“The main barrier standing between ourselves and a local-food culture is not price, but attitude.  The most difficult requirements are patience and a pinch of restraint–virtues that are hardly the property of the wealthy.  These virtues seem to find precious little shelter, in fact, in any modern quarter of this nation founded by Puritans.  Furthermore, we apply them selectively:  browbeating our teenagers with the message that they should wait for sex, for example.  Only if the wait to experience intercourse under the ideal circumstances (the story goes), will they know its true value.  ‘Blah blah blah,‘ hears the teenager: words issuing from a mouth that can’t even wait for the right time to eat tomatoes, but instead consumes tasteless ones all winter to satisfy a craving for everything now.  We’re raising our children on the definition of promiscuity if we feed them a casual, indiscriminate mingling of foods from every season plucked from the supermarket, ignoring how our sustenance is cheapened by whole sale desires.”

-Barbara Kingsolver, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Thanks for the book, Fr. R.B.!

I think she has a point, don’t you?  What do we wait for anymore?  Not information, there’s the internet.  Not food, there are microwaves.  Not TV shows, even: we have DVR.  Not letters, a phone call is quicker.  Not babies, their ‘delivery’ is scheduled for our convenience or our doctor’s.  There does seem to be a pattern.

Ah, Lucy.  Lucy was very wiggly last night.  She didn’t particularly want to go to sleep, but she laid down with Samantha and me and proceeded to wiggle her self to sleep.  After flopping, flailing kicking, blankets on, blankets off, and repeating it all several times, she curled up in a ball.  Then she pulled her head towards her knees.  And again.  Finally she was backwards in the bed, and she stretched out on her stomach.  I laughed, thinking she would right herself soon.

The next time I woke up, she was not only still backwards, but her feet were the only part showing out from the blankets where her head should have been.

And finally, this morning, there was a rustle under the blanket.  “Help!” weakly from near my feet.  I laughed again, and freed her from her soft prison.  And she went back to sleep, which is why I have time to write for the second day in a row.

Did I mention she still sleeps in our bed quite often?  Sometimes it’s worth the crowding.  I’d hate to have missed that.

Craig was pretty excited about his Whole Foods deli purchase. We brought it all home (going to Whole Foods is like a pilgramage – it’s forever away and only done on occasion when we’re feeling rich) and I heated up the roast. We started to eat, and Craig wondered out loud if it was cooked through when purchased, or if we should have cooked it more than the quick nuclear reheat. I asked him if he was sure this was meat.

Of course it was meat!  It was “field roast”.  What could roast be, besides meat?  Probably meat which lived in a field.  What kind of meat didn’t matter, it had looked good in the deli window.

I dug out the wrapper.  Field roast.  See for yourself: http://www.fieldroast.com/index.htm

And we laughed.  Well, I laughed.  Craig plotted his revenge, musing over whom might be the most likely victim for a mock-meat trick.  So watch out, all you carnivores, when you dine with us.  Consider yourself warned.

In an attempt to make up for the long, long silence, here are some pictures.  First, the “man pit” that Craig build over the old (dug out hole in the grass) fire pit.  It is now an oven and stove.  I picked up the brick off the curb, in my church clothes, no less.  Dad would be proud.

The roasted (in brick oven) vegetable quesidillas (cooked on brick stove) were really, really good.

We have done a little planting.  We’ve had several dafodills bloom, and the tulips and iris are ready to bust.

In other garden news, an orange bell pepper, orange mint, dill, lemon balm, dill, and chives are in the ground.  The lettuce which over-wintered is going crazy, and some of it tastes like bacon.  I don’t know what it is, because it’s from a mixed lettuce seed packet, and process of elimination hasn’t worked it out yet.  But it’s bacon-lettuce.  Who knew.

In Lucy news, she is fiesty as ever.  Wants to watch a movie every day, and rarely gets to.  But she likes “writing” scribbles and “reading” books she has memorized, or just looking at the pictures.  And she loves the zoo.

In Samantha news, she is getting the last four pesky teeth through.  She is running.  And she has a nice long list of words now, including Da, dog (which also means cat), doll, bowl (which also seems to mean spoon and basket), Papa, Ma, banana (which is sometimes “ba” and sometimes “nana”), ball, no, diaper, book, door, open, hot…those are all that come to mind at the moment.  She has been walking around the house “reading” books out loud over the last couple of days, which is really, really cute.

So that’s the update.  Craig’s working a lot, and I spent the day baking.  Which reminds me, happy St. Joseph’s Day.  Here’s the bread I made:

It’s supposed to look like St. Joseph’s beard.  Judge for yourself.  I also made egg-free chocolate chip cookies (surprisingly delicious, once you make it past the cookie dough that acts like toasted bread crumbs), vegetable broth, two pans of bread pudding, and dinner today.  I wish I could say days like this were the reason I haven’t written in so long, but it’s really been more a combination of distraction and laziness.  So hopefully more interesting things will happen soon for me to share with you, and I’ll feel like sharing it.  In the mean time, here’s a pic of the girls with their friend Cylis to hold you over.