and May. I have transplanted seedlings to buckets, staked them, watered them, watched them. They have grown taller, but the tomato plants have a tendency to wilt here in the fog. As of this afternoon I have small green tomatoes, both Principe Borghese and Amish Paste varieties and, miraculously, at least one flower on each of the pepper plants. Let us hope that September will provide enough heat and clear days to ripen them all. I’ll let you know at the end of the month — perhaps I’ll even find my camera by then and add a photo or two.

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Categories baking, fruit, gardening, home cooking, muffins

Something Beautiful: Life’s Brevity, Shared Meals and Peach/Plum Crisp Two Ways

July 22, 2012 //
41
Original watercolor painting shows fruit crisp and ingredients.

Peach and Plum Crisp. 8″ x 8″ Gouache and acquarelle on paper. Sharyn Dimmick.

I am not the most informed person in the world: I find that reading a daily paper depresses me and paralyzes me with all that I don’t know and all that I can’t do about things. I watch Bill Moyers on PBS and occasionally dip into The Newshour. I read a local weekly rag, The East Bay Express, sometimes focusing on the astrology column and the restaurant reviews, although I usually read the cover story. Other than that, I get my news from Facebook updates and a few chosen sources that I subscribe to.

Because of that, I learned about the movie theater shootings in Colorado on Facebook on Friday afternoon. A friend of mine, Deby Dixon, posted a link to a blog she wrote about the brevity of life and the importance of following your dreams while you have time and health because none of us know when our life will be cut short, when our health will fail, when life or death will intervene in some unexpected fashion. Deby wondered if some of the people in Colorado died wishing that they had gotten to some dream of theirs. Deby’s story and her reflections moved me to tears and I asked permission to share it with you. You’ll find her post here, along with some of her photographs: Deby is traveling and photographing the beauty and majesty of our national parks.

What do you do when life smacks you down, when you suffer a loss? You grieve. You tell the story to others. You seek comfort. Perhaps you seek to comfort others. What comforts me in my most dire straits is beauty. Which is not to say that beauty makes me feel all better right way: beauty breaks open the heart, opening it up to the full catastrophe of grief, but beauty also helps you bear having your heart open in its pain. Beauty is a reminder that in the face of loss there are moments of great beauty and tenderness, that we are in this together, that the sun rises even on our worst day, scattering light through the atmosphere. Sometimes it doesn’t seem fair that the sun is shining — how can it be when we have suffered such a blow?

How to deal with a tragedy on a food blog? When you are grieving, it can be hard to eat. But you need to eat. In my hardest times I have found it was easier to eat with other people, that I could eat a few bites in the company of a trusted friend if I could not eat alone. So my recommendation for you this weekend is that you find some way to share a meal with someone else. It could be a version of David Lebovitz’s tomato tart.

You could go to a potluck and bring a loaf of bread, a dessert. a salad. What matters is that you eat with others to ease your hearts and theirs. And that someone puts something beautiful on the table: a vase of flowers, a special tablecloth, a rose from the yard, a silver pitcher, a photo of your best beloved.

Original ink and watercolor sketch of old Harmony guitar.

Harmony Guitar #3. 5″x 7″ ink and watercolor on paper. Sharyn DImmick

After I heard about the shooting in Colorado I spent a few hours sketching my old Harmony guitar that I got from a pawn shop in San Francisco. I listened to music as I worked. The Harmony is beat up, but has a sweet tone: to me it is beautiful. I share it with you and I urge you to look at Deby’s photographs and, possibly, to listen to some music you love, hymns or loud rock and roll — it matters only that you love it.

A simple seasonal dessert we have been eating lately around here is mixed peach and plum crisp. I’ve been making it with fresh Santa Rosa plums (both from the farm box and from my sister-in-law’s tree in Vallejo) and fresh peaches from Frog Hollow Farm. I usually use a Betty Crocker apple crisp recipe for the proportions of the topping ingredients and make the topping with rolled oats, unbleached and whole wheat flours, butter, brown sugar, nutmeg and cinnamon, but a few weeks ago I made a gluten-free version to take to a party: what I did was use more oats and substitute a couple of tablespoons of cornstarch for the flour (Oats are gluten-free if you make sure to buy oats that have not been processed in a facility that also processes wheat and other grains). You can make it either way. I usually make it in an 8″ x 8″ Pyrex pan, but sometimes I double the topping amounts, use more fruit and bake it in a 9″ x 13″ pan.

Gluten-Free Peach and Plum Crisp

Preheat oven to  350.

Slice enough fruit to cover the bottom of an 8″ x 8″ square pan. If you have small plums, it might take a whole bag; if you have average plums, use four or five, plus four or five peaches.

Combine 1 cup gluten-free rolled oats and 2 heaping tablespoons cornstarch.

Add 1/2 cup  brown sugar, plus nutmeg and cinnamon to taste.

Cut in 1/3 cup butter.

Sprinkle topping over fruit.

Bake for 35 minutes or until sufficiently browned to suit you.

Serve with creme fraiche, whipped cream, burnt caramel ice cream, or just with a little milk or cream drizzled on top. Share with someone.

For the standard version, use 1/2 cup of flour, 1/2 cup of rolled oats and the same amounts of butter, brown sugar and spices as above and follow the same baking and serving instructions.

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Categories desserts, fruit, seasonal recipes, Uncategorized