What happens when ice balls fall from the sky and meet up with organic produce? How about one hour producing four inches of rain?
Bad things.
The picture of dirt with a tiny bit of green was taken late spring when we spent a Saturday morning planting asparagus.
The bounty of vegetables was snapped last week after just a few minutes of gathering the plentiful harvest and leaving behind much, much more to continue ripening.
The farm resembled picture A more than picture B yesterday. Except the true picture was far worse. More like picture A's desolation but with piles of vegetable carnage, too. Twenty minutes of hail (softball sized followed by golf-ball sized) followed by torrential rain on Thursday did a lot of damage around my home. I've got holes in my siding and dents in my roof and vehicles. But those are all covered by insurance and replaceable. Annoying, will be costly because of deductibles, but it had no impact on my job or income potential.
However, the organic farm was hammered where it hurts. The lush, tall corn stalks that hid the pickers from each other are decimated into three feet tall splintered spikes, if that. Melons and tomatoes lay strewn where their bodies were smashed by hailstones. Little sets on plants were destroyed by being knocked from the plant and their life source. Hailstones hammered the high tunnel leaving holes the size of baseballs. A small river took out rows of produce in a mini-flood.
This is one of the unfortunate realities of farming. Bugs, prices/marketplaces and weather conspire against and discourage growe
rs.
Could there possibly be an upside?
The sun shone. We cut kale back to encourage new growth because there was new growth to encourage.
Struggling plants needed weeding.
A few melons clung to the vine, whomped on but not beaten. They may make it and grow to wear their hail scars proudly. A miracle survivor tomato was found hiding under an untouched vine.
The farmers are focusing on the life that remains and choosing to avoid looking at the garden as a battlefield with the wounded, dead and dying strewn about.
Our box of produce will be more precious. We have seen (and on the tiniest scale have experienced) the blood, sweat and tears that go into the growing and harvesting.
I blabbled on and on yesterday about this cookbook. Maybe I was just starving. Maybe if you make me laugh you kind of own me. However it goes, I'm going to give you a link to her blog to one of the recipes (recipeas) I recreated in my own kitchen. Here it is.
Now. I didn't just sit d
own and chow them by the handful though I could've because they are freakishly good. I needed to use up some cucumbers and thought they might be just the delicious top to a tasty salad.
I made the Lemon Rosemary Roasted Chickpeas as directed. (Okay. Confession. I did not follow the exact recipe. I exchanged the rosemary for dill.) So mine were Lemon Dill Roasted Chickpeas. Here's why. She refers to her husband as Pea Daddy (makes sense, trust me.) Well my equivalent to her Pea Daddy, Rob, hates rosemary. He detests rosemary. He has forbidden me to buy this spice which he likens to pine needles but worse. So. I had to improvise.
Otherwise the recipe was exactly like she said.
Then I chopped some tomatoes (the organic farm ones YUM) and chopped a few cucumbers. But. I had a problem. I had a an extra cucumber that needed to be used up in the worst way. And I wanted some sort of dressing. And really, Balsamic just wasn't cutting it.
What if I threw the medium to large peeled cucumber in the Vitamix,
added a TBSP of lemon juice,
a TBSP of Olive Oil,
a teaspoon of dried dill and
a 1/2 teaspoon of salt?
So I did. And out comes this freakishly good, CREAMY LEMON DILL CUCUMBER DRESSING. Next time I'll add 1/2 a clove of garlic or garlic powder.
I poured the dressing over the diced cucumbers and tomatoes and tossed on some Lemon Dill Roasted Chickpeas.
Yum. 
(Okay, some of you might be bothered by this seemingly cucumber cannibalistic sounding recipe. Don't think of it that way. All the cucumbers were eaten by humans.)
There will be some additional posts about this recipe book. I still need to tell you why I owed Rob a big dinner. Today is farm day, though, so you may have to suffer through a few more farm stories. But I'll still be pouring over recipes and seeing what else jumps out at me and grabs me by the stomach.
Blogging about books for five years has finally, deliciously paid off.
My family and I recently embraced the Whole Food Plant Based lifestyle. Which is basically a more complicated and detailed way of saying Vegan. As in not-chain-ourselves-to-destined-for-Thanksgiving-turkey-chopping-blocks or tossing-red-paint animal activists. Also not the Diet-Pepsi-sucking-living
-on-Oreo-Vegan either.
The whole Vegan thing was pretty new to us. We knew a Vegetarian who'd been a raw foodist for six months. (Raw food is basically no cooking. They dehydrate or are creative mixers. Nothing is heated over the temperature of...I think 115 degrees (F).) And three family members jumped on the Vegan train three months before we did 
after reading the Engine 2 Diet and The China Study. However, those three family members are still exploring this whole new way of eating, just like we are.
My husband is now Pescetarian. Which is a vegetarian who will eat fish. However, he is still dairy free at home. I've found dairy product replacements are about the easiest part of going Whole Food Plant Based. Finding recipes and foods that we feel really replace some of the things we crave, and are easy or at least
not crazy-hard has been a challenge.
I've really had to rethink most of my learned behaviors. We started doing that when we went organic (mostly) and toward whole foods (meaning not in bags and boxes i.e. less processed...why? The more processing i.e. steps, the less green and the less nutrition...as a rule...there are exceptions.) but losin
g animal products and replacing them was a much bigger ball game.
I found several websites with recipes and began to haunt them. I learned about crazy sounding things like seitan, t.v.p. and tempeh and found some amazing recipes.
Since April 1st when I crossed over the line that took me to Vegan I've continued to find and s
talk other food blogs and websites.
And that's where I found peas and thank you, while stalking. And here's the payoff. This chick is hilarious. And I found she had a new cookbook. And, me, knowing how this publicity drill works being I review books and get lots of offers for ARCs (Advanced Reader Copy which is usually an unfinished manu
script, often in the unwieldy 8.5 by 11 spiral bound format.) But. A recipe ARC is fine by me. So I contacted Sarah's publicist. I got my copy in Friday's mail! And it was the real deal. Friday night I poured over the book. Sarah has quite a few hilarious stories, one before each recipe, so there was plenty of reading.
Saturday afternoon I made four of her recipes. But, after Friday night I owed it to my husband. And look. I've written so much. You are just going to have to finish reading tomorrow.
My review:
Every once in a while a movie comes along that completely transcends entertainment. Based on a novel I've not read, The Help adds one more layer to the Civil Rights movement. The hardworking layer of the African American maids who lovingly raised the children of their employers and then suffered many of those same children growing into bigoted adults. Stories are shared, lives explored, attitudes revealed and the fictional account is likely just a tiny shadow of reality.
A white young writer (Emma Stone) who is part of the upper social class struggles with her "friends's" treatment of their maids. And she feels deceived over the disappearance of her own family maid/nanny, a woman she loves maybe even more than her own mother. She approaches one maid about telling her story so she can write a book. For the maid to reveal what goes on behind closed doors could cost her what little she has.
This film is so well written, filmed and acted that it needs multiple award nominations. Powerful, inspirational, sad and important. I highly recommend it, even for children. Language, some mild violence and the themes might be issues for younger children, though.
My Review
:
I love Colin Firth and had this film on my radar. The royal life is always fascinating and of course the time frame, pre-WWII was of interest, so I finally took the plunge and rented a copy. I knew it was about a stuttering monarch and had read just enough to know that he used some inventive tools to overcome his situation when required to speak publicly.
I didn't expect the movie to be so charmingly quirky though. And quirk is a hot button for me so I ended up loving this flick. Firth as Bertie is spot on. His frustrations, his heart, his sensitivity show throughout the span of the movie. The film begins with Firth's Prince Albert Bertie filling in for his father, the king. And the distress at stuttering his way through the simple announcement is all over his face, and throughout the listening audience as the camera pans over them. Humiliated and frustrated he seeks help and finds more frustration and humiliation. Until his wife finds Logue, Geoffrey Rush, a "doctor" with a flair for the dramatic. The two men begin to form a friendship and it's a beautiful thing to behold. Bertie's story was heart-breaking but his heart for the people and his family and his drive to overcome this challenge were inspiring.
Geoffrey Rush is a delight to watch, and is perfectly cast as well. The cinematography and editing are well done. Overall, the only thing that could be offputting for family viewing is two bursts of language. Bertie doesn't stutter when cussing. This becomes an exercise. Preview it if it concerns you, the two (I think) sections could be muted for family viewing.
So X-ta asked if I farmed naked-footed. I started to answer the question in the comments and decided I had enough material for a blog post. Hmmm.
Well, what would you do?
And since one of the other comments was in the dulcet tones of Napoleon I say. "Whatever I want to. GOSH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
The saga of the filthy, disgustingly gross, freaky foot commences.
The filthy foot is a result of the following:
1) not loving soggy feet so the refusal to wear tennis shoes.
2) Extreme cheapness. I don't want to buy boots just to get them all dirty and nasty. The rain boots I did wear were sweaty foot makers. And I had these perfectly good (thanks, Mom.) five-year-old faux croc garden clogs just sitting around, under the deck, with the terra cotta pots and digging implements, waiting for garden season.
So after washing all the spider webs off, I called them good.
However, they kind of stink...not literally. I lost one strap and threw away the other so the pair matches. So, now they sometimes slip forward when I step back and vice versa.
Dirt also gets in them, big time.
When I do ANYTHING with water, including water such as dewdrops on the plants, I make MUD in my shoes.
Yes. Really. And the past few weeks when I was washing turnips and radishes in the lovely warm sunshine, I was seriously slipping and sliding inside my shoes. It's really surprising that I haven't wiped out yet. Hmmm. Should I rethink my footwear? I am naturally a klutz anyhoo. Can slippery footwear truly be a wise choice?
My little piggies love playing in their very own mud hole though, that's for sure.
I wore long sleeves to the farm because it was just kind of chilly. A far, far cry from the whining I was doing when I babbled incoherently about heat exhaustion and dehydration.
Iowa's motto. "Hey, if you don't like the weather, hang around twenty minutes, it'll change."
Picking produce at the high tunnel was the highlight of the day. Kind of. Actually it may haunt my dreams.
I was given the nod to harvest any zucchini that might be ready to go. I bent, looking for large green torpedoish veggies and found instead an insect party on one of the leaves. The leaf right in my face.
Now these weren't just any insects. There were a lot. A lot of creepy paleish, ghostly gray alien-bo
t kind of insects. A lot of them. I eeked and said. "Bugs!"
The farmer might have been able to tell by my tone which ones they were. "Oh, Squash Nymphs. Kill em. Do the Mexican hat dance all over them."
Pretty easy to do, actually, with the adrenaline and all. First I folded up the huge zucchini leaf and crushed the living daylights out of the party. Then did do a modified Mexican hat dance. A) I had no hat. B) I was tangled up in vines about my knees and ankles. C) I needed to KILL a lot of stupid bugs.
The farmer came to help. "There's a bunch." Smash! Bash! POW! Holy Squash Eaters, Batman! She found a mating pair, pointed them out and crushed them.
I recommend squash bug crushing as a stress reliever.
And do you find it odd that I was creeped out by ghostly squash bugs but went gaga over the adorable and HUGE Loess Hills toad that hopped across my path? Hey, I like toads. I prefer my creepy crawlies to have warts and slightly toxic skin.
Pictures of our fabulous haul. (A mere percentage we took home PACKED boxes.) And my infamou
s and filthy Mexican squash bug dance foot.
rs.
