Now Norma Knits

Look What I Did Today

"Yeah, yeah," you say, "so you bought another travel mug from Starbucks."

 

But look! In the sea of choices marked "Made in China," I found a few items on the shelves that are marked "Made in USA." These may have been there all along -- the trademark/copyright date says 2011 -- but it's the first time I've noticed them. They are said to be BPA-free, and made of 30% post-consumer recycled plastic. 

Well done, Starbucks! I said I would buy mugs when the Made in the USA ones hit the shelves, and I started today. 

This is a slow week for me, while all of my students are busy taking exams. Next week things will ramp up steeply again, and so I'd best take advantage of the time I have this week. I bought a few cold-hardy veggie plants and put them in. 

Having discovered broccoli raab last year, and loving it, I bought six plants this year and plunked them in.

And under cover of the trusty inexpensive coldframe from Gardener's Supply (this is year three, and it's still in great shape), I have four Winterbore kale plants, eight lettuce plants, a curly parsley, several arugulas, and then I threw in a few seeds for radishes and more arugula:

Let growing season commence!

Reorg, Part 2

In the home office reorganization, I've tried to upgrade a bit while also trying to be conservative in both money spent and impact to the environment in the form of things recycled, repurposed, reused if possible.

I retired the ancient (but still working well -- just too damn slow for me) Compaq tower computer. I donated it to ReSOURCE, along with some various and sundry other old electronics. I kept the non-interlaced monitor I had, bought a new keyboard and mouse, and repurposed the older 17-inch laptop, to turn it into the new "desktop" home computer.

The original plan was to place it under the monitor stand (which is also a new purchase), where it looked all clean and sleek and nifty and neat, but that didn't work because I have to lift the lid to turn it on. My new rule is to ALWAYS turn the computers off at night in order to save electricity, and so after only one night, I discovered that my original plan was not going to work. It's a big pain in the butt to pull it out from there and lift the lid to push the "on" button, because of the tugging of the cables and such. So it sits on the side.  

This laptop has had nine lives. It was my deposition laptop for a few years. Its motherboard died and was replaced (under warranty). In January 2007, when I first started doing CART at UVM, it was my CART laptop until the hard drive died. I had to buy a new, smaller laptop for CART, but I had the hard drive replaced on this one (under extended warranty) and used it at home. It has a really big screen and is great for watching movies, but it's kind of cumbersome to lug around for CART. Last year the extended warranties all ran out, and immediately (of course) the wireless internet card died. I opted not to get that replaced, and now just use it with the ethernet cable. I hope I have not done a stupid thing here by sending the old sturdy and reliable, albeit slow, Compaq tower away, and kept this one that has had such a checkered past, but it is definitely a big improvement in performance. It runs good old Windows XP Professional, and it isn't used all that much, so I hope it will serve a good purpose for a while.

In my remote CART work, I like to run two laptops simultaneously. There is a lot going on at one time, and my brain wants to go on overload if it's all going on on one computer. Having two laptops set up, doing discrete things, helps me to better compartmentalize. So I set up two:  One for receiving the remote audio and for chatting with my remote student and the A/V team there, as well as monitoring the live stream as seen exactly as my student sees it. The second laptop has my steno system running, and the linking software to send it to the streaming website that my student logs into and receives my CART transcript as it is being written.

See? I told you a lot was going on!

So once again, I have been maybe a bit too minimalist in my setup in the past. I made it through the spring semester, and part of the summer semester, with my two laptops sitting side by side, cables all ajumble, with my prep materials and the class calendar piled around me somewhere, just making the best of it and trying not to trip on anything when I stood up. I knew that I would like it better if one of the laptops was raised higher than the other. Again, it helps to prioritize events, helps me to feel mentally calm and organized.  

In the spring, I handed down my high-volume mega-printer to Abigail, who needed a better, faster, more reliable printer for law school. I (sing it with me) am no longer a courrrrrt reporrrrrterrrrrr, and so I can get by with the other cheap, low-volume, household type of multi-function scanner/fax/printer now. Getting rid of the printer on steroids freed up a lot of space on my work table.

Et voila!

I was able to accomplish this without spending any new money. That riser or stand, or whatever you want to call it, was a part of the other desk where the "home computer" resides (which is right next to me in my home office). The old tower computer used to sit on this thing, on the floor. I just put it on my desk/table for my second laptop, and there's room to organize other stuff such as the wireless router and the Netgear box I have for splitting the ethernet cable into four, and other stuff and nonsense like that. Awesomely better!

I got rid of some other superfluous things, such as my older iPod...

...that I never use since I replaced it with one of those wonderful little newer Nano ones, and my older digital camera. I sold them both at Gazelle. $24 for the camera and $31 for the iPod. Not a lot of money, but something for my troubles, and it gets it out of my space and gets to someone else who can use it while it still has some useful life left in it. I've still got unopened boxes of 3-inch diskettes and other old crap to get rid of, but I'm chipping away at things. 

So now I'm all ready for my fancy new chair and Happy Place Headphones to arrive, and then, BRING ON THE WORK!

In the process of all this, I stumbled upon something that made me a little bit weepy with nostalgia:

Bees!

After several years of almost absolute silence on the bee radar here at Chez Norma, there is a large increase in their population this year. It is not up to the pre-2006 levels, but it's definitely getting there. Our yard of flowers and flowering weeds is a very inviting place for them, and the silence, when they were not here for the past few years, was almost deafening. Now it's quite alive with buzz again, at least for now -- a fact that makes me very happy. 

A focused eye can see many varieties represented, far beyond the bumblebees who seemed to be the only occasional visitors and pollinators, for the past few years. Earlier in the season, this did not appear to be the case. I was very concerned about my fruit trees not being pollinated, because I saw frighteningly little bee activity. Some of that might have been because of the never-ending rainy weather, but in any case, I am very happy to see many of the bees back. I have not seen any actual honeybees yet, however. I suppose I should consider putting in a hive, but I seriously wonder: Do I really need to take on yet another thing?

I tried to capture some of the bee activity photographically, but it is very hard to do. 

Just when I step in to take a photo, the bees sense my presence and take off. Then I stay still for a while, but when I press the shutter, a bunch of them will fly. I try to focus close-up to a single bee, and I end up getting the stamen of the flower, or a real nicely focused shot of the hosta, or Hank the garden gnome, seven feet behind the bee I'm trying to photograph. I try to take a wider shot to show you the volume of activity in a patch, and the camera doesn't pick up most of the bees, or it's blurred.

Sigh.

But anyway, here are a few, to give my environmentalist and bee-loving friends -- and hell, anyone anywhere who eats fruits and vegetables -- some hope.

 

 

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The Weatherman Was Wrong Again, But This Time The Doctor Seems To Have Been Right

It wasn't supposed to rain yesterday. Well, I guess you could technically say that was correct, since it POURED BUCKETS. But at least it waited till the late afternoon, and I was able to put in a good six hours in the garden before it hit.

You see, I was doing it under doctor's orders. The mysterious ankle- or foot- or who-knows-what injury was not resolving, and so on Friday I ended up back at my primary care doc. I won't get into the whole thing, but in the end she and I decided that I should stop being inactive. It probably wasn't helping anything, and I have also wondered if just being active might help push those fluids out of their sluggishness. So she told me to walk a lot this weekend. I did intend to go and do some true "exercise" walking, and maybe even a teeny bit of running -- perhaps starting from square one of the Couch to 5K program again, because I am very eager to get back to that if at all possible.

I never made it to do that, but I did spend almost a full day in the garden, wearing my hiking boots and my SmartWool socks, and doing a LOT of climbing up and down our steep backyard hill, as well as carrying things. I came out of it with certainly no deleterious effects, and probably considerable positive effects. It was a deliciously sweaty day and a beautiful day. At the end of the day as I'm writing this, I definitely feel miles better physically and psychologically.

The water, though. OMG, the rain, it just won't stop. I put my seedlings in the wheelbarrow while I turned my back for a couple of hours to go to an appointment, and came back to them sitting in 4 inches of water.

I am very lucky that I live on a hill. My gardens are not soggy like the cornfields and hayfields and athletic fields and parks and basements (not ours, thank the goddess) around here. Everything I've planted is doing well. I stuck a few of the plants I bought recently into the ground without a whole lot of fanfare yesterday. If we don't get some sunshine, and it keeps pouring like this, many things won't amount to much anyway. Siiiiigh. 

Here is my best accidental discovery (is that redundant?) of this year:

Onions do incredibly well when mulched with shredded leaves. So now I'm doing it on purpose, and wow! I've never grown such lovely onions before!

My first planting of radishes is getting close to harvest-ready:

Those are baby Romaine lettuces in the foreground, and they are thriving.

I love baby bok choi, and so do the slugs. The bok choi are planted in a rather large bed of various types of lettuce and plants from the cruciferous family. They are the clear favorite of the slugs, which makes them sort of the sacrificial lambs of my garden at the moment. I did manage to get a few unchomped-on leaves to put in my salad yesterday. 

And the state of the compost bins is pretty sad:

Soggy and anaerobic. There are four of them that need to be emptied, aerated and relayered. 

I have no work scheduled for the next week, so now that it seems that I have a usable foot again, I will be able to peck away at some things that really need to get done around here, which will give my muscles a pretty good workout, too...

...in between torrential rainstorms, lightning storms and tornado watches. 

CFLs are a Big Lie

CFLs are propaganda at its best. I'm not sure who they are supposed to be helping, but the way they are being shoved down our throats, it must be big business or something. I'm fed up with them, and I'm not gonna take it any more.

I try to live green. I really do. I do everything I can, but these freaking light bulbs are such a ripoff. And to top it off, I broke one the other day, and I got all freaked out about the mercury. In my house. On my hands. Probably up my nose and down my lungs.

How can that be green or healthy, in any way whatsoever?

I have tried to feel so good about buying them and replacing all my light bulbs, but the feeble light they give off is just getting me down. The package says, "To replace a 60-watt bulb! Only uses 14 watts [or whatever it is -- I have not fact-checked this for complete accuracy, as you can probably guess.] of electricity!"

Then you get it home and it's like a tiny candle's worth of gray, cold light, but without the warmth and charm of a candle, that only struggles unconvincingly to turn on. It's only GIVING you 14 watts worth of light, NOT 60. It's all a big lie. You can't read with them. They're unreliable even about turning on. They burn out often and early, even though the boxes say they last practically indefinitely. It's all a bunch of BIG LIES. I've HAD it with these stupid bulbs. Had it! 

No amount of Vitamin D capsules is gonna help this.

There. I said it and I'm GLAD. 

Another Step in the Direction of Less Plastic

I stopped in at Grand Isle Artworks again yesterday, because I saw it announced in Facebook that Thursdays are Sylvie's days to be there. I recently met Sylvie at a farmer's market where she was selling her wares and bought several bars of soap. Sylvie is a delightful woman with a French accent -- she is originally from Montreal, she told me yesterday -- who makes beautiful soaps and lotions and body washes.

One exciting thing about her soaps is that she uses sunflower seed oil from the Roger and Claire Rainville farm in Alburgh that I mentioned a while back. There is a little post about their farm here. Talk about local! Her business is mere yards (only a very slight exaggeration) from the farm that produces the sunflower oil, and a half hour from me.

The reason I wanted to go in yesterday is because I wanted to try something I had seen on her website, her goat's milk face cream. In recent years I have gotten off track on my former adherence to as-natural-as-possible, with-as-few-ingredients-as-possible cosmetics. After having read Clean recently, I was reminded that the skin is the biggest organ of the body. My resolve to try to put nothing on my skin that I wouldn't eat [within reason, within REASON!] has returned. I've still been quite happily using Philosophy products, but they are way expensive, and my last two jars of Hope In A Jar turned rancid or something when they were only half gone, and sadly these products do contain parabens, which have been found in high concentrations in breast cancer tumors, so I'd really rather not put those things on my body, thankyouverymuch.

When I got to the shop, I told Sylvie that this was my quest (to put nothing on my skin that I wouldn't eat). She proceeded to explain to me in detail the ingredients in the face cream, their derivation, their function, and why each one was desirable and necessary to make a nice face cream that isn't too greasy, that soaks in, that contains humectants. She spoke with convincing knowledge and authority, and said that yes, I could eat this (though I probably wouldn't want to). The price of the face cream is really reasonable, and so I bought some -- after I tried it first, of course. 

One thing I loved about her explanation is that she was so honest and forthright: She told me that yes, there are some preservatives in there, but they are weak ones. This is a new batch, and there is an expiration date of one year hence, but that this product will be best used up within about six months or so -- and not to let it sit in a cupboard somewhere for a long time before I use it, or it will go "off".

But before I left, somehow we got on the topic of another product she makes that, as it turns out, I am even more excited about:

Solid shampoo. It comes in a bar or cake like soap, it is covered in biodegradable plastic shrink wrap (realizing that is an oxymoron, but this is a little bit gentler to the earth and landfills, I suppose) -- no other wrapping, and best of all, no plastic bottle or cap. Most shampoos, she explained, come in plastic bottles that are mostly filled with water. There is very little real product in the shampoo bottle -- the first ingredient is water. This makes it heavy to ship, and you have one more plastic bottle to throw away.

(You know I don't really buy the whole "we are recycling it" thing, right? I've talked at length about this before, that I really doubt that most of the plastic stuff that we, with all best intentions, hope and think that we are recycling, actually gets recycled.) 

Once again, Sylvie explained each and every ingredient in the shampoo (which can also be used as a regular body bar) and why it's there. 

This is great for traveling, and it's also better for the environment and for the less-plastic lifestyle. I'm excited to try it and I'm really looking forward to my shower tomorrow morning!

And that's not all. There is also the solid conditioner:

While I was there, I bought some raffle tickets for Grand Isle Art Works' grand opening and fundraiser for additional lighting and other things that the new gallery needs, such as chairs for knit night (hint-hint) that is taking place this Saturday. You can buy raffle tickets, too, here.

THE REVIEW IS IN:  (added at 9:43 a.m. ET)  I just finished my first shower with the solid shampoo and conditioner. I'm very happy. A nice feel, easy to use (I was a bit concerned about that), and though the lather is not as "moussey" as a shampoo from a bottle -- or maybe it could be if you used more, but I was on minimalist mode this morning -- it is wonderful! I used the shampoo bar as a body bar, too, because I loved the smell so much. It's just the smell of milk and almonds, practically nonexistent, but just a hint. Lovely and purifying-feeling.  And the conditioner is brilliant! As Sylvie told me, you can feel it going on, and you can control how much you put on by how silky your hair starts to feel.  I'm a happy showerer, and I'm sold on all three products.  I used the face cream last night (it is really a night cream), and used it after my shower today on my arms.  Nice.  

WTFriday: All The Bad News That's Fit To Print

1. I made my first batch of mozzarella cheese yesterday. I'm very disappointed and whiny about the whole thing. I wasted a whole gallon of really good organic raw milk that I drove a good distance to acquire. The people who say cheesemaking is much easier than yogurt-making are wrong and they should have to write that on the chalkboard 110 times, RIGHT NOW. And the directions in the little booklet that came with the cheesemaking kit I sent for are terribly ambiguous. Worse, they are gleefully described on the package to be SO EASY A 7-YEAR-OLD can do it, exclaims one testimonial. 

Well, I suppose that's me and Sarah Palin: Not smarter than your average 7-year-old. I can never figure out what so-called universal symbols are supposed to mean, and I can't make mozzarella like any old 7-year-old should be able to do. Let me see if I can remember how to tie my shoes... hm. I'll have to get back to you on that.

(Take out a colander, it says, but then doesn't have an instruction in which you use a colander, for example.) (Add the dissolved rennet, stirring in an up-and-down motion. WTF does THAT mean?) (Drain the floating whey off the top. But if you try that, the curds go down the drain with it.) (Ladle the curds into a bowl. They had not said to take out a ladle, but a slotted spoon -- and chasing the little curds with the slotted spoon in all that whey is like trying to get guppies out of a 100-gallon murky fish tank using a salmon net.) I finally said $%#&* *^&%##% (come on; are you surprised?), and poured it into the colander that the instructions had TOLD me to take out, but without telling me what to do with it, to drain the whey off the curds. And when it comes to the addition of salt, the quantity specified (1 T.) MUST be wrong, because that cheese is so salty I can hardly eat it. VERDICT: Mozzarella-making is fiddly, MUCH more complicated than making yogurt, and though I will probably try it again someday, I will not jump to make it again tomorrow. I'll use my good milk for yogurt or ice cream and just buy my freakin' mozzarella. 

2. Yesterday was July 1, and Mr. Jefferies had had a haircut the day before. Poor l'il dude was shivering so much yesterday afternoon (high temp in the mid-60s F) that I had to put his alpaca sweater on him. That's just not RIGHT.

3.  It seems to me that it's been raining and grey pretty much nonstop, and yet yesterday afternoon when I went to check my garden, almost everything was BONE DRY. I had to water. I could die.

4. The strawberries I planted seem to have been asleep, sitting dormant, not doing anything, looking like they are not thriving, but just (barely) BEING. I felt it was probably a pH problem, and since my soil is often on the acid side (though this soil is the bagged MooDoo potting soil, so I really don't understand why it would have a pH imbalance, but there you go) last week I gave most of them a little feeding of lime.  They seem to have perked up a bit since then -- some of them, anyway. But they are still not bursting out with a joyful rendition of "I Feel Pretty!" as they should be.

Ditto for the peppers. JUST.SITTING.THERE. I thought I gave all of the peppers some lime and bone meal last week, but as of yesterday three have sort of taken off and three are still JUST.SITTING.THERE looking anemic and pathetic, like they are out on the frigid corner of a building in January for a smoke break, rather than sitting in the beautiful peninsula garden of expensive soil and sun I made JUST.FOR.THEM. Ungrateful snots. I guess I need to get out there and give them some lime, too. And perhaps some fertilizer. Maybe all the rain has leached out the nutrients from the soil; I don't know.

5. I've spotted my first Japanese beetles. Gardengeddon.

6. I have planted bush beans four times. It is not a good story.

If they deign to germinate, they either seem to rot at the base (or something is eating their roots) or get eaten by something when they are in the cotyledon stage. These are the few that are hanging on so far, but they don't look well.

I'm having my usual unimpressive results with pole beans. Sort of like the people who yelled that cheesemaking was EASY compared to yogurt (Yes, I'm bitter; why do you ask?), the people who shout out that pole beans are superior to bush beans because they produce all season are just plain WHACKED.

They just SIT there and SIT there. Slow growth, and I do mean S-L-O-W. This is always the case with me and pole beans. They just don't LIKE ME. I'm starting to get a complex. The gardening books say these things start producing right away and produce all season as they grow up the pole, and Jack will be climbing the beanstalk and bring me back the golden ticket from the chocolate factory. Wait. I think I'm mixing up my stories a little bit. But those people and their pole bean fairytales are JUST.SO.WRONG. Pfffffft.

7. I fear that I can see the telltale early signs of the squash vine borers, and I'm sick about it. Freaking moths. I'm hoping it's just my imagination and I'm holding my breath. What a shame if we managed to keep away the beetles and the bugs, and yet our squash still got ruined by the borers. Gahhhhhhhhhh.

8. My sinuses are taking a wee bit of umbrage with the level of dairy eating I've been doing. They are my own little "off" switch to stop me from overeating the ice cream, so I can't just sit and down those incredibly complex and delicious and adventurous flavors all day. 

But there is some good news!

1. Not one cucumber beetle has been seen, nor squash bug, except the one cucumber beetle I killed. The nasturtiums have worked WONDERS in that regard. 

2. Is there anything cuter than a baby cucumber in bloom?

These are those lonnnnng English cucumbers, and this is what they look like before they are pollinated. Can you believe that thing is going to be a foot long or longer when it's mature? 

3. We're eating delicious broccoli!

And beets and radishes and asparagus and lettuces and onions and black raspberries and Swiss chard. It's really more than two people can possibly eat. I've been giving some to my mom and the neighbors. Soon the many cabbages I planted are about to take center stage. I don't have any idea how we're going to eat them all. Please do not suggest kimchi or sauerkraut. I do.not.like either of those, even though I would love to love them. I love the idea of them, and I could totally see myself wasting days and weeks and months (or however long it takes to make that smelly crap) making it, only to throw it away because I can't tolerate it. So it'll be fresh or braised or cooked with root veggies and corned beef or something, and SHARED. A lot of it will be shared. 

4. See #8 above. The sinuses are keeping me from overindulging in all the most amazing flavors of ice cream I've been making. OK, it's only been two. I made two batches of orgasmic rose petal ice cream and one batch of orgasmic strawberry-basil. You want my honest assessment? ORGASMIC. But beyond that, the basil ice cream base BEFORE I put in the pureed strawberries, was OR-GASSSSSS-MIIIIIIIICCCCCCC. Next time, I'm going to forget about the strawberries and just make basil. I know it sounds strange, but you have to believe me: O. I'm not even kidding. 

But, thank goodness for my screaming sinuses. Otherwise I'd gain back all the weight I lost over the winter, and PLUS have to work out 13 hours a day. 

So see? It's all good, even the bad.   

Terrier Tuesday -- We've Got BEETS!

Dear Readers:

A.Alpha says that a lot of people have been writing her to say, "Halp! I hate beets! How do I learn to stop gagging when I try to eat them?!"

Whatchu say?!

How could anybody hate beets? What they ever done to hurt you, eh? They're so sweet and delicious and versatile and pretty on the plate, like gemstones, and they are packed with nutrients. We have to do something about this maligning and misunderstanding of the poor beet. We hafta! 

Alpha's (you know her!) first reaction was, "Oh, GROW UP!" But I told her she had to calm down and be rational. She knows how she feels when everybody oohs and ahhs and goes on endlessly and orgasmically about sushi, and how she sort of gags it down in social settings and questions everyone else's sanity about that whole raw fish thing. 

So we will all try to be adults here, right? And we will TRY to:

Save the beet! Love the beet you're with. And all that good stuff. Watch Alpha's blog: Recipes and ideas and beet-eating anecdotes, contests and challenges to come! 

Love,

Mr. Jefferies 

Can You Smell Me From There?

The garlic scapes (many of them, anyway) were ready to be cut yesterday.

This is a seasonal delicacy that will be gone far too quickly, so I wasted no time in making some garlic scape pesto <------ that is a link to an article about garlic scapes with a recipe for pesto which bears only distant-cousin resemblance to the paste I made. 

I didn't have any olive oil on hand because I keep forgetting to buy some. So I used grapeseed oil. I didn't have any parmesan cheese on hand because I used the last of my parmesan in a multi-veg/multi-cheese frittata I threw together the other night. So I didn't use any cheese at all, but used my homemade Greek yogurt for tang and creaminess, with a squeeze of lemon juice and some salt and walnuts. It was delicious and so potent that I doubt there will be any evil spirits around here for the rest of this decade. 

I slathered the pesto thickly onto a large bone-in chicken breast (Does a chicken have two breasts or one? Two, I guess. This was a double -- both boobs -- an entire chest, in other words.) that I bought from that Hog Island Organics place the other day, and I put it in a covered casserole on lowish heat and slow-roasted it. 

Oh, dear. The smell of garlic was fierce! And it was oh-so-delicious and oh-so-tender. After it finished cooking, I was not surprised, but still sad, to see that the lovely green color was all a rather ugly brownish-tannish mess. Not really something I'd like to serve to company, because it wasn't so pretty after it was cooked, but it tasted damn good, that garlic-smeared chicken chest.

And then, to add insult to the potent-smell injury, I made a red cabbage and fresh green onion slaw as a side dish. 

Now, even though there are more scapes to be used, and there is still a bowl of the pesto left, I think we will need to give it a bit of a break for a few days. That, or offend everyone around us with the smell. And this being campaign season, perhaps we should just eat nothing but parsley, mint tea, and brown rice for a few days till it clears out of our system. 

A Locavore Meal and An Excellent & Entertaining Video: Dan Barber, Chef and Scholar

 

A place called Hog Island Organics, which I'd been eyeing for a long time but was always closed when I drove past, was finally open when we went by the other day. I am thrilled with their little place -- the freezer was full of a great selection of locally raised meats and poultry -- beef, pork, emu, chicken -- and that's just what I took note of. There might have been even more things. The prices were great for the meats and poultry, and the eggs were a downright bargain -- two dozen for $4. It's not that far from me, it's convenient on the way to and from the Islands, and I'll be going out there often, though I will have to try to stock up my freezer for winter, because it is only open seasonally. And they don't (yet) take credit cards. The proprietor said she doesn't have a phone line because, being just a seasonal business, the hookup and unhooking charges are exorbitant. She is looking into other options, but in the meantime if you go, bring cash or the checkbook.  

So Sunday evening we had this meal composed of a roasted loin of local pork, together with a salad of mesclun greens and roasted asparagus and sliced radishes from our garden. Mmmm, perfection! 

Recently a friend asked if I save money by growing my own vegetables. At the time I said no, but seriously, this meal was CHEAP. The organic roast cost $16, and we have enough left from it for another meal. The veggies, for all intents and purposes -- well, maybe I'm stretching the truth here slightly, but really only slightly -- after having so many meals of asparagus and mesclun greens this spring, I'm inclined to say that the veggies were just about free. And you just can't GET any fresher or more delicious. 

Another bonus: When I was at Hog Island, I asked about raw milk for my yogurt and cheesemaking. There is a law on the books in Vermont permitting people to buy and sell raw milk, but only in very limited quantities and only direct from the farm and by word of mouth (in other words, no advertising), and honestly, as one of "those people" -- you know the ones I mean -- one of those annoying crunchy-granola-eat-local-go-organic wingnuts -- and being a farm girl who grew up in Vermont and who lives in the Dairy Capital of the state and not much more than a half mile from the St. Albans Co-Operative Creamery, I find it infuriatingly difficult to find such a seemingly simple and natural thing as raw milk. Good grief! I should be tripping over it! I should be having to wipe it off my shoes every time I go for a walk! I should be complaining about the smell keeping me awake at night! 

But no. It's like it does not exist. "No, ma'am, it's like they tell the kids in kindergarten in New York City -- Milk comes from plastic cartons in the supermarket, and Jamie Oliver is all wrong -- milk is not white, but it is pink or brown, is homogenized and pasteurized to within an inch of its life, and has about 24 tablespoons of high-fructose corn syrup per serving in the kiddie size. Beyond that, I don't know what to tell you. Cows? We don't got no cows around here."

Grr...

Even this list is not up to date or complete, but the nice young man behind the counter gave me directions to his uncle's farm, and I think it was his mom who was the proprietor, and she gave me the phone number. So we're golden. When the tomatoes are ripe and the basil is plentiful later this summer, you can bet your sweet patooties I'll be making some homemade mozzarella to go with. Because not long ago I attended a fabulous Italy-themed party at the beautiful home of Mike and Rebecca, and one of their guests served homemade mozzarella that she had made that afternoon. 

I only have two words about it:

LIFE. CHANGING. 

Of course we hit it off like two peas in a pod, and she said if I make my own yogurt, mozzarella is even easier. So oh yeah, baby. She told me where to get the starter kit, and I've already got it. BONUS: The cheesemaker's/buttermaker's grade of cheesecloth that was in the package makes the Greek yogurt all in one strainer batch! It makes it so much better and so much more easily, that alone is worth the cost of the kit.

And this is so timely -- I had just finished writing this post, and my friend and fellow clean-sustainable-local-good-food aficionado Kristen sent me a link to this fabulous talk. 

This guy had me laughing and cheering. I sure hope Dan Barber is one of the next speakers at UVM, what with their new focus on clean, sustainable food production which makes me more in love with the university than I already was. 

Love this! It's 20 minutes long, but I hope you can find the time to watch it: