Shift of Tow

I can’t fathom why my brother is engaged to his fiancee. It’s an extreme example of opposites attract. She’s not a bad person, just unfathomable. She is much younger than him (7 years) and in her early twenties. I predict heart break. Is there a good way of counseling my brother out of this? Or maybe it’s none of my business? There is no date for the wedding set yet, thank god.

Here’s one true thing I know about other people’s relationships: We don’t know what’s going on inside them.

We think we do, and this is especially true if we’re in a relationship with which we’re happy. We think that since we have a great relationship, we have the secret to how anybody can have a great relationship. It’s kind of crazy how we all seem to hold this idea that we’re unique and that we also know what everyone else ought to be doing in our heads at the same time.

This is not to say I think it’s none of your business, but that maybe it’s not the problem you see it as being. Maybe you’re right, maybe it’ll end in heartbreak, but maybe it won’t. If it does, maybe heartbreak is what he needs, and maybe when it comes, it will be time for it. Your brother might need something from relationships that you don’t see or understand. He might need her to be pretty, because maybe he cares what other people think about who he’s with. He might need her to be a little bit dim, so he’ll feel smart. He might need her to be an artist, even if she’s a bad one, because that’s what he longs for in a mate. He might need her to be tall, or short. He might just need her to love him without any judgment, because maybe we all go through phases like that, where we need to be loved more than we need to be fulfilled. You might see these needs as wrong, as immature, something which he’ll outgrow. But that’s who he is right now. The point is that whatever has him with this girl isn’t just that he doesn’t see her, er, lack of fathomability, but that he needs something she’s giving him–that’s about what he is, and not just about the relationship.

The thing about advice—and I recognize the irony in my saying this here—is that the person to whom you want to give advice has to be ready for it if it’s got a deadline, or it has to be advice that they can save up for later. Most people are not ready for timely advice when they’re in the middle of doing something that isn’t quite right. All you’ll get if you tell him not to marry this girl is the ability to say “I told you so” if and when it falls apart. It’s not going to prevent the marriage; it’s not going to change his relationship.

Here’s a suggestion: Try to figure out why he wants to marry her. Don’t ask him directly, because it’s going to be hard to do that without letting on that you think it’s a bad idea. Just listen and watch. It’ll help you know your brother a little better, and settle your mind at the same time.

I hope that helps.

We used to have a very ugly television stand. The wood veneer was like plastic, and it was very beat up from several moves.

I decided that rather than buy a new stand, I’d make the old one pretty. Sadly, I didn’t take pictures of the process, so you just get an after:

There’s going to be an after after, too. Look closely at the paper on the left side of the doors:

It’s bad enough that the paper got all crinkled, but one side is upside down! There are seams on the back or I could’ve just turned them around. I’m going to take the doors off and either re-do them or leave it be.

Isn’t the color awesome? I tried to match the blue birds on the paper. I got the Snow & Graham paper from Paper Mojo–it’s the fourth one down the page.

It goes pretty well with the new chairs we got.

We have three huge crape myrtles in our front yard.

As you can see, they aren’t blooming yet. Crape myrtles all over town are blooming right now, but ours haven’t, and I worry. The web tells me that the biggest reasons that crape myrtles don’t bloom are too much shade, too much pruning, or not enough water. These get plenty of light and I certainly haven’t pruned them, so I wonder if they’re still recovering from last year’s drought. But that wouldn’t explain why even the crape myrtles across the street are blooming and these are not.

The trunks are pretty, at least.

Like most of the plants in our front yard, the crape myrtle is originally from East Asia. It was first cultivated in the US in the late 1700s, down in South Carolina.

If the zombie apocalypse comes, I could use the bark as a fever reducer, a stimulant, and to staunch bleeding. The flowers have been used to treat colds, though I imagine that we’d not be too worried about the sniffles if the zombies were coming–good, since there are no flowers yet. The root is an astringent, detoxicant, and diuretic. I read in one place that you can brew and drink the leaves to help reduce blood sugar for diabetics, too, which might help once the insulin runs out.

I will let you know if they start to bloom. It’s especially heart-breaking since crape myrtles bloom for a really long time. Cross your fingers for me.

I had a few friends over one night last week and made black bean soup for them.

My black bean soup, which I got from the Foster’s Market cookbook, is one of the most reliably tasty things I make. Foster’s is a restaurant/market here in Durham with a spectacular atmosphere and really good food, and everything I’ve made from this cookbook has been good except the butternut squash soup, with which I think I got a little too creative and substitutey*. This is a great soup for a summer evening—I mean, yeah, you have to stand over a stove for a bit, but the soup has a Caribbean flavor to it that seems very summery to me. A few people have asked me for the recipe in the past, so here you go.

Ingredients

2 c. dried black beans
1/4 c. olive oil
4 stalks celery
1 red onion
2 carrots
2 jalapeños
1 red bell pepper
4 cloves garlic
dried basil
8 c. chicken or veggie broth
bay leaves
salt
pepper
Optional for topping: Yogurt (or sour cream), lime, cilantro, hot sauce, cheese

First, quick cook two cups of dried black beans by boiling them with a lot of extra water for about an hour. You can skip this and use canned beans, but if you do, drain them and rinse them. I think the dried beans give it a better flavor, though.

While the beans are cooking, dice a red bell pepper, two jalapeños, four stalks of celery, and two carrots. These things all go in at the same time, so you can put them in the same bowl.

You also need to dice, and keep separate, four cloves of garlic, a peeled tart apple (I always use Granny Smith), and a red onion. If you don’t want your apple to get brown, put it in lime juice when you dice it.

Once the beans are done, drain and rinse them. In a big soup pot, sweat the onions in the olive oil over medium to medium-high heat. If you brown the onions, your soup will be a little funky in the bad way, so take it slow–it’ll be about ten minutes.

Add the pepper, jalapeño, carrot, and celery and cook for another ten minutes or so. Towards the end, add the garlic.

Once everything is nice and softened, add the beans, broth, apple, four bay leaves, a tablespoon of dried basil, and some salt and pepper. Bring it to a boil, then turn it down and simmer it for an hour or two. When it’s close to ready, start some rice and cut up some cilantro and a lime.

Serve the soup over rice, and top with cheese, cilantro, a little lime juice, yogurt or sour cream, and hot sauce. I think the tartness of yogurt works better on this soup, but sour cream will do. I usually serve it with chips or spicy cornbread**.

If I make it for just me and Poor M., the leftovers last for days, and I never get sick of it.

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*This was the only thing I’ve ever made which Poor M. could not finish. It was dire.

**I use Jiffy cornbread mix and add diced jalapeño and maybe some cheese.

This week we got cucumbers, tomatoes, li’l tomatoes (not all pictured), potatoes, squash, cabbage, and chard. I’m excited about the tiny tomatoes! They look like sungolds.

This is our mantle. For a few weeks I had the bottles in place at one end and a candle (not in the picture) at the other, but couldn’t figure out what went in between. Then I started lining up postcards, and now I’m in love.

This is another favorite spot in my house. Inside the box are some neat old handkerchiefs and my little elephant, and on top is a fancy box and a rubber duck. I think I need to add a little picture or postcard inside the box.

I keep all of my cookbooks on the hoosier, along with my cast iron frying pan.

I can’t come up with a way of cutting grocery bills any further. I make lists based on meal plans, eat very little processed foods and snacks, and often eat vegetarian. Planting a garden is sadly not an option. Any thoughts?

I’m a little obsessed with saving money on groceries, so I’m glad you asked. Here are a few ideas that might be useful:

• Cook from scratch as much as possible. It’s cheaper to make granola and biscuits and tortillas than it is to buy them already made. With some things the difference in cost is so small that it’s almost negligible, especially if you don’t like to cook, but it’s up to you to figure out where it’s worthwhile. Remember that your time and happiness are just as important as your money, though.
• Eat a lot of beans. Beans are cheap, tasty, and filling. Dry beans are cheaper than canned beans; they’re a great example of how spending a little more time cooking can save you a little money.
• If you eat the same thing several times a week, you can save. Do this either because you make a big pot of soup and are eating leftovers for two days, or because it’s cheaper to make pizza dough and have pizza three times in a row than it is to have ingredients on hand for three different meals.
• Buy in bulk! The initial expense is higher, but I read somewhere that buying in bulk is one of the best investments you can make. If you know you’re going to use it all and have the money, buy the biggest size of whatever you need.
• Related to that, stock up on the things you buy regularly when there’s a sale.
• You mention that you often eat vegetarian; try doing it all the time! We don’t eat meat at home and that’s cut down on our grocery bill a lot.
• It might help to figure out what you’re spending the most money on, and ask yourself whether you can substitute something else, go generic, make it at home, or cut it out. That’s how I ended up making granola at home, for instance—we eat a lot of the stuff and a box from Trader Joe’s that will last a week costs $3. If I make it, I buy the ingredients for around $10 and they last several weeks and also get used for other things. Hang on to your grocery receipts for a few weeks and see where the most money is going.
• I haven’t managed to do this myself, but going vegan could save even more money. Dairy products are the highest part of our grocery bill.
• And speaking of vegetables, you can often find bargains at your local farmer’s market. If you buy in season, you spend less. That goes for buying fruits and vegetables at the grocery store, too.
• You could also try coupon clipping. I don’t do that myself, but there’s a ton of advice on the web about how to do it best.

I hope that helped a little. If all else fails and you’re really broke, the all beans and rice diet all the time is not that bad.

I have started using the compost for the appropriate household waste. I am awash in virtue. My next target in my ongoing attempt to waste less money and send less stuff to the landfill is to not let food go to waste in our house. We have let a shameful amount of farm share greens end up in the trash this year, and I am on a mission to keep that from happening again*. To that end, I looked up “storing cabbage,” since cabbage was what we had the most of in the fridge.

It’s embarrassingly easy to store greens these days, it turns out. You cut them up, you blanch them:

Then you freeze them. So that’s what I did.

I also froze some pesto this week, since I made a huge batch from the basil we got last week.

I won’t show you the banana bread I made to use up the bananas that were going bad, though. You would think that after making quick bread as many times as I have I wouldn’t do something like overfill the pan and have it spill all over the bottom of the oven. And that would be awfully generous of you. I will say no more.

*It’s a whole lot easier now that we’re getting less greens, though, let me be honest.

Today I talked myself into another attempt at canna removal, even though I’d convinced myself that the bees had taken over the compost and there was little I could do about it except wait until they moved on. My conviction faded along with the pain from the bee sting, and I managed to get the rest of the cannas out of the compost bins. I also didn’t get stung again, despite stirring up the bees a couple of times while shoveling compost. I got a few mosquito bites, but that’s nothing compared to the fire of a bee sting. I am suddenly cavalier about mosquito bites*.

Here’s how it looks now:

The compost smells fantastic to me, like everything good about the outdoors. If it weren’t for the bees and the wariness they cause, getting out there to dig in the dirt would be a completely fantastic experience. The stuff in the bins now is loose, a little leafy, and full of little bugs. Oh, and our bins are really huge! Each one is about four feet on a side; I had to climb into one of them to get the last of the plants pulled out. I’m not sure what I’m going to do with all of this compost when it’s done—I’ve been really focused on having a way to reduce and reuse household waste and haven’t given a lot of thought to using the product of the bins. I guess compost is great for mulching, and maybe next year we can use it as a top layer for our planned vegetable garden.

I accumulated quite a pile of what I was calling canna bulbs, but it turns out that what I’ve got are canna roots with little “eye” bulbs coming off of them.

Cannas are apparently a huge source of starch, and they’re grown agriculturally for just that. I can see it; some of the roots I pulled up were huge. I have a ton of the little bulbs, and I think I’m going to try to dry them and give them away to friends.

I also think I figured out where the cannas in the yard are, now that I’ve seen a bunch of pictures. They’ve got stalks with smallish red flowers on them, but the leaves look a lot like the cannas in the compost. It’s just that they grew a lot taller in the compost, and I never saw them flower. These were probably a result of thinning out the ones in our sunny side bed, and the little patch out back. You apparently have to thin these out every few years, in our zone (right on the border of 7 and 8, for the curious), though in cooler places they have to be dug up each fall.

The next thing I have to do for the compost is finish shoveling it over (and covering the canna waste), and then set up a compost bucket inside. I think I might just use a bowl that we’ll keep in the freezer (to prevent smells), and take it outside each day.

*Someday, a shark will bite me and then I’ll dismiss bee stings as nothing. But it will totally take a shark bite and nothing less.

We get a farm share every Saturday from Harland’s Creek Farm. This week was the first time we didn’t get any greens! We have sweet corn, beets, tomatoes, garlic, cucumbers, potatoes, and a big pile of basil. This is going to be a pesto week.