Carrot Fairies and Food Queries

The day that DT and I got married, my godmother called me frantically on my cell phone while I was driving to my hair appointment.  "Can I see you before the wedding?"  I squeezed her in.  She met me in the basement of the church where I was getting ready with my bridesmaids.  She said she felt guilty about being somewhat absent and wanted to take this moment to impart some words of wisdom (she is a mother of six and has been married over 40 years).  She pulled me aside in a linen closet.  Nine years later, the only piece of advice that I remember her giving is "Please don't feed your children processed food."

Now, I didn't know what processed food was in 2002 and I really still don't.  I get that it's not the zucchini we grow in our garden, and it probably is Spaghetti Os from a can, but there seems to be a lot of gray area in between. 

My godmother was not the last person to make food-related edicts to me in my new role as wife and mother, however.  There are all the studies, summarized to me over the radio and internet, saying "have dinner as a family or else your children will join gangs!"  And one of my favorite authors, Barbara Kingsolver, told me proudly (via the written page, and in too much detail, really) about the entire year she lived just off what her family grew and killed. There is smiling Michelle Obama with her anti-obesity campaign, harvesting kale from the White House garden.  And there is the not-so-gentle prodding from my beloved New York Times every Sunday about the ethical, environmental, and gastronomical benefits of local food, organic food, slow food, "real" food. 

It stresses me out.

I am a very busy woman!  I have a career.  My husband has a career.  Neither of us are exactly naturals in the kitchen (there are about four things I can cook without a recipe).  The four of us arrive at home between 5:45 and 6 pm, famished and frenzied.  There is never enough time to cook something from scratch.  But, I also recognize that meals are important.  They are the energy we give our bodies, the way we impart good eating habits to our children, they are the most consistent time we spend together every day, and they form memories like few other things. 

So every week I try and balance my desire to make healthy, homemade meals (that are not just out of a jar or frozen bag), with our limited time for grocery shopping and cooking.  Sometimes it means I am making meatloaf at 6 am.  Sometimes it means I work from 8 pm to midnight so that I can be home for dinner and bedtime.  And othertimes it means a box of Annie's macaroni and cheese (is that processed?? wait, I don't want to know) with frozen peas (at least we are serving vegetables!). 

On the weekend, cooking can be more fun.  Here, David helps with pudding.

As part of my ongoing effort to heed my better food angels and establish more of a connection between us and our meals, we planted a garden again this year.  (We also joined a CSA.)  Over Memorial Day, DT and Maria (with help from Chiara) built the beds and planted seeds:



We grew the pumpkins that DT showed in the last post, a few zucchini, a few green cucumbers (way too many tennis-ball-shaped yellow cucumbers from lack of water), and some skinny sunflowers.  But mostly, we got carrots.  This was our second year planting carrots, but our first success.  (Thanks to the chickenwire that kept out all the neighborhood Peter Cottontails.) 

We have been pulling carrots and eating them just about every weekend for months.  In early November I realized that we better harvest the rest before the ground freezes.  So Maria and I pulled, and pulled, and pulled carrots (and then washed, and washed, and washed them).  These two photos are taken the same day, and still do not convey the massive carrot bounty. 

What would we DO with all these carrots??  We kept many, but we also gave many away.  We made six different plastic bags full of carrots and delivered them to our neighbors, like carrot fairies. 

All this garden work makes me think of hippies.  Didn't this phase go around once already, in the 60s and 70s?  The phase of eating healthy things made from scratch?  And then, as a country, we ditched it.  Why?  Probably because more and more women went to work and had less time for pulling, washing, and cooking carrots.  Well, more and more women are still working, so how will we all incorporate this renewed desire to live a little closer to the land?  (Even if this generation of husbands and dads are cooking, they still have the same job-related time constraints.)

Every time I hear or read a special about the obesity epidemic in America, I think to myself: it's partly due to the labor market!  People are working long, long hours (either at one job, or many), and they don't have time to make nutritious and economical meals.  They also don't have time or energy to exercise.  Address that aspect of the problem!  But no one calls to interview me about it.   :)

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p.s. Since we have a four-day weekend and all, I thought I could spend some time cooking today (after I initially published this post).  I bought a 3 lb breast of turkey, a stuffing mix from my favorite little cafe, rolls, and patty-pan squash.  I spent over two hours chopping celery and onions (has anyone seen the cuisinart blade?), mixing stuffing, and babying that turkey breast. 

The kids ended up eating cereal for dinner. 

The squash I bought was rotten when I opened the bag; the turkey took twice as long to cook as the guy at the meat counter promised.  At six o'clock, when everyone wanted to eat, all I had to offer were cold bread rolls and stuffing.  And the whole family thought the stuffing was disgusting.  We have a whole sink full of dirty dishes, and no good food to show for it.  UGH.