“Simplify, simplify…” –Henry David Thoreau
Last night I watched the second segment of Brian Williams’ “Inside the Obama White House,” which aired on NBC last week. One of the highlights for me was seeing the new garden that the Obama’s have installed this year at the White House. (It’s stunning!)
I especially loved seeing the chefs tromping out there in their fancy starched white chef’s uniforms, scissors and bowls in hand, cutting bunches of greens to put into the evening meal.
Today I received the weekly email from the director of the local farm where we get our produce during the summer months. I share it not because I think you all should go out and join your local CSA [Community Supported Agriculture] or put in a container or window box post haste (though well worth it if you can manage it), but because there’s something energizing in the idea of super fresh, green, alive, real… food.
I find the words all by themselves very nourishing – like poetry. I feel “loved up” by this list. How about you?
This Week on the Farm
Tomorrow and Thursday we’ll be harvesting in the rain. It looks like rain both days. We hope you all brave the weather to get your produce – especially since the strawberries are in!
This week:
- lettuce
- spinach: a cool weather delicacy
- scallions
- radishes: smaller than last week’s
- hakurei turnips: the white salad turnips, so large this week we’ve been eating them like apples. The skin is the spiciest part, the inside is mild. great in stir fry or raw on salads
- bok choy: amazing grilled
In the Field:
- strawberries
- sugar snap peas (they love the rain)
- dill and cilantro
– Special thanks to Katherine Mrozicki of The Food Project for this and all her weekly emails.
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[…] Tromping through the fields to gather fresh flowers, pick raspberries (which never make it past the car ride), feel the smooth, shiny skins of the chili peppers, allow the wafting scents of cilantro to transport me. I wrote about my new love affair with the farm in a post entitled Fresh, Alive, Real…Food. […]
[…] wrote a piece back in June called Fresh, Alive… Real Food about my love affair with the CSA that we belong to. As we head into Thanksgiving it seems only […]
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I love spring!!!! 🙂
Seeing the garden at the White House was my favorite part of that special as well! I love going to the growers market near my house. There is nothing like fresh produce from local farms.
Thank you for this post, Stephanie! Indeed, there is nothing more sensuous, luscious, loving, and abundant than gathering your own fresh veggies and fruit, or eating such lovely foods from someone who has gathered them lovingly on your behalf. I have so missed being able to go out on our farm and just gathering kale buds, or calendula petals, or snippets of dill, thyme, and basil, or sugar snap pea pods and just nibbling right where I am, chatting with the plants all the while, and feeling the earth under my toes!
I’m so delighted that the Obamas have created a kitchen garden at the White House. It’s about time this happened. And delightful that the chefs in their fancy white uniforms go out and snip greens and gather goodies for the White House meals.
My feeling is that one’s quality of life improves enormously when we eat mindfully tended organic foods–whether grown by us, or through a CSA, or from our local Farmer’s Market. Definitly the life energy is high in such foods, and they are oh so delicious (let’s not forget that part!) and usually stunningly beautiful as well!
Love this post (including the photograph with it), and the fact that we are being inspired by the Obamas every day and in so many ways, their garden being huge on the inspiration scale.
In case anyone reading here would like to share their story of how any of the Obamas has inspired them personally to change something in their life, thinking, way of being–or maybe is just inspiring them in an overall general way, please be a part of a book that is collecting these stories from people of all ages–kids included. http://www.obamainspirations.com
Thanks, Stephanie!