Gracie's Kitchen

The weather has settled into the typical Pacific Northwest winter pattern - rain, with temperature in the 40's fahrenheit (5-10 Celsius).  Yesterday the sun came out, though, which gave a chance to finish moving raspberries.

My activities were closely supervised, as usual..

I also decided to harvest the bamboo. 

This bamboo, a variety of Phyllostachys, was purchased at Portland Nursery about 10 years ago.  It had 3 stalks.  The plant is a beautiful screen, makes excellent plant stakes, and does well even in our occasional ice and snow.  It does spread, though (the fenced area is where the main clump of bamboo was; however, there are a number of runners outside the circle which need a new home!). 

This year I decided I wanted to use the area for squash plants, which grow well in that spot (it is close to the compost pile!).  Well, it would have been more picturesque to take the grove down with a machete, but loppers to a better job, and also I didn't think of it until afterwards. 

The bamboo is stacked roughly by diameter, and will become several hundred plant stakes.  Once cut and trimmed, they will go into the garden shed to season, and will be ready for use by summer.

It's been a couple of weeks now.  Part of the adjustment to cutting animal products from my diet is figuring out what to eat instead and making sure those things are in the house.  It's been eye opening to realize how much we relied on cheese, butter, cottage cheese and yogurt as staples.   It's very much like when I found out I was gluten intolerant.  I had to shift my thinking away from what I couldn't eat to what I still can eat.   Part of the challenge for me in eating mostly vegan is that I can't eat gluten (wheat, barley, etc.).   Cutting out dairy products is harder for us than cutting out meat.

We are in the process of figuring it out.  I found a great recipe in the January Sunset magazine.  It's a recipe for Wild Rice, butternut squash and cannellini stew.  Of course I couldn't follow the recipe exactly just because I don't think I've ever done that in my life.  I left out the dried mushrooms because I forgot to buy them, I increased the amount of butternut squash because the one we had from our garden was big.  Our Swiss chard plant is not producing anymore so I used frozen spinach and I used vegetable broth instead of chicken.  Recipes are just guidelines, right?   It was really good.

We still have butter and chicken and cheese in the house.  I imagine we will still be buying cheese because one of my cats adores it.   I wouldn't dream of depriving her!

We spend all of fall, and the beginning of winter, 'putting the yard to bed'.  With 50+ deciduous trees, some of them gigantic, all of them dropping leaves on a different schedule, most of that process is raking and mulching leaves (some of them are in the raised beds below), then pruning.  It seems like a race to put the yard to bed before it starts to get up again.  This winter has been mild so far, and the raspberries are budding already.  So even though it feels a bit odd to be dragging out the rototiller in January...

Guess it's time to dig and divide the raspberries.  Between plants given us by friends, the plants in the frame that need dividing, and the ones that have wandered out of the patch altogether, there are enough plants for another 4' X 12' raspberry bed.  Things are never simple, though - the new bed had long-time residents, ferns that had to be relocated to the woods (they'll be happy there, with some cousins they haven't seen in years!) and some gypsy perennials that have already been moved a time or two had to be moved again.

The blueberries got a similar treatment.  We have two bushes that have been in the wrong place, shaded out by roses - they finally got to join the chorus line of blueberries along the fence, bringing the number to 7.

The old plants are not much bigger than the 5 we planted last spring, but the change of scene should do them good. 

We ate bacon for breakfast the day after we decided to transition to eating vegan.  It felt strange, but when we opened the fridge we realized we had it full of all the things we decided not to eat.  Vintage white cheddar, bacon, eggs and butter.  We have lots of chicken in our freezer.   So we talked about the whole concept of transitioning.  We have no desire to be wasteful of the food we already have.  The transition will be just that.  A transition.   We aren't even sure at this point if we'll be able to sustain a truly vegan diet.  If we can get 95% of the way there, we will be happy with ourselves.

It will probably take a month to work through everything in the house.  Then what?  Although I'm excited to try this, I'm a bit concerned too.  I have tried to eat vegetarian before.  It failed.  I was training really hard as a competitive master's rower and it got to the point where I couldn't sustain not eating meat.  The day I broke will live in infamy (with Steve anyway).  Steve said I "went feral" and demanded we drive immediately to a local BBQ restaurant where I devoured an order of beef ribs.  I remember the day like it was yesterday.  

So what makes me think we can do this now?  I'm not sure we can but I'm willing to try. I'm willing to try and be smart about it.  I know I didn't do that before.  I did not track protein intake.  I did not pay attention to eating good, whole natural food.  I still ate a lot of junk.  I didn't eat nuts or legumes or soy protein.  We didn't grow our own vegetables.  We just didn't give it much thought beyond not eating meat.

This time, I'll be paying attention.

Gracie’s Kitchen was an idea that arose from the pet food contamination ‘incident’ in 2007 that sickened or killed hundreds (or thousands, depending upon whose numbers you believe) of pets.  This contamination affected an ingredient used by several major pet food manufacturers in high-end products.  The idea was to create a website that would provide information about pet food, recipes, or even act as an online store for healthy pet foods.

That website never happened, but the name stuck.  Gracie’s Kitchen was named for our borzoi Gracie (1983-1997) who, despite our relative ignorance of pet nutrition, lived to over 14 years of age (a venerable age indeed for her breed!).

The Kitchen has now taken a new (but related) direction.  It is both a place (our back yard) and a lifestyle.  The adventure starts now, but years of thought, study, and experience have prepared us to take the first step. 

My wife, Lori, took her degree in health education, and keeps herself (and me) informed of developments in health and nutrition.  The findings show that animal protein is not good for us, and Americans eat far too much of it.  Increasingly it appears that we should be getting our protein mainly, if not exclusively, from plants.  In short, we should stop eating meat.

For my part, the motivation to do so is partly philosophical, though concerns about the environment, dependence on Middle East oil, and the rising health care problem in America (and the role of diet therein) are all good reasons for eating locally and largely vegan, (to say nothing of the personal benefits of a healthy diet!).

Although I come from a farming family, and spent my childhood (as much as I was able) on my grandparents’ dairy farm, I have never been comfortable with the practice of raising animals for food.  We did not raise beef cattle; however, bulls do not produce milk, and bull calves, along with 'surplus' heifers, ended up on somebody's dinner table (starting with ours).  Eating meat, therefore, has always involved an uneasy compromise, from which this new adventure will free me. 

However, animal protein is not just meat – it is dairy and eggs as well.  I am quite fond of a good aged cheddar, and cottage cheese, yogurt and buttermilk have all been daily fare for a very long time.  Weaning myself of those things is not going to be easy, especially as I have less philosophical problem with eating them. 

Perhaps because of my upbringing, I believe there is a legitimate place in human endeavor for animal husbandry, and that the ethical measure of raising cows and goats for milk, chickens for their eggs, or sheep for their wool, lies more in the treatment of the animals than in the enterprise itself.  

Further, I have long felt that we, as a society, have diet-related health issues and unprecedented obesity in large part because we have become so far removed from the production of what we eat.   Growing up on a small family farm was a priceless experience, because even if I never learned enough to become a farmer myself I did learn, in some measure, that farming requires diligence, very specialized knowledge, and above all, an intimate and respectful relationship with the natural world. 

My goal in this adventure, therefore, is not to become a ‘strict’ vegan (whatever that is), but rather to give expression to the would-be farmer in me and make much better use of our acre of land, to support local farmers by buying from them the food that we don’t grow, or don't grow enough of, ourselves, to change the way I eat so that at least 95% of my dietary protein comes from plants, to learn to grow and preserve those foods, and prepare meals that are healthy and (hopefully) delicious.

The adventure begins now.  I think it will be fun.