Proselytizing

For many years, David and I have talked about the politics of food with his parents. Before this year, those conversations have gone nowhere. Usually, they just humor us as we buy whole wheat bread and organic milk when we visit them. They nod mindlessly as we drone on about sustainable local, seasonal, or organic “real” food. Those kids! Once the discussion erupted into the closest thing to an argument I have had with them in all the time I have loved their son.

Both of David's parents grew up in post-WWII New York City immigrant communities. Although food was an incredibly important part of Jewish culture and even Jewish religion, the people in their community had relatively little direct connection with the actual growing of the food they ate. Both my MIL and FIL were instilled with beliefs in Americanization, in progress, and in a post-rural economy. They are loyal and trusting people who believe deeply in justice—but I think they have trouble believing that anything that looks to the future could possibly be wrong, that anything that is a convenience or a small luxury could possibly be bad for them or the world.

I first met Jay when he was in the ICU after a heart attack. (Interestingly, the day I was supposed to meet David’s parents was two months earlier--the day I was admitted for my brain surgery.) He is a diabetic who has lost much of his sight and had other complications from the disease as well. Sue--the recipient of some of my finest knitting (like this silk lace shawl, and this beaded one, and this lightly multicolored one) because of her petite size--carefully watches her weight and her family member’s weights. Recently, she has some recurring heart issues--and had a somewhat high blood sugar reading at her last appointment as well. Eating a healthy diet is something extremely important to her—although she approaches healthy eating with a shopping cart full of iceberg lettuce, margarine, low-fat American cheese, artificial sweeteners, and diet sodas. Her sweet tooth doesn’t always make it easy to avoid the highly processed goodies she can find in the local grocery stores here in south Florida (like chocolate babka and rugelach, or that fat-free/sugar-free chocolate that tastes like Styrofoam to me).

When the movie Food, Inc. came out this year, we wondered if this might be the perfect way to bring up these issues again. But after much thought and discussion, we decided not to mention it this year. Yes, we’d buy our own milk and the like, but this time we wouldn’t say a word about their choices. They've suffered through that discussion quite enough. At some point, we recognized that our connection with them had to lead us to at least try to respect their food decisions.

But then Sue surprised us by describing a show she had watched on Ellen Degeneris. What she could remember is that it was a young man with a new baby who talked about how industry is doing bad things to food and that we need to use our dollars to support what we believed in. She was excited to pass this information on to us. After searching on Ellen's site, I think the interview she saw might have been with Jonathan Safran Foer, author of Eating Animals. You can watch the clip over at Ellen's site.

I was thrilled--and immediately started thinking that perhaps this was the right time to do a little proselytizing after all!

We started telling them about Michael Pollen's The Omnivore's Dilemma, his next book In Defense of Food, and Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. As we were talking, Jay picked up the phone and dialed the number of the service that provides audio books for the blind to him at his request.  He ordered all three. If after listening to these he is still itching for more, I think I'll recommend Fast Food Nation to him.  It was the book that really pushed us into this issue when it first came out.

Jay commented to Sue that it would be hard for them to listen to the books together because of the way the technology works. So we also bought paper copies of In Defense of Food and Animal, Vegetable, Miracle for Sue to read in print. When she finishes those two, if she wants more I might give her the new young reader's adaptation of The Omnivore's Dilemma which my son has enjoyed.  I’ve also heard about the guidebook that accompanies the Food Inc. (Anyone know if any good?  I think I'll have to go check it out.)

After seeing their interest, we started to reconsider showing Food Inc.  It is currently available for instant watch on Netflix, so we pulled it up on their large-screen computer and gathered our chairs around.

After watching the film, we sat at the kitchen table and talked a bit. Sue was very moved by the film and interested in making changes, but she was at a loss as to how to go about it. “Are there still any farms around here?” she asked—a good question since gated retirement communities (including their own) are replacing farms everywhere you look.

Immediately I popped on Local Harvest and found the address of the farmer’s market nearby, a farm stand, and even a CSA. I don’t think they are quite ready for a CSA since they are not yet serious fresh vegetable eaters and Jay is pretty picky about what vegetables he’ll even taste. (Serving broccoli and asparagus to him will illicit cries of “Are you trying to poison me?!”) Nevertheless, I do think finding places where they could make their own choices might work.

The south Florida growing season is during the winter, so the markets are open and full of abundance right now:







As a DC gal, I'm blown away by their "homegrown" labels on things like mangos, avocados, and bananas!



For New York transplants, these pickles are a welcome sight.

* * *

David knows it won’t be easy for his parents to break habits they have had for decades. And we’ll be miles away from them as they navigate this new terrain, unable to offer regular shopping support. We tried to think of a few first steps to help them out.

1. Buy organic milk when you go to the grocery store.

2. Commit to going to the farmer’s market or a farmstand at least every two weeks. Plan to spend at least $20 of your food budget on foods you can buy from a local grower.

Do y’all have any other suggestions for those just getting started on this path?

The Nature of Togetherness

As we near the end of our holiday travels, I think about my favorite parts of our long vacation. We first visited my family in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina (where my parents grew up). We then drove down to visit David’s family in Florida.

In both places, we got to visit our parents, our brothers, and our cousins and retell stories of years past. Our 10yo son had a wonderful time seeing his uncles and grandparents. He is the only grandchild on both sides, and that seems relatively likely to remain true.

All three of us enjoyed eating foods traditional to our families and the places we grew up. For me, that was roasted oysters, soft-shelled crab, and boiled shrimp my uncle caught himself. For David, it is bagels and chocolate babka , as well as the salmon croquettes my MIL always makes. (David’s family is not made up of observant Jews, but even so, the treif feast we eat on the coast of SC always feels like a funny precursor to our visit to the southeastern part of Florida--the New York of the South.)

Two very special parts of our vacation were spending time walking at Myrtle Beach after a big storm and finding incredible shells, and walking on our favorite wildlife boardwalk in south Florida and watching birds and alligators and turtles.

After a few days in south Florida, I was struck that while waiting in line at the restaurant or milling around at the pool, the interactions between people were short and typically rude. Most people even resist making eye contact with strangers. While South Carolina has a long tradition of “southern hospitality” and friendliness to strangers, Myrtle Beach has become so large, so cosmopolitan, and so transient that many characteristics of southern culture are beginning to disappear there.

As soon as we were out in the fresh air surrounded by wildlife, everyone seemed to relax and open up to each other. On the beach, people smile at you and exchange pleasantries, even if they walk past you without acknowledgment at other times.

And at the wildlife walk, conversations start when someone spots a beautiful or unusual bird...









…especially nesting birds...






and the amazing anhingas drying their wings.



Folks continue to interact in a slow and relaxed way as they slowly circle the boardwalk together, pausing to snap photographs or look through binoculars. Sometimes someone spots a teacher bird with her students:



Or turtles lounging in the sun on the remnants of a tree…





…or even their brothers and sisters confidently hanging out with a little alligator:



Or perhaps a bird in the process of catching and preparing his dinner, a long and shining snake:



Everyone gathers in very quiet amazement, whispering intimately at times to complete strangers to keep things peaceful and to welcome the animals. Even the sounds of beeping cameras sometimes seem like an interruption to the quiet communion between humans and other animals, and between humans and other humans.

People point out iguanas--and the vivid green parrots who have found their way to the park.






Folks on their way out will tell excited children on their way in where to find the big alligator.



And a crowd of laughing (but also terrified) children calls a small crowd to visit the smaller alligator who had crawled on land right to the edge of the wooden fence.



Brave fathers bent with their cameras close enough to pet her:



And more cautious fathers bend nearby with binoculars:



Later in the evening we discovered that David’s cousins had been at the park about half an hour after we saw this alligator. By then she had backed away from the fence. Our cousins saw three incredibly tiny babies at the waterline with her! We had been so transfixed (and frightened!) by how close she was that we did not realize what treasure she was protecting.

The boardwalk is always full of new sights—every day and every hour. Today will be our last walk there before we have to pack our bags and begin our long drive home in our overly-full little red car. I’m looking forward to sleeping on my own hard mattress, to eating our usual diet, to imagining our new year together at home. Nevertheless, this has been a warm and wonderful communion with family and the world.

Self Portrait

Eating in the Snow: Dark Days Update

Here at Chez Raven, located inside the beltway of Washington DC, we were blessed with almost twenty inches of snow this weekend!

My family spent much of the weekend sitting on the couch watching the snow, enjoying fires in the fireplace, listening to books on tape, knitting, and drinking warm beverages.

*  *  *

We started the morning with migas (made with local eggs, cheese, onions, and salsa as well as home-grown parsley picked just before the snow--but non-local beans) and mimosas (made fresh with non-local clementines and champagne):





* * *

I spent most of the day knitting holiday presents in the warmth of our house while David and our son shoveled the driveway, made snow forts, and went sledding.

*  *  *

Our brisket dinner cooked all day in the crockpot. I added to the pot a few onions, some turnips, mushrooms, carrots, shredded cabbage, and dehydrated greens. Before serving, I shredded the meat and added it back to the liquid. We served the stew next to mashed potatoes.  Everything was local except the tomato paste I added to the sauce.  We enjoyed some local red wine along with our meal.



* * *

Dessert during the snow was homemade eggnog with local milk, egg yolks from local organically raised free-range chickens (important if you're consuming raw eggs), and maple syrup from the farmer's market. The adults spiked with non-local bourbon.



* * *

This time, we decided not to have our meals at the bistro table on our deck.  The lump on the left lower than the table is my chair!

Making the Oil Last

image source: Jewish Review

Chanukah/Hanukkah is a beautiful holiday celebrating the universal hope for the return of the light as we approach the winter solstice.

It is also a time when Jews celebrate both the victory of the weak against the mighty, as well as the "miracle of the oil" when one day's worth of sacred olive oil in the eternal lamp stayed lit for eight days as the early Jews rededicated their temple after its desecration. This event was perhaps the world's first oil shock, and resource conservation is obviously the moral of the story. (Well, perhaps everyone doesn't read it that way.)

We are facing questions of oil again now. Again we ask ourselves: "How long will it last?" Peak Oil activists deal with this issue. And climate activists ask us to try to use less oil in order to save the planet. We have to recognize that this time, we should not expect a sequel to the Hanukkah miracle.

Thinking about the holiday from these perspectives can shake our ideas about long-celebrated traditions. Jews all over the world celebrate by eating foods cooked in oil, especially latkes (potato pancakes) and sufganiyot (jelly doughnuts). As Culiblog says, "Now I don’t know why it took me so long to question the logic of this, but why do we celebrate this miracle of oil conservation by massively increasing oil consumption? Shouldn’t we be eating the opposite of oily foods? Shouldn’t Chanukkah be an oil fast, a holiday of raw and steamed vegetables and bike riding?"

my post is continued here

My Journey to Green, part 2

For my entire life, I have enjoyed gardening--especially growing herbs and vegetables. I'm sure I got the desire to grow my own food from Granny, and from my mother who carried on the tradition for many years. Growing up, I had cherry tomatoes growing outside my playhouse. In college, I kept a pot of mint on my windowsill for making tea. In grad school, a variety of herbs on a fire escape. And as soon as we bought a house, David and I began to plant vegetables in our back yard. There have been years when we've grown a lot and others when we've let the weeds get the better of the beds. I did not plant in order to be self-sufficient or for environmental reasons. I did it because it was a pleasure. As our son grew up, he got excited about what we were doing and enjoyed puttering around in the sunshine as we dug, planted, and weeded.

Every summer we spent days away from our garden at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival. And in 2005 when our son had just turned 6yo, one of the themes was American Food Culture. I was excited to learn more about the variety of food traditions and tastes from all the cultures that make up this diverse country.

What I really did not expect is how world-expanding this summer festival would be for me. Rather than only celebrating the abundance of cooking creativity around the country, the festival focused on SOLE food--that is, sustainable, organic, local, and ethical food.

Slow Food was there, articulating the connection between the pleasure of community and the politics of our food practices. I loved their message and it resonated with not only my hedonist side but my old-fashioned plain side. They also talked about the need to celebrate and protect our native foods to keep them from being eradicated. This was an entirely new message for me.

I also learned much more about how organic farming methods not only were good for our bodies but good for both the workers on organic farms and the land itself. I learned how "corporate organic" was an inferior choice to sustainably-raised organic (even when it is not certified organic). And, due to lectures about naturally-raised meat and animals' role on a family farm, I even started to question some of my beliefs about vegetarianism and began to think about eating certain kinds of meat again. (This is a question that continues to rattle around in my head and one where my practice changes over time.)

Perhaps even more important to my increasing radicalization was the presence of Berkeley's Edible Schoolyard. They planted a garden on the national mall complete with an outdoor pizza oven to demonstrate and a shady gazebo-like structure to welcome visitors to sit together. My son and I went everyday for two weeks, listening to folks talk about everything from the how-to's of gardening to the goals of the schoolyard project. The organizers got to know my young son so well that they pulled him on to the front and handed him a microphone so he could explain the purposes of mulching to newbie gardeners.

The Edible Schoolyard combines lessons in organic growing, healthy food preparation, community celebration of that abundance, and even a chance to practice a new language. (The school where the Schoolyard is located is middle school which includes a high number of students new to the US.)

At the end of the festival, the head of the Edible Schoolyard told my son that if he was ever in California, he should stop by for a tour. As luck would have it, we happened to be going to a conference in San Francisco just two months later! So we had the great fortune to visit the real schoolyard with its little chicken tractor and beautiful plants--and also the cooking-and-eating facility and the seed saving room. My son held chickens in his lap, collected and saved amaranth seeds, and help fold tablecloths in the dining room.

I came home from the summer festival understanding that food--in both its growing and its cooking as well as its distribution--is a way of combining the fight against hunger, the fight against corporate power and globalism, the fight for workers' rights, the fight for better health, and the fight for the planet.

I stopped hesitating: at that moment, I knew I was an environmentalist.

(continued from yesterday)

My Journey to Green

I grew up during the 1970s.  My parents, who had been activists in the Civil Rights Movement, were in those years teachers at a liberal-progressive college in the small-town rural South.  Watergate and the first Earth Day and the early oil shocks are foundational memories for me.

Even more important to my world view, however, was my grandmother.  She was not a lefty--not political at all, really--but she cared deeply about the place where she lived.  Granny had lived through the Great Depression.  She had also been widowed twice by the time she was 40yo.  The two experiences combined to make her a very independent and resourceful woman.

Granny worked full time at the same department store for almost fifty years.  She went fishing and crabbing and clamming to feed us with the bounty of what surrounded us.  She had an enormous farm-garden in her backyard.  She had a compost pile and rain barrels set up around her house.  She brought home every plastic bag from her job and folded them carefully for reuse. She knitted ferociously.

Granny's sister raised animals (from chickens to rabbits to peacocks) in her yard (and snakes and huge spiders in her house), collected wild mushrooms and foraging greens, and crocheted ferociously.  The two of them were quite a pair.

So I grew up with liberal commitments to social justice, taught to me by my parents.  And I grew up with the influence of my grandmother's commitment to a life led simply and plainly using resources to their fullest.  But I never considered myself an environmentalist.

When I finished college, I moved into an apartment and began cooking for myself.  I had been a more-or-less vegetarian in college, simply because the meat was so poorly prepared in the cafeteria.  But reading Frances Moore Lappe's Diet for a Small Planet totally changed my thought process about choosing food.  She showed me that my daily choices were fundamentally linked to social justice--and even to Granny-style self-reliance.  Buying into industrial meat production seemed like using more than my fair share and simply wasting so much of the earth's abundance.

I still did not think of myself as an environmentalist.  I was in fact put off by the message of such environmental tracts as E - The Environmental Magazine with what I saw as its emphasis on a more pop-culture, consumer-driven image of life than I wanted to live.  I'm not sure this is a fair representation of the magazine then, much less now, but it was my reaction.  I put my efforts into the anti-war movement (responding to Gulf 1) and to the feminist and GLBT movements instead.  And I studied history as I slowly worked through graduate school.

When in 2001 I started spending all my time with David, I began to hear more about environmentalism from him.  I was still resistant, honestly.  I've always cared a lot more about humanity that about the planet, if I'm going to be honest--and so doing things right for society seemed more relevant to me.  Cleaning up a stream in order to allow native peoples to fish there safely was one thing--but making things pristine, apparently so middle class hikers could enjoy nature, did not.  The idea of preventing indigenous people from continuing to live in the rain forests of the Amazon--all in an effort to protect the environment--seemed wrong to me.

Of course, now I see how social justice and environmentalism go absolutely hand in hand.  I'm sure people back then understood that as well, but I did not.  On the other hand, what I did know is that David was deeply involved in both movements.  The other thing I knew is that my instincts towards plainness and towards social justice often meant the two of us were heading towards the same place of personal action.

David and I fell in love.  We eventually decided to have a child.  But I was reluctant to make that step until we had really confirmed that our dreams for the future were reconcilable.  Before we even started dating, David had told me he wanted four children.  I, meanwhile, had decided at the age of seven that I would have only one.  (And as any of you who know me realize, I am incredibly stubborn once I have made a decision.)

In an effort to convince David that 'onlies' are perfectly happy and normal people, I started reading up on raising only children.  One of the first books I ran across was Bill McKibben's Maybe One: A Case for Smaller Families.  This book changed my life in the way few books have.

First, it tapped into the issues of deep importance to David and convinced him that our future was definitely going in the same direction childwise.  Within just a few months, we were staring at two little pink lines and dancing around the room.

Secondly, it transformed how I saw environmentalism.  It was scholarly (something I have a weakness for), non-materialistic, and full of emotional honesty.  McKibben introduced me to a world of green thinking that was rooted in both social justice and deep kindness.

Knowing that Bill McKibben has been such a powerful moral voice within the environmental movement since the year I graduated from college (from the same college from which he graduated!) makes it seem remarkable to me that I stumbled across his work through the back door of parenting choices.

Parenting choices led me further down the environmental path.  I made the choice to have a homebirth with a midwife because it was a self-reliant low-resource option.  We used cloth diapers because they felt luxurious compared to a plastic bottom, but also because they are lasting and use fewer resources.  (In fact, our son's old diapers are still being used by others, a full decade later.)  The luxury and ease of cloth diapers led me to start using cloth menstrual pads, and then to start using cloth bathroom wipes.  We breastfed because it was the natural thing to do, because it was healthier for mother and baby, because it was both cheaper and easier than formula feeding, and because it seemed like the responsible use of the resources we have. We coslept--which avoided the crib.  We carried our baby in a cotton sling rather than a complex large stroller.  The idea of simple plainness motivated many of my choices--but by this point I was recognizing that being plain and being green often went hand in hand.

There was one more step that totally pushed me over and made me into a card-carrying environmentalist.  I'll share that story tomorrow.

*  *  *

Thanks to Erin for raising such a fabulous issue for this month's APLS carnival.  What a lovely time of year to play over our pasts and see what led us to where we are today.

Local Thanksgiving: Dark Days Challenge

We had a wonderfully quiet, almost 100% local Thanksgiving this year--following on the heels of a combination of travel to various conferences by both the adults in the family, work crises that took a lot of time and emotion, and lots of random busyness and its attending crankiness. It was lovely to take a day off just to cook, play games, and eat.

We have a tradition of splitting our Thanksgiving feast into two meals. This plan works well for both cooks and eaters.

For lunch, we made a thick apple-butternut squash soup enriched with local onion, cream, and hot pepper as well as some non-local spices such as ginger and cumin.



David fried up some fritters made with wild rice and frozen corn. The rice, while not local, is sold by the sustainable White Earth Land Recovery Project, an American Indian organization dedicated "to preserving and restoring traditional practices of sound land stewardship, language fluency, community development, and strengthening our spiritual and cultural heritage."



It seemed especially fitting to recognize the importance on native harvests--like wild rice but also corn and winter squash--as well as American Indian cooking traditions. The recipe for the fritters can be found in the beautiful new book, Foods of the Americas: Native Recipes and Traditions.

* * *

At suppertime, we had our main meal of local turkey, pickled lemon cukes, pickled garlicky green beans...



...roasted Brussels sprouts, mashed potatoes-and-turnips, and cherry jam (instead of cranberries--which we could not find locally).  The dressing was made from cornbread (the gorgeous Indian corn we grew in our backyard!), assorted winter greens from our backyard garden, CSA carrots, sage and rosemary from our herb plot, local eggs, lots of local mushrooms--plus local oysters!  We ran into them at the very last moment--and it was absolutely kismet.  Oyster stuffing may become a tradition in our family.



The meal was served with a local white wine. When David first handed it to me, I misread the variety and honestly thought it said it was Vinegar. Luckily, it was a delicious, perfect-with-turkey Viognier.

To end the feast, David made a not-pumpkin pie using the recipe on the back of canned pumpkin. He made a few exceptions: first, he used pureed butternut squash and carnival squash which he baked himself. Second, he replaced the canned evaporated milk with a mix of milk and cream from our Amish dairy supplier.



The pie was fabulous--a little yellower than pumpkin pie but sweet, light, and delicate. We served it warm with whipped cream.

We enjoyed the rest of the evening in front of a fire in the fireplace, sipping our wine and reconnecting.

Buy Nothing (tm) Day

Celebrating Buy Nothing Day?

Be sure you check out this brilliant advertisement from Amazero. (And be sure to pronounce that adVERTizment while you read.)

Check out the customer comments at the bottom, such as this one: "I bought my daughter NothingTM for Xmas--and now suddenly I'm the world's best mum! If you're a parent, take my advice and make sure you put NothingTM in your kids' stocking this Christmas."

Even the "people who liked this also liked..." section is hilarious.

(And thanks to Fake Plastic Fish for steering me to this site!)

Don't Peek, if you expect to get a present from me...

Green Bean over at Green Phone Booth is way ahead of me when it comes to getting her holiday handknits ready to present. Check out her adorable presents and the excellent rhyme she's concocted to keep us entertained and inspired.

Me? Everything is still in the works. Nothing is finished. And that is where you can join me--in holiday crafting, in medias res, and in a complete panic.

First up is a present for my mother-in-law, a delicate woman who loves sparkly things and is one of the most appreciative recipients of handknits I know. For the last three years, I've knitted her incredibly detailed shawls with silk and beads. This year, I figured she needed something different. When I saw the pattern for the Scallop-Edge Beaded Necklace in 101 Designer One-Skein Wonders,I knew it would be perfect for her.



What I did not expect it that it would only take a few hours to make! I immediately whipped up one for my own mother:



Of course, neither of these necklaces have clasps sewn on yet...

My mother has gotten some fairly labor-intensive knitting presents for the past three years but both my father and brother have gotten the shorter end of the stick. They've gotten simple scarves and the like. This year I'm determined to use the time I've got on making up a little bit of the difference.

For Dad, I've made a Hemlock Ring Blanket from designer Jared Flood at Brooklyn Tweed. While the knitting is finished, it is very much unfinished. I can't imagine that this lumpy blob will turn into the lovely blanket of the pattern--but I am always amazed by the magic of wet-blocking wool. I'll keep you posted.



For my brother, who I do hope has taken the instructions above and has not continued reading, I'm making perhaps the most complicated thing I've ever made--although I certainly did not realize that when I started it! I won't give away what it is, just in case (unless you are on Ravelry). But it involves two lines of provisional cast-ons, colorwork ribbing combined with cabling without a needle, picking up stitches in the round, grafting, and a bazillion kinds of increases and decreases. Here's what it looked like this morning, after at least three aborted attempts following utter failures:



I have a little thing finished (except for sewing in the ends) for my partner David. Can I actually keep it a surprise until the holidays? (I assume he did not heed the instructions in the title since he never gets anything handknit by me now that he can do his own beautiful knitting.)

But much is still left to knit. On top of my brother's present, my 10 yo son has requested I make him the balaclava-like Black Prince Hood for Hanukkah. I have something in mind to knit for an additional little present for my mother (one of these?).

Wish me luck!

I'm looking forward to seeing all the handmade gifts folks come up with for the season!

Eating Local during the Dark Days of Winter

This year's celebration of the eating local during the Dark Days begins this week. While finding local produce seems easy during the abundant harvests of late summer and early fall, the pickings start getting slim once the temperatures drop and the amount of light lessons. The annual challenge put forth by the (not so) Urban Hennery helps motivate eaters to keep up the work and realize that what sometimes seems hidden is in fact its own kind of abundance.

Eighteen months ago, we started a tradition of Eco-Shabbat, or Sabbath for the Earth--a continuation of Earth Hour. We were originally inspired by Melinda at One Green Generation to have an evening off the grid. We've enjoyed the candlelight dinners every fall, winter, and spring--but during the summer, we usually loose our way when the sun provides the light to allow us to continue full speed ahead. Darkness doesn't point toward a slowing down until it is almost time for bed.

But now that the "Dark Days" are back, we've started again. Our No Impact Project helped us adopt the practice again more regularly this season. The official project guide gives a variety of helpful suggestions for ways to mark one day a week as an eco-sabbath.

For our recent Eco-Shabbat, we pulled the only successful spaghetti squash out of our garden and baked it up.  We served it with a sauce made of red peppers (from our amazing CSA), which we dehydrated last summer.  Dried peppers simmered in water--just as simple and plain as that, and yet it was astoundingly delicious.

For a side, we cooked up some mixed greens with an onion and some garlic from our CSA and from the farmer's market in town.

We also served a home-canned jar of "Not-So-Sweet Bread and Butter Pickles." The recipe can be found in the excellent canning guide The Joy of Pickling: 250 Flavor-Packed Flavor-Packed Recipes for Vegetables and More from Garden or Market.

For our dessert beverage, the adults at the table sipped our sickeningly sweet but oddly charming homemade Rhubarb Liqueur.  This little taste of preserved summer was a lovely ending to the evening.