Another American Adventure: UPDATE - safe and snug in Cranberry TWP

Sunday, November 20, 2011

UPDATE - safe and snug in Cranberry TWP

Jubilee and I are now safe and snug back in Cranberry TWP. The trees are mostly bare (except for the red ones in front of the apartments). I find the browns of late autumn comforting, somehow. We are eating up all the great veggies that John has collected from the CSA deliveries. Made a soup yesterday with red squash, carrots, leeks, and lots of other stuff. Last night we had a green that was sort of like collards, but much more tender. (It might be what Eric and Dawn got at their Farmer's Market.) I think it is my favorite green. We are feeling healthy, and like bears getting ready for winter! Jubilee's allergies are settling down.

UPDATE: We have identified the good greens as BRUSSEL SPROUT GREENS (can you imagine?) Here is a photo. They sure look like collards, don't they?

5 comments:

BarbaraNovember 20, 2011 at 11:28 AM
I recall how great I felt after a week's retreat at the Jesuit place in Guelph, ON. The retreat house is situated on a farm and the produce is fresh. The menu is heavily weighted towards veggies, although not vegetarian. You'd think I'd have appropriated that experience. I think I will make one of my great soups next week! You've once again inspired me!
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beth cioffolettiNovember 20, 2011 at 2:12 PM
This was one of my best soups, Barbara. After I good all the veggies in olive oil and broth, I put it in the blender to sort of puree (not all the way to baby food) it. Then I added this great mixture of cooked wild rices and red lentils. It is the best! Sometimes when we eat it we grate some good cheese on it, but it doesn't really need it. I'm convinced that eating these organic and local vegetables is good for our bodies and our souls.
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beth cioffolettiNovember 20, 2011 at 2:12 PM
I mean to say - "after I COOK the veggies ..."
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BarbaraNovember 20, 2011 at 7:38 PM
I wouldn't know collard greens from Brussels sprouts greens or spinach for that matter!
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beth cioffolettiNovember 21, 2011 at 9:41 AM
Oh, Barbara -- you've been missing out! But until my husband had me working in his gardens, I didn't have a clue about what growing vegetables looked like either!

Don't know why, but I like the green leafy ones the best.
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"In those first days, people said, a squirrel could run the long length of Pennsylvania without ever touching the ground. In those first days, the woods were white oak and chestnut, hickory, maple, sycamore, walnut, wild ash, wild plum, and white pine. The pine grew on the ridgetops where the mountains' lumpy spines stuck up and their skin was thinnest.

"The wilderness was uncanny, unknown. Benjamin Franklin had already invented his stove in Philadelphia by 1753, and Thomas Jefferson was a schoolboy in Virginia; French soldiers had been living in forts along Lake Erie for two generations. But west of the Alleghenies in western Pennsylvania, there was not even a settlement, not even a cabin. No Indians lived there, or even near there.

"Wild grapevines tangled the treetops and shut out the sun. Few songbirds lived in the deep woods. Bright Carolina parakeets - red, green, and yellow - nested in the dark forest. There were ravens then, too. Woodpeckers rattled the big trees' trunks, ruffed grouse whirred their tail feathers in the fall, and every long once in a while a nervous gang of empty-headed turkeys came hustling and kicking through the leaves - but no one heard any of this, no one at all."

Annie Dillard, An American Childhood.