Week 2 of the CSA experiment

Garlic scapes were part of my share for the first two weeks. I've never used them before, but knew I would like them. They are garlic, after all! I wanted to pick something special to make since there were only a few; I felt I had garlic gold and couldn't waste it on a failed experiment. So I turned to pesto.

Pesto is one of my favorite foods, usually ranking just after chocolate, and just ahead of more chocolate. I make it in pint batches all summer, but I've never tried it with garlic scape. The flavor is fantastic - just like garlic but not as sharp. Perfect for pesto.

For the pesto itself, I used 6 scapes, about a cup each of parmesan and basil (it should have had more basil, but my plants aren't that big yet), a quarter cup of pine nuts, and enough olive oil to make a good pasty consistency. Then I tossed it with pasta, chicken, tomatoes, and roasted red peppers, inspired by Joanne's blog post.



yum.

Eating Locally and Creatively

This year, I had the wonderful opportunity to join a CSA and have fresh picked vegetables delivered to me at work every week for 6 months. They come from One Straw Farm, an organic farm in Northern Maryland. I love the idea of supporting local agriculture, eating food that hasn't traveled a thousand miles or more to get to me, organic food at that, and working with the seasons to eat what is growing right now.

It's going to be challenging, of course. First of all, I won't be deciding what to eat and then buying it, but will be doing it the other way around. And, it won't always be something I like very much, or have any idea at all how to prepare. So I'll have to be creative, adventurous, and resourceful to keep up with my weekly share.

Luckily, I found a group of people doing the same thing and sharing their results, in the Cooking Away My CSA Challenge. We also have a discussion board at work for sharing recipes and ideas.

My first two shares contained a lot of chard. Red Chard, Rainbow Chard, and another kind of Chard I never identified. I've never eaten Chard before, but I needed to learn. Someone at work posted a recipe for pie, and so this week I gave it a shot.



I used this following recipe, but halved it to match the amount of chard I had. I also replaced 2/3 of the feta cheese called for with a soft farmer's cheese. It turned out great, and I ate a lot more vegetables than usual that night for dinner.


SWISS CHARD OR SPINACH PIE

2 1/4 lbs. Swiss chard or 2 1/2 lbs. spinach
6 eggs
2 1/2 or 3 dry onions, sliced, sauteed in 1/4 c. olive oil until soft
2 bunches green onions, chopped
1 1/2 lb. feta cheese, crumbled
1/4 c. Parmesan cheese
1 tsp. white pepper
1/2 tsp. dill (optional)
1 lb. filo pastry sheets
3 tbs butter, melted
1/4 c. olive oil

Mix oil and melted butter together after butter has cooled.

Clean and wash Swiss chard or spinach, drain, dry completely. Chop Swiss chard or spinach, green onions, put in large mixing bowl with the sauteed onions. Add crumbled feta cheese, Parmesan, add slightly beaten eggs to mixture, white pepper and dill. Mix well.

Grease an 11 1/2 x 17 1/2 inch baking pan with butter and oil mixture. Add 6 pastry sheets on bottom of greased pan, spread each with the oil and butter mixture, sprinkle with the Swiss chard or spinach mixture alternating the pastry sheets and Swiss chard mixture. Cover with 6 individually buttered sheets. Pour the remaining butter and oil on top. Bake at 350 degrees for 1 hour. Cool and cut in squares.

I love my credit union

Most businesses I deal with that involve regular statements and the exchange of money are just necessary evils, but the APL Federal Credit Union is a different kind of beast. There are two branches in Howard County now; the one on McGaw Rd is where I usually go.

The way it is set up was confusing to me at first, but now I love it. There is no bank of tellers hidden behind bullet proof glass, no long lines, no hassle. It's a wide open, pleasant space, and when I go in I meet one of the tellers at a free-standing desk to work out whatever exchange I need. I don't have to fill out deposit or withdrawal slips, instead, I just tell them my member number and show an ID. The people there are always nice and helpful, and nobody ever mumbles "Thankyouhaveanice day" while looking another direction. I'm sure most banks do this now, but the free online bill pay feature has changed my life. I got my last two car loans through them, and a credit card, and I've never had a problem. I originally resisted moving my accounts to APL when I moved here because of the lack of ATMs. But who uses ATMs anymore? OK, I'm sure plenty of people do, but I have found it quite easy to do without. It is easy to stop in while I'm out on other errands, and I actually like being able to walk in and talk to someone friendly for a moment instead of standing at a machine. They have coffee for members in the morning, and a small lounge with wifi should I need to stop and check anything on the computer. Remarkably civilized.

I think anyone in the county can become a member these days, but my husband has had an account there since he was a child because his father worked for APL for his entire career. Back in the day, only employees of APL could join the credit union, and in fact, it used to be in a secure area of APL that nobody else could even get to, including family members. He has a great story about how it worked when he was in high school. First he called the credit union to explain exactly what he wanted, and then arranged a time to meet in a non-secure area of the APL campus. A teller would bring a cash box and a receipt and make the transaction sitting at a table in the library. I love that bit of history.

Social Media challenge

I had the pleasure of meeting with a small group of people (including local bloggers JessieX who set the whole thing up, Cherie Beck,and Chris Bachmann this Sunday to listen to a talk by Ken Fischer on social media and how it can foster transparency, participation, and collaboration in the federal government. He will be presenting to some government folks this week, and this was a dry run with like-minded geeks to get some feedback. (The nice folks at the Second Chance Saloon in Oakland Mills kindly agreed to open the doors early for us, and then we partook of the food afterward. The veggie basket was good.)

His focus was on government, but I listened to everything from my lens of small to mid-size business entity, and the message is the same. That's the wonderful thing about big picture thinking - patterns can be found that appear in multiple situations, and the only thing that changes is the scale and the details. In the case of communication, participation, and collaboration, the larger the group of people (e.g. the federal government and U.S. citizens) the harder it is to do effectively, and the more important it is to attempt to do well. What changes between a group of 5, a group of 500, and a group of 50,000 is the method.

I'm glad to hear that Obama is pushing for transparency in government. However, I'm jaded enough to realize that this won't be fast or easy, if it is even possible. People in charge often say the right things, but when it comes time for them or their reports to commit to actual, personal change in the way things are done, it often becomes clear that they have no actual desire to do this. It just sounded good.

Social Media as a means of connecting people definitely means a real change in how things are done for most organizations, especially the government. Is it change they want? It all sounds good from a citizen's point of view: trust, accountability, transparency, participation, yeah! Bring it on! I suspect that most government beaurocrats don't want to sign up for more accountability though. They may not want to have their name or their face behind any words that go out there, and we know the personal touch is important in a social media world. Do they really want to open up the gates and let citizens in to voice their opinions and let them actually participate? This is all frightening, threatening change. It's a great goal, but I suspect a very difficult one to achieve. I applaud Ken and wish him luck in selling social media's worth this week.

The lesson goes both ways. None of this is about the tools. It is about the people. Tools come and go at the drop of a hat, changing easily and rapidly. People, however, do not.

stories in the snow

I went for a walk this morning with my husband at Meadowbrook Park. Everything was covered in a perfect, powdery layer of white. We followed the circuit around the park, on a path that wasn't shoveled, and saw that we were not the first people to take a walk this morning. A lone walker and a dog had been there before us, and their tracks in the snow told a story. The walker's footprints maintained a relatively straight line along the path, while the dog's zigzagged along, veering off into the weeds or down across one of the ponds and back, where they circled around a point along the walker's trajectory, and zipped away again. At several points, where the dog and the walker intersected, there was a small cluster of footprints in one place, as though dog had run up, nosed her owner, who then turned and pet her or ruffled her fur for a moment before moving on. Another story was told in the snow on a frozen pond, where the dog's prints ended in a wide swath of clear ice, followed by a messy series of paw prints and long, narrow streaks. There had been a fall and a slide and a frantic attempt to get up and regain balance there. I wondered if the walker had seen and laughed.

We left a few stories of our own. Once, Roger suddenly lost footing on a slippery patch and was down hard and quickly, leaving a smeared body image on the ground. Later, we found another sheet of ice under the snow on the path. First Roger lost his footing, slid sideways, tried to catch himself, slid again, and regained balance just as my foot slid off to one side. I twisted my body around to keep from falling, while Roger reached out to help, and we ended up in each other arms, holding on for safety and laughing at our circus antics. I turned and looked back at the chaotic tracks we had left and wondered if the next person would be able to divine what had happened there.

Crowdsourced Coffee

A sample of Joffrey's new coffee flavor arrived in the mail this weekend, and the package amused me enough that I want to share:

Joffrey's Coffee 2.0, the specially engineered, highly optimized flavorful coffee developed for hard working techies and social media lovers.

The package includes a list of categories and tags that apply to the new flavor, and the included installation instructions warn: "Do not disconnect while enjoying."

The "2.0" thing is seriously overdone, but for some reason this gave me a chuckle anyway. Thanks, Joffrey's.

Monumental Rocks

The original plans for this weekend were to be far away on a camping trip; instead, busy life left me without a plan and I stayed local. Not long ago, I got tired of finding my own way in Patapsco State Park, and ordered a map, which I broke out on Saturday to begin anew the exploration of Patapsco.

I was pleased to discover that the map had been produced by Tom Rabenhorst, from the geography department at UMBC. I learned many of my own mapmaking skills from him, years back, when I took several cartography classes for fun. We actually started a trail mapping project of Patapsco with him in the last class I took, but didn't get far. Luckily, the project went on without us, because the map is extremely useful.

There really is a lot more to the park system and the trails than I had managed to discover on my own, though not through lack of trying. In fact, part of my reason for getting the map was to verify that some of the trails I had been enjoying really were part of the park and that I wasn't trespassing on someone's property. Saturday, we explored some rarely used and never maintained trails out near Sykesville, along the river. Afterwards, I took a detour and toured Soldier's Delight Environmental Area. While there I was treated with a rare (for me) sighting of two American Kestrals, showing off in the bright sunlight. The first chromium in the country was mined there, I learned, and the old choate mine is still there looking like an except from an old cartoon.

Sunday, again working from the map, we decided to visit an old granite quarry, also in Patapsco, from which many of the monuments in D.C. and Maryland were made. It is full of water now, and though there are signs declaring that swimming is prohibited, it is a tempting notion. The pool is in an idyllic, secluded setting in the woods, accessible from many lovely, peaceful trails through the park. And on the way there, I saw two more kestrals.

At the end of the day, I reflected, as I often do, how lucky I am to have such a nice variety of parks available to me all within a short drive.