Some of you might enjoy listening today, rather than reading, especially
my essay at the end. If you would, I have attached a downloadable audio link to
my thoughts for you today.
I have today’s press conference on in the background as I write this,
this subject is something we really don’t want to hear about but that know we
must. Unfortunately the feeling I’m getting from the screen, as I half listen
while typing this, is anger and tension and defensiveness. We need to take in
information from people who, well let’s say, seem to have a hard time with
empathy and people skills. We need, though, to reduce any negative emotions kicked
up from all the information coming at us.
I’ve been reminding, are you turning to things that focus your mind, and
reduce your stress as you go through your days? When we worked for years
helping folks face life-threatening illnesses, for the first time in most of
their lives they were facing something frightening that they couldn’t “resolve”
or “immediately find an answer to” they had to, as we would say, learn to ‘Live
with the Sucker”.
We are all facing problems and concerns that cannot be resolved at the
moment. How we respond to them is the key. People are contacting me and I have
started to do some sessions with people online, but whether you formally
practice mental training or do some of the other things that help our bodies
and minds…do something to distract your mind, to stimulate that creative right
hemisphere, don’t let your brain obsess continuously. My Dad would be out
preparing his garden.
This brings me back to salads and kale and fennel and their roles in our
lives. Bell peppers, kale, fennel, red onion, spinach tortellini and basil are the
main ingredients in a recipe that appeared on my screen this morning. Some of
you have taste buds that perked up at the thought of that vegetable mix; others
of you are squinting at the screen worried that I might be moving over to the
‘kale crowd’ and wondering where I’m going with this. For those of you
salivating, I’ll put the recipe up at the end but several things came to mind
as I saw that recipe headline. I grew up with a Dad and a Grandfather who kept
huge gardens. They grew up in times and places where keeping a garden was
critical for subsistence (and they went through times of national crisis. I
wonder how many of you have heard of the Victory Gardens of World War II?) After
those times passed, lucky for me, keeping a garden seemed to be long enjoyed
habits in their lives. It seemed to be how my dad would relax returning home
daily from his job as an electrician. It is something he would be turning to in
times like these.
In all their years with dirt, I’m pretty sure that neither my Dad or
Grandfather had encountered kale or fennel. And, pasta with spinach inside of
it! That was probably not imaginable in most American homes of the 1940’s,
1950’s and even 1960’s (I never heard about it, we were a long way from Italy).
When I read the term “Vegetable Salad” it reminded me of a tale my Dad told me
about his mother and which I wrote about in an essay I’ll offer below.
So, as we move forward, drink lots of water (I’m finally responding to
that easy and good advice to keep my body well hydrated, come on you guys, we
gotta help our bodies out in any way we can.) Find ways of distracting your
minds, practice formal mind or body training you have learned or learn new
ways. Seattle’s YMCA is offering free exercise classes online for everyone here
is a link www.ymca360.org.
I’ll continue to be in touch with my observations and suggestions. And
continuing the vegetable theme that ran through my thoughts for you today here
is my essay that I titled, Raised Green.
RAISED GREEN
By Marilyn Michael
There is an area in India where, because of religious
beliefs, many folks do not eat onions or garlic. Now, you’ll find me a most
tolerant person of even the most odd-seeming religious convictions but – onions
and garlic!? Since my husband and I are of the ‘live to eat’ rather than the
‘eat to live' crowd, I tried to imagine cuisine without onions and garlic.
Unbelievably, I survived the first twenty years of my life without garlic (I do believe I’ve made up for it since). With all the amazing fresh produce that emerged from my Dad’s huge and thriving yearly gardens and with the universal love of anything green and fresh, I don’t know how garlic slipped by them. I think they pretty much stuck to the vegetable array that had filled their plates in childhood. Thinking about that endless stream of green things to our table, though, they really did stick to the basics, onions, green and yellow, literally tons of potatoes, ears of corn, cauliflower, radishes, carrots, lettuce, cabbage (for vats of homemade sauerkraut) tomatoes, big, yellow Hubbard squashes (to be baked with butter and sugar), cucumbers and a few pumpkins for Halloween carving. There was that odd and wonderful asparagus patch my Dad tended lovingly and bunches of rhubarb on the side of the garage. Oh, and his huge and enviable raspberry patch with plants in it that were, he’d proudly explain, ‘75 years old’. How spoiled was I by all those readily munchable raspberries. And by the beautiful quart jars filled of peaches, apricots, and pears that lined our basement shelves each year. One day each year the whole family, grandparents, aunts and kids would trek to Wawawi, a sunnier place some twenty miles or so near a river to spend the day picking fruit for canning.
And, they’d bring home extra cucumbers from those picking trips because every year they would “put up” 60 quarts of dill pickles. Only after my cousin married a German fellow who introduced the “amazing” idea of hot peppers amidst the pickles was there a change from the established pattern. After that a certain number of quarts would get the peppers, for my Dad who quickly developed a taste for the peppery hotness. Hot peppers had certainly not been a part of those gardens or of the food they ate (wrong soil I now know - hot peppers had grown well in the soil of my husband’s folks in Nevada and, thus had been a part of what he had learned to love.)
I guess there wasn’t a lot of vegetable experimentation. No garlic appeared in our dishes. I never met a bell pepper until I was grown. An avocado was a foreign animal to them (an adventuresome Uncle would return once in a while and enjoy avocado with salt, I heard said. I vividly remember my mom commenting, “They taste like soap.” Though a vegetable lover and willing experimenter, it took me way into my twenties to develop a taste for avocado (in guacamole) and into my thirties to enjoy it straight on sandwiches. Yeah, I know it’s really a fruit but it seems awfully vegetably to me.
The tomatoes were eaten fresh, not “put up”. Dad ate the thick sweet slices with salt and pepper. Mom and I loved sugar on ours. In the summer, salads (something unfamiliar in their youths because of no refrigeration for mayonnaise) would appear. They were made with iceberg lettuce (a favorite to this day) and chunks of fresh tomato mixed with mayonnaise. On special occasions, a can of shrimp would be added. The concept of a salad appearing as part of what they ate stuck in my Dad’s memory. He told the tale of remembering his mother chatting with friends on the party line all agog over the new idea of a “vegetable salad”. He called them vegetable salads all his life.
Ah the vegetables of my youth all freshly picked and full of taste. And back to onions, my Dad loved those little green onions we now call scallions, on a little plate at dinner alongside those slices of white bread. He'd eat each one with a little salt. Funny, as so many other dishes were filled with onions, no one ate them straight except dad. I guess there were some chopped into those simple green salads sometimes.
Since learning to make Indian food, I’m amazed at how they’ve come to combine vegetables. I make a Dahl (a dish with lentils or dried peas). It’s a heavenly mixture of zucchini, onions, tomatoes and green peppers all swirled together with aromatic spices and at the end combined with yellow peas. My folks would not ever have imagined combining vegetables this way. The only combining they did was to dump carrots, potatoes and onions together into a beef stew. The only vegetable combining I truly remember was when the “new potatoes” were on, new potatoes and fresh peas swimming in a cream sauce with a pinch or two of sugar. It was yummy, but certainly not the serious vegetable combining of the Indian dahls. And, even though where I was raised (the wheat country of Eastern Washington) is now known as the “Pea and Lentil Capital of the World” no dried pea I ever knew existed outside split pea soup and I never munched on one lentil during my entire childhood.
Ah, see where onions and garlic can lead one? I certainly thank my folks for my love of vegetables. I wish I could share with them some things I’ve learned and amaze them with my vegetable repertoire. I think they’d have loved, or at least tried, anything done with vegetables as long as avocados weren’t in the mix. And, if dad had his garden today, I’ll bet I could convince him to plant some garlic.
Unbelievably, I survived the first twenty years of my life without garlic (I do believe I’ve made up for it since). With all the amazing fresh produce that emerged from my Dad’s huge and thriving yearly gardens and with the universal love of anything green and fresh, I don’t know how garlic slipped by them. I think they pretty much stuck to the vegetable array that had filled their plates in childhood. Thinking about that endless stream of green things to our table, though, they really did stick to the basics, onions, green and yellow, literally tons of potatoes, ears of corn, cauliflower, radishes, carrots, lettuce, cabbage (for vats of homemade sauerkraut) tomatoes, big, yellow Hubbard squashes (to be baked with butter and sugar), cucumbers and a few pumpkins for Halloween carving. There was that odd and wonderful asparagus patch my Dad tended lovingly and bunches of rhubarb on the side of the garage. Oh, and his huge and enviable raspberry patch with plants in it that were, he’d proudly explain, ‘75 years old’. How spoiled was I by all those readily munchable raspberries. And by the beautiful quart jars filled of peaches, apricots, and pears that lined our basement shelves each year. One day each year the whole family, grandparents, aunts and kids would trek to Wawawi, a sunnier place some twenty miles or so near a river to spend the day picking fruit for canning.
And, they’d bring home extra cucumbers from those picking trips because every year they would “put up” 60 quarts of dill pickles. Only after my cousin married a German fellow who introduced the “amazing” idea of hot peppers amidst the pickles was there a change from the established pattern. After that a certain number of quarts would get the peppers, for my Dad who quickly developed a taste for the peppery hotness. Hot peppers had certainly not been a part of those gardens or of the food they ate (wrong soil I now know - hot peppers had grown well in the soil of my husband’s folks in Nevada and, thus had been a part of what he had learned to love.)
I guess there wasn’t a lot of vegetable experimentation. No garlic appeared in our dishes. I never met a bell pepper until I was grown. An avocado was a foreign animal to them (an adventuresome Uncle would return once in a while and enjoy avocado with salt, I heard said. I vividly remember my mom commenting, “They taste like soap.” Though a vegetable lover and willing experimenter, it took me way into my twenties to develop a taste for avocado (in guacamole) and into my thirties to enjoy it straight on sandwiches. Yeah, I know it’s really a fruit but it seems awfully vegetably to me.
The tomatoes were eaten fresh, not “put up”. Dad ate the thick sweet slices with salt and pepper. Mom and I loved sugar on ours. In the summer, salads (something unfamiliar in their youths because of no refrigeration for mayonnaise) would appear. They were made with iceberg lettuce (a favorite to this day) and chunks of fresh tomato mixed with mayonnaise. On special occasions, a can of shrimp would be added. The concept of a salad appearing as part of what they ate stuck in my Dad’s memory. He told the tale of remembering his mother chatting with friends on the party line all agog over the new idea of a “vegetable salad”. He called them vegetable salads all his life.
Ah the vegetables of my youth all freshly picked and full of taste. And back to onions, my Dad loved those little green onions we now call scallions, on a little plate at dinner alongside those slices of white bread. He'd eat each one with a little salt. Funny, as so many other dishes were filled with onions, no one ate them straight except dad. I guess there were some chopped into those simple green salads sometimes.
Since learning to make Indian food, I’m amazed at how they’ve come to combine vegetables. I make a Dahl (a dish with lentils or dried peas). It’s a heavenly mixture of zucchini, onions, tomatoes and green peppers all swirled together with aromatic spices and at the end combined with yellow peas. My folks would not ever have imagined combining vegetables this way. The only combining they did was to dump carrots, potatoes and onions together into a beef stew. The only vegetable combining I truly remember was when the “new potatoes” were on, new potatoes and fresh peas swimming in a cream sauce with a pinch or two of sugar. It was yummy, but certainly not the serious vegetable combining of the Indian dahls. And, even though where I was raised (the wheat country of Eastern Washington) is now known as the “Pea and Lentil Capital of the World” no dried pea I ever knew existed outside split pea soup and I never munched on one lentil during my entire childhood.
Ah, see where onions and garlic can lead one? I certainly thank my folks for my love of vegetables. I wish I could share with them some things I’ve learned and amaze them with my vegetable repertoire. I think they’d have loved, or at least tried, anything done with vegetables as long as avocados weren’t in the mix. And, if dad had his garden today, I’ll bet I could convince him to plant some garlic.
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