Food

So absolutely nothing makes me feel happy and grateful as quickly as a good meal. It's not that I've ever gone hungry in my life, though I do have some food-hoarding instincts (simply makes seasonal sense, or a bad childhood? You decide), but that a meal made of good food is such nourishment both physically and symbolically. It's a demonstration of caring, where time and effort goes into something which makes you feel good (anyone who doesn't understand this should go eat a ripe peach, or a square of bitter chocolate, pay attention to it, and then come back and finish reading). It re-homes the soul in the body, because with all the taste and texture going on, the body is a great place to be.

Yesterday morning Angus made me fruit (kiwi, mango, and banana) oversome nice granola, with soy milk. It was fabulous. I felt light and happy for the rest of the day, and I was inspired to do some inductrial-style cooking today.

Now I have a gallon of quinoa salad in my fridge, a few days' worth of chopped fruit and cooked buckwheat, some soy milk, and some assorted odds and ends that I'm thinking of making into red rice to freeze for next week so I don't have to put out another three hours next weekend. I also have some extra-firm tofu and some marinade and one last zucchini that I think might go on the grill for dinner. I feel wealthy, and confident. It's good, cause I go to a house viewing in a couple of hours.

Note that all this food (including the lovely bowl of buckwheat and nectarines and mangoes and bananas and pineapple and rice milk in my lap) is vegan. That's part coincidence and part seasonal. I've quit dairy as default, which means I'm happy to have a *really nice* piece of cheese but don't keep milk or butter around the house as a matter of course, and my energy level has flown up to the ceiling. It's not the season for long-cooked meats, and unless it's a slow roast or a stew I don't really cook meat. And I just don't have the cash for really nice steak for the grill right now, but I don't seem to be suffering any.

I've noticed that I love, love, love buckwheat. I love the way it tastes, I love the way it smells. I love kasha (toasted) and the plain green stuff. Quinoa I'm not a fan of- it smells weird to me, it tastes indifferent, it looks like murdered baby plants -but Eva's recipe for quinoa salad is so good that I'll eat it on occasion. Everyone *else* I know likes quinoa.

I've been experimenting with different grains lately, though I have yet to work through everything available to me. I've been helped a lot by http://www.vegparadise.com/ , which has a handy grain/bean cooking chart and a kickass holiday meal section. It's also vegan-slanted (rather than the standard cheese slant that so many vegetarian websites have) and it has some truly exciting dishes. It is a bitch to navigate, though.

I'm starting to feel more and more competent to eat well. I'm learning tricks more than skills to do things quickly and with what's available. Today I wish more of my fruit was local- it's all tropical foof in my bowl except for the nectarines, and I live in a climate where we can grow grape kiwis easily and standard kiwis with only a modicum of care. Blueberries, raspberries, strawberries: those are all easily preservable and plentiful in season. Apples are ready now, and the apple-pears or asian pears are beginning. Grapes are in season.

Of course, some of those foods are only good when they're processed seasonally, take apples for example. Apples are truly disgusting off-the-shelf in a Safeway or whatever, but get a good ripe one from a farmer's market right now and it's like going to heaven. The proper way to do it would be to have cool storage, or even just some dark shelving, buy a bunch of long-keeping apples when they're ready in a month or two, and store them. They'd wrinkle up slowly and be good till march. Blueberries and raspberries and strawberries just need to be popped in a freezer. Tomatoes just need to be popped into a pot and boiled down to 1/2 or 1/3 volume, then poured into freezer bags. You know, this stuff isn't *hard* it just takes space to do it.

So I obviously need a deep-freeze.

(Bob comes in eating my raw salsa and I tell him to add salt, which I didn't do in the making. It becomes amazing-wonderful)

And the thing is, I *love* doing this. I love being part of the food's whole journey, from the seed to my mouth, and I love being *able* to do it. I love having the skill to make everything especially tasty, and that is a skill that takes lots of time and mentoring for me to learn. Some people are naturals; I'm not. I know so many people who are fabulous cooks, and who appreciate food so much, that isn't an issue.

My ideal would be for maybe 95% of my food to be raised or grown by either myself, people I know, friends of friends, or places I am willing to travel to and acquaint myself with the food practices there. So I would like my food to be local, but local in a social sense as well as a physical sense. I'm especially happy with the idea of treats from far away (a box of mangoes, a bunch of cocoa beans) that come to me because a friend of mine travelled and met someone who grows these things. I love networking that way. I adore the idea of trading blackberry jam or smoked salmon for chocolate or mangoes. Were that kind of networking to be better developed, I could definitely see 100% of my food coming at me that way. It feels so much better to eat something raised by someone you know.

(I wonder about making soy sauce. That might be *fun*)

Part of the reason I'm getting a deep freeze is so I can do this with meat (where ethical treatment of the animals is very important to me, and it's much easier to stockpile meat when you find a good source than to buy it once or twice a week. I am, by the way, so happy for the SPCA certification that's becoming popular around here, though I still will likely stick to grassfed beef and pastured pork by preference) as well as seasonal fruits. When you buy a 'seasonal' fruit locally but already frozen, f'rinstance blueberries, sometimes you don't get local at all, and other times they get shipped to China for packaging, then shipped back. "Local" indeed.

So anyhow, I feel good right now about my food, but not ideal, and that's why. And I love food and processing and cooking. And it's the new exciting area of permaculture I'm venturing into, in addition to the growing. So there.

Edit: cz_unit posted this today, which is super-topical. What do the rest of you think about your food, when you do?

More Slice Of Life

Today I had some house viewings, all within walking distance of Famous Foods. There were two of them, and the whole thing was actually quite funny.

The first was a very nice medium-sized one-bedroom suite in a house with two other suites, one of which contained the mother and the other of which contained the expecting couple/daughter. It was pretty, it had no storage really, there was green outside the front door, it was cared for.

The second was a two-bedroom, slumlord style- the landlord had lived in the house before, and was possibly just moving out, but it had lots of funny storage spaces, hideous linoleum, and was gigantic.

I spent some time walking around the area because the appointments were pretty close (maybe ten-fifteen blocks apart, and another ten blocks from where I live now) but not quite back-to-back timewise. I lived for a couple years another ten blocks south of there, when I was maybe seven, and I'm reminded just how much more at ease I feel in an asian neighborhood (with a spattering of italian) than I do in the super-white hippie-dyke-italian neighborhood of Commercial Drive. The food stores are more interesting and more useful. The gardens have people in them, people who use the garden, and who grow food which they then eat. Some of the houses are run-down, some are not, but the yards are generally tidy. The houses are often constructed according to the principles of good feng shui (you think I jest?). And... I don't know. I feel more relaxed there. I like that feeling.

The neighborhood is sorta-kinda transit friendly- well, very transit friendly if you're okay taking the bus or walking a couple of blocks to Nanaimo or Victoria or Main St stations, depending. More than that, though, it's *people*-friendly. It's not cliquey. It's just people, doing their thing. I wish I could describe the feeling better.

There's comfrey to steal in the backyards and they don't hire landscapers. Does that make sense? The outdoors is a normal part of life rather than something divorced from the kitchen with food maybe there because local foods are trendy or because growing plants is neat.

And totally unrelated, the girl I work with, who I have a huge crush on and have since day 1, has resolved a dilemma for me. I said to her, 'so what do you do for fun?' and she said, 'well, I went to the Pride Parade' first thing, despite the Pride Parade being quite some time ago. Now I don't have to figure out how to ask her if she likes girls, cause I think that was a pretty clear message. I can just put my nose down and flirt. :D

I think it's funny how difficult it is for me to approach girls at all, compared to my normal sledgehammer 'nice boots, wanna fuck' approach to boys. Then again, I'm both physically more attracted to girls and more ambivalent about the emotional/social training aspects of big-R relationships with them (and even somewhat about friendships, but I'm getting over that. Girls may be crazy, but not all *bad* crazy all the time).