Finally, Some Sweet Health News

Proof, at last, that chocolate is a wonder food! Yes, I know I’ve thousands of words debunking bad science and bogus ideas about health and bodies. (Offline, it’s upwards of a thousand pages.) But I’m also on record as supporting the health benefits of red wine and coffee (oh, and more on coffee here and here, for nervous new moms). And now, with chocolate, we’ve got the trifecta! A yummy, healthy hattrick!

From Moonstruck Chocolate in Champaign, Illinois, posted by Flicker user eszter, used under a Creative Commons license.

The bottom line is that a meta-study just published in the British Medical Journal found that the people who ate the most chocolate were  37% less likely to have cardiovascular disease and 29% less likely to suffer a stroke. No consistent, measurable impact was seen on diabetes or heart failure. Popular reporting on the new findings has actually been mighty thin, beyond the gleeful headlines. The New York Times and the medical newswire Ivanhoe both offered up the bare bones: the good news, plus a few cautionary phrases about the need for further research and a disclaimer that you shouldn’t just go hog out on chocolate because OH NOES, THE FATZ!

So I took a peek at the study, which is freely available on line. As all important research should be! I don’t care if we historians have to go through a library; the people who want to read my work know where to find me, anyway. But health is a public good, such research is often publicly underwritten, and most medical journals are part of a rapacious oligopoly raking in 40% profits on other people’s work. Earlier this week, the Guardian compared these journals to Rupert Murdoch, except with extra, surplus, bonus evil. Kudos to the BMJ for bucking this trend and letting regular folks view the full text without ponying up $35 or more for the privilege.

On to the study itself, which is a review of seven earlier studies that were mostly observational in character. None were randomized and controlled, so probably the whole lot would be discarded as rubbish by the Cochrane Review. They largely relied on questionnaires administered to patients, which raises the specter of recall bias. (I often can’t remember what I had for lunch yesterday.) As in any meta-study, comparison is difficult because the individual studies relied on different measures and methods. But they weren’t crap science, either (that was the point of excluding other studies that weren’t adequately rigorous or informative).

Importantly, most of the studies under review did make serious attempts to control for confounding variables (even though this reader was prepared to forgive just about any methodological flaw):

Five of the seven studies included in this meta-analysis reported a significant reduction in the risk of developing cardiometabolic disorders associated with higher levels of chocolate intake (one on cocoa intake), even after adjustment for potential confounders, including age, physical activity, body mass index, smoking status, dietary factors, education, and drug use. Although we did not find any experimental studies (randomised controlled trials) evaluating the effect of chocolate on hard cardiometabolic outcomes, our findings corroborate those of previous meta-analyses of experimental and observational studies in different populations related to risk factors for cardiometabolic disorders.

In other words, the literature is pretty consistent: chocolate is good for the heart and your whole cardiovascular system. And contrary to how some commenters at the Times were trying to spin it, those benefits were not negated by fat, whether in the chocolate or in the human consumer. They accrued even in people who ate the cheap, sugary stuff (though this is one area where I’d like to see research, which would no doubt confirm my own prejudice in favor of very dark chocolate). I am not surprised by this, since chocolate milk has already gotten the Dr. SunGold stamp of healthy hedonism.

Another way in which this strikes me as pretty good science: The authors point to a couple of plausible biological mechanisms that could make chocolate protective, which include “increasing the bioavailability of nitric oxide, which subsequently might lead to improvements in endothelial function, reductions in platelet function, and additional beneficial effects on blood pressure, insulin resistance, and blood lipids.” Nitric oxide, as you may recall, is the linchpin behind the effectiveness of a certain little blue pill. Viagra was initially under development as a cardiovascular drug that just happened to have felicitous effects on blood vessels located further south.

So in conclusion, if your chocolate bar is still rigid after 4 hours, you may want to consult your physician. Or you could just take it in hand and nibble it ’til it softens. Melting it into a hot fudge sauce is another medically advisable option. And remember: all that erotic enjoyment is good for you!

As for me, I’m trying to get a syllabus together this evening, so no cocoa-inspired sexytimes for me! But I just poured a glass of red wine and broke out oa square of the dark stuff. For breakfast, it’ll be my classic homemade mocha with Snowville milk. Now some intrepid researcher just needs to reveal the wonder nutrients in cheese.

From Chocolatier Blue in Lincoln, Nebraska, taken by Flickr user J. Paxon Reyes, used under a Creative Commons license.

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A Heartfelt Apology to the Turnip

My deepest apologies to any turnips who feel slighted by the previous post’s title.

In so many, many way, turnips have far more to offer than John Kasich. For one, turnips are strikingly prettier than Kasich, as evidenced by the photo in my last post. For good measure, here is more documentary evidence of their comeliness:

(Photo by Flickr user wikioticslan, used under a Creative Commons license.)

I shall refrain from posting a photo of Kasich here because I like my blog to be visually pretty even when I write about doom and gloom. (Srsly. This has been Kittywampus policy from the get-go.) Besides, his mug was all over the banner ads on Alternet (!!) throughout the fall, and I’d be just as happy if I never saw it again.

Another way turnips are unlike Kasich: They have never once threatened to run their bus over anyone, having no bus at their command and also being rather timorous vegetables. Quoth Kasich:

“If you think you’re going to stop us, you’re crazy. You will not stop us. We will beat you … This is our chance. Please leave the cynicism and political maneuvering at the door … If you’re not on the bus, we’ll run over you with the bus. And I’m not kidding.”

—John Kasich, Republican and governor-elect of Ohio, said at a luncheon for state lobbyists.

By comparison, turnips are more likely to roll with you. They’ll never roll over you – nor roll you over. They are political naïfs: earnest and unassuming, with their feet planted firmly in the earth, their convictions deeply-rooted.

That hasn’t stopped Margaret Atwood from proposing a turnip for Prime Minister of Canada. Atwood declared: “I’d vote for a turnip if it was accountable, transparent, a parliamentary democrat, and listened to people.”

Sounds about right.

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Tuesday Recipe: Howard’s Cream Candy

Howard was a singular figure: a gay man in a tiny mid-North Dakotan town in the middle decades of the previous century. Courtenay had just under 300 in-town residents according to the 1940 census (trend: declining). It had lady elders running the Presbyterian church (first and foremost, my grandma), a general store, and plenty of orderly, hard-working, meat-eating farmers. Courtenay had its own grain elevator. It had various misfits and outsiders, most of whom my grandma befriended; some she even took into her home as boarders. What Courtenay didn’t have: a mate for Howard.

Howard, you see, was the misfittiest of the misfits. He was the only gay man in Courtenay and – we believe – for miles around. He did excellent work at the store. In his spare time, he perfected various housewifely arts: knitting, crochet, sewing, candy-making. Still no mate was forthcoming. It goes without saying that my grandma befriended him warmly. (Today she’d make a fine fag hag.) I was the greedy beneficiary of this, because he was still stitching up snazzy Barbie clothes circa 1970.

Howard didn’t get such a sweet deal. He lived an unpartnered life, alone (except for a few friends like my grandma) and I suspect celibate, until late in his days, when he went into retirement and moved to the next largest town, Jamestown. There, he met another like-minded and like-oriented gentlemen. Together they enjoyed their golden years.

Whenever I think of the joy Howard found in his final years, I don’t know whether to smile or weep.

His cream candy just might make you do both. It’s simple to make, though it takes some time and patience while you’re cooking it.

Ingredients:

• 2 cups evaporated milk
• 3 cups sugar
• 1 stick butter
• pinch of salt
• 1 teaspoon vanilla – be generous

Using a very heavy pot, melt the butter, sugar, and 1 cup of the evaporated milk until it reaches a boil. I needed to go pretty close to high heat to get the process started. Once you’re boiling, set a timer for 10 minutes and turn down the heat. You want to keep the candy at a boil for 10 minutes. If your heat source is too strong, you’ll see chunks of caramel begin to form at the bottom of the pot. That’s a signal to dial back the heat. (I saw enough of those chunks that I started frantically bailing them while stirring vigorously with my other hand.)

If you don’t already have a candy thermometer, an hour ago would be a good time to have bought one. If your candy is at a boil and you’re lacking a thermometer, corral a lover, roommate, or random wino on the street to buy you one.

When your ten minutes are up, add the second cup of evaporated milk, then go back to your stirring. You are aiming to hit a sweet space just above “soft ball” stage but still below “hard ball.” This will take a while – for me, perhaps 20 minutes? Once you think you’ve got the right temperature, remove the pot from heat. Let it cool for three minutes or so – not much longer or the candy will have reverted to solid. Beat it with a mixer on high, adding the vanilla and salt. Then smear into a pre-buttered dish. I used an 8 1/2 by 11 inch pyrex pan, but I don’t think this is critical. At this point, Howard’s candy will behave a bit like fudge. Let cool in the pan at room temp, cut, and serve! (If the pieces are super-sticky, you probably didn’t cook it long or hard enough. Expose them to air overnight.)

Serve to anyone who appreciate a good sugar confection with no nutritional value – unless you consider a good backstory to be healthy for the soul. Howard left this earth over a quarter century ago. If there’s an afterlife worth living, it surely includes his candy.

(I thought about trying to illustrate this post, but frankly, the candy is beige, and I’ve got nothing purty to decorate them.)

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Mother-Blaming Alert: You Are What Your Mother Eats

Earlier this week, I talked to my husband and kids, who are keeping the fires burning in Ohio while I’m visiting family in California. All of them were aggrieved. My husband was planning to fix broccoli and noodles for dinner. Both boys were insisting that they would not eat it and furthermore never had liked broccoli. Never mind that two reliable witnesses (both of their parents) have seen them eat it with gusto! The standoff ended when the broccoli was discovered to have both mold and bugs.

You might imagine that this was simply an instance of children being picky and ornery. You would be wrong. New research shows that I am to blame!

When I saw the headline on the medical news wire Ivanhoe – “Pregnancy Diet Predicts Food Choices of Children” – I figured it would insinuate that mommy is at fault. But the actual article was much worse. It managed to blame mothers directly in its very first sentence:

If you’re a mother to a finicky child, then you may be to blame for his or her picky taste.  A new study conducted at the University of Colorado School of Medicine uncovers the possibility that a mother’s diet during pregnancy can both familiarize the unborn baby with specific scents and tastes and directly influence what the child will later prefer to eat or drink.

“This highlights the importance of eating a healthy diet and refraining from drinking alcohol during pregnancy and nursing,” lead researcher Josephine Todrank was quoted as saying.  “If the mother drinks alcohol, her child may be more attracted to alcohol because the developing fetus ‘expects’ that whatever comes from the mother must be safe.  If she eats healthy food, the child will prefer healthy food.”

I’m dizzy with those leaps of logic. How did we jump straight from food to alcohol – the kryptonite of mother-blaming? And how many children are attracted to alcohol, anyway? Yes, fetal alcohol syndrome is a serious problem among the offspring of binge drinkers. I don’t see a lot of kids clamoring for a glass of Merlot. In fact, we’ve let our kids taste beer and wine, when they expressed curiosity, just so they could discover that it tasted “pooey” to them.

Read a little farther and you learn that Todrank et al. tested their hypothesis on newborn mice. For better or worse, mice don’t have much of a culinary culture. They aren’t tempted by the toys in Happy Meals. Nor are they exposed to my delicious vegetarian chili. Even in terms of the mouse lifecycle, one wonders whether the pups acquired a broader range of tastes as they grew. Also, mother mice are never told to drastically limit their diet while breastfeeding due to a colicky or restless pup.

My firstborn child tolerates much more spice than I do. He eats chard and Thai curry and Kalamata olives with gusto. My second son? He’d live on candy, breakfast cereal, hard-boiled eggs, Kraft mac-n-cheese, and more candy if we’d let him.

If this study has any applicability to humans, you’d expect to see the same pattern in every family: the firstborn should be a foodie, while subsequent children – conditioned by the relatively bland diet that families often adopt while feeding a toddler – should be pickier. You’d also expect the children of my spice-loving friends to be omnivores, yet many of them are pickier than my younger son.

It may well be that the biological effects on taste and smell that Todrank et al. found in mice have some applicability to humans. If so, it’s heavily filtered through culture. As parents generally know, young children usually have much more restricted tastes than their parents. I, for one, forced myself to eat broccoli during pregnancy even though it triggered nausea – and look where it got me!

Can we stop with the mother-blaming already? Most women consume a reasonably well-balanced diet during pregnancy. The few who don’t are usually either poor or plagued by hyperemesis gravidarum (that’s medicalese for uncontrollable barfing). Let’s not make mothers feel guilty because they failed to eat their brussel sprouts.

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Of Tofu, Pop-Tarts, and Boobs

Addressing a proposal in Australia to make baby formula a prescription-only product, Spilt Milk strikes the perfect balance between breastfeeding advocacy and respect for women’s individual situations, experiences, and autonomy.

As a lactivist I obviously have a problem with the marketing of infant formula and any implication that it is as good as, or better than, breast milk. But as a human being I also know that people are hurt, seriously hurt, when they feel judged and shamed and when they are exhaustedly holding a hungry, crying, baby at 2:30 am and it feels like no one can help them.

Removing systemic barriers to breastfeeding certainly may require improved measures to reduce the popularity of formula – popularity which can be attributed to decades of marketing not only to the public but to health professionals. A big part of that marketing is about convenience: huge displays in chemist shops and regular sales at the supermarket of products in familiar-looking tins add to the impression of ease of use and the normalisation of artificial feeding. But whether we like it or not, formula and its ready availability is important to many families. Removing that now feels like a stick where a carrot should be.

Give parents the tools to make sound decisions that benefit them and their babies. Give parents not only choices, but supported, realistic choices. Don’t tell a woman who has to go out of the home to work, or who has other children to look after and little support, that the choice to dedicate perhaps days to increasing her milk supply through frequent feeding and skin-skin contact to avoid supplementing with formula is an easy one: it clearly is not. Education and information are hugely important but they are only part of the picture when practical barriers still so often interfere with breastfeeding relationships.

Adding practical barriers to formula use, as I think this proposal would, isn’t a particularly kind way to help parents. Being caught between a rock and a hard place doesn’t make the rock seem any easier to budge: it just makes it hurt more to be stuck there.

(There’s lots more where this came from.)

I want to zero in on the problem of shaming. It’s illuminating to shift the focus away from infants and toward the choices that we adults make about our own bodies.

For instance: I had a super healthy dinner tonight: baked tofu, locally-grown Carola potatoes, locally-grown watermelon, and sliced golden tomatoes that I grew from seed. (I had been trying to grow these ‘maters, Aunt Gertie’s Gold, since I read rave reviews about them on Garden Web, but managed to kill them on the first attempt by mixing in too much organic fertilizer when I planted them out. Another year, they failed to germinate. This year – success!) I added a dab of butter to the potatoes and marinated the tofu in teriyaki sauce. I was in late-summer heaven.

But last night? Late after the kids were in bed? I ate a strawberry Pop-Tart. And damn, was that good too.

What if someone had decided to shame me about that Pop-Tart? Would that have caused me to ascertain that those potatoes were also organically grown, instead of just sustainably? Might I have foregone the butter? (Admittedly, if I’d been feeling well instead of ushering out a nasty GI infection, that pat of butter would have blossomed.)

Hell No!

I would have had a Pop-Tart for dessert.

Now, luckily people have not often shamed me for my Pop-Tart weakness. We don’t eat them regularly. My kids love them precisely because a Pop-Tart is a pink unicorn in their world, and a yummy one, at that. Most crucially, though: I am NOT FAT. And therefore I can only shamed along the “bad mommy” axis for keeping Pop-Tarts in stock; I’m pretty impervious to fat-shaming. (Fat-shaming would surely be worth a whole ‘nother post, and this post would be a whole lot different if not for my thin privilege.)

Of course, “bad mommy” shaming is the main tactic used against women who don’t conform to the loftiest ideals of breastfeeding practice. They’re told in no uncertain terms that their child’s survival depends on what they feed him or her. And they’d better feed mother’s milk, but then the true shaming begins. The new mother is eating all wrong! At least, this must be true, or the baby would settle better, sleep longer, give up his eight-hour crying jags. And so they’d better watch out for garlic! Peanuts! Soy! Cow’s milk! Eggs! That dejected bottle of prune juice, purchased solely in the hope of warding off postpartum constipation? Might as well dump it, dear; no one else in your family will go near it.

Through all this, the mother is trying to suss out her child’s new and changing needs. If she’s poor and/or not white, the “well-meant” advice may well come wrapped in a thick wrapping of paternalism. How’s she supposed to develop her sense of mastery and competency in this hullaboo of “Yer doin’ it rong!”

Really, what new mothers need is respect for the fact that they still are humans, and that their body remains their own. The baby has a moral claim on breastmilk, sure; the mother has a moral claim on being an autonomous person. In most cases, she also is willing to make very significant sacrifices for her baby – her sleep, bodily fluids, her illusion of invulnerability,  the very minerals from her bones. Shame her, though, and you’ve shortcircuited her chance to figure out what combination of sacrifices (because there will be sacrifices) could help her child thrive without eviscerating her as a woman – as a person.

And darn it – sometimes every mother needs a Pop-Tart. Mine was strawberry. Toasted. And I haven’t breastfed since spring 2003, so how much more do new mothers need a Tart? I don’t believe food should have to be earned through moral machinations, but I do tend to think that I’ve got a lifetime entitlement to Pop-Tarts. I’m certain that there’s still one box of brown sugar/cinnamon in the basement. I will eat it with utter lack of shame. Next morning, with nothing but a Tart headache, I will help my kids get their reasonably healthy breakfasts and lunches. They are growing. I’m pretty sure we’re doing something right. Quite possibly something that deserves a Pop-Tart and champagne celebration.

I’d be interested in your metaphorical Pop-Tarts – and that goes for non-parents, too. What small self-indulgences keep you afloat? How do you gird yourself against scolds?

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Salmonella Culprit DeCoster: His Morality Is a Big Goose Egg

By now, you may have heard that the source of the recent salmonella outbreak is a single egg baron in Iowa, Austin “Jack” DeCoster. What you might not have heard: He’s just as reckless with his human employees as with his hens.

At Grist, Tom Philpott reports that in 2002, five undocumented female migrant workers brought criminal charges alleging that they had been raped by supervisors while at work. In a subsequent EEOC lawsuit, DeCoster settled for $1.5 million dollars. He has also been fined for housing immigrant workers in deplorable rat-infested conditions , for having employees handle dead animals and manure with their bare hands, and for repeated water-safety violations (some stemming from his hog farms). Philpott concludes:

The outrage here is not that Wright County Eggs has released nearly half a billion tainted eggs into the market, exposing untold numbers of people to sickness. DeCoster’s record of abuse — of people and the environment — has taught anyone who’s paying attention to expect such things from his operations.

The outrage is that regulatory authorities at both the state and national levels have allowed him to continue hiring workers and producing food as violations piled up.

(Read the rest here.)

Yes. But the problem isn’t just Jack DeCoster, even if the current outbreak is traceable entirely to his operations. It also goes beyond our lax regulations and their even laxer enforcement. The issue goes to the core of how we eat: our dependence on large-scale farming.

As I noted when swine flu first emerged, factory farming is a public health threat on a number of levels, including the breeding of novel viruses and bacteria. In addition, such farms routinely use antibiotics to control the diseases that inevitably erupt when you concentrate thousands or hundreds of thousands (!!) of animals. This is creating a perfect chance for bacteria to mutate into drug-resistant forms. It’s undermining our ability to effectively treat human diseases. And while some industrial farming operations may treat their workers well, DeCoster is not alone in exploiting them.

The overall problem is that industrial agriculture is geared to making profits, first and foremost – and the quest for profit-maximization has eclipsed human values. This has happened in many industries, of course, but it can be deadly in agriculture because of its direct impact on our food supply and public health.

DeCoster exemplifies sheer callousness to the human and animal wreckage he and his ilk have fostered.

• The hens crowded together, suffering from mutual aggression and sitting in their own feces.
• Their chicks, sickened with salmonella, who brought the infection to another industrial egg operation.
• The undocumented women whose bodily integrity was violated by supervisors who exploited a lawless atmosphere.
• All the other workers living and working in filth.
• And now the rest of us, who could be infected by a simple sunny-side up egg.

Thorough cooking kills salmonella, as Salon’s Francis Lam reminds us. From my own experience, I know that’s not quite enough. The cook who handled the raw eggs needs to wash her or his hands very thoroughly. The worst “tummy flu” I’ve had hit me after I’d boiled a bunch of eggs for dyeing at Easter and, distracted by a house full of company, hadn’t paid much heed to hand-washing. I was the only person who got sick, but I was down for a week, so immobilized that a girlfriend had to drop by to check on me and deliver ginger ale. I’m sure it was salmonella, caught from the shells. I can be glad I was young and healthy when it hit. And yes, those eggs came from factory farms (albeit in Germany, so they were subject to some regulation).

These days, I buy Kroger’s organic free-range eggs when I don’t have a local source. When my friends’ chickens are laying, I don’t have to buy eggs at all (and they just gave me three this evening – yippee!). There’s never a perfect guarantee of safe food, but our odds improve dramatically when we don’t rely on industrial mass production. And when we eat an egg from happy hens, we can be pretty confident that no humans have been treated cruelly, either.

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In Which I Acquire a Hypodermic Needle

I’m not planning to convert my Ph.D. to an M.D. anytime soon, nor to start mainlining heroin. But I did purchase a hypodermic needle this weekend. I’m using it to doctor … my summer squash plants.

Yes, that’s right. I’ve been shooting up my squash. My old enemy, the squash vine borer, has taken up residence in my garden again. I recognized her because she comes around every year. I’d hoped in vain to avoid her this summer because I planted my squash seeds so late – June 22 – that the borers should no longer be flying. Or so say all the Internet sources I consulted (one of which claimed they’d be done by the Fourth of July).

I know, I know: never trust the Internet.

And so, I’m doing battle with the squash vine borer. The single adult I saw isn’t the issue, actually; it’s the offspring that are trying to kill my plants. They are grubs. I find them so repugnant that I’ll just say they are the stuff of bad sci fi (and no, they aren’t pictured anywhere in this post, so grub-o-phobes like me are safe to read on). They grow to well over an inch while tunneling through the vines, girdling them, and killing the plant from within. Their calling card is a small pile of yellow crud called “frass” that appears at the base of the plant. Think of them much like the red crosses daubed on the doors of plague sufferers: once the frass appears, you know the plant is doomed.

But this year, I decided to fight back. Yesterday afternoon, I bought a bottle of bacteria (bacillus thuringiensis, aka BT), which will infect and (I hope) kill the grubs before they’re able to do much damage. Using my new hypodermic needle, I squirted a solution of this into as many vines as possible. (Summer squash has hollow stems.) Then I poured the rest around the base of the plants. I’m planning to spray with it weekly. Or daily. I’m determined to win, this time.

However, I worried that the BT wouldn’t be too slow to kill the larvae already at work. So, again per the advice of the Intertubes, I took a sharp knife and slit the stems just above the frass. There, I discovered two evildoers and dispatched them immediately. (I was, after all, wielding a sharp knife.)

During all this carnage, I also spotted cucumber beetles feeding on the blossoms of the summer squash. They were also attacking my butternut vines (which are so vigorous that they, in turn, are menacing New York and Tokyo, much like last year). A massive thunderstorm was moving in on us, but just before it broke, I planted a couple of yellow sticky traps. Today, despite the storm, they looked like this.

Ha!

Unfortunately the spotted cucumber beetles are more resistant than the striped variety. (Are they smarter? Or just stronger? At any rate, they are refudiating my traps.) After dinner tonight, I chased some of them with the Dust Buster. Hey, I may look ridiculous vacuuming my squash, but I’m determined to stick with organic methods

And this WILL be the year I prove I can grow zucchinis – or at least yellow summer squash. This little beauty is about 4” long.

If I can nurse my plants until this teensy baby squash matures, it’ll be a personal record for me.

And yes, I do realize that zucchini is the one veggie that everyone can grow by the bushel.

This evening, I talked on the phone with my mom and learned that shooting up cucurbits actually has a family history. Way back before I was born, my dad and their neighbor Fran took a hypodermic to some watermelon. They pumped it up with vodka instead of BT. And yes, I know some folks do this for parties, but these melons … were still on the vine. They died on the vine. Oops.

Measured against that history, one-and-a-half yellow summer squash may well be a family record. By my personal standards, it’s already a bountiful harvest. Most years, my yield of summer squash has been a big old ZERO. But oh, I dream of such excess that I’ll have to turn squash into baked goods.

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Poor Lovelorn Me: Spain 1, Germany 0

You know you shouldn’t do it. You know your heart will be broken. Your beloved is unsteady, fickle, transient. He’s bound to let you down. When he does, you’ll be crushed. And your friends will either be equally crushed by the same unreliable cad – or they’ll mock you for being such a trite stereotype. Now you feel bereft and stupid. Worse, they’re right … unless reversing genders is enough to undo the stereotype?

This is what happens when you fall for a soccer team. Similar heartbreak transpired in 2006 after Germany’s semifinal loss to eventual world champion Italy. But in 2006, we (that is, my family and I) were buoyed by the spirit of the whole German nation celebrating a World Cup in their collective backyard. Games were being played a few miles from our apartment. Strangers were smiling foolishly at strangers, and that in too-cool, too-busy, too-insular Berlin! We also had the lovely distraction of Jürgen Klinsmann as coach.

This year, the tournament is on a distant (though very deserving) continent. German flags still fly from people’s cars and dangle from balconies. But with last night’s 1-0 loss to Spain, the “air is out” of it, as they say here. I picture this as our hearts hanging empty, like deflated balloons, though I supposed only a foreigner would come up with this image. Walhalla (where we watched the game) was the Saloon of Despond; the Spanish team was an Armada that appeared seemingly out of nowhere. Today my husband decreed it was time to take the German flags off the back of the kids’ bikes. (All three of us – Bear, Tiger, and I – screeched NO, it is not time!)

So just what happened yesterday? Well, Spain delivered its best game of the tournament. They showed the Germans how a passing game is really done. The German’s version of passing and counter-attacking got no traction until the Spanish side scored on a set piece with just 15 minutes to go. Carlos Puyol was utterly undefended by a team known for decades as punctilious, whatever its other faults. No one marked up. Puyol headed it into the net. Germany rallied, but they were too late. Given the number of chances Spain had woven out of its passing game, the German defense actually did just fine with last-minute saves – except for that one fatal moment.

To quote the excellent “Mike’s Best Guess” at Open Salon:

Die Mannschaft were finally eliminated because they forgot to be, well, German during decisive moment of Wednesday’s semifinal against Spain.

That decisive moment came in the 73rd minute when Carles “Rambo” Puyol barreled unmarked through the box like a crazed Spanish kamikaze fighter and headed the winning goal past the towering German Luftwaffe.

It was shocking. It was the little, skillful, artistic Spaniards beating the Germans by being better at, well, being German. …

… Instead of scoring from open play (the way they probably would have preferred), the Spaniards out-Germaned the Germans by converting on a header by a center back from a corner kick — and by grinding out a result despite often failing to play beautiful soccer.

To put it more bluntly, the Spanish were well worth their win, but the goal probably should have never happened. Rambo Puyol, for all his grit and determination, is 5-foot-10: not short for a soccer player by any means, but not tall by German standards. But even with their sizable height advantage, the Germans failed to do what they’ve done better than anyone for decades: Mark up. Indeed, if Puyol hadn’t gotten a head to the cross, his partner in crime, the fantastically facial-haired central defender Gerard Piqué, would have.

(More here – and I agree with all but the Blitzkrieg analogy **shudder**)

Piqué, by the way, amuses Mike with his facial hair, which my son the Tiger would surely call “nifty whiskers.” Personally, I think Piqué has got some hedgehog ancestry, judging from his bristly brace of head-hair.

(This photo was shamelessly swiped from here to illustrate Piqué’s hedgehog hair and not his injuries. The Germany-Spain match was one of the least foul that I’ve seen.)

O, for another 30 minutes plus penalties! That might have won the game for Germany. We certainly weren’t going to win it through standard means. Spain were (gulp) better. Spain won verdient.

But the Spanish virtues are only half the tale. On the German side, I think two factors intensely demoralized “our Jungs” and kept them from unfurling their creativity, their passing game, and their coolly hot counterattacks:

1) The utterly unearned yellow card for a “handball” that was actually Lionel Messi’s work in the previous match against Argentina. Thomas Müller paid for Messi’s sins in a game marked by shitty officiating. Müller had to sit the game out last night, with paralysis on the right side the logical result. But Spain also managed to largely shut down Özil and Podolski as well, freezing up our entire offensive midfield.

2) The embarrassing and divisive debate in the German press on who will lead the team as captain after the World Cup. Will it be the injured star midfielder Michael Ballack, whose absence must sting terribly? (He’s old enough that this would have been his World Cup.) Or will it be the calm, even-tempered, modest defender Philip Lahm, whose leadership has been exemplary? I favor Lahm, myself, not least because I agree with my friend who thinks the team plays better without its anointed star. But allowing this debate to seep into the tabloids was just foolish. It can’t have helped the number one asset of the team, its esprit de corps. Worse yet, the gossip about the captain’s position may well have split the team. Perhaps its apearance in the boulevard press signals a disintegration within the team, in which case the leaks to the press are only a symptom of a deeper problem. At any rate, a team that can’t talk to each other probably isn’t gonna pass to each other, either.

Oh, my lovely young men, too soon departed! Why, oh why, did I let me self fall? Why so besotted, when we never had a chance?

So today I mope. I eat Nutella on Ritz crackers. I sneak licorice snails while the kids aren’t looking. I nurse my bruised feelings. I’ll be my sober self again soon. Really, I will. For now, I’m still pining for the Weltmeister title. Looks like I’ll have to settle for Waldmeister jello. With vanilla sauce. Lucky me, I’ve got some in the fridge. It’s just not quite solidified. Much like the German team.

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Playdoh – The Smell of Nostalgia?

One of the little pleasures of parenthood is the sudden surfaces of memories from deep within the body. Sometimes, when my kids were younger and I was trying to ease a snug shirt over a noggin, I’d flash back to how it felt when my own mother tried to help me out of a too-tight shirt. I’ve noticed, too, that Playdoh throws me back to my own childhood whenever I get a whiff of it.

Smell, it turns out, isn’t just the most potent trigger of nostalgia – an experience I’ll be you’ve noted too. The types of smells that short-circuit time are also generationally and geographically specific, according to neurologist Alan Hirsch:

We’ve also looked at geographic distributions of olfactory evoked nostalgia. While baked goods are number one, people from the East coast describe the smell of flowers as making them nostalgic for childhood. In the South it was the smell of fresh air, and in the Midwest it was the smell of farm animals. On the West coast it was the smell of meat cooking or meat barbequing. It also depends on when you were born. For people born from 1900 to 1930, natural smells made them nostalgic for their childhood—trees, horses, hay, pine, that sort of thing. People born from 1930 to 1980 were more likely to describe artificial smells that make them nostalgic for childhood—Playdoh, Pez, Sweet Tarts, Vapo rub, jet fuel.

(Hirsch was interviewed for Salon by Sarah Breselor; read the rest here.)

Jet fuel? Geez, were these folks the spawn of Tom Hanks’s character in The Terminal?

For me, it’s not only Playdoh that sends me back. I used to hide in our lilac bushes in front of the house in North Dakota. Another Dakotan association, hay – but also freshly cut grass – gives me the same feeling of transport through time, though cut grass also reminds me of band practice in college. As for Pez, the smell leaves me untouched, but the act of stuffing Pez into their dispenser does evoke a body memory.

What about you? What smell or other trigger puts you right back in your childhood?

Weirdly, the mild scent of petunias also makes me feel nostalgic, but for what? They weren’t a major feature of my childhood. These I photographed behind my house in Ohio a couple of weeks ago; they’re mixed in with flowering (non-edible) sage.

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Tuesday Recipe: Little Raspberry Tarts

These are a variation on the pecan tassies that I make at Christmas. The raspberry/almond combo might even be better than the original.

Tart dough:

1/2 cup butter, softened
1 3-ounce package cream cheese, softened
1 cup all-purpose flour
Filling (see below)

In a small mixer bowl, beat together butter and cream cheese. Stir in flour. Cover and chill about one hour or till easy to handle. Cut into 24 pieces. Shape into one-inch balls. Press onto bottom and up sides of ungreased 1 3/4-inch muffin cups. Fill each with one rounded teaspoon filling. Bake in a 325 F oven for 20 to 25 minutes or till done. Cool slightly in pan. Remove and cool well. Makes 24.

Almond-Raspberry Filling:

Divide 1/4 cup red raspberry preserves among pastries (about 1/2 teaspoon each). Beat together 1 egg, 1/2 cup sugar, 1/2 teaspoon real almond extract, and 1/2 cup  ground almonds. (I used Trader Joe’s almond meal, plus a handful of chopped almonds that I first blanched and popped out of their skin.) Spoon one level teaspoon of the mixture over preserves. Sprinkle with coarsely chopped sliced almonds or a whole almond. If desired, drizzle cooled baked tarts with additional red raspberry preserves (I didn’t bother).

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Tuesday Recipe: Assertive Chard

Okay, so technically I made this yesterday. And to be honest, there’s not really a recipe. The only trick to it is that you need to have 1) planted your own chard earlier in the year, and 2) nursed it through the first several hard freezes. Mine survived only thanks to the ministrations of my friend (and occasional commenter) Hydraargyrum, who covered it with a tarp while I was in California. I’ve since substituted Remay (a light agricultural row-cover fabric) for the tarp. It lets some sunlight through while trapping just enough heat. This is not a happy chard existence. It’s sort of a veal-pen for veggies. But hey, it’s already in a vegetative state.

It’s still pretty, isn’t it?

Anyway, I harvested enough yesterday to make chard greens with fried eggs and English muffins for dinner. I normally like to cook up the stems, too, but having survived several nights of 15 degrees Fahrenheit, the stems collapsed into mush. So I trimmed off as much stem as possible and cooked the greens in a non-stick pan with a splash of added water. Once they were wilted but still held a bit of shape, I added two tablespoons of butter and a dash of salt and pepper.

Here you can see the sprinkling of snow the leaves picked up as I harvested them. I’m a snow cynic, but golly, the snow sparkled like tiny diamonds.

And here’s the view from my back porch (the garden is behind the peachy garage) right after I cut the chard.

Be forewarned that there’s no way most kids will eat chard that’s this intense. My Bear, who’s pretty adventurous for a kid, wouldn’t even try it. That’s where the English muffins bridged the calorie gap.

To be honest, I prefer my chard younger and milder, but I still thought it absolutely RAWKED to be able to havest anything from my garden on the 28th of December. That’s a new record, beating the previous mark of arugula for Christmas Eve 2005. It would be really cool if my chard survives until I’ve started my first flat of seeds for next year’s garden.

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Whereupon I am Reminded: Pumpkins Don’t Grow in Cans

At 4:30 today, my husband and I settled up the idea of making a turkey-dinner-without-the-turkey for our Christmas meal. Hey, we east mostly veggie, and to be honest, the whole family could happily crawl into a barrel of my stuffing and eat our way out over the course of a week.

So I found myself in Kroger at 5 p.m. the day before Christmas Eve, which is a fool’s errand under any circumstances. Still, I found everything I needed, including duct tape (or Duck Tape, as it seems to be called these days?) for my little Bear. Until it dawned on me that maybe a turkey-dinner-without-turkey might still require a pumpkin pie.

Using my shopping cart as a batter ram (a skill I learned in German supermarkets), I jostled my way back through the store – but no canned pumpkin was to be found. Fortunately, the cashier at the register was a former student of mine, who’s still working at Kroger while he finishes school. And even more fortunately, he had answer for me.

Less fortunately, the answer was this: Kroger has been out of canned pumpkin since Thanksgiving! Something about bad weather and harvest.

Sure enough, when I consulted the google just now, I learned that heavy rains kept pumpkins from being harvested. Maybe some of them first rotted in the fields; ultimately, the ones that didn’t get picked fell victim to frost.

It is good to know I can make a pumpkin pie from butternut squash if need be. It’s probably even more salutary to be reminded that pumpkins don’t grow in cans. They grow on vines. They’re tender fruit. And when the weather and climate don’t cooperate, pumpkins are only a vague Halloween memory. I’m wishing we hadn’t left those uncarved would-be Jack-o-lanterns freeze and then liquify on our front porch.

Also, it’s sobering to realize that Libby controls virtually the whole pumpkin market.

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Tuesday Recipe: Kiss Cookies

Sugarmag has a touch of the holiday blues, but she mentioned she might make kiss cookies with her kids. So I’m posting my version of my mom’s recipe here (which I’m pretty sure is not far removed from the official Hershey recipe), in hopes that her spirit will lift while she’s in the kitchen. Maybe I can’t give you hugs, Sugarmag, but at least I can send you kisses.

Kiss Cookies

1/2 c. butter
1/2 c. peanut butter (I used Kroger’s organic chunky)
1/2 c. sugar
1/2 c. brown sugar
1 egg
2 T. cream or whole milk
1 tsp. vanilla
1 1/2 c. flour
1 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
Dark Chocolate Hersheys Kisses, 1 for each cookie

Preheat over to 350 F.

Cream together the softened butter and peanut butter. Cream well with both sugars. Beat in the egg, cream or milk, and vanilla. Then sift together the flour, baking soda, and salt. (I am lazy and usually just dump half the flour into the bowl, then stir the rising agents into the rest of the flour in the measuring cup.) Blend the dry ingredients well with the rest of the mess.

Roll batter into walnut-sized balls and place on a cookie sheet. Bake at 350 for seven minutes, then remove the cookies from the oven, place a kiss in the center of each cookie, pressing it oh so slightly down, and return the cookies to the oven for two more minutes. Don’t overbake! (This is a standard admonishment from my mom to me, and so I will gladly pass it on, because she’s right, by golly.)

My contribution to these cookies is that I swapped butter back in for Crisco, substituted chunky peanut butter for Skippy’s creamy (Mom warns against Jif), and went for the dark chocolate kisses, because mmmmm! My cookies were a bit flatter than Mom’s – I guess adding more flour wouldn’t hurt? – but they were darn good.

Mind you, I’m serious about the dark chocolate! Anyone who goes for milk chocolate is not allowed to cite this recipe as their source. So really, you need to go dark.

Makes about 2 1/2 dozen. Plan for half to be devoured while the kisses are still slightly molten. (And no, that last sentence is not intended as my entry in the Bad Sex Writing contest.)

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Yet Another Vice That’s Good for You: Chocolate Milk!

Yippee! I am always tickled to hear that yet another ostensibly bad-for-you food has been Officially Declared Healthy. Today, it’s chocolate milk, according to the New York Times.

Move over, red wine. Make room for chocolate milk. A new study suggests that regular consumption of skim milk with flavonoid-rich cocoa may reduce inflammation, potentially slowing or preventing development of atherosclerosis. Researchers noted, however, that the effect was not as pronounced as that seen with red wine.

Contrary to my usual practice, I am not going to even try to hunt down the original study. The NYT reports that it was done in Barcelona on people aged 55 and up, and that it also found cocoa elevated levels of “good” cholesterol (HDL). Also, my time is limited; while I was reading this article, the Bear popped downstairs (it was only 10:45, why on earth would he be asleep?) and extracted a promise that he and his little brother would get regular doses of chocolate milk, since they aren’t exactly eligible for red wine.

Instead, I am going to develop a personal action plan. I don’t have a personal trainer. This is as good as it’s gonna get.

1) Keep riding my bike to work, as this is my only defense against complete slothitude.

2) Stop parceling out my homemade mochas as if they were a special treat, and start considering them a staple food. Skim milk from happy cows with vitamin D + Hershey’s special dark syrup + Trader Joe’s Five-Country Fair Trade espresso brimming with antioxidants = live to be 112!

(My breskit of champions, photographed by me, Sungold)

3) Drink more red wine and less white. And no, adding food color to the white will not do the trick.

4) Await the day when the health benefits of martinis are announced. I don’t drink them often. I don’t expect the good news imminently. But I am a patient woman.

What about you, dear reader? What supposed vice would you love to see declared healthy?

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A Happy Lego Birthday

We celebrated the Bear’s tenth birthday today (only six days late) with a few of his friends and lots of Legos. The cake was a giant yellow Lego surrounded by Duplo people.

It’s made from a 9 x 13 rectangular sheet cake with eight cupcakes. (Since two mixes are required for this, you end up with 16 bonus cupcakes.) I sawed off the tops of the cupcakes, then frosted their sides and planted them upside-down in the already frosted sheet cake. Then I frosted the tops (or rather, the upended bottoms) of the cupcakes. My frosting was a little too thick for optimal spreading, but it was very buttery homemade buttercream with a dash of almond flavoring, the cake was chocolate, and no one complained. Also, in case you’re foolish enough to try this at home, you should know that getting a good Lego yellow required possibly toxic doses of food coloring (oodles of yellow plus a single drop of red).

The kids played outside for the first half of the party. I thanks the goddesses of parties for finally giving us warm weather for the Bear’s birthday – the first time ever! (One year we did a scavenger hunt as snow fell all around us.)

After the cake, the kids split up into two teams and built elaborate Duplo creations.

One team built a fancy farm. The tall figures are scarecrows.

The other team built a kitty spy city. But that was already obvious, right?

 

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Tuesday Recipe: Sungold Quiche

I’m past the peak of my tomato season. Even the cherry tomatoes have slowed way down. It almost doesn’t matter because I’m too swamped with work to make a real meal. (Today was quesadillas, sandwiched between teaching, soccer, homework, and another tidal wave of student emails.)

But this quiche was wonderful just a few weeks ago, so I want to mention it before the season is over entirely.

First things first: You will have planted Sungolds at the start of your growing season. Go out into your garden and harvest them. They’re sweetest when they’re orange, not just deep gold. Alternatively, check a local farmer’s market; they’re usually available at our Athens Farmer’s Market, in season.

Ingredients:

• One 9-inch pie crust
• 1 small onion
• 3 eggs
• Approximately 3/4 cup milk
• 1/2 to 3/4 cup fresh corn
• 3/4 cup grated cheese (I’ve used Swiss or cheddar, depending on my mood)
• Salt and pepper to taste
• A generous handful of chopped basil

I typically start with a Marie Callendar frozen crust. You can obviously make a crust of your choice, but Marie’s are pretty good, and it’s way better than never making pies on a worknight. Purists might scoff, but then, those purists might not have grown those tomatoes from seed! I guess I’m just my own kind of purist.

Preheat the over to 425. Chop the onion and saute it. While it’s cooking, whisk together the eggs, milk, salt, and pepper. Stir in the cheese, onion, corn, and chopped basil. (I used fresh corn shaved off a cob left over from the previous night’s dinner.) Pour the egg mixture into the pie crust and place the whole tomatoes as desired. I used a few red cherries here for the color contrast. I often end up bailing out a bit of the egg mixture, since I don’t really measure anything properly.

Turn the oven down to 350 at the start of baking. Bake for about an hour, or until the filling is set, taking care not to get the crust too dark.

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Tuesday Recipe: Zucchini Muffins

Upon my return from Germany 10 days ago, I harvested one massive summer squash. Since then, I’ve gotten just one more measly little yellow squash. It was delicious. My husband and I ate it with gratitude and refused to share with the kids. (They didn’t want it, so that worked out fine.) Thanks to the evil squash vine borer (avoid that link if squeamish about grubs), this was probably my first and last perfect summer squash for this season. The vine borer larvae have been severed the vines at their base and my last summer squash plant is dying.

So there was a lot of pressure on that overgrown squash to achieve transcendence, or at least muffinhood. However, the dang thing was hard as a rock. Grating marble might’ve been easier. It also had this odd green ring.

By the time I realized that my squash had suffered an unfortunate encounter with Medusa, I’d already mixed half the muffin ingredients. I was committed. And so off I trotted to the local health food store (luckily just a block away) for some zucchini.

The muffins turned out great anyway. Here’s how to make them:

Zucchini Muffins

• 3 eggs
• 1 cup oil
• 2 cups white sugar
• 2 teaspoons vanilla
• 2 cups grated zucchini
• 1 small can crushed pineapple, well drained
• 3 cups flour
• 2 teaspoons soda
• 1/2 teaspoon baking powder
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 teaspoon cinnamon
• 1/3 teaspoon nutmeg

Beat together the eggs, oil, sugar, and vanilla, until thick and foamy. Stir in zucchini and pineapple. Combine flour, soda, salt, baking powder, cinnamon, and nutmeg. Stir gently into first mixture, just to blend well.

For muffins bake at 350 degree for 25 minutes. Makes 24 muffins.

For bread, bake in two greased and floured 5×9″ pans at 350 degrees for 1 hour.

You’ll note that the instruction do not include “harvest massive squash from the garden.”

This is how my muffins turned out. They were transcendent in their own way. And the kids ate them with gusto, even though I didn’t bother giving them an alias. (The Tiger did ask if I could make ‘em without zucchini, even as he was begging for thirds.)

See, I can grow impatiens just fine. From seed. I could tell you all about that. But if I were you, I wouldn’t take any gardening advice from a wench who can’t even grow @%&*#! zucchini.

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Squirrely about Chocolate

I haven’t seen our bunnies since I returned from Germany. They’re probably pouting about the cage we put over my chard. So I got all excited when I heard a rustling sound while my husband and I were sitting on the front porch.

It wasn’t a bunny. It was a squirrel, having a big fight with this:

The pic is a little blurry, but yep, that’s Hershey’s chocolate syrup. I know it’s not from our recycling because I only go for the Special Dark syrup.

Here you can see the holes he’d already punctured in it.

He then scrambled up the silver maple tree with the bottle still in his mouth …

… and climbed higher, higher …

… until he dropped it!

He tried and failed at least once more before we gave him some privacy. Since I haven’t seen a Hershey’s bottle anyway near that tree, I hope he finally managed to tuck it into a high fork and gorge himself silly.

I’m also hoping chocolate isn’t lethal to squirrels; the Intertoobs tell me it’s not, but what do they know? I kinda like the little critters, even though they’re pesky rodents who tore up our last rainbow flag. My grandma used to feed them, and it was some of her best entertainment; there’s not much else to do when you’re 85 or 90, outliving most of your friends in a dying North Dakotan town where you only get two TV channels on a good day. I’d like to think of this squirrely chocolate treat as carrying on her tradition in some small way.

This nutty little guy is not the first squirrel on record for liking chocolate. Two years ago, a squirrel in Helsinki had his 15 minutes of fame for stealing Kinder Surprise Eggs (milk chocolate eggs with a toy inside them) from a supermarket. It was smart enough to unwrap the foil from the egg, eat the chocolate, and then abscond with the toy. Finnish authorities eventually banned the squirrel from the store, citing food safety concerns.

If that sounds paranoid, consider that Kinder Surprise Eggs are banned entirely in the U.S. – evidently because they violate a 1938 law that prohibits mixing confections and non-food items. I’m baffled at this; I don’t see any difference between the toys in Kinder Eggs and the trinkets that came in every Crackerjack box of my childhood. In fact, the Kinder toys are easier to isolate from the food because they’re always inside the chocolate egg and also enclosed in a yellow plastic egg! And what about fortune cookies??!

The chocoloate is really quite abysmal, but the toys are fun enough that during my early months in Germany, some other grad students and I used to buy Kinder Eggs just to see what toy we’d get. If your toy consisted of a bunch of tiny pieces that required assembly, you know you’d scored. My kids love them so much they soaked their dad for eight or ten of ‘em over the month we were in Berlin.

I’m sure there’s be a massive market for Kinder Eggs in the U.S. – if only our regulators weren’t quite so squirrely.

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The Economics of Crowded Veggies

A few days ago, Amanda Marcotte posted at Pandagon on the trend toward urban gardening/farming – a trend that she diagnosed through similar trend pieces in Salon. So I’m not sure if she’s right about this being an actual trend, or if we’re just seeing the media flurry around Michelle Obama’s veggie patch. But I’m glad to see any rise in gardening, if only because everything you grow makes you more conscious of the origins of your food, and thus more skeptical toward the agri-industrial complex.

Amanda worries that neophytes might give up too easily, though, or find that gardening is downright uneconomical:

What’s interesting about the trend is that it’s not really certain that growing your own garden is necessarily going to save people money, as Amy Benfer notes.  In the 1940s, Eleanor Roosevelt’s push for people to start victory gardens was incredibly effective—up to 40% of all produce grown in the country was in victory gardens.  Numbers like that would make one think that this resurgence would have similar results, but I think a lot fewer people (particularly the political foodie types that generally live in urban centers) have as much space to garden, and collectively, we have a lot less know-how.  Of course, if people stick with it for a few years, they’ll learn what works and what doesn’t, and it will start to save them money.  Of course, that requires staying put for long periods of time, which is also not so easy for modern urbanites.

(More here, including a mostly fruitless discussion – pardon the bad pun.)

I can’t create a sea change in how we see our food supply, but I can offer a few tips on the economics of small-space gardening. People shouldn’t have to reinvent the plow to discover gardening’s rewards. Giving authoritative advice feels funny to me, because I’m still a relative newcomer to gardening myself, but these few things I know. Any excellent tips in comments will be boosted into the main post, because I know I have reader who are much more accomplished gardeners than I.

First, grow what you love to eat, but bear in mind that certain veggies offer much more in return for your time and your precious garden space. Tomatoes top the list. Good quality fresh tomatoes will run you a few dollars a pound, maybe more for heirlooms. Most heirlooms are fussier and won’t bear as prolifically as hybrids, but they offer wonderful variety and flavor, so I grow them anyway. But I have some favorite hybrids, too, notably Sungold and Brandy Boy. If I bought as many Sungolds as I harvest, I’d probably spend as much as I lay out for all my vegetable garden supplies (and I tend to go all out on tomato seeds, because I’m greedy for variety).

From Virginia Tech, here’s a nifty ranking of the veggies that give you the best value for your space. The ranking is subject to debate because it depends on how you value and weight labor inputs, space constraints, and of course what you think is yummy. Still, I think it’s basically sound:

• Tomatoes
• Green bunching onions
• Leaf lettuce - and most “gourmet” greens
• Turnip (green + roots)
• Summer squash
• Edible pod peas – shelling peas give you a lot less to chew on, so look for sugar snap varieties
• Onion storage bulbs
• Beans (pole, bush) – but pole beans will keep going
• Beets – don’t forget the greens are yummy
• Carrots
• Cucumbers
• Peppers
• Broccoli
• Head lettuce
• Swiss chard

I personally am a big fan of chard, as are my resident rabbits. And I just as passionately don’t care how economical turnips are; they’d only be used for lawn bowling around my house. The list doesn’t mention radish, and I don’t either because I dislike it, but you can interplant it among your lettuce. Also, I want to put in a plug for leaf lettuce which, like chard, is cut and come again. Arugula grows like a weed and is pricey in stores but dirt cheap from your garden (pardon another bad pun). If you’re short on sunny patches, virtually all greens can tolerate some shade, whereas fruiting veggies like tomatoes really need at least six hours of sunlight, preferably more.

But oh, did I mention tomatoes are the big win, economically and culinarily?

Grow these plants if space isn’t much of an issue, or if you’ve got kids who really, really want to see a pumpkin grow:

• Corn
• Melons
• Squash
• Pumpkins

Note that the good extension agents must mean sprawling winter squash, because zucchini and other summer squash give you oodles of produce for the space they take. I planted winter squash this year despite my better judgment, and now I have to worry about it becoming the Godzilla of vegetables, tearing down the rest of my garden while I’m out of town.

While they’re not on either list, herbs don’t take much space. You can put them in a planter or window box. If you like to cook (or eat!), they’re really rewarding to grow. Yum basil!

My second tip for keeping things economical is to grow from seed whenever possible. If you don’t have a very well-lit space for seedlings indoors, you might want to buy tomato, pepper, and eggplant starts. (Assuming you can do anything with eggplant, which has always been an utter failure for me.) But it’s just folly to buy starts for melons, squash, pumpkins, or cukes. These seeds germinate easily and it’s fun to watch their big seed leaves unfold. Ditto for beans and peas, which actually resent transplanting. Among the herbs, basil and sage grow easily from seed. Other herbs tend to have tiny seeds, though mint is easy to grow anyway.

And finally, my third bit of advice is to read up a bit on intensive gardening techniques. They let you use the space you have (instead of squandering much of it for paths between rows). Also, by planting closely, you’ll shade out the weeds, though you will still save yourself lots of work if you lay down a good layer of mulch. For more info on intensive techniques, check out square foot gardening (which is useful for deciding how to space plants even if you don’t have all the raised beds, etc.) and that Virginia Tech site.

No, sorry, here’s my real final point: Do as much or as little in your garden as you enjoy. The point is to connect with the earth, get dirty, and enjoy delicious food in the end. If gardening turns into an endless chore, that won’t happen. I thought that the recent article in Alternet arguing that gardeners make better lovers was a bit overblown, but not entirely wrong: Gardening is like sex in that you should get messy, feed your senses, and enjoy it, even if you’re a bit sore the next day.

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Don’t Eat the Marshmallow

A while back, a bunch of Stanford researchers ran an experiment on some four-year-olds at the university’s childcare center. They put a marshmallow in front of each kid with instructions to not eat it while the experimenter left for 15 minutes. The kids were told they’d get two marshmallows if they didn’t eat the first one. About a third managed to wait. When the researchers checked in with them a decade or so later, the early masters of delayed gratification were doing notably better, socially and academically, than the rest.

I think of myself as a total slacker, but that may be because I’ve spent lots of time with people who would have invested both marshmallows, hoping for a good annual return. My mom likes to tell the story of how she offered the toddler-me a chocolate cookie. “Two!” I said. “No, just one.” And with that I turned my back and stomped off in a snit. So maybe I would have waited for the marshmallow.

Anyway, the idea is that we should cultivate our kids’ ability to delay gratification as a magic formula for success in later life. I utterly failed at this today. I took them to Berlin’s Labyrinth Kindermuseum and plied them with Smarties ice cream treats.

Then I rode around aimlessly on the Strassenbahn (the Berlin tram system) with them. I let them have French fries as their main course for dinner. (Ketchup is still a vegetable, yes?) In lieu of dessert, I bought them each a small stuffed animal. In short, I pandered shamelessly, since their dad is traveling for a couple of days. I think it’s okay to indulge them a little when their routine is disrupted for the worse. Honestly, if I’d had a whole bag of fresh marshmallows, I’d have handed that over to them, too.

I originally heard about the marshmallow experiment on NPR, but TED has a nice précis of it, complete with hilarious footage of kids in Colombia replicating the original experiment. In case you’re impatient, the best part – the kids – starts around 3:30. And no, there’s no prize for not skipping ahead.

posted with vodpod

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