Garden in December

We test drove Rick's new little camera at the Missouri Botanical Garden today. The Garden has half of their parking lot closed for renovation. With a crowd to go to the holiday train show, the parking lot was full. We parked on a side street. Other than the train show and the restaurant, the Garden was pretty quiet.

The camellias are starting to bloom in the Linnean House, so we want to go again soon.

Here I am in my wool coat, petting one of the new pair of lions along the path to the Chinese Garden.

And here's Rick in his new coat, next to the witch hazels he likes in the Chinese Garden because they have been pruned to look sculptural in the winter.

We were impressed with the winter showiness of the Heavenly Bamboo (Nandina domestica) -- red berries and green leaves in December!

More photos on my flickr page.

Happy St. Nicholas Day

Sunday Postcard Art chose St. Nicholas for today's theme, of course! So, I dusted off my rusty Photoshop skills.

St. Nicholas from Vintage Santa/Christmas Postcard scanned by Suzee Que and posted on flickr.

Everything else from a collaborative scrapbook kit called White Christmas by Ziggle Designs and Pixel Geek Designs.

Little Wishes

There are still lots of wonderful gifts to give to foster children in the St. Louis area available at the Little Wishes website. Check out the Activities -- you can, like I did, give a child the experience of visiting the City Museum!

The End of Overeating

It's been more than two months since I read The End of Overeating by David Kessler and I haven't had a candy bar, potato chip, or nugget of orange chicken since then. I have cut out commercially processed foods before, most aggressively after reading Michael Pollan's book In Defense of Food, but this feels permanent. If I do slip again, I'll re-read The End of Overeating and expect to be reinvigorated in my conviction that abstinence is the only way for me to cope with an eating environment that caters to my worst instincts.

The book finally convinced me that what I'm experiencing in relation to doughnuts, bacon cheese burgers on toasted sourdough, and french onion dip is addiction. And that addiction has been carefully orchestrated by the food industry's ever new creative ways of inserting more fat, salt, and sugar into the foods they process as well as sophisticated marketing techniques that have conditioned me to think that I deserve a break and an edible treat is just the way to get it.

Getting angry at the food industry helped, mostly because it gave some energy to the idea that I need to set some rules for myself about eating. Normally, the notion of rules pulls out my inner teenage rebel and the whole endeavor goes down in fiery turmoil. But with anger at the food industry at the root of this, my inner rebel had a different way of looking at things. My rules help me subvert the conditioning of the food industry while asserting my will. My inner teenage rebel likes being subversive and independent.

The rules that made the biggest difference for me were "No eating in the car" and "No eating anything purchased from a drugstore or gas station." Kessler points out that each person reacts differently to the stimuli in our environment, so my rules may not help someone else overcome their conditioning by the food industry.

The End of Overeating made it clear that my environment was not supporting a healthy lifestyle. I am now carefully building an environment that does. For me, this new environment includes a constant influx of health books from the library, an almost daily presence on the forums at 3 Fat Chicks, and a commitment to eating food made from scratch in my own kitchen with very few exceptions.

Why I grow basil (and you should, too)

1. It's so easy! Grow it in the ground or in a pot, outside or on a sunny windowsill.

2. It's so cheap! A basil plant will often cost you the same as a package of fresh basil at the grocery store -- and it will keep giving you more basil.

3. It's so good! We use basil all summer in cucumber and green bean salads, on pizza and pasta, in my favorite vegetable breakfast dishes.

And then, there's the pesto. For the last couple of years, I've made pesto in August and again on the day of the first predicted freeze. (There's another thing I love -- caring about the first freeze and having a traditional activity to do that day). I cut the basil back to a third of it's size in August and there's still plenty of basil left to make more pesto when the freeze comes about ten or twelve weeks later.

Here's a picture from before I started harvesting today. The Genovese on the right is about four feet tall! The purple basil on the left is a little shorter but very lush and dense. And I thought my purple crocs looked good with all of this.

I was inspired by a recipe on Farmgirl Fare to make a lower fat version of pesto than I did last year. But I still wanted to incorporate the traditional ingredients that were in last year's recipe from Simply Recipes. Also, I leave out the salt and cheese because I prefer adding those to the final dish rather than to the pesto. So, here's the recipe I used today:

Pesto

3 cloves garlic

1/2 cup pine nuts

4 ounces basil leaves (Farmgirl says this is about the same as 4 packed cups -- it's easier to weigh)

6 Tablespoons olive oil

In the food processor, coarsely chop the garlic. Then add the pine nuts and basil, processing to the consistency you like. Scrape the bowl down once during processing. While the processor is running, add the oil a little at a time through the chute.

As I described last year, I prefer a quantity that gets me enough pesto to fill two ice cube trays (once they are frozen, I pop the cubes out and store them in freezer bags to use all winter) and a little extra for immediate use. This recipe didn't quite fill one tray, so next time (tomorrow?), I'll triple the recipe. That will be a pretty big project. Today's adventure, though, took less than an hour. Tripling it is unlikely to triple the time although most of the effort goes into removing the leaves from the stems.

Of course, the first question when encountering a recipe like this is "how much basil do I harvest to get 4 ounces?" I don't have enough experience to know, but I got lucky. This is our second largest bowl (we only use the largest for making stuffing for very large birds). Overfilling it with cut basil netted 4.6 ounces of leaves.

Memories and Family News

I realized last week that I may not actually remember seeing the first time that man walked on the moon. As my brother said, I remember remembering it, but that's not quite the same thing. The memory I have in my head is of a different house than we lived in during July of 1969, so I've likely mixed up a later moon walk with the first one.

A few weeks ago, Dale and I swapped some emails trying to piece together time lines of memories from our childhood. I have a slight advantage in getting things straight by being one year and three months ahead in age. Having that discussion fresh in my mind is what made it suddenly clear that I had the first moon walk memory in the wrong house.

Walter Cronkite's voice is present in my memories of the Apollo program.

This month has been challenging for what's left of my family now that our parents are gone. Dale was diagnosed with follicular lymphoma in the same month that his girl friend of fourteen years, Jana, was diagnosed with heart failure.

Jana ended up in the rehab unit of a nursing home, hopefully for a temporary stint, while they work out what she may or may not be able to do now that she can't take many of the drugs she used to take for her rheumatoid arthritis. Jana's condition was critical for a couple of the days that she was in the hospital, so her current situation is much improved if still surrounded by a lot of uncertainty.

Dale's cancer is slow-growing, not aggressive, and very treatable. He's to undergo a battery of tests in the next week or so to determine the extent of the disease. Then, there will be a decision-making process about treatment with one of the options being "watchful waiting." The other options are a variety of chemotherapy regimens -- all of which are much less damaging than what I went through in 1985. With modern chemo, many people get a treatment in the morning and go to work in the afternoon, often missing very little work. The worst side effect is often fatigue.

Everyone involved is hopeful and in good spirits, most of the time, now that we seem to have turned the corner from what felt like an acute situation a couple of weeks ago to long term issues.

Collage credits: Everything from Phuong Ton's Veiled Moonlight kit except the earth which is from Tangie Baxter's Chronicles of Imagination, Chapter 3.

Lee Farm Tour

The Family Harvest CSA, our source for our weekly box of produce, consists of two farms. We visited one of them today, Lee Farm near Truxton, Missouri.

Rick got a kick out of figuring out how this old planter worked, with the help of Rusty Lee, our host, and a neighbor farmer.

One of the workers is an intern who is doing experiments with cut flowers on the farm. Those rows were all blooming and pretty in late July.

We got a preview of the eggplant that we'll be getting in our box in the next week or two.

More photos on my flickr page.