She Brings Me Water
An aeclectic look at the nearby worldArchive for June, 2008
Mid-Summer, Litha or the Summer Solstice
Whatever you choose to call it, now is the time to celebrate the shortest night of the year, and the longest days, and the burgeoning fields and gardens. There are many, though, that at this time will not be celebrating, because of the destruction of their fields and gardens and homes through floods, drought, or some other catastrophe exacerbated by global warming, mono-culture agriculture, destruction of wetlands and flood plains, or Mother Nature just fighting back. So we might also take this time of year to reflect on our lives in relation to the world around us and what we can do about the problems we see.
Treehugger has posted a few suggestions for observing this time of year; which you can read about here. They also have suggestions on greening your life, as well as environmental news; I recommend them as well as Grist for great reads on being green. Mother Earth News, the “original guide for living wisely”, has a post here on how to help the Midwestern flood victims. At all of these and many other places online, not only can you learn about greening your life (and possibly life as we know it), you can also glean tips for saving money, becoming healthier, reducing waste and chemicals, and maybe score some great recipes into the bargain.
As I’ve talked about before, one of the major ways you can achieve all of the above-mentioned goodies is by cutting meat out of your diet, in particular red meat, or at least reducing it substantially. We have also cut out chicken and have changed our fish-eating habits based on evidence that some types of fish have been drastically over-fished and that the “farm-raised” ones are as full of chemicals and hormones as feedlot cows (salmon is an example of both of these categories; natural populations are dwindling and the farm-raised ones, just like feedlot cows, are being fed corn which is not their natural diet and so they must be fed antibiotics and hormones to help them stay alive until they are big enough to kill).
This brings us back to the celebration of the Summer Solstice, or Litha, the festival of enjoying the summer sun and warmth, and sharing the abundance of the fruits (and vegetables!) of our labors. So for my part, I’ll share with you a few meatless ways to partake of your garden’s produce (or your local farmer’s market, or even your grocery stores’)…
For Father’s Day, we were going to my dad’s for a covered dish/ barbeque and I decided to bring something based on what was available in our garden on the day of the gathering. The day before, I dug some red potatoes from the four hills we have of them, and cut a zucchini squash and a yellow squash. We have bunches of lemon balm pretty much all over the yard, so with all this mind (and in hand), I made a garden potato salad: first, I cut the potatoes into chunks and steamed them until just tender, then I cut the squash into chunks and steamed them till just tender along with some chopped onions. All of these I rinsed in cold water to stop them from cooking after they were done steaming. Then I combined them all together along with handfuls of chopped lemon balm, some lemon pepper seasoning, some chopped garlic and sour cream, and put it into the refirgerator to let the flavors “marry”. Later my husband added dry mustard, garlic powder and paprika. If we had been having this at home as a meal, I probably would have added some steamed greens as the “side” dish, and that would have been our entire meal.
Later in the week, I took more zucchini and yellow squash, steamed them and combined them with couscous, chopped roasted red peppers, some leftover alfredo sauce and parmesan cheese in a casserole, seasoned to taste with lemon pepper, garlic and coarse salt. This morning, our burgeoning basil plants needed cutting, so I cut a large basket full and made three batches of pesto (pine nuts, garlic, basil leaves, parmesan cheese, lemon pepper season and garlic powder) and tied two handfuls together to hang and dry. I don’t add olive oil to my pesto while I’m making it because it tends to “cook” in the food processor as you are whirring the ingredients around, and I think it keeps longer without it. I put my pesto into tight-lidded jars, label and date them, and keep them in the freezer till I’m ready to use them, except for one jar I keep in the fridge for quick access. I add the olive oil when I use the pesto; for example, when I put some on my salad, I pour a little olive oil over it and stir it around in my salad. Same with pasta: cook your pasta, drizzle olive oil on it, then sprinkle on the pesto. This is particularly good when making a primavera (spring) pasta: another chance to pick and choose whatever veggies you want in your dish, steam them separately or cook them right in with your pasta, drain, season with pesto and parmesan cheese and there’s a complete meal.
Now get out there and enjoy the Mid-Summer Litha and/or Solstice, whatever you choose to call it and however you choose to celebrate it.
Meet the Neighbors
In previous posts I have mentioned our strawberry-eating pair of foxes; here’s one of them who stopped to pose for my husband to take a few shots of him. This one has a beautiful long tale, tipped with black, that supposedly means he is a gray fox. I don’t really know that he is a “he”, but the other one, who has no tail at all, looked earlier this year as if she were pregnant. Why does she have no tail? We don’t know, but last year she had half a tail, and this year, no tail. There’s a tale there somewhere.
Our human next-door neighbor, the one who tends a larger garden than ours, says he thinks the parent foxes are bringing their babies out at night or in the early mornings or late evenings to play in the loose dirt/sand in a back corner of his garden (where the wild fields and trees begin). He hasn’t seen them, he says, but he sees the messed-up dirt with fox tracks all around. This neighbor came over a few evenings ago to show me his hat. Here’s a picture of it:
Yes, that’s duct tape on his hat, and one of those rolls of sticky fly trap paper. A couple of years ago, when the deerflies were biting us all, my husband gave this role of sticky fly paper to our neighbor and suggested he stick it on his hat to trap the flies. So two years later, he’s finally done it- and it works.
Our neighbor says he’s going to get more rolls and put them all over his hat.
I’m not sure if this next neighbor is really a neighbor or not, he might have been just passing through, searching for females. One morning several weeks ago, it was drizzling slightly, and I looked up from my computer to see this little guy crossing the yard:
He’s an Eastern box turtle, and I do know for a fact that he is a “he”, because the males have orange eyes (females have brown eyes) and slightly concave shells underneath, so that when they are mating they fit neatly over the female’s convex upper shell. Box turtles can completely close up their shells to protect themselves from predators; that’s what this turtle did when I walked up to him, not knowing that I was not considering using him for turtle soup.
“Is she gone yet?”
P.S. Yesterday evening, which was Father’s Day, my farmer/neighbor’s wife told me that they had seen the fox pups! Two of them, playing hide and seek in the beans while mom watched from the sidelines. So Happy Father’s Day to the male fox at the top of this post and congratulations to mom too.
