Cooking

Bits of Sunshine Coming In

/ Michelle at The Green Study / 31 Comments

canstockphoto2875377In journalistic vernacular, this is going to be a disjointed fluff piece. For months, I’ve been wrapped up in the turmoil that is political life in America and this week, I’m calling a time out. It’s exhausting and depressing – and I’m pretty sure I’ve lost some IQ points in the process. My practice this week is to not read any news until the evening, leaving my day untainted by a sense of apocalyptic foreboding.

The sun has been shining and we’re having a bit of a warm streak here in Minnesota. Despite a few slip-n-slide sidewalks, I’ve been able to get out and walk and feel some sense of normalcy. I perused my yard, taking note of various garden projects and making lists of supplies. It’s premature. These warm streaks are inevitably followed by blizzards and my notes get put aside for a snow shovel. But still, it’s a break in the cold days and bleak skies. And it keeps the Minnesota homicide rate down during cabin fever February.

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canstockphoto9109848I forgot that it was Valentine’s day yesterday. Late afternoon, I stood in line at the drugstore with a lot of men who were clutching chocolate and stuffed animals. It’s a test each year about expectations. I usually have to make up something for my husband to get me, because when I say nothing, he worries that he should do something. Inevitably I end up with some heart-shaped doodad that, until that moment, I didn’t know I didn’t want. I usually ask for spring flowers, which show up in shops around this time of year and are easy to pick up downtown on the way to his bus. We’re a romantic lot here.

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canstockphoto7037830If you have a compulsive personality like I do, the real trick is to turn that negative into a positive. I cancelled Netflix and Amazon Prime to curtail a binge-watching habit. I traded it in for a free language training program called Duolingo. I’m not into product promotion, but this is a fantastic online program. I’ve been reviewing, in short snippets, my Spanish, Russian, German, and French every day for the last week. Once I get back into the groove, I would like to start some Hindi and Korean. It’s user-friendly (my 12 year old got me onto it) and is self-paced. I feel parts of my brain light up that were collecting dust.

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If only my cats were this useful.

In my attempt to eat less packaged foods, I’ve been cooking. As a rule, I don’t particularly enjoy cooking. I’m so accustomed to quick food that the preparation, cooking and cleanup seems interminable. A meal from scratch can take 2 or more hours, and it takes my family all of 15 minutes to eat it – even less to grimace on the first bite and make themselves a sandwich instead. It’s not a gratifying experience and I’m stuck eating a soup nobody liked for the next week.

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Writing has been going well for me. I’ve been more productive in the last couple of weeks than I have in months. I need a finished manuscript done by April for a writers’ pitch conference. I had to let go of preconceptions about how and when I work. I purchased a cheap laptop which I drag along to all the places where I wait – all my daughter’s rehearsals and lessons and practices.

I finally trained myself to use Scrivener, which I had purchased with a discount after NaNoWriMo in 2012. It’s a challenge to learn it, but my novel and notes were becoming too unwieldy in Word. I’m finding it useful, but there is definitely a learning curve.

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As an American, I’m highly trained in instant gratification. Instant entertainment, instant food, instant information. Cooking, reading longer form news, not trying to incessantly fill every space with sound, images and ideas – it seems that this is emerging as a new intention for me. It’s not just slowing down, but giving myself time to unravel all the tight, angry tension that I’ve felt for the last year.

canstockphoto34597907Lately, what I’ve been observing in schools, coffee shops, offices and sometimes in my own home, is that we are batteries that are never fully recharging. Our information comes in fast, short bursts. We lie to ourselves about multitasking. We pride ourselves on odd things like functioning on little sleep or how many emails we get or how many friends we’ve acquired on social media.

I’ve been thinking about the concreteness of life around me, a life not lived ephemerally through my phone or computer. It’s not as interesting or exciting. It defies instant gratification. There is no drama, nothing that inspires rage or jealousy or triggers eating and shopping sprees. I realized how addictive some emotions can be. I’ve felt addicted to anger with all the online reading, an anger I usually reserve for driving. The space left when I turn off all the noise is unsettling.

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Useless trivia I will remember instead of where my car keys are:

I watched my daughter’s orchestra perform at Orchestra Hall last week and ended up with a melody stuck in my head. That’s when I found out that a pop song I knew from the 1970s had liberally lifted from Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2 in E Minor, III. Adagio.  Perhaps, if you’re an oldbie like me, you recognize the tune. The Rachmaninoff estate now gets 12% of royalties due this pop singer. This same singer also borrowed from Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto no. 2 in C Minor, Opus 18 for another pop single.

Self-sufficiency in a World of Automated Doors

/ Michelle at The Green Study / 50 Comments

Last night I taught my daughter how to sew. I wish I could write that sentence without a snort of derision. In 8th grade, I had a home economics teacher who was more concerned about being popular with the cool kids than whether or not she taught me. She held my shirt project up in front of the class and they all had a good laugh. One sleeve was two inches shorter than the other. From that point on, I believed that I could not sew.

canstockphoto2020194The women in my family do not cook. Basic dishes can be made under duress –  like four hungry children and a state mandate that they should be fed. I believed also that I could not cook. I did know, under the tutelage of parental OCD, how to clean the hell out of things. My hands look like a sharecropper’s, from the many hours spent dipping into scrub buckets of hot, soapy water. Cleaning was cheap and manageable and gave some semblance of control in a world of government cheese and subsistence living.

These days, I am middle class living below my means, but unlike gun enthusiasts, my apocalyptic preparations involve learning basic skills – how to grow my own food, cook meals from basic ingredients, sew and fix things. Sure, none of it will mean anything when the starving gun enthusiast steals all my stuff at gunpoint, but we share a similar institutional paranoia. The government has some ‘splainin’ to do about how it has manipulated our food supplies, set up regulatory entities that don’t regulate and allowed us to become so dependent on corporations that we can hardly open doors on our own.

Paranoia aside, there is something personally gratifying about knowing how to do things on your own. I am self-taught on just about anything domestic and it seems more important now that I have a child. In an age of information, you can find directions on how to do just about anything, but I want her to remember what her mother taught her – how to Google. Barely kidding. My daughter will know how to cook and sew for herself, though. She will know that she is capable of growing food. She will know what homemade means.

Last week, while getting a class on art at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, I was amazed at the intricate and beautiful beadwork done by the Ojibwe Native Americans. No machines, no YouTube videos, no prepackaged kit – hand sewn and woven. The time and effort required must have been intense. And that is what it boils down to – time. We say we don’t have time for anything, but that’s rarely true. We have plenty of time, but the many ways in which we can spend it, diverts it into tiny fragments, the moment, the now.

I taught myself to bake bread. I found a recipe on the internet. After a few practice rounds, I modified the recipe more to my liking. It’s time-consuming, but only requires basic ingredients and an oven. I don’t bake our bread all the time, but enough so that I know the recipe by heart and my daughter will have images of her childhood that include a mother baking bread. It is weirdly important to me that she remembers more than mommy surfing the internet.

canstockphoto3932201This spring, we will plant another garden. We’ve experimented over the years and have learned the hard way about growing things organically (damn you, squash bugs!). Our suburban yard is not a vast acreage, but every time growing season comes around, it seems like miles, as it teems with a wide variety of foods. We have a cherry tree, raspberries, blackberries, and Concord grapes that grow on the border of our vegetable garden. Each year we try new things. My daughter has, over the years, stood in the middle of it, alternately eating green beans and raspberries straight off the plants.

In an age when we barely have to climb stairs or pick our own food or sew our clothes, we become further removed from the making of the goods we use, wear and eat. I feel uncomfortable with that. A vision of a gigantic urban over-pampered baby comes to mind. Helpless, waiting for someone, dependent on whatever we are given. It’s unlikely I’ll be living “off the grid” any time soon, but even maintaining the slightest self-sufficiency makes me imagine that if I had to, I could.

Kirsten Whyte wrote yesterday that she’d like to un-invent automated doors, which got me thinking about self-sufficiency. Thanks for the inspiration, Kirsten!