I miss my market

One of the great things about where I live is the weekly farmers market 50 yards from my front door.  Anything you could want, produce, milk, cheese, eggs, potatoes, grains, sides of beef, honey, chocolate cake…all there, all fairly cheap and its all just…food.  I’ve been trying to get more interested in my food lately, beyond thinking about just what I want for dinner (pizza, obviously).  It amazes me how little we know about food.  Not just the intricacies of what particular diet is the secret combination to good health (Atkins!  South Beach!  Grapefruit and Pistachios!), but what it is I’m eating, where it came from, how it go so darn tasty, etc.  I was reading an article about our food system the other day, and the author pointed out that as kids grow up they get the founding of the United States pretty much every year, but are never really taught simpler everyday wonders, such as how to make bread.

So, here are a few unconnected thoughts:

It amazes me to go to a grocery store.  Beyond the sheer variety, and the huge number of things that, until a recent advance in chemistry, wasn’t even FOOD, its just the idea that out of a few hundred or so plants and animals, we can have tens of thousands of different types of food, all carefully formulated, packaged and advertised for each of our carefully segmented demographic markets.   And the ingredients are amazing too…its all chemistry.  I’ve been trying to avoid eating too much sugar/corn syrup, and its impossible to find stuff without any in it.  Bread, crackers, juice, soup – the other day I was looking for corn, and almost all of the cans had corn syrup or sugar in them as well.  It’s a frickin’ vegetable, not a Snickers bar!

I’m always amused watching M cook, because we have very different styles.  I stare at the recipe carefully, get out all the ingrediants before starting, and slavishly follow the rules.  She’s more of a “this needs more leavening to account for the humidity, and then I’ll need to eyeball this much of this weird spice and heat it for, oh, this long and then stir counterclockwise until I can see Orion’s Belt, because its a Tuesday” type of cook.  Recipes shmecipes.  But when you think about it, cooking is really becoming a lost art.  60 years ago, most people could cook, and do so with whatever is at hand.  “A little butter, some flour, two onions and a chicken…I can work with that.”  Last weekend M made spaghetti sauce from scratch, I think because we had diced tomatoes and some peppers.  But if you think of a typically spaghetti meal, the one everyone can cook, are we really cooking it?  Pre-made sauce, noodles, bread, parmasean cheese, wine….none of it is really being cooked.  What if it was wheat, a cow, some tomatoes and a plot of grapes?  We don’t really know how to make food anymore, unless you work for Lean Cuisine.  I think real cooking is becoming a lost art.  Not that I’m going to rush out and milk a cow tomorrow.

I have a bunch of other little thoughts like these, but that will have to wait for another day, cause I need to go to class.

Sleepy time…

…seems to be all the time some days.  The hazards of everyone attempting to cram way more things than they probably should into a given day, that energy-destroying sin nearly everyone is guilty of.   But it does lead to amusing mornings.

M really needed to get up at 5:00 today, the byproduct of an over-busy week.  I’ve become sort of the backup alarm clock lately, although I’m no where near as reliable as a $3 piece of plastic.  Normally I just roll away while subtly stealing all the blankets and occasionally using cold feet as the brutally effective weapon they are.  This morning I was feeling more creative, so on her second whacking of the snooze alarm, I started “singing” a well known motivational ditty:

Softly, but with increasing enthusiasm: “duh duh duh duh duh duh duh duh duh duh duh”

Louder, and quite off key: ““da da DAAAAA da da DAAAAA da da DAAAA da da DAAA da da da da da da da da DAAAAA!”

Nothing like the Rocky theme to get someone up and moving in the morning. Makes you want to run up a flight of stairs, if only to get away from my singing.  Recordings are available, $5.99 plus S&H.

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M gets her revenge when I go to bed, since I typically do so a good while after she does.  I have to unwind after my late classes, or I just lie there thinking about….trigger strategies under oligopolistic competition with multimarket contacts.  Its about as confusing as it sounds.  This means I have to find myself a) space to sleep and b) blankets to sleep under.

M likes to sleep in a particular fashion, known geometrically as “diagonally”.  This is usually fairly easy to solve, by way of nudging, lifting, shoving, etc.  The blanket situation is more complicated.  The American Medical Association classifies M’s sleeping style as “the blanket burrito”.   Those familiar with attempting to unwind the burrito sleeper will recognize the inherent problem here: the tradeoff between blanket and space.  Because if you pull on the end of the blanket in hopes for some coverage, Newton tells us that the equal and opposite reaction will be the dreaded body roll.  So now you have some nice pre-heated blanket and eight inches of bedspace on one side, and 5 open feet with no blanket on the other.  I tend to go with the blankets.

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All of this is, of course, in jest and with substantial exaggeration.  Except the Rocky music.   And I really can’t complain, because anyone that watches someone wash down two bowls of chili with a couple of beers at 10 p.m. and doesn’t force them to sleep in the garage is clearly making a few sacrifices.

Hornk.

Around 2:30 this morning, M and I both woke up at the same time.  The culprit?  On the floor next to me, a little furball was making the dreaded “hornk” sound.  M cut through my semi-intelligent babbling to tell me it was fine, just that cat throwing up again.  Thinking slowly, I grabbed a magazine off the nightstand and got it in front of the cat, right before detonation.  If I’d thought a little faster, I might have realized that its easier to clean up kitty presents from a hardwood floor that we don’t own than a magazine I was planning on reading the next day.

Five minutes later, I’m still a bit out of it and standing in the kitchen in my underwear, cutting the nasty spots out of the latest issue of the Economist over the trash can.  M is in the other room comforting the cat, having already taken care of the small amount of vomit that wasn’t soaking into my late night reading material.  Several thoughts went through my head:

- why am I getting cat vomit all over my hands to salvage a magazine I can either read online or get for free at the school library?

- the cat loves attention at night.  M is now paying much attention to the cat.  Let’s hope this doesn’t start any kind of association between throwing up on the floor and getting attention.

- why is M comforting the cat, who is fine, and not me, who is gagging in a futile attempt to save a magazine?  My guess is that at 2:30 in the morning, covered in magazine clippings and puke, I am not the most cuddly of individuals.

- is this what having a kid is like?  Randomly jerked from sleep to deal with vomit everywhere?  Actually, it kind of reminds me more of the frat house days….