Over the past several weeks, Donald and I have had plenty of time to reflect on our food and homestead goals for 2012.  This is what we’ve come up with:
    1.  We want to make time for a few u-picks with Charlotte, particularly cherries in spring, berries in summer, and apples/pears in autumn.
    2.  We are slowly cutting back on meat and replacing what meat we do eat with organic, locally and humanely-produced meats.  We are also hoping to engage Charlotte in this process where it involves poultry we raise.
    3.  We make green smoothies a few times a week (great way to get vegetables Charlotte isn’t crazy about into her diet).  I would really like to streamline this process.
    4.  A few times a year Donald and I buy a bag of chips or chocolate candies and watch a movie.  We don’t really eat processed foods and most of our snacks are things like roasted nuts or home-made fruit leather, so we’re keeping the treats we do have…but we do want them to be fair trade.
    5.  We want to cut back on food waste, so we need to grow more of our own food (we’re making raised beds to span 1/4-acre of our property this year to this end) and to make meal plans we stick to.
    6.  We have two important garden spaces this year.  The first is the herb garden: we want to halve the number of herbs we buy.  And the second is the vertical salad garden: we want to grow enough lettuces and mixed greens to have salads without relying on the grocery.
    7.  Damn it, if it’s the last thing I do I am going to grow enough tomatoes to keep us in sauce, salsa, paste, and fresh eating all year long.
    8.  I might actually try ginger in something outside of a ginger snap this year.  We’ll see.  Don’t hold your breath.  And Donald might actually try a mushroom this year.  Don’t hold your breath for that either.
    9.  We want to have people over for dinner more often.  We say this all the time and it’s high time we made it happen.  Also: cousins.  My goal last year was to get together with my cousins more often and I mega-failed.  I would like to try to redeem myself there.
    10.  Right now I bring glassware filled with healthy food choices for Charlotte to about 90% of gatherings with family or friends.  And although I think that ensuring that she has a diet free of preservatives and pesticides is important for her developing body, I also think it’s important that Charlotte not be isolated from her peers by her psycho mother.  So.  I need to just learn to let go a bit.  A little cake laden with high fructose corn syrup twice a year isn’t going to kill the kid, after all.
    11.  Write about food more frequently here, including recipes and what our meal plans look like and what we do to ensure that Charlotte has a healthy diet and how our veggies are growing.  I wish I’d done this more over the past year because right now this blog is the only garden journal I have and it’s very much lacking.

This is a photograph I took on Charlotte’s birthday three months ago, when she helped my father plant beans by the fence.  I keep meaning to share it, but keep forgetting.

Over the past few weeks, Charlotte and I have made huge progress in our winter garden.  I made several garden-related goals for our homeschooling unit on pumpkins and thus far we’re right on track.  We’ve planted two rounds of broccoli, cauliflower, and artichokes.  A couple of Charlotte’s cousins helped us plant about two hundred peas, about half of which have sprouted.  The peas will be ready to transplant this weekend or early next week.

Last week, Charlotte and I cleared out a couple hundred square feet of garden space that will be hers and hers alone for the next few months.  I salvaged two old dresser drawers last spring and we finally drilled holes in the bottom, filled them with dirt, and turned them into toddler-sized garden beds.  We sowed carrot seeds in one and parsnip seeds in the other.  I also put Charlotte in charge of two small patches of onions, a few dozen square feet of garlic, and a row each of radishes and beets.  Yesterday afternoon, the two of us drew out a series of three hearts together - each one nesting inside the other.  Charlotte picked out where she wanted the hearts to be and tomorrow we’ll be dropping cabbage seeds in the small one, lettuce seeds in the middle one, and spinach and mixed greens seeds in the large one.  She’s very very excited.

With the exception of transplanting our kazillion pea plants, our food and garden plans for this week are mostly focused on kitchen goings-on.  We have plans to carve pumpkins and turnips this weekend with some good friends of ours, and roasting pumpkin seeds will naturally follow.  But this week I had hoped to involve Charlotte in preparing a turnip and apple salad, baking pumpkin bread, and cooking a root vegetable tagine (turnips, sweet potatoes, carrots, parsnips, and chickpeas) - and although we have a busy week planned which may mean that I have to cut some corners, I’m still hoping that we have a chance to at least prepare a pumpkin-wheat bread together tomorrow and make the tagine later in the week.  I think we’ll also cut up a pumpkin this week and bring the baked squash with us when we carve lanterns this weekend.

A couple months ago, we visited The Huntington Library’s open house for a new urban farming area they have called The Ranch.  There were several things that caught my eye at the open house, but the one thing that really stood out to me was this tree, rooted into an arch.

I am convinced that this belongs in my garden.  I just can’t figure out where.

When we lost Aurora, I stopped watering the garden and for sixteen days my vegetable garden burned in the sun.  I thought about it a time or two, but then I turned away.  I didn’t want to nurture a bunch of plants; I wanted to nurture my baby.

On the seventeenth day, I visited my garden.

Our sweet corn had ripened a week or two earlier, but we were so busy surviving that we overlooked it.  The stalks were yellow and withered.  The kernels were hard and dry.  A second variety of corn we were growing had been stressed by the sudden drought, had stopped growing and tassled early.

The sweet pepper plants had been overrun by weeds.  We’d lost nearly 2/3 of our tomato plants to heat, weeds, and gophers.  Every last one of our bean plants had been taken down by gophers.  Our squash plants were devastated, our cucumbers were going to seed, and our zucchini each weighed more than Charlotte.

Our pea plants had withered and died.  My native onions had been crushed, presumably by some critter who had made its nest on top of them.  The sweet potato plant had been taken by gophers.  The asparagus peas had mysteriously vanished.  Our gourds and pumpkins were taken by gophers.

None of my herb seeds germinated.  My licorice basil plant dried out and bent over, half-dead, and its leaves yellowed and its blooms darkened.  Our carrot greens fell over.

The only thing I had any time for at all was the apple tree.

This week is about mending the garden.  Planting new herb seeds.  Reviving that poor, unfortunate basil plant.  Laying out our winter vegetable garden plot.  Tying our corn stalks together to dry.  Harvesting the sorghum.  Removing dying zucchini and squash plants to the compost pile.  Watering the carrots.  Showing Charlotte how to pick an oversized watermelon.

I have been gardening long enough now to have seen that when my garden thrives, I feel more positive about my life.  As it is, I’m one of those irritating optimists who thinks her dogs fart sunshine, so it’s not like I’m ordinarily in dire need of more positivity…but I also believe in trusting my instincts and right now my instincts are telling me that this will help.  That turning this garden around, that watching new things grow again, that nurturing the plants that will provide sustenance to my family will help.

So outside we go, Charlotte and me, my grey gumboots beside her blue ones, my red trowel beside her pink one, both of us with our hands in the earth, to make this garden grow.

It started with the zucchini.  One green zucchini and one yellow zucchini sitting on my counter, to be more precise.  I e-mailed my friend, who loves to cook, for help.  She suggested vegetable tian.

The first time that I had vegetable tian, I was living part-time with a conservative Sephardic family in Provence.  Every Friday afternoon, we gathered for Shabbat dinner.  Our fingers grazed the mezuzah and then touched our lips as we entered the door.  We hugged, we kissed cheeks.  While the women cooked and the children watched television, the men studied in the living room.

Sorry about the poor light - I snapped these after dark on the dinner table!

Sometimes when we went out to ask a question, the men were watching television with the children.  It was endlessly endearing.  The television turned off at sun-down, so the women joked that this was their way of sneaking in a little last-minute cartoon action.

In the kitchen, everything was divided up.  This was my first exposure to kosher eating and it fascinated me.  There were three sinks that were forever being filled with boiling water to ensure that they remained clean.  There were two stoves, each atop an oven, on opposite sides of the kitchen.  Two sets of cutlery.  Two stacks of tablecloths and napkins.  And in the pantry, there were two small refrigerators so that dairy products could be kept separate.

When dinner was finished, we all sat down at the table.  Yarmulkes were handed out to the boys who weren’t old enough to wear them all day long.  We sang a song and blessed the wine.  Challah bread was sliced and pieces were tossed across the table.  We caught them in wine glasses.  Then we dipped our fingers in a bowl of water and began to eat.

The dinner always began with bread and stew and wine and a vegetable tart.  The courses after that varied, but for months and months we ate a squash-based vegetable tian because that was what was in season.

This is the first time that I have eaten a vegetable tian since leaving France.  When I sautéed the onion, I remembered that kitchen.  When I chopped the garlic, I remembered the guilty looks of the men when we caught them watching cartoons with the kids.  When I layered the sliced vegetables in the tart dish, I smiled thinking about clapping our hands and singing while we caught chunks of bread in our wine glasses.  When I sprinkled (copious amounts of) the spices over the top, I remembered the way we laughed over dinner.  The way we came together every week, regardless of where we were born or what we believed, and broke bread and shared jokes and enjoyed one another’s company.

They may not have been my family and I may not keep Shabbat today, but to me eating vegetable tian will always feel a little bit like coming home.

Vegetable tian recipe is a combination of recipes found at For the Love of Cooking and within James Peterson’s book Vegetables.  I contacted the family in France, but apparently they don’t use recipes - just whatever’s on hand.  Another vegetable tian recipe that I found is this one at A Couple Cooks.  I think the extra onions and the Swiss cheese might actually be tastier.  Next time I’ll try it and find out!