Gardening looks mighty easy when your trowel is a pencil and you're a thousand miles from the raised bed

     I've tried to embrace my Scotch-Irish roots. I really did. 
Gwendolyn Young/Fairbairn/O'Halloran, just how Celtic can you get?  
Especially after moving to the verdant rolling hills of Middle Tennessee. I couldn't wait to embrace that Celtic love of the land and plant a garden and throw myself into yard work. I wanted to take it literally, you know, grow where your planted. After living in the Sonoran Desert for 8 years, where my weekends were spent by the pool and our gardening was outsourced, I was excited about the possibilities and getting some dirt under my nails. Hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature, that's what I imagined. Jerry was ecstatic about resuming his love affair with Home Depot and some new toys in the form of lawn equipment. 

hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/topics/topic_gardening.html#XXkYb78cJc2ottrS.99

hands in the dirt, head in the sun, heart with nature.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/topics/topic_gardening.html#XXkYb78cJc2ottrS.99

    The garden that I had huge plans for this summer ended in humiliation and dashed hope. I spent a year preparing the soil and composting. I researched each plant's spacing needs and growing habits. I built trellises for climbing plants. All the hard work, sweat and weeks of waiting for that first sun-ripened bite of produce… with the hope of many baskets full of peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers and zuchinni to follow. I watered and weeded, feeded and pruned, but my tomatillos barely sprouted. I hoed and tilled, and was rewarded with baskets of rotten tomatoes. Just as they were reaching the zenith of their producing power, the cucumbers died. So much for the salad days of home gardening. I'm thinking that it may be time to throw in the trowel. This could be the sad final chapter to my gardening endeavors.
I did experience this amazing feeling of peace that came over me and grabbed me by surprise at the beginning of the summer when my garden had such signs of promise.  

    Yard work, well what can I say. Lancinate vines that grow back at the blink of an eye, getting flogged by sentient sticker-bushes, awe-inspiring weeds taller that you are, noxious stinging insects that chase you around the yard, and inject you with venom causing bolus reactions and trips to urgent care, limb-severing shrapnel from the brush-cutters,steep grades that cause one leg to grow longer than the other, the inutility of raking leaves on a windy day, and having your hands shake for 12 hours after operating lawn equipment. And grass....! Growing grass is an excercise in futility.

      I am humbled and saddened that I don't have the green thumb or the love of the land of my Scotch-Irish ancestors. I'm beginning to think that This Irish lassie belongs in the warm breezy simplicity of shore life and the understated elegance of a high rise on the crystal sands next to a large body of salt-water.
(With a good farmer's  market nearby!)

     


    

Books

Books are the quietest and most constant of friends; they are the most accessible and wisest of counselors, and the most patient of teachers.  ~Charles W. Eliot

 

 

While weeding through my library, I discovered that both public and school libraries generally do not accept donations of books that are more than two or three years old. Really??? When did this happen? The librarian (media specialist as they are called today) at a local school informed me that they end up throwing out many books every year. I was appalled! 

The thought came to me that America seems to be in a fraught historical moment in our relationship with our books. We are in the midst of a huge cultural shift. As reading declines in each successive generation, and as content moves increasingly into digital form, there appears to be two schools of thought toward what to do with old books. Throw them out or alter them. Over the past few years, I have been seeing more and more altered book exhibits that seem to venerate the object of the book rather than the content

At first, I was bothered greatly about the cutting, tearing, painting, gluing and other mixed-media techniques done to the books, that changes  it to make something else.  The immediate response I had against a threat to books was rooted deep within me. When I was a child, if my mother saw me writing in a book, bending the page, or treating it carelessly, she would scold, “Never do that to a book!  But then the artist in me appreciates the creativity infused in these altered books.  What is it about a book that makes it a respected object and not just an information-delivery system?

I grew up in a house filled with books.  My parents, especially my father was an avid and eclectic reader .  My mother wrote poetry, she loved arranging and rearranging words until they rubbed up against each other in beautiful ways. She dabbled in collage using letters.  Her works had a layered symphonic quality to them.  My parents surrounded themselves with a variety of people who would drop in at our home to give me books, talk about ideas found in books, art, popular culture, philosophy, life, the universe and everything in between, and I was always delighted by their eccentricities- it was a kind of poetry in life.

When I was young, every Wednesday after dinner, my father would take me to the Toledo Heights Library,  a beautiful high -gabled English Tudor building where the books nestled in mahogany shelves. We would get lost there for hours and wind up checking out the limit. The library formed a pretty essential part of my family's culture and lore.We were all addicted, flashlight-under-the-covers readers. Getting your own library card--and riding your bike to the library on your own--was a significant rite of passage.(A fair amount of library fines were a predictable part of my allowance too.)

Books were valued for their words and ideas, we did not cut, destroy or paint over books.  They certainly were not sacred, but  they were respected.   It seems that as our culture values and needs books less for what they really are, we fetishize their form even more.  My question is "What is the place of a bound book or an altered book in a reading society?"

A Taste of Heaven

Some foods are comfort foods because they remind us of our childhoods. They remind us of home.
Other foods are comforting because of what they are. I never tasted Tom Kha Gai when I was growing up. The first time I had the pleasure was at Malee's in Scottsdale, AZ, and every time I tasted it, my heart was made at peace, my stomach ecstatic, and I couldn't help but smile, resting in the comfort of the flavors that enveloped my senses. I craved the soup and I've spent the last 6 years trying to re-create the recipe, and the last 3 years trying to located some of the more elusive ingredients in Nashville.  I think that I might have finally struck gold!  (I swear there are some medicinal properties to this soup because it sure clears your sinuses!)

 Tom Kha Gai Soup Recipe

Ingredients

• 3 cups (24 fluid ounces) sodium-free chicken stock
• 1½ lbs boneless, skinless chicken breasts, cut into bite size pieces across the grain
• ¾ lb fresh straw mushrooms (you can also use oyster mushrooms)
• Two stalks lemongrass (fresh)
•  3 chopped green onions
• 5-6 fresh bird’s eye chili
• 3 cloves of garlic, minced
• 1 tsp palm sugar
• 2-inch piece of fresh galanga root, sliced thinly crosswise (this TOTALLY makes the flavor of this dish.  If you can't get this locally, scour the internet, buy a pound, then freeze what you can't use now.  It's a floral flavor that you'll definitely recognize if you've had tom kha gai before, especially at Malee's)
• 4-5 fresh kaffir lime leaves
• 4-5 limes
• ¼ cup fish sauce
• ½ cup fresh cilantro leaves
• 1½ cups (12 fluid ounces) full-fat coconut milk
•  1 can baby corn, drained and chopped to 1/2" chunks (optional) (This is in Malee's)
• Red and green Thai bird chiles, sliced thinly as a garnish

Instructions

1. First, concentrate the stock. Put the chicken stock in a wide and shallow saucepan (to ensure fast evaporation), bring it to a boil, and reduce it over medium-high heat until the liquid measures half its original volume. 
2. Quarter the straw mushrooms into bite-sized pieces; set aside.
3. Cut the lemongrass stalks into 1-inch pieces and smash them with a heavy object, set aside.
4. Do what you just did to the lemongrass to the chilies; set aside.
5. Remove the stems and the tough veins that run through the middle from the kaffir lime leaves, and tear them up into small pieces. You can also bruise them a little to bring out the flavor. Set aside.
6. Juice 2 limes; set aside. (You may need more; you may not. It’s better to have more than you need than not enough.)
7. Put the coconut milk into a 4-quart pot, followed by concentrated chicken stock, kaffir lime leaves, lemongrass pieces, garlic, palm sugar and galanga root slices.
8. Bring the mixture slowly to just below a simmer, allowing the herbs to infuse the liquid. (THE SECRET!)
9. Keeping the temperature steady, add the mushrooms and the chicken to the liquid; adjust the heat to maintain the temperature. The liquid should never at any point come to a rapid boil. Don’t worry; at 160°-180°F, your chicken will be thoroughly cooked in about 10 minutes.. (IMPORTANT)
10. Stir gently to ensure that the chicken is evenly cooked.
11. Once the chicken is cooked through, throw in the smashed chilies and baby corn and remove the pot from heat immediately.
12. Add the juice of 2 limes and the fish sauce to the pot, stir, and taste. Add more lime juice and fish sauce, if necessary. I added one additional lime.
13. Stir in the cilantro leaves and garnish with green onion and thai bird chiles
14. Serve your tom kha gai as soup or ladle over a bowl of steamed jasmine rice as an entree.

(You could make a raw version, or a vegan version by substituting tofu for the chicken)