Flying Tomato Farms

I don’t know how long it has been since I made pies–especially entirely from scratch.  But the two pumpkin pies turned out pretty well.  The filling, made from the Neck Pumpkin I grew, is fabulous–I dug into the dish of pumpkin custard I cooked after the pies were done and gave a taste to H and M  this morning (after I tasted it).  The dog got a little lick of the spoon, too.

I plan to make the apple pie this morning–the crust is chilling in the fridge from last night, and the filling is coming to room temperature on the table.  I popped open the canning jar last night and we had a little with supper as chunky applesauce.  If there’s not enough left in that quart canning jar, I’ll open a small jar of boozy fruit and mix that in.

H. was pretty excited about the apple pie.  For some reason, it feels like some kind of womanhood test–can I make an apple pie from scratch for “my man”?  He’s not acting like that, of course–it’s more my own strange ideas.  I can laugh about it, of course, but it’s still lurking there in the corner of my brain.  Maybe I’ll put on a flouncy skirt, heels, and makeup–pull it with a flourish out of the oven.  Except I don’t think H would find that more or less attractive than anything else I might or might not be wearing–he just wants the pie, not the fifties housewife. 

I had gotten back from Sioux Falls with M., made pie crusts for the pumpkin and apple pies and had them chilling in the fridge, then made dinner for me, M, and H. when the phone rang.

It was my dad calling to tell me that his father, my last surviving grandparent, died in his sleep this afternoon.  He had congestive heart failure from pneumonia, and had been in a hospice room in Troy, New York, for a couple of days.  I hadn’t seen him for almost four years, after having tried to bring M. to see him last winter and been turned back by the weather.

My grandpa always seemed like a force of nature to me, even when his shock of red hair went white.  It never did seem to want to lie down–half the time I remember it sticking almost straight up like a fringe of flame around his head.

His boisterous voice and bouncing knee startled me a little when I was young and shy, but his stories and songs always made me laugh.  He made up all kinds of raucous lyrics that would trail off just as he got to the good parts–the parts where my grandma’s stern look would cut him off, and he’d stand there grinning a rascal’s grin.

He was married and had kids by his first wife before meeting my grandmother–but no one in the family ever knew about them (even my dad and his three brothers) until after my grandma died.  She wouldn’t allow him to see them, and after her death he tried to reconnect with them, and to introduce his later children to their step-siblings.

I didn’t know until a couple years ago that he’d started out a dairy farmer, and then went on to become a mechanic–I always remember him working on some old car or truck or tractor.  He’d always drive Cadillacs that he fixed up, and one of the memories I have of my childhood time with my grandparents was riding in those plush big cars to some supper club.  Most of the time they ate at home though, and the feasts we ate at their house remain some of the biggest meals I’ve ever seen in my life.

The last visit I had with my grandpa was at the old house where he and my grandma had lived for decades.  After that, he moved into an apartment.  M was two years old, and I’d brought him to my parents’ for Christmas, and then my dad took M., my husband, and I down to Troy to see him.

I have a picture my ex-husband took of us there in the house I’ll always remember him in: me and M., my grandpa, my dad, and my Uncle Gary, all posing together, with a portrait of my grandpa’s mother also in the shot, unplanned but clearly visible in the background.

H. and I drove to Centerville this morning to the Royal Bake Shop for some Thanksgiving treats and had breakfast in the cafe there.  It’s nice to go to a real bakery for a change–we don’t have one in Vermillion anymore.  I don’t count bakeries attached to grocery stores as real ones–even if they do bake their own breads and make their own cakes (Sorry Larry & Monica!).

To me, a real bakery is one that makes all kind of baked goods–breads and pastries.  They have a little bell on the door.  Their windows are steamy.  They might have sandwiches for lunch or not, made with their own fresh bread, but they always have that Bunn coffee maker going, and they smell like a yeasty sweet heaven.

They have a few tables so the regulars can sit down and have a bearclaw or a glazed doughnut and a cup of coffee, but the most space in the place is taken up by the ovens and the glass cases and the racks of breads and rolls and brioche (if you’re lucky) and fritters and Bismarks.  They have waxed paper bags.

When I was little and we lived right in Middlebury, my parents would send my brother and I out on our bikes on a Saturday morning with a little cash, and we’d ride over to the Bakery Lane Bakery across from the Grand Union grocery store for yeasted glazed doughtnuts and sugared doughnut holes, wrapping the tops of the waxed paper bags over our handlebars to get them safely home.  That bakery is gone now–Middlebury Bagel and Deli has taken its place, and the grocery store is a Shaw’s rather than a Grand Union.

After we’d moved up to the mountain and I was in my late teens, I worked early counter shifts for about six months at the Otter Creek Bakery.  We made everything from hearty breads to fancy cakes, tarts, and eclairs (the bakers let me help separate eggs for the cream centers once), plus croutons (I nearly cut my thumb off helping with that), salads, and sandwiches. I had a crush on the head baker, who had brown eyes, a dark full beard, and workingman’s hands, and who also worked as a gardener at Shelburne Farms.

I loved coming in at six in the morning and getting the coffee going, immersed in a warm bath of bakery scents, and nibbling on a Danish while I got the till ready and stocked the bags.  We didn’t sell doughnuts–I remember this well because it was a point of snobbish pride.  We were too near the college to vend such proletariat fare.  Still, almost every morning some old duffer would come in asking for them and wondering just what kind of bakery didn’t have them.

I still have the plastic mug they gave me to mark my official acceptance into their employee fold.  Once you worked there for a few weeks, one of the cake decorators would take a plastic mug and fashion your name in caulk in a fancy script, and that’s what we all used for our morning coffee and afternoon tea while we were there.  I probably won’t ever drink out of it again–since I’ve been using it for the past several years as a dog food scoop.

Still, it’d be interesting to see what would happen if I walked in there after all these years and presented it for a refill.  I took my son there last winter and Ben, the owner, was still working the counter.  I didn’t expect he’d recognize me after the better part of two decades had elapsed, so we just ordered our hot chocolate and muffins and headed back out into the cold, the sweet yeasty scent still trapped in the fibers of our woolly coats.

This time of year, I can get a bit scatterbrained.  There’s no garden to focus my thoughts, so when I’m not teaching, I can kind of drift around.  If it’s a bad year, the Seasonal Affective Disorder sets in early, and then not only am I drifting, I’m doing it in a sea of “nothing matters.”

I’d like to personally thank Barack Obama and all the people who voted for him, and those who voted No on Initiated Measure 11 for this year’s reprieve.  Nothing to make SAD come on faster than a mean little man as president-elect and the feeling that the state and religious wingnuts think they own your body.  So, thanks for keeping that from happening.

This year isn’t so bad thusfar–I am doing a lot of reading when I’m not online, which is pretty standard for the darker months.  I do have to watch what I read a little–it’s a good thing I finished Giants in the Earth when I did, and can move on to slightly lighter reading.  Still, there were a couple days when the thought crossed my mind that I might be getting a little like Beret, without the saving grace of religious righteousness.  In short, just plain mean and crazy.

I’m past that now, and onto more pleasant thoughts.  I do enjoy the holiday season coming when it does mostly because of the opportunity to get out and talk to people a little, though lately I seem to have a slight problem stringing together a coherent sentence out loud to an actual living person.  I took myself down to the Coffee Shop with my current novel, so as to break the spell of speaking to no one but myself and the dog (and H of course).

There seems to be a trend of more people talking out loud to themselves in public–or maybe I’m just noticing it more among those not yet admitted to the state hospitals.  I do it–in the grocery store especially if I haven’t made a list.  Let me just be clear that I don’t have a problem with it if no one else does. I’d like to see us all just get along on this point.

I overheard one of the Coffee Shop employees do it this afternoon–he was right by my table, and I was fairly well engrossed in my book, but I heard him say “Well, that wasn’t smart,” and I peeked out of the corner of my eye.  I was the only one within earshot, and since he wasn’t looking at me for a response, I can only assume he was talking to himself.  That’s just OK with me.

One of the things I do regularly in order to have contact with fellow human beings and also give my dog the opportunity to exercise is drive down to the dog park in the afternoons.  The social scene is a little weird there because in dog park etiquette, you know the names of all the dogs, but you may know literally none of the names of the owners.  You can stand there for the whole hour chatting with a person day after day and never ask their name, but their dog’s names you couldn’t forget if you tried.

One time I was chatting with a guy down there whose dog my dog had played with almost every day for a few weeks, and I asked him his name, thinking that at that point in the conversation it seemed a reasonable thing to do.  He started getting weird about it and immediately brought up his wife in a sort of random way that suggested he thought I was hitting on him.  Since then, I don’t generally bother asking people’s names.  Only the dogs have identities at the dog park, and since we can’t go around sniffing their butts like our dogs do, we remember their names.

I can see how it’s doubly strange when the partners of people who regularly bring their dogs down suddenly show up with the dog but without their partner.  If they don’t know how things are at the dog park, they might be more than a little creeped out at the fact that quite literally everyone knows their dog, and they’ve never seen any of those people before in their lives.  They might get to thinking their dog is somehow moonlighting on them, and is part of a rockin’ social scene.

It might be a little sad to realize that my dog has an awful lot more friends she sees on a regular basis than I do, but she at least lets me come to her parties.  And she hardly ever looks at me funny when I talk to myself.

We will be having dinner at the house on the bluff, with me and H. and two of his daughters and hopefully everyone’s husbands and significant others can make it.  Not sure who else will be showing up, but S, H’s youngest daughter, is in charge of the main meal prep.

My mission is to make pie.  I’m doing a couple of traditional pies–an apple and a pumpkin, and while the apple filling is already sitting in a canning jar on the pantry shelf, the pumpkin needs some preparation.

My mother always eschewed carving up an actual pumkin for her pies, and although I’m going by her recipe, I’m using some of my big Neck Pumpkin instead of the usual “one can One Pie Pumpkin” that she does.  You can’t get One Pie Pumpkin around here anyway, last I checked–Libby’s is the usual brand name.

Not that it really matters what brand of canned pumpkin you use–most of them are just plain pumpkin anyhow, so using from-scratch squash or pumpkin is about getting the consistency right.  It needs to be pretty thick in order that the pie will set in a custard-like consistency.

What’s in those cans of pumpkin isn’t really what you’d think of as a pumpkin–all my sources tell me they use Neck Pumpkin–an exaggeratedly elongated form of butternut squash. This one was pretty big–I’m having to cook it two different ways–half roasted and half boiled.  I don’t have a big enough steamer basket to cook the large quantity of squash I had left over when the roasting pan was full.  I’ll see which comes out of the cooking process in a better consistency for pie-making and freeze the rest for later use.

At least, since all my other winter squash went kaput this season, I know I can save the seeds from this fruit and they will likely come true.  Squashes, melons, and cukes are indiscriminate cross-breeders, so you can’t save seed from them if they were flowering at the same time as any others of their kind and you didn’t cover and hand-pollinate them.  Well, you can, but what you’ll get out of those seeds may be quite a bit different than you expected.

I let my spaghetti squash do the hoochie-coochie with acorns and teacup squashes one season, and the next year those seeds formed some strange yellow and green striped and splotched fruits.  Luckily, they were all pretty tasty anyhow, and most still had the spaghetti-like flesh you’d expect.

Spent most of the weekend reading and cleaning house.  We got the idea Friday night that we might go to Omaha on Saturday, but ended up just getting an ice cream sundae in Elk Point.  How’s that for scaling down?

But I managed to do a lot that needed doing–after the floor-scrubbing and cabinet cleaning Friday, I did dusting and a little holiday decorating Saturday, and major paper filing and discarding yesterday.  I managed to get four schoolwork folders reduced to one–tossing all the worksheets and keeping only the projects, which are now stored in the bottom of M’s dresser.

It continues to amaze me how much paper comes into my life without my even asking for it.  Sure, I print out articles here and there, but you’d think teaching online would cut down on the piles.  The mail seems to more than make up for it.

Still haven’t gone through last year’s seed catalogs, but those are next and can be recycled.  I hate to get rid of the standards I order from every year (Territorial, Johnny’s, Pinetree, Seeds Savers. Seeds of Change) until I get the new version.  Unlike the catalogs, the books I cleared out of my bookcase will hopefully be re-used: I’ve got a box for the English Dept. free table and some to donate to the library as well.

Unlike many English majors I’ve known, I don’t hoard books in bulk.  Well, I don’t anymore–I used to hoard them and then sell or get rid of most of them every time I moved, but after many nomadic years, I got tired of the process, and decided to reduce my store about every six months whether I was moving or not.

Now, when my big bookcase starts getting over-full, I start culling.  The top two shelves are reserved for novels, poetry, and essay collections; the middle shelf holds anthologies, reference, and textbooks; and the bottom two are for history, cookbooks, garden books, and tall books of all kinds.

I do have a tendency to stack books horizontally on top of the vertically-aligned ones, so along with the thirty-five to forty books that can properly fit on each shelf, I can get about five or fifteen more stacked on top.  When I reduce, I try to get my collection down to what will fit vertically on the shelves, or about two hundred books total.

I think of this as a positive exercise mainly because in culling some of the no longer desirable texts, I can open up space for more books to come into my life.  I did just purchase a couple novels from the new Main Street Bookstore, one of which I’ve already finished (Margaret Atwood’s Cat’s Eye) and another I’ve just begun: Tom Wolfe’s I am Charlotte Simmons.

Atwood’s novel got a vertical spot on my shelf right away, but as much as I am enjoying Wolfe’s, his will likely go in the horizontal position on top–easier to pull out and give away in the next book reduction.

I went down to Carey’s last night with a friend I stole away from her family to listen to “the boys” (Nick and Owen) play and chat a little.  H’s neighbor Kathy was there–she and her brother took a couple deer from the area–a nice big buck and a doe, so maybe that will cut down a little on our deer damage troubles.

I did cover the row of wild garden kales–they already had a series of cages over their row and I stretched a length of row cover over the top and tucked it under the sides, so hopefully that will give enough protection from cold and drying winds to bring them through the winter.

It’s not really the cold temperatures so much that kills the kale plants, but the winds that dry out the stalks.  Then the deer clip off their tops and they’re done for.  Snow cover usually helps save a few plants, but I’m trying to protect all of them if I can.  They’re growing a lot slower now and I can only pick the small leaves every few weeks. With the row cover on, I’ll have to be pretty hungry for greens to dissembled the cover to get at the plants.

With my decision to quit the CSA for next year, I’m trying to focus on a garden plan that is more about what I want to eat and about what makes money at the market.  Not many people grow greens for market around here–most of the truck farmers do the fruits like squashes and peppers and melons, plus sweet corn, etc.  A lot of those crops take up a lot of room, and so I can’t grow them in the bulk other, bigger growers do.

So, greens will be my big focus.  I can sell a lot of lettuce and spinach and salad mix in the spring–sales usually taper off a bit once the summer crops come in, but then that’s usually the time the greens themselves are tapering off–except those that can survive the summer heat.

For fall I’m interested in greens again, but also in something I’ve noticed there’s a market for, but no one is doing much–ornamentals besides the usual gourds.  Mostly what I’m interested in is things like broom corn–Cromwells brought a little to market this year and last (that’s where I got my seed), but not big bunches like what I want to do.  I love the mixed colors–the reds and blacks and golds and purples.

We had a couple customers show up wanting a big bunch of cornstalks to decorate their yard with.  The older farmers kind of chuckled about that–”You want a big bunch of dried-out cornstalks tied together in a bunch?  You want to give me money for that?  Um, OK.”  I remember we did that when I was little–I was the “expert” on how to do it because I’d read the Little House on the Prairie books.

But overall, I think it would please me greatly to really get into my greens–the Goddess Mix, of course (I need to look up what herbs I used to blend that–it has changed slightly over the last three years), and earlier-seeded kale, plus chard (which I’ve had trouble with–deer and rabbits love it), heads of romaine lettuce, and lots more.  I want to do baby bok choy again because it’s lovely and fun to cook with.

I’m not going to do the red romaine this year because even though it formed nice, big heads, people wouldn’t buy it.  I always ended up with a lot of that left over, while the smaller heads of green romaine and even the speckled ones sold well.  I want to do some more kinds of head lettuce as well–summer crisp maybe (since I do have seed for that), and perhaps some oakleaf.  I’ll do the leaf lettuce–red and green–because that is easy to grow and I can sell it for less–kind of an economy lettuce.

The thing I did last season with the constant starting and re-starting of trays of head lettuce worked out well.  Once I transplanted one tray, I simply brough the tray back home, washed it out, and started another batch in the basement.  By the time the first batch was getting ready to come out, the new seedlings were ready to go in.

Maybe I should change the name of my farm to something more indicative of what I’m planning to do?  Lettuce Head Farms?  Green Acre?

Nah.  I like Flying Tomato.  And it’s not like I’ll quit growing those, no matter what else I bring to market.

My students sometimes give me great inspiration–they set my mind on various adventures and my fingers walking through the internet to search for answers and sometimes more questions.

And sometimes they inspire me, through their rather awkward fumblings toward a point not yet determined, to take a break from reading and do housework.  Such was this morning’s inspiration, which led me to scrub the lower kitchen cupboards.

They need a paint job badly, but I tend to save those kinds of projects for when H. is out of town, and I’ve stayed here.  I can make a grand mess of my house without anyone inconvenienced but myself, and I can take my time and work at odd hours if I like–playing music I might not want others to know I listen to.

But this morning’s inspiration started at the cupboards and rapidly expanded to the kitchen floor.  Then, since I was emptying the dirty floor-cleaning water in the toilet and getting clean water from the tub, I thought I might as well wash the bathroom rugs and wipe down that floor, too.

By now, the inspiration has worn off a bit, and I’m ready to go back into class for awhile and see if I can get some more of either the mind-expanding or housework-provoking kind.

Hat tip Fat Guy on a Little Bike: Good stuff from JibJab.

Hat tip to Private Tom!

File under: I never thought I’d see the day (from the Washington Post):

Frustrated by the failure to overturn Roe v. Wade, a growing number of antiabortion pastors, conservative academics and activists are setting aside efforts to outlaw abortion and instead are focusing on building social programs and developing other assistance for pregnant women to reduce the number of abortions.

Some of the activists are actually working with abortion rights advocates to push for legislation in Congress that would provide pregnant women with health care, child care and money for education — services that could encourage them to continue their pregnancies. [Salmon, Jacqueline. "Some Abortion Foes Shifting Focus from Ban to Reduction" 18 Nov. 2008]

Of course, not all anti-choicers are for actually working to reduce the numbers of abortions. Some still pray for a total ban that will hurt and endanger women in the name of righteousness.

“It’s a sellout, as far as we are concerned,” said Joe Scheidler, founder of the Pro-Life Action League. “We don’t think it’s really genuine. You don’t have to have a lot of social programs to cut down on abortions.”

It’s only genuine, you see, if it hurts. Making it easier and safer and more feasible for women to have babies does not punish them for their original sin of tempting Adam with a piece of juicy fruit!  Total sellout.

Of course, the wording of the above quote can be interpreted in more than one way: maybe “you don’t need to have a lot of social programs to cut down on abortions”–maybe you just need a couple of really good ones.

I’m so happy to see that, on this most divisive issue, common ground might be forged by the two sides for the good of all.