Quieting Life

Buying Corn: A Public Service Announcement

I'm always dumbfounded at the way people defile corn in the process of buying it, stripping bare one ear after another and tossing them heartlessly back on the pile. To tell you the truth, I'm not entirely sure what it is they're looking for...and I've become convinced that – in most cases – they don't either. Just that, like everything else in their lives, there must be a better one somewhere.

Back when I was still doing the farmer's market, I was chatting with a fellow vendor one morning, a woman and a farmer I respect and admire (once I got over being terrified of her fierce demeanor) and like a lot. She'd wandered over to my booth during the slow early hour of the market. She kept a keen eye on her stall as we talked, and suddenly she took off at a sprint mid-sentence, hollering across the green 'Hey! hey! What are you doing? Stop it, stop that!!!'. There in her stall, some jackass was rifling through her bushels of corn, stripping the husks, tossing them back...I was almost as pissed as she was, and when I got home, I sat and wrote up a post for my previous blog – A Cooking Life – to try and rehabilitate the Corn Molesters. Chances are, the people that really needed to read it never did, but those sympathetic to the cause have suggested it should be printed out and posted everywhere corn is sold. And during this high corn season (here in Vermont, the sweet corn has been spectacular, even while it withers and dies elsewhere around the country), I think it bears repeating.

Garden Report: July 30

Every gardener I talk to says the same thing, even the professional growers. Sure, endless watering because it refused to rain (the drought finally broke last week)...but holy crap the bugs. I've been gardening for 25 years, and I've never felt so under assault. That fella there in the picture is a red-legged grasshopper, measuring over 2 inches long. There are dozens like him out in the yard, each capable of devouring many times his body weight in tasty plant material every day. Add to that his lesser cousins, numbering in the thousands. Factor in the flea, tortoise, and cucumber beetles, the cabbage loopers and moth worms, centi- and millipedes, slugs and snails, all in quantities enough to make me queasy; it's a wonder there's a single leaf left. But.

I am vigilant. I prevail. And my garden thrives, flourishes – and feeds us.

Little Darlings

There's nothing from the garden I look forward to more than the first sweet tender English peas. Perfect ripe cherry tomato after a year-long wait? Sure, but cracking open a fat green pod and swiping a handful of sweet little pearls right into my mouth is, for me, the garden's greatest reward. Until I figured out how to grow enough of them to satisfy my greed, I'd often eat most of them right from the vine. Now I gang-plant a full bed and have enough for several fresh-from-the-garden dinners plus a couple of pounds to freeze for safekeeping. It's become tradition to serve our own peas with Christmas dinner every year, whatever else may be on the menu.

For the last 3 years, we've gone off to Maine for the week of July 4th, and I'm always sure the peas will peak while we're away and be dried and shriveled by the time we get home. But each year, they've held back through the blasting heat only to welcome us home with handfuls of perfect pods.

A Better Burger Bun

A few weeks ago, I had thawed some nice grass-fed ground beef for hamburgers and needed to pick up some buns. I'm in the habit of buying the ones from the grocery-store bakery (lacking any good local bakeries that would bake them from scratch), but as I reached for the package that afternoon, the thought crossed my mind that I should be making my own. I have a perfectly good recipe, proven and simple. So here you are, just in time for 4th of July cookouts.

Yoga Dipshits

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I'm not quite as cool or forgiving as I sound.

~ Mr. Bob Dylan, from Floater (Too Much to Ask)

I'm about to lay bare just how cool and forgiving I am not. I probably stand to alienate a lot of potential readers, but I am nothing if not forthright and I did warn that there would be sanctimony.

The Wanderlust Festival came to town this week. Under normal circumstances, I would have about as much interest in partaking of the festival's activities as I would in going to Disneyland or Las Vegas or a Phish concert, which is to say: less than none. But friends of ours had signed on to volunteer so that they could participate, and we offered them lodging here for a few days. In browsing through a schedule left on the kitchen counter, I noticed that Joel Salatin was scheduled to speak on Sunday morning.