The 2012 Agriculture Census and You

We, or more accurately, my husband, received this in the mail a couple of days ago. As a general rule, I go through my mail when I get it with a casual glance to ensure I’m not missing anything important and toss it on the desk near the door to deal with “at some point in the future” if it’s not. (I could derail this whole post with my bad mail habits, so I’ll just skip those details for now.) When I do see something unusual or possibly important, like things with big warnings about breaking the law, I open it right away.

I read the letter that came with it in bemusement. The USDA-NASS has somehow pegged Bill as the “operator” of a farm. I pegged it to some sort of survey that showed we own five acres with a bunch of fruit trees. He took the survey online and was done with it, but I posted the picture here on my Facebook page. Other friends who live in varying states of suburbia mentioned they’d received the same Census form as well.

A quick google search for “agricultural census” takes us to the United States Department of Agriculture National Agriculture Statistic Service website–USDA-NASS for short. No need to click the link because here’s what they have to say about who the USDA likes to include in their census.

The Census of Agriculture, taken every five years, is a complete count of U.S. farms and ranches and the people who operate them. Any person with estimated or expected annual sales of agricultural products of at least $1,000 is considered a producer and should be counted. The 2012 census will be conducted late in 2012 and into 2013 to reflect 2012 farming activities. It is the voice of agriculture: Make your voice heard. Sign up to be counted by clicking on I Want to… Make sure I’m Counted on the right hand side.

Okay…that’s all well and good, but it doesn’t say why the heck the government suddenly thinks we have any sort of agricultural product for sale. We grow veggies and eat them. I make a lot of jelly, but I give it away as gifts and make no profit. Clicking on the “About the census” link gives only outdated information from how the 2007 census will be carried out. The Frequently Asked Questions doesn’t help very much. Clearly, the site is still stuck in 2007 even though the same site has plenty of links to the results of the 2007 census.

I clicked and I clicked, but the official government sites did not give a clear rationale as to why we were suddenly being included in such a census or why people who live on one acre plots in a heavily wooded, never farmed part of Woodinville were also included in such a census.

What I did find outside of the government site isn’t really very much. A proposal made in 2009 by Kenneth A. Meter, called one of the most experienced food system analysts in the United States, makes my head spin a bit. Meter talks about food planning at the watershed level–a concept that resonates well with my organic and quasi-local oriented table. (I love chocolate and coffee…there are some things that will never be grown within 100 miles of where I live that I just won’t give up.) I find thinking about food distribution at this level exciting and sort of mind numbing at the same time, but perhaps this census has more to do with long-term planning and sustainability. The progressive in me would like to think that the USDA is finally acting, for once, responsibly and planning ahead for localized food production and decreased mega-agribusiness. You know, for when we have to get back to eating food that is grown locally when we can no longer transport perishables long distances on a regular and reliable basis.

Or, perhaps we can assume the worst. There is this blog that makes rather conspiracy-theory-like arguments and advocates tossing the survey into the trash with the junk mail.

I’ve clearly bungled into what could be a very controversial topic. At any rate, we answered the survey with a big bunch of “no” because, quite frankly, we don’t produce enough food to service our little family let alone to sell to anyone else.

Bring It, 2012

“Bring it” is a phrase that I didn’t use growing up or as a teen or even as a young adult. As a matter of fact, it’s not really part of my vocabulary at all, but the phrase has attitude. That’s what I need right now is a little bit of that kind of ‘tude. It’s not that 2011 was a bad year or anything like that. As I entered 2011 I blogged about my 2011 resolutions, and then I blogged half-way through the year, and again after the third quarter was over. I met the writing goal and then some. The weight-loss at the end of the year was hampered by a medical issue that my husband describes as TMI for any day, including Friday. I’ll just say multiple doctors visits over the last ten weeks and several prescriptions later, I think my system is finding enough equilibrium to focus on weight loss again.

You can put down a bunch of goals, like I did last year and either meet them all, meet some of them, or just flail and stop trying. None of the goals I put forth last year were unrealistic for me, even though I did not meet them all. I didn’t ignore them or forget about them, but lived with them and evaluated them throughout the year.

Here’s where the attitude comes in. Just because I didn’t meet certain goals does not mean I am going to give up on them because the calendar is closing on another year. In spite of various obstacles I placed in my own path, I managed to step around or over most of them and get stories out the door, most of that F*(#*@(&# extra weight shed, and most of that reading done. I can’t, however, just sit back and look at it as an experiment for 2011 that is over. So, whatever obstacles come my way this year, I will need to figure out how to muscle up to them and overcome them. Goals need to be evaluated and adjusted with the realities of life. This year, I’m organizing things a bit differently.

Writing
One of my writing friends, Charlotte Morganti, blogged about sticking to writing resolutions. I like the way she approaches the goal setting in terms of “time spent.” Last year, I was specifically focused on product–three stories out the door. The things is…I think I could have done a lot more than that. I looked at the calendar and thought, “if I don’t submit a story soon, I’m never going to make that goal.” I would spend some minimal amount of time working on a story to get it ready. I am thinking ten hours per week on “writing related activities”–other than blogging–will be an interesting experiment. I plan on taking notes of how I spend my time–either doing research, actual writing or editing–and then revisit the ten hour a week scenario sometime after the first quarter.

Health
I’m going to continue on that “mostly vegan” health plan. It’s been working, my weight is down and my numbers are down. I’ll get to that goal weight before June, and maintain the healthy HA1c, cholesterol and blood pressure numbers that I’ve gotten to this year. I might even get to go off of the injections of lizard spit by summer time. That would be totally awesome.

Family
My daughter is going to be a senior in high school next year. I am not going to write her college applications for her, but I will support her in every way possible to achieve her hopes and dreams in this regard. Her school has a support system for this, but I know that, as her mom, I can take an active supportive role in the process. I will not dictate where she applies or attends or what she plans to major in. I’ll schlep her around to pre-Sat and pre-ACT prep courses, tutoring sessions, and whatever else a senior-who-doesn’t-drive-a-car needs to be schlepped around to in order to get her ready for the all-important application process.

I think that’s probably more than enough things to keep my mind occupied during the coming year. Okay, 2012…bring it.

Tradition! Tradition!

A couple of weeks ago, I posted about my annual cookie baking spree that I usually go on before Christmas.  My mom used to do it, and, well, it is a family tradition bordering on something sacred.  And, you don’t mess with sacred.  Right?

Right.  So, here’s the thing.  I have very much felt compelled to carry on the tradition by making all the same cookies my mom made.  In an attempt to reign in the crazy unhealthy part of it, I decided to limit the number of types of cookies to just a few of my family’s choosing.  At one point I had imagined each of my kids picking a different cookie for me to make out of the family repertoire.  Spritz?  Chocolate Pinwheel? Santa Thumbprint?  I had picked the Scandinavian Oatmeal cookies, they had all the rest to choose from.  Then, they go and throw a wrench into my tradition by informing me that none of them were what they wanted.

In fact, my teen informed me she wanted to make her own cookie–bourbon balls.  (There’s not enough booze in them to get anyone high, so I don’t count them as an alcoholic no-no.)   Fine.  One less recipe for me to deal with.  I can let go of some of the cookie control, no problem. Besides, this freed me up to experiment with the quince-lime marmalade cookies I posted about in my last post–not at all part of my growing up tradition.

My husband wanted his aunt’s rolled spice cookies.  I don’t do rolled cookies, so he and my nine-year-old made them.  (Well, except the part where the husband forgot the orange peel and I had to knead it all in there after the dough had chilled.  I still didn’t have to roll it out and use cookie cutters or actually bake them.)

It was my son who threw me the biggest curve-ball.  His fondest most desired cookie is not one of mine.  I know.  Break a mother’s heart, kiddo!  In fact, his biggest fondest sweetest cookie memory comes from the car pool.  Ever since he was four, he has been part of this crazy carpool  from school.  One of the moms who picks up regularly has always made this minty-chocolate cookie that is a huge hit.  By now, I’m sure she’s made thousands of them for bake sales and as gifts.  And, frankly, they are uber-yummy.  This year, when I offered each kid a cookie pick, my son didn’t take half a second to say he wanted  “Christa’s Cookies.”  My daughter, also part of the same carpool for years, chimed in with hearty agreement.

I had never made these cookies before, but Christa had given me the recipe a while ago.  I figured the kids get them in the car pool, so there was no reason for me to make them because I would just eat way too many of them myself.  I mean, these are seriously good cookies–dark rich chocolate cookie crumb with a mint chocolate frosting.  They are dangerously easy to make.  I waited until today to make them because we have a few social gatherings this weekend and there is less time for me to eat them before I can give them away.  I will need to use self-control to not nibble at them, and as I write this I have already lost that battle for a good percentage of my daily calorie count.  Once they are in a closed box, it will be easier, and I’m forcing myself to blog and do other stuff on the computer until the frosting has cooled enough to do that.

The thing about the cookie that really gets to me is that it’s “new.”  It’s not something I grew up with.  I am sure I would have loved them as a child, but they are new-fangled and unfamiliar as a Christmas tradition for me.  For my son, though, they have a completely different meaning.  For him, they have been something that heralds in the school break and the Christmas holidays for most of his life.  They are a chocolatey reminder that my children have their own lives, memories and traditions that are part of, yet separate, from my own.  Here is where I could quote Gibran and get all teary-preachy-sentimental.  But, I won’t do that.  I have cookies I need to avoid.

Just for completeness–here’s the recipe copied from a web search so I didn’t have to type it in.  We use Ande’s mints–the little green foil wrapped things you sometimes get in restaurants and really don’t want to think about after a big meal.  (Bonus points for people who comment on that reference.)

Lime-Quince Marmalade Cardamom Shortbread Cookies

The other day I was doing that clicking thing that happens when I look at blogs. I read a blog, click on the links to read another blog, and another. Pretty soon, I’ve read a couple of dozen blogs and find myself forgetting what it was I was doing in the first place. I stumbled upon this recipe for cardamom shortbread bars with marmalade. I’ve written about cookies more than once on this blog, and, I guess, I have a particular ‘thing’ for cookies. So, when I saw the words cardamom and shortbread together I couldn’t help but print out the recipe for some testing.

As also happens, my dreams are influenced by what I read during the day. I woke up the next morning with a variation on the recipe running through my head. It really is a complicated mix up of thoughts that brought me to it, but between the recipe on the blog, the plans I had for making quince jelly and my husband reminding me how much he wants me to save some of the quince juice for a drink we make, I ended up with a new idea.

The drink we make takes quince juice and freshly squeezed limes and sugar. It’s nothing more than limeade plus quince juice, but it tastes unbelievably good and is rather exotic. I found it in a Persian cookbook when I was desperately looking for something to do with some extra quince juice I had made once I had hit the wall with making jelly. Since it was a Persian recipe to begin with, it seemed to me that the cardamom shortbread would go with a lime-quince marmalade. As far as I can tell, there aren’t any recipes out there for lime-quince marmalade, but I found one for lime marmalade. Substituting most of the water with quince juice, I made a lime-quince marmalade jelly like substance that tastes an awful lot like the drink with a heady lime kick to it. (It’s quite yummy on English muffins.)

By following the cookie part of the recipe linked above and using my new concoction instead of the grapefruit marmalade, I got a cookie that would fit in on a plate of Christmas cookies (pretty colors) and also fill in for a dessert at the end of a middle eastern dinner. I’d never had to grate frozen cookie dough before, so I thought it would be fun to do a time-lapse of the process. This brief clip shows the whole process once the dough has been frozen for two hours until they are put away. This video shows the way the cookies are put together.

Lime-Quince Marmalade
8 Cups quince Juice
2 pounds limes
one cup water
9-10 cups sugar
14 cup canning jars, lids and rings, processed and hot

Carefully grate the lime peel off the limes, removing the green part with as little as the white pith beneath. I used a regular grater for this and then chopped up the pieces. Juice the limes.

Put the quince juice, the lime peels, the lime juice and the water in a heavy non-reactive stock pot or dutch oven. Bring to a boil, cover and simmer for two hours. This softens the peel and infuses the quince juice with yummy limeness.

Bring to a boil, add the sugar and bring to a boil again. Reduce the heat to medium and stir, stir, stir, stir. Just keep standing there stirring. For a long time. Until the mixture comes to 219° F. Pour into waiting hot jars and allow to seal at room temp.

Quince Juice

Lime Peels

Quince Juice
Finding quinces is going to be the tricky part. Quinces are a fruit that have a brief season and show up in the stores for just a week or two in October. To make quince juice, you just wash off all the fuzz, quarter the fruit and toss it in a huge pot. Add enough water that it shows through the fruit but is not floating, bring to a boil, cover and cook until the fruit is moosh. Strain well. If you have a jelly bag, you can use that. I usually put it through a colander first, then a fine mesh sieve, and finally a sieve lined in wet cheesecloth. I’m not too picky about it being perfectly clear, though. If you want to make super clear jelly, then doing an over-night hang with a jelly bag will keep it from getting any cloudiness.

Like Mother, Like Daughter (or son)

Until about three years ago, I wouldn’t eat a fried or poached egg. It had to be scrambled or hardboiled, and the hardboiled yoke bit had to be mixed with something to make it less chalky. If I was served a fried egg, I would cut the white part carefully free of the gross yellow stuff and eat it. If the yellow leaked onto the white, I wouldn’t eat any of it. I remember clearly freaking one day when my mom was cooking me an egg. She cracked the egg into the fry pan directly and started breaking it up with a spoon. This would create cooked bits of yellow and white, not one uniform color. Even as I read this right now, I am sort of laughing at myself. It’s kind of strange. I wouldn’t eat this strangely not quite scrambled and not fried egg thing that my mom cooked. She got upset and huffy about it, but pulled out a bowl muttering about one more dish to wash.

Just this morning, I offered my son a cooked egg for breakfast. I shouldn’t have said anything, but I asked him if he wanted it fried or scrambled. This was a complete waste of time because I already knew what his answer was going to be. Unlike me, he’ll eat a fried egg, but if given a choice…he’ll always choose scrambled. All I could think of when I was cracking the eggs into the bowl was, “one more dish to wash.”

Cookies, Cookies, and More Cookies

My Mom's recipe box.

I sent an email to my aunts about our family gift exchange as I couldn’t remember who I drew or, actually, if we drew names. I seem to recall something at our family reunion, but I’m not really clear on it. My mind turned toward Christmas and getting ready for the whole big tadoo. And, inevitably, for me, that means cookies. Just as my thoughts turned in that direction, I let out a soft sigh and said, “Cookies.”

My daughter, who was sitting directly across from me at the table, looked down at the very recently emptied pie plate sitting in front of me and back up at me with a shocked horror. “You just had pie, and now you want cookies?”

The look on her face had me giggling straight to tears and it took me a while to explain my whole thought process and that, no, I wasn’t actually interested in eating cookies, but planning the making of cookies. It used to be that I would make 10-12 varieties of cookies, package them up, and send them to various friends and family. I think my shopping list went something like five dozen eggs, ten pounds butter, fifteen pounds flour, three pounds chocolate chips, six pounds nuts…well, you get the idea. I never got the feeling that the cookies weren’t appreciated, but lifestyles have changed in the last twenty years and eating so much sugar and fat laden baked goods just isn’t being done so much any more.

I will still make some cookies, but I’ve pared it down to making one kind of cookie per person in the immediate household. That’s just six kinds of cookies, and that’s easy for me to knock out in no time. My mother in law will make rolled-iced sugar cookies and host a couple of fun filled icing parties with my son and his friends. (Yay! The only kind of cookie that I don’t like making are rolled and cut.) We’ll have plenty of cookies to put on plates and take to various parties and gatherings, a few to indulge ourselves with over the holidays, and that will be more than enough.

My mom would start making cookies a day or two after Thanksgiving. We had one 12″ reel-to-reel Heathkit made tape player that had one tape in it year round–a collection Frank Sinatra, Perry Como and others of that era singing secular Christmas diddies. My mom would crank it up loud and hum to ol’ blue eyes crooning away while rolling cookie dough into balls and placing them evenly onto cookie sheets. Most butter cookies taste better after they sit in a tightly closed box for a few weeks, so she’d start with those and move toward the more delicate and less sturdy cookies.

My mom's recipe box with the recipe in front.

Once I’d moved out and started my own baking, I had this tradition of calling my mom on a yearly basis for one recipe in particular. I’d write it down on a scrap of paper and lose the scrap by the following year. Deep down, I think it was just an excuse to get me to call my mom–not necessary really, since I talked to her three times a week anyway. After she died, I got her old-fashioned recipe box. I didn’t open it for months, well, not until after Thanksgiving. When I opened it, I saw that the recipe in front was the one I had been calling her for. Apparently, she didn’t use this box much any more…maybe not at all except for my phone call. It was pretty clear that the last time she’d used it was when I had called her. I’ve used it several times in the last few years looking for recipes I remember from my childhood (Aunt Doris’ tamale pie, Grandma Herbert’s Cracker Jack…) I don’t move things around and always leave the cookie recipe right back in front where I can find it.

Scandinavian Oatmeal Cookies
3 Cups quick cooking rolled oats finely ground
3/4 C soft Butter
1/2 C sugar
1 tsp. Vanilla
Halved Walnuts

Grind oats through medium fine block in food chopper. Combine with softened butter, sugar and vanilla. Work at low speed with mixer or hands. Form into small balls and place on lightly buttered cookie sheet. Put half a nut onto top. Bake at 325° until very lightly browned. These store very well in a tightly closed container up to 6 weeks. They taste better after at LEAST a week.

Shaker Lemon Pie

One of my all time favorite kitchen tools. Microplanes were originally used in woodworking, but some clever person figured out they make light work in the kitchen.

I mentioned in my last post that I was making two lemon pies this week. The one reserved for Thanksgiving day dinner is the Shaker Lemon Pie. I was disappointed in how mine ended up looking this year, though it still tasted terrific.

While using a microplane to zest the lemons isn’t necessary, it is a lot faster and easier than the old fashioned graters out there. (If you only have the old-fashioned boxy style, put a piece of waxed paper over the top and work the grating bits through–removing the waxed paper with the last bits of lemon will save you a lot of scraping effort.)

The scariest tool in our kitchen. It does, however, do the trick.

The Mandolin slicer is the perfect tool for getting paper-thin slices of lemon. Before I purchased the mandolin last year, I used a sharp knife which works just as well if slower. So, if you don’t have a mandolin, just take your time and go for the thinnest possible slices you can. Remove all the seeds from the lemon slices as you work.

Thinly sliced lemons are really important.

The lemons and grated rind sit in sugar. Various recipes call for different lengths of time, but I let mine sit for more than twenty-four hours. I think anything more than eight hours is likely to be just fine, but anything under eight might get you chewier lemon pieces inside the pie. The longer they have to macerate in the sugar and lemon juice, the more likely they are to be tender.

The lemons, sugar and zest mixed together.

The lemons, sugar and zest after 24 hours.

The completed filling waiting for the top crust.

I made a standard white flour pie crust for this. I often use whole wheat pastry flour to make crusts these days, but I didn’t think the lemon would hold up all that well to the whole wheat. People can get a little prickly when you start talking about making pie crusts. There are the die-hard butter enthusiasts, the shortening crowd and the mixed-fat folk. I went to a pie making class a number of years ago, and the person teaching it gave us a mini-chemistry lesson. I came away with a crust recipe that is very simple. For each crust use 1 and 1/4 cup flour, one stick butter, one tablespoon sugar, 1/4 tsp., and ice water. The technique is to cut the cold fat into the dry ingredients and add water until you have a dough. The idea is to make the dough wetter than you think it needs to be so that when you roll it out, the extra flour from the rolling pin won’t make the crust overly dry and brittle. I also learned that a pastry cloth is my best friend when rolling out a crust. (Frankly, I also like the store-bought already rolled, just stick it on the counter for a while and use it kind of pie crusts. They save time and clean-up for a quick and easy pie. I think the best is actually the one in the red box…Pillsbury maybe?…but it uses LARD. Given the fact that a good majority of our friends do not eat lard, I choose to not use it most of the time.)

I also thought it would ‘be fun’ to make a lattice crust. Turns out that the filling of the lemon pie is rather liquid–unlike an apple or cherry pie–and the crust kept dunking down into the filling. When I complained about the finished product to my other pie making friend, he suggested I use the “make the lattice on waxed paper and freeze it method.” Now that I know that is a possibility, I’ll try that next time, but it never occurred to me. Making a lattice crust on top of the pie is the only way I’d ever heard of, so I learned something new yesterday.

Cutting the top crust for a lattice.

Turns out that my lattice ended up half-drowned in the filling this year.

In spite of a quarter of the top crust disappearing into the pie, it still tasted tart and lemony, the way a lemon pie should. Yes, it’s a pucker-up kind of lemon, not a sweet-cloying kind of lemon.

Shaker Lemon Pie
2 large lemons, preferably Meyers (I didn’t have Meyers, and used three smaller regular lemons)
2 cups sugar
1/4 teaspoon salt
4 eggs
4 tablespoons butter, melted
3 tablespoons all-purpose flour

Grate the zest off the lemons first. Slice paper-thin. Add sugar to lemons and zest and put in non-reactive bowl, preferably glass. Stir every once in a while and allow to macerate for 24 hours. Make your crust, mix the eggs until frothy, add melted butter, salt and flour then add the lemon and sugar mixture. Pour into the crust. Cover with top crust of choice. The easiest will be a flat top with simple vents across the top. Bake at 400 for 20 minutes, reduce heat to 350 and bake another 30. (Give or take, watch the pie and make sure it is done–a knife inserted into the center will come out clean when it is done.)

A thin slice ready to enjoy.