First things first

I have never been a huge fan of Valentine’s Day. (This opinion has been true regardless of my relationship status at the moment.) Fortunately, my husband feels the same way, so neither of us expects any super-special display of affection on that day. (We have a private joke about it. I ask him several times during the day, “Where are my diamonds? And my flowers? And chocolate? And balloons with a stuffed animal—ideally a teddy bear? Don’t you love me?” and he rolls his eyes. Heh.)

Most people in our society do engage in a “traditional” celebration of Valentine’s Day, though. As Sylvia has grown into a fully talking-thinking-soaking-it-all-in individual, Jan and I have realized that the two of us, as adults with a lifetime of experience and some ability to analyze popular culture, can critically examine and resist the consumerism-driven aspects of Valentine’s Day, but that she doesn’t yet have the tools that we have—and that her own life experience will involve exposure to all sorts of cultural concepts and practices. We can’t shield her from all of the ones we dislike, but we can try to mediate their impact on her by discussing them and, we hope, teaching her how to think critically about them.

Last year we started explaining to Sylvia that Valentine’s Day is a special day when people like to tell people they love them (taking care to point out that that’s a nice thing to say to people on any day you like). We talked about valentines, too, and the idea that people often do special things on that day.

Now that she’s in preschool, she had her first-even valentines swap on Friday. It was rather sweet (even though nearly all of the cards given were character-branded items that are basically advertisements for the latest Disney/Pixar/Barbie endeavor), and she really enjoyed making cards at home and passing them out at school. She made a card for her dad, too, a few days ago—and could barely keep the secret. (Example: “Daddy, don’t look on top of the bookcase, okay? It’s a secret!”)

The best part was when the three of us made these shortbread cookies together. As a vegetarian, Sylvia can’t eat traditional conversation hearts (they contain gelatin), so these are a nice substitute. As a future geek (she has two geeky parents, so she doesn’t stand a chance; she already has her own dice bag) we figured we should give her some early lolcats exposure. And of course she just loved seeing her name on several cookies!

Watching: Groundhog Day. Yes, I watched this on February 2.

Knitting: Wavy scarf from Knitty.

Reading: Mr. Darcy’s Diary, by Amanda Grange. This is total fluff, but entertaining. I think Pride and Prejudice and Zombies: The Classic Regency Romance – Now with Ultraviolent Zombie Mayhem! will be an appropriate follow-up read.

Growing: Paperwhites (forced in Mason jars on the kitchen counter).

Eating: Pureed broccoli soup with garlic, ginger, and white miso.

Shoveling: Lots of snow. But I actually enjoy shoveling snow, so I don’t mind.

Check out the Noodle Soup Oracle. There’s even a vegetarian option—yippee! No recipes, but lots of ideas…

Watching: Iron Man (finally), which I thought was just awesome. I love the ending. At last, a superhero whose conflicts and enemies aren’t based on the utterly predictable trope of needing to maintain a secret identity.

Reading: Feet of Clay, by Terry Pratchett.

Ordering: Seeds for this year’s garden, from Pinetree Garden Seeds (who sells seed packets with quantities and prices that are sensible for home gardeners. We’ve used their seeds for years. I really like this company.

Knitting: A new buttonband for my B.O.B. Sweater. And I need to shorten the hood on Jan’s Wonderful Wallaby. I finished that last fall, and he’s been wearing it ever since, but somehow I ended up making the hood deep enough to suit a Jedi.

Eating: Quesadillas made by Sylvia. Except she likes to call them “tortitos” (and, occasionally, “tornadoes”).

Thinking: About how our eight-year-long national nightmare is over. Oh sure, Obama will definitely do stuff I don’t agree with. But it’s really hard to imagine how he can be worse than his predecessor.

We spent the the first two weeks of this month on vacation in Vermont, and since our return on Sunday I’ve been trying to get caught up. I had about 1700 posts in my reader, a gazillion e-mails, and of course gobs of vacation pictures to get through.

I hope to post about my trip in a few days, but for now I wanted to mention this week’s CSA haul. (My friend Beth enjoyed my CSA boxes during the two weeks I was out of town, so I don’t have pictures of those.) I now have enough cukes to make another batch of pickles (I made a double batch the day before we left for Vermont, too).

There’s a winter squash (which I plan to bake, then smother with butter and grade B maple syrup), summer squash, cukes, a ton of green beans, fresh portabellos (the county I live in is the mushroom-growing capital of the USA—there’s a very good chance your supermarket mushrooms came from here), a watermelon, onions, a red pepper, some potatoes, a quart of plums, and a couple of yams. And “a few” (ahem!) tomatoes. No eggplant, thank goodness.

We’re well stocked on the veggie front, but some items (like orange juice and cheese) aren’t available through my CSA. So I took a trip to my local supermarket yesterday, where I was just tickled pink to discover that it now carries (in the international foods department) The Greatest Candy Bar in the World. Please note that there is not a shred of hyperbole in this paragraph: Lion Bars really are the best candy bar ever. Until now, I’ve been able to get them only from friends who visit the UK or from import shops/sites. Now I can get them whenever I go grocery shopping. Woot!

After writing about how, even though I loathe pickles, I was planning to make some pickles with the gazillion cucumbers I’d gotten from my CSA, I was pleasantly surprised to discover that I actually like these pickles. Hot damn.

After this revelation, I was feeling inspired to do some more pickling of stuff. Last week’s beet bounty combined with beets I already had on hand got me thinking about how to preserve beets. Kelli put me in touch with her friend Jessica, who passed along a recipe for canning beets. It looked pretty good, and I was all set to give it a go when I found (in Preserving Summer’s Bounty,” from the good folks at Rodale) a recipe for pickled beets in a honey, cinnamon, and allspice syrup. Yum.

Here’s this week’s CSA haul. More cucumbers, more zucchini, some yellow beans, red onions (this are the first ones of the season), smaller onions, bell peppers, hot peppers (another first of the season), small onions, an eggplant, and about a gazillion tomatoes.

I’m going to save the pickles until next week, when I hope to get enough new ones to make up another batch of pickles. (The recipe I’m using calls for a gallon of thin slices, which came out to about five decent-sized cukes last time.) For the other veggies, I’m going to turn to The Vegetarian Bistro, by Marlena Spieler, for inspiration. Many of the recipes call for eggplant, tomatoes, or zucchini—or even all three—so I’m bound to find something good in there.

And here are this week’s “bonus” items. The CSA boxes are kept in a small, air-conditioned trailer, and there are usually boxes or small refrigerators with extras available for purchase. Portabello mushrooms, for example, did not appear in this week’s share but could be bought for $1.50/bag. Local meat is also available at various prices.

This week, there was a box de-greened beets, with a sign encouraging people to help themselves to what they wanted. Another sign also told people to take one of the melons outside (there was a pile of them under a garden umbrella next to the trailer). I bought a dozen chicken eggs (laid yesterday morning) for $2.50.

I may have mentioned before that my CSA is at a nearby dairy farm that, for the past fifteen years or so, has operated an ice creamery. I recently learned from Tim, the farmer who runs the CSA, that only about two percent of the farm’s daily milk production goes to ice cream; the rest of the milk is sold to a regional distributor.

He sent an e-mail out to the CSA members last week announcing that they had just invested in pasteurization equipment and would be offering fresh pasteurized milk for sale once the licensing process was complete. Happy news indeed! We, however, are a raw milk-drinking family, so when I saw Tim yesterday (when picking up my box) I asked if he’d ever have raw milk available. He said, “I can’t sell it to you, but I can give it to you,” then went off to fill a half-gallon jug for me.

As it turns out, to get a license for pasteurized milk, the farm must first get a license for raw milk. Once all that is done (within the next week, Tim hopes), they’ll be able to sell both kinds of milk. He’ll have prefilled jugs of milk available for people to buy on CSA pickup days, but since I am (so far) the only person who’s inquired about raw milk, he won’t have those ready-made but will prep them to order. I’m pretty happy about this, because currently the only place I can get raw milk around here is at a natural-foods store about fifteen minutes away—it’s not too far from us, but the travel time (and gas!) really adds up when you’re going there about three times every two weeks. (Raw milk is fresh for only seven days, so buying in one trip more than we can drink in that time isn’t an option.)

It’s been a busy weekend here.

On Friday, we celebrated our nation’s birthday by taking a trip to our nation’s first zoo. The Philadelphia Zoo doesn’t hold a candle to the zoo I grew up going to—both in terms of animal habitats and entrance fees (the St. Louis Zoo is free, whereas the Philly one is a whopping $18 for adults and $15 for kids 2-11)—but it’s what we’ve got. And Sylvia loves it, so there you go.

Yesterday morning my brother arrived for a two-day visit. He lives in Greenwich Village and almost always brings us a dozen fresh bagels that he picks up at the shop around the corner from him on his way to Penn Station. We’re so grateful for this gift, because even though it’s possible to get decent bagels where we live, nothing compares to New York bagels. (Seriously. They’re standing on the summit of Mount Everest, with all other bagels in the world stuck in the Mariana Trench. They’re that good. The other bagels aren’t jealous, though, because they’re in so much awe of New York bagels that they can’t help but admire them.)

This time, in addition to bagels, he brought a special treat that I’d asked him to find: vegan marshmallows. (Real marshmallows contain gelatin, which is made from animal bones and pig and cow skin.)* A few days earlier, I’d told him that Whole Foods stores in NYC carry them (but not any stores in my area), and because they need to be refrigerated it’s very expensive to get them by mail-order during the summer. “Don’t go to any trouble, but if you can find some, that would be great,” I told him. He took it as his personal mission to find these for us, and after visiting a few stores, scored two boxes of them (each holding about a dozen marshmallows for $7, if you can believe it). Thanks to her uncle’s efforts, Sylvia got to enjoy her first backyard s’mores yesterday evening. Which she loved, of course!

Once Sylvia was in bed for the evening, a few friends came over for some serious geeking out. Nine of us played a board game until 2 a.m. Yeah, I’d say we had a good time.

I also managed to get a lot of knitting done. Last night I finished knitting one new piece, and this morning I seamed it; it just needs a few more embellishments. Right now, I’m blocking Sylvia’s new sweater and hope to finish it up (finally!) this evening. A more detailed knitting update—with pictures—will be forthcoming later this week (I hope!).

I hope all of you, too, had a great weekend!

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*A few years ago, the excrement hit the fan in the vegetarian world when it was revealed the Emes Kosher Jel, which had marketed itself as a vegetarian gelatin substitute, actually contained animal gelatin. (CNBC did a story about this: part 1, part 2.) The few companies that made vegetarian marshmallows using Emes products went out of business, and since then only a handful of companies in the world have figured out how to make vegan marshmallows.

The broiled eggplant we had for dinner last night was…well…meh. My taste buds weren’t thrilled by hot mayonnaise, but the mayo and Parmesan did do a pretty good job of dominating the eggplant flavor.

A few people commented in the last post that they love eggplant, and a few recipes were mentioened. If you have a favorite you’d like to share, please do! Remember, I’m expecting to get a lot of eggplant this summer…

In the meantime, here’s last night’s recipe, in case anyone wants to try it.

Broiled Eggplant with Crunchy Parmesan Crust

Ingredients:
—oil for greasing a baking sheet
—mayonnaise
—eggplant, cut into 1/4″ slices
—freshly grated Parmesan cheese (about 1/2 cup)

Directions:
1. Preheat broiler. Lightly oil a baking sheet.
2. Spread mayonnaise sparingly on both sides of each eggplant slice, then dip the slices in the grated Parmesan cheese, thoroughly coating sides.
3. Arrange the slices in a single layer on the baking sheet.
4. Place under the broiler until golden brown—about 3 minutes.
5. Flip the slices and broil until golden grown and crunchy on top—about 3 minutes more. (The eggplant will become soft, with a crunchy outside.)

Last week’s CSA box (which I didn’t photograph or write about before it was eaten) was good. But it pales in comparison to what we got this week.

Enclosed was a recipe for broiled eggplant. I’m not a huge fan of eggplant (something I didn’t admit to myself for years—after all, vegetarians are supposed to like eggplant, right?), but this recipe involves coating sliced eggplant with mayonnaise, covering it with grated fresh Parmesan, and broiling it. I’m intrigued. I think we’ll try that tonight. I hope I like it, because something tells me we’ll be getting a lot of eggplant from our CSA. (I suspect the free recipe is a “get ready for the onslaught of eggplant” warning.)