Small Moment: Late Lettuce

Back in late September, I planted four planters with lettuce seed, hoping for a late fall harvest. Right after I planted them, the weather turned quirky: hot dry days, gray days, dry days, early light frost days.

I doubted anything would come up. Nonetheless I watered the planters during the sun-stricken days and pulled them inside Warren's shop on the frosty nights.

And my efforts were rewarded, more or less. The Black Seeded Simpson did not come up, the Emerald Jewel did:

It came up despite the irregular weather. It came up despite the squirrel or two who insisted on digging in the planters (that is why the planter at the top of the photo has an irregularity in the soil at the end on the right side: squirrel digs).

And tonight, not knowing how much more these planters will produce, I added some to our salad:

There's probably enough to make a small salad or two, or to supplement a salad with a different (i.e., store bought) salad base. And then the lettuce is done for the season.

Next year's garden is already in my head.

Some More Thoughts About The Essentials: Unplugging

My last post I  wrote about balancing the essential again the urgent or, really, about my tendency to shove the essential aside for the urgent. I have been thinking about that very concept for days now, trying to be more aware of my actions and activities.

As part of this, I have found within myself the commitment to finally tackle the paperwork clutter that I let pile up in my study. I'm not talking about a small stack on my desk. I am talking about a voluminous stack, which I then shift to the bed, which I then shift to a paper sack, telling myself "I'll get to that soon." And then don't.

For the past several days, I have been dealing with the piles (yes, plural) in 15 minute shifts. I set my alarm for 15, then tell myself to sort through and make three stacks: Keep (and file away at the end of the 15 minutes), Recycle, Shred. I am embarrassed to say the Shred pile has been large, the Recycle pile larger. The Keep pile? Small potatoes.

This morning I tackled the paper pile in two separate sessions (with enough interlude between the two that I did not feel overwhelmed by the task before me). While doing so, I came across some notes, meant to be a blog post, from just after we got back from vacation. Here they are, as they perhaps tell a story related to the essential:

Unplugging

 When we went on vacation, I left behind my Chromebook because it pushed the limits of my minimal packing too far.

12 days without email or Facebook. That was interesting.

And eye opening.

Two things I learned:

1. Despite my protestations to the contrary (and reading books as much as I do), my mindless perusal of social media has steadily increased over time, especially on weekends.
2. Along with that increase, my time to do other things decreases.What other things? Write letters, read, prep zucchini and apples for freezing [remember, this was written in early September], or just sit and luxuriate in the moment.

So now I am looking at all my electronic tethering: the computer, the Chromebook, the phone. I carry a flip phone, not a smart phone, so the temptations are fewer, but there is still texting. And based on that and my vacation experience, I am ready to take a few more steps:

1. I am already not on my computer/Chromebook most evenings after 6:00 (and often earlier). What if I eliminated Saturday and Sunday too? Or only use Word and Numbers for work-related or Clinic purposes? Or only turn it on an hour one of those days for those reasons and also to blog? 
2. When I am at work, I carry my phone. I always have it on me or nearby at home. I always carry it in my car if I am running errands or driving to a school; with a 14+ year old car, I want a way to call someone if I get stranded. But what if I stopped carrying it at all when we (Warren and I) go out? There is no news, good or bad, that the delay in seeing the message would make a difference. 

I am penning these thoughts sitting at a rehearsal an hour away from home. I left my phone at home. I'm not sure of the time because I am not wearing a wristwatch and to wear one again would require a new battery. But with the phone gone, I am also not glancing constantly to see what the time is or whether anyone has texted me or tried to call.

So what if I tried this? What if I tried stepping away even more?

I know there will be exceptions from time to time. We should be reestablishing weekly chats with Ramona soon and those will fall in the early evening because of the time difference between here and there. There will an occasion, most likely related to my writing the Symphony press releases, which will find me on the computer some evening.

It is hard to break the lines of the electronic. One of my favorite minimalists is Anthony Ongaro at Break The Twitch. He came up with that name to describe the mindless clicking of the mouse to make yet another unnecessary purchase, but it fits here as well. My twitch is not to buy, but to click mindlessly across sites.

So what do I hope to get out of breaking my own twitch? I hope to be more mindful. I hope to be more thoughtful. I hope to deepen my personal connections to my work, to my day, to my marriage, to my friends.

To my community.

I hope to be more connected to my self.

*******
That's where my notes ended. They were written about a month ago. In the time since, I have managed to turn off or not even start the computer most (all?) evenings and even some weekend days (this is not one of them, obviously, but it IS going off soon). I have found it even easier to turn down the phone and only check for messages/calls occasionally.

And this goes back to thoughts of the essential. It is essential for me to connect outside of the electronic world. It is essential for me to reclaim that time.

Let's see where this goes.

The Essential And The Urgent

I spoke last week to a local United Methodist Women's group, an engagement that had been scheduled in late 2018 and, through a series of calendar complications, mostly of my own making, got moved more than once. It had been scheduled long enough that, in preparation for my talk, I scanned the most recent church newsletter to see if there was any note about the evening.

There was not. But in the minister's message, which I just happened to glance at, I found such a nugget that I have been walking around quoting it (usually badly paraphrasing it) ever since.

The minister had taken time away from the pulpit in August. In the September newsletter, he reflected on what he had learned during his renewal leave. His second observation caused me to stop reading:

It's easy for the essential to be crowded out by the urgent. 

I read that again, then said it out loud.

It's easy for the essential to be crowded out by the urgent. 

Holy moly. If that isn't my life, then I don't know what is. When I look back on my posts, my conversations with colleagues and friends and my dear husband, my letters, my thoughts (day or night, a day just starting or a day half over, or a day spent and gone), an overwhelming portion of my thoughts and sentences are spent on the urgent (or what I perceive to be "urgent") and on complaining (internally or externally) about how I never have enough time to get to the essential. My writing comes to mind immediately. Even when I have in mind a brief post or have sketched out some thoughts for one (or for my column or for a poem), I too easily shelve it in the urgency of the moment. ("How can I take time to write now? There's [name it] that needs done.")

And when I talk about the "urgent," I am not referring to the daily routine. Yes, the laundry needs done. Yes, the meal needs prepared. Tasks are tasks. I am talking about the white noise: the everything else that I frantically grab at and tend to all the time. All. The. Time.

So this sentence grabbed me and shook me.

It's easy for the essential to be crowded out by the urgent. 

It is still shaking me. April, it shouts, what are you doing? You are throwing away the essential to do the urgent.  STOP IT.

As I noted, I read that sentence last week. I have been handing it out like business cards ever since. I met a new friend for coffee in one of our local shops this Thursday past. Standing at the counter, I chatted with the proprietor about how her week was going. She made the typical comment about how busy things were, how hectic things were. I started to agree, then remembered my sentence and pulled it out, clumsily paraphrasing it.

Shelley stopped immediately. "Oh, I like that! How true!"

How true, indeed.

I do a poor job of not letting the urgent crowd out the essential. I know that about myself. That is why my study is a mess, why my writing is in piles here and there (some literal piles, some figurative piles), why I always seem to be busy. Coming off of the High Holy Days, during which I indeed let the urgent (the tasks and demands of the day) crowd out the essential (the spiritual significance and self-reflection required), I am telling myself that, in this year that has just started, I need to make an effort to live more essentially and less urgently.

Need to make? Have to make.

It's easy for the essential to be crowded out by the urgent. 

Let's see where this takes me.

September Money Review

Here we are in early October. After a week of blistering, high heat summer days (temps in the 90s), Thursday evening the weather suddenly looked at the calendar and dropped into suitable fall weather: cool days, blue skies, and crisp nights. The lettuce I planted last weekend has come up (its germination helped along by the high heat, no doubt); now the question is whether there will be enough days before the frost to get a bowl or two of salad out of my efforts.

And the black eye (and black and swollen jaws) from last week are fading, enough that casual interactions do not result in curious stares or questions. Kim of Out My Window worried whether my predicament was the result of treatment. Nope: I do not have treatments at Mayo. My situation was simply my body saying "I've had enough." As I told my dad when I saw him earlier this week, my body is a union shop and it walked out. Management has duly noted the severity and legitimacy of the issue and changes will be made.

After the vacation-increased food expenses of August, our September spending dropped substantially, although not to or below the $175.00 a month average I am aiming for (to my surprise). We spent $178.31 on food at the grocery and farm market (come on, it was the end of the sweet corn season!) and another $19.74 in household (half of which was a big toilet paper pack at Aldi; most of the rest of which was foil, freezer bags, and other kitchen items related to food storage) for a total of $198.05. When I plug September into our year-to-date spending and divide by nine, I get a monthly average of $181.74.

So we're running six dollars ahead of our goal. If we hang around that mark, we'll finish the year $120.00 ahead (in a good way) of where we finished last year.

Eating out in September included the trip to Mayo, We spent a whopping $36.75 on that trip. ('Whopping" is to be read with great sarcasm.) Our food costs were so low because we packed a lunch/supper for Day 1 (the supper was supplemented with a salad from my beloved Kwik Trip) and ate the free breakfasts that came with our overnight accommodations. The rest of the month came to $72.77, a figure that included a concert night in Mansfield and treating ourselves to fair food when the county fair rolled around. Grand total: $109.52.

October food costs on the home front should be routine, with the exception of the opening of Season 41 with the Central Ohio Symphony. I'm anticipating we'll be hosting a reception afterwards; my mind is already turning to what to prepare and how to keep the costs reasonable. If nothing else, I do not have to buy any proseco, because I still have the five (5!) bottles from our reception at the end of Season 40.

One food expenses we will not have this year is Halloween candy, not because we are ignoring it, but because we leave town on the 31st for a two-day conference in Pittsburgh. I will miss our town's Beggar Night: I love to see the children and their costumes, I love to pass out the candy, I love to snack on the candy while I sit outside...

Next year.

Starting To Wind Down The Garden

 This was a hard week, ending a hard month. This week was a particularly hard ending to September as we did a 54-hour door-to-door road trip to Mayo, sliced and diced so thin because of other equally (more?) pressing matters at home, including the Symphony. Oh, we made the trip all right, but I got spectacularly road-sick once we were back home, vomiting with such force that I ended up with a severely swollen face and a black eye.

I'm much better now.

It is the last Sunday in September and the eve of Rosh Hashanah, for which I am not spiritually ready in the least, and it is an intense spiritual holiday, opening the High Holy Days. So perhaps it was not all bad that I just came in from an hour in the garden, cleaning it up somewhat, checking what was going on (peppers now going strong, tomatoes on the wane) and, perhaps, showing some optimism myself in one of the garden tasks I accomplished.

The bees in the agastache 

The bees are still around and I caught a few in the agastache. They were far heavier in number earlier in the summer, usually so many that you could hear the plants hum. As Warren and I looked the bed over (cutting back on agastache bunch that had uprooted in the drought), I looked up at the tall ornamental grasses we had transplanted from a friend's giveaways. 

"Look."

The grasses have gone to seed and are beautiful in a new and different way.

The ornamental grass going to seed 

I picked tomatoes this morning, while Warren deadheaded the marigolds rimming two of the four sides of the garden. This late in the season, the marigolds in are full glory, blazing away, paying no heed to the coming autumn, seemingly impervious to the coming frosts and snows. As for the tomatoes, after I picked (and trimmed back and even pulled out one plant, done for the year), I ended up with a respectable load to share with my family's joint household here in town.

The basil got caught in the heat while we were out in Oregon and Washington, and never recovered. I'm glad I made pesto earlier in the season. I contemplated pulling it up, then figured that task could wait. 

We are clearly moving into the cooler days, with the sun moving along its fall course. With the cooler weather comes the hope of a fall crop of lettuce. So I spent a quiet half hour or so breaking up the dried soil in the planters, remixing the soil, and seeding it again. I'm going with the Black Seeded Simpson and Emerald Jewel for the fall, having found those the most enjoyable of the ones I tried this spring.

And maybe that's my optimism: seeding four planters in lettuce seed, hoping for a fall crop of salad, looking forward to what the autumn holds. 

One of four planters, seeded for salad

And perhaps my thoughts while I prepared the planters was some preparation for the High Holy Days.

The High Holy Days are a time of contemplation and self-assessment. It is a time for soul-searching. What did I accomplish last year? What were my biggest mistakes? What do I want to change for the coming year? What do I need to change in myself?

Mixing the soil, breaking up the clods, adding some plant food, watering it to the right consistency were all concrete tasks with fixed end points. My mind could wander through some of those more intense, personal thoughts: Where am I in my life? What does this year hold? Who am I now?

The Jewish sage Maimonides came to mind: "If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am for myself only, then what am I? And if not now, when?"

And if not now, when?

Let me see what the New Year brings, both inside me and outside in the garden. 

Small Moment: Washing The Loaf Pans

I made zucchini bread Friday night as I had a lot of zucchini that needed cooked, baked, or cut, bagged, and frozen. I ended up making a triple batch of bread: six loaves in all. When I turned them out onto the cooling racks (including yours, Katrina!), I just ran water into the pans and let them set overnight.

[Note: My zucchini-less status lasted until Saturday morning, when my dad brought by another grocery bag of them, possibly, maybe the last of the season. We just finished dealing with them this morning: freezer for some, supper tonight for the rest.]

Saturday morning I turned my attention to the loaf pans. All, even the non-stick ones, had been greased well so cleaning them was not an onerous task. I washed them in groups: the two smaller non-stick pans, the two larger aluminum pans, a small glass pan, and a large pottery one.

I ran warm, soapy water into the first two (while the others still held water from the night before) and started in. For the next 15 to 20 minutes, I cleaned them one by one, pouring the soapy water from one into the next one. There is a window overlooking the backyard at the sink and the sunlight played on the water as I washed.

I paid slow attention to each pan instead of my usual brisk, swipe and wipe pace. You heard of the Slow Food Movement? This was the Slow Washing Movement. As I washed, I thought about the pans. Warren remembered his mother making molded jello fruit salads ("all the time," per Warren) in the glass loaf pan. The two aluminum pans, standard size, were the remaining ones of the eight or ten I bought and used the summer I kept our household (my two sons and I) afloat baking and selling breads and pies at our downtown Farmers Market.

The heavy pottery loaf pan came from a long ago client, a young woman whose divorce I handled for free because she was having a hard enough time keeping her children and herself fed, let alone scrape together the money to pay an attorney. When the divorce was all over, she came into my office and presented me with the loaf pan filled with something delicious she had baked. My client explained that her mother had bought the pan to make her offering extra special. Then she looked at me with tears in her eyes and said, "Thank you. Thank you."

Just her "thank you" was enough. The baked dessert was more than enough. And the pan? Well, I still use it and I think of that long ago client every single time.

The whole washing episode was a peaceful, quiet start to my day. It was a small moment, a routine task. It was a way to be more mindful, more grateful, as I stood there just washing the pans.

The Pie Of Summer

Kim, the blogger at Out My Window, asked me whether I would share the recipe for the corn/bacon/onion pie I references in my blog about August spending.

Absolutely!

Warren is the one who called my attention to the recipe, which appeared in The New York Times under the caption "Is This the Pie of the Summer?" The subheading referred to bacon and corn in a "rich, quiche-like tart."

How was I not going to make that, especially with it being sweet corn season?

The recipe as originally published called for a traditional butter crust with some cornmeal thrown in. I made my own standard water/mayonnaise/flour crust, threw in some cornmeal (by feel) and rolled out a (deliberately) thicker than usual crust, which I baked first and let cool. What I did to make the thicker crust was make the recipe for a double-crust pie, then roll out a single crust.  You can find my crust recipe discussed here; if you are pre-baking a shell using my crust recipe, you heat the oven to 475 degrees and bake it about 12-15 minutes.

The ingredients for the filling for one pie are:
1 small red onion
1 tablespoon fresh lime juice (note: i used bottled lime juice and it worked fine)
1/2 teaspoon salt
pinch granulated sugar (I omitted this one time; it did not make a noticeable difference)
4 ounces bacon (4 slices), diced
1 1/2 cups fresh/frozen corn kernels (2 small ears if fresh)
1 cup heavy cream
1/2 cup sour cream or plain Greek yogurt [I used Greek yogurt one time I made it; sour cream the other. No difference.]
3 large eggs
3/4 cup coarsely shredded sharp Cheddar (3 ounces)
3 tablespoons chopped parsley. I omitted this ingredient because I am not big on parsley and just threw in some dried herbs one time, some chopped fresh basil the other.

I left out one ingredient entirely: 2+ tablespoons chopped jalapeños because I do not eat jalapeños. I will note in the instructions where they come in. Looking at step 2 below, you can also pickle a little of the chopped jalapeños and add them later (step 5).

You make the filling as follows (this assumes the crust is made and cooling or cooled):

1. Preheat your oven to 375 degrees.

The corn/onion mixture

2. Cut red onion in half at equator (not root to stem), then from the center cut out two very thin round slices. Separate the onion into rings and put in a bowl with lime juice, salt, and pinch of sugar. [This would also be where a little of the chopped jalapeños would go.] Set aside. Coarsely chop the remaining onion and set it aside.

3. Scatter diced bacon in a cold skillet. Turn heat to medium, and cook until bacon is brown and fat has rendered: 10-14 minutes. Transfer bacon to plate (paper towel on it) and leave fat in the skillet.

4. Stir chopped onion into skiller with bacon fat and place on medium heat. Sauté until golden-edged and translucent: about 6 minutes. Stir in corn, 1/2 teaspoon salt. [If you are adding the chopped jalapeños, add them here.] Cook until corn is tender, about 2-5 minutes.

Ready to go into the oven

5. Remove from heat and scoop 1/2 corn mixture into blender. Add cream, sour cream, and eggs; blend until you get a thick purée. [Note: I used a hand mixer one time because I did not have a blender handy. Same result and cleanup was about 1000% easier.] Scrape the purée in the pan with the other kernels, add the bacon and 1/2 cup Cheddar. Stir, then scrape into the pie shell.

6. Top mixture with pickled red onion (jalapeños if you did that) and sprinkle the remaining Cheddar cheese on top.

7. Bake until puffed, golden, and just set: 35-45 minutes. Transfer to wire rack, cool slightly. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Out of the oven

And there you have it.

Kim, if you make it, I'll be interested to hear how it turned out and what you thought!

Did someone say bacon? And corn?