I just wanted a grapefruit

I went into the kitchen today in search of a grapefruit. We used to have many, and I enjoyed some of them this weekend on the sidewalk in the sun. An odd grey cat strolled by and sniffed them. I think grapefruit might almost be tied with raspberries as my favorite.

I didn't find any grapefruit. Just an overwhelming proliferation of oranges. They are similar enough to remind me how much I wanted a grapefruit, but different enough to bother me a little. I started to eat one anyway. I thought it might be good.

Then I thought I would draw it and write about it for my blog. The drawing, although fairly accurate and aesthetic looks even more like a vagina than the orange in question. Not reasonable for this blog. I might draw flowers, fruit, seeds and whatnot but I draw the line at the more explicit.

My inadvertent artistic faux-pas reminded me of when I was three and participating in some kind of drawing project about what I wanted to be when I grew up. I definitely remember wanting to be an artist. I was pleased to think about spending my future drawing, coloring, painting and generally depicting life in colorful images. This isn't a dream I plan to give up on, even though I am fairly sure I might never officially be an "artist" and at the moment I'm displeased with my rendition of a citrus I didn't really want to eat.

Today I wrote an essay about the end of the traditional English pastoral, when the ideal of a pure, distinctly non-developed countryside could no longer exist. Interestingly, this simplified, misrepresentation of rural folks was really for the benefit of city people who needed to imagine a paradise outside the boundaries of their probably smelly, tedious, urban lives. It was a dream that even readers couldn't enjoy after a time because it wasn't possible to imagine anymore.

In general, I'd say that regarding literature and history, I don't really like to let escapist fantasies carry me too far afield from inquiry and critical thinking. However, I do wonder about what I really like to imagine and hope for. I hoped to be an artist and I hoped to eat a grapefruit. These ideals remain unrealized in my consciousness, and unrealistic in my present situation. Yet I'm not sure I know myself without some impractical schemes and visions for a perfect future I know I'll never have. Authors who write about such things tend to annoy me with their earnestness. My interest in grapefruit partially comes from my cynical attraction to things that are bittersweet, melancholy, that somewhat sharply remind me of what life is all about with pithy rinds, stringy membranes and delicious, sour, vitamin-filled juice.

I admit that I continue to reserve optimism for a few things, which I will tenuously admit to here: the mythic and most delicious grapefruit ever, rewarding relationships, some kind of artistic accomplishment, and a big garden some day where I can grow interesting foods and cats strolling by can visit me. In the case of the relationships, the garden, and the incidental cats, it is uncertain whether those are mythic figments of my imagination or real possibilities. Yet I reserve a special place in my mind for the grapefruit of my dreams that I know I can never have.

Perhaps it is the fantasy of the grapefruit that I really want.

Walkin around

This weekend I went on two lovely hikes and saw many flowers. Some of my favorites were the shooting stars.







Both hikes were much more like ambling around than hiking. I had time to notice little things like whether or not there were any four leaf clovers on the open oak savannah, how many different sounds the little streams made, how large the water droplets were on the pinky-nail sized leaves on mossy rocks next to waterfalls, and other such things.

Along with meandering at Mt. Pisgah and Silver Falls State Park, I'm pleased to say that my friends and I ate very indulgent pastrami sandwiches outside on the deck under the persimmon tree. It required a trip to the local butcher, the baker, the natural foods store, and the garden.

It's somewhat silly to provide a recipe for a pastrami sandwich, but there are several details of importance:

Good mustard

Sauerkraut (homemade? see below)

Thinly sliced warm pastrami. You can heat it in a cast iron skillet. (This will be heretical to some, but there's no reason you couldn't replace the meaty pastrami with grilled, marinated tempeh)

Toasted rye bread. The hippies at the natural food store almost tricked us into buying rye that had flax instead of caraway seeds. We figured it out and made the right choice. I got my favorite gluten free pumpernickel.

A side of horseradish if you're into that kind of thing. I am.

Swiss cheese is optional.

A salad of some kind on the side. We went with red potato, fresh garden arugula, sauteed onions, balsamic, salt and black pepper salad. Ok, I secretly admit there was bacon in it, but it's not a requirement.

Homemade sauerkraut

If you live in a giant co-op, have friends who are gardeners, or you just get over-zealous at the farmer's market, the problem of way too much cabbage can sneak up on you. Here's my solution:

Thinly slice the cabbage. Chop up some onion and a little garlic. Get a quart/half gallon jar and plenty of sea salt.

Put a little layer of cabbage/onion/garlic mix in the bottom of the jar, sprinkle a bunch of salt over it, then pummel it with your fist or some other implement until the salt macerates (pushes the water out) of the cabbage. Then add another layer of and repeat. Keep adding layers and pummeling until the jar is an inch or more from full and the fluid level is above the cabbage by at least half an inch. If the fluid is lower than that, just add a little water. Then, put something on top of the cabbage like a bowl with a rock or can on top of it to keep the cabbage under water. Cover it with cloth, leave it someplace dark and not too cold/not too hot and in several weeks it will be delicious sauerkraut. It shouldn't get moldy if it's salty enough, but mold can be ok as long as it's just the weird white salty mold on the top of the water, and not mold anywhere else. Check out this book about it: Wild Fermentation. I met this guy in Humboldt when he talked about fermenting a million different things in his co-op house.

Seeds

Last weekend I went out to see my friends Sarah and Andrew. We met when I was an undergrad at Humboldt and now they are farmers. They just started leasing a new farm and have a name, a plan, and all kinds of exciting stories about how they learned to grow open pollinated heirloom vegetables. Here's their seed project website: seed ambassadors

They gave a talk about seed saving. My favorite part was when their two ducks happened to waddle around next to Andrew just in time for him to explain how hybridization works and why it isn't good for seed savers. The cats were lurking in the audience thinking about how unfortunate it was that the ducks were just slightly too large to eat.

After the talk we unrolled two layers of plastic to put over their new greenhouse. The greenhouse is about 12 feet wide and 80 feet long. We got the plastic up just in time before it started pouring buckets.

Another time I was helping with chores, Sarah and I were hacking away at some invasive himalaya berry roots with the rusted old machetes in a giant mud hole in an attempt to clear out some space for the new fence and start to sort out a drainage problem in the old barn. She said that just as she began to get discouraged about the amount of work it would take to get her farm functional she thought about how I just started a five year long PhD program. She felt better. We both benefit from this analogy.

I can't say I've ever really committed to something for five years, even something I was really sure of. I can honestly say that when I decided to come to Oregon for school, I knew about as much about what my life would be like as a farmer might know about the future of a plant from just looking at a tiny seed.

Thankfully, so far this has been a good growing season for Ph.D students.

Speaking of seeds, here's my best guess at how I made tasty granola for my housemates. It's suspiciously nut free because one of my housemates can't eat nuts. If I were going to add nuts, I would add almonds, walnuts, and sesame seeds.

Rolled Oats
Dry Quinoa
Flax seeds
Brown Rice Flour
Goji berries
Raisins
Vanilla
Honey
Salt
Earth Balance (un-butter)
Nutmeg
Cinnamon

Let it be known that granola is more like a slightly nutritious carby dessert than a meal. That said, I can't emphasize enough how much butter or earth balance all these dry grains really want to soak up. So, put liberal quantities of honey and earth balance in a measuring cup and heat them in the microwave. Then mix them into the quinoa and oats. As for the flax, it is not digestible whole. I threw it into a food processor with the rice flour and then put all of that in with the other stuff. Mix it all together and make sure it's moist enough that the grains are sticking together in some places. Add the vanilla, nutmeg, salt and cinnamon to taste. Go ahead and add more earth balance and honey. It takes more than you think. Carby dessert.

*Don't throw the poor raisins and goji berries into an oven! They are already humiliated grapes, in the words of my friend Jeff. Add them later.

Then, cook the granola spread thinly on sheet pans on about 300 until it's brown and crunchy. Take it out a little before you think it's done and let it coast for a while on the pans while it cools. It goes from perfect to overcooked quickly.