Monthly Archives: July 2009

Greens Garage: The opposite of “Food, Inc.”

Posted on July 26, 2009 | 1 Comment

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I’m sorry that we didn’t make it to FloydFest this year, but at least we made it to Floyd, to the home of our friends Rob Neukirch and his beautiful wife Michelle. When the former owners of your formerly favorite Floyd restaurant — Oddfella’s Cantina — invite you for Sunday brunch, it doesn’t matter how much packing you have to do. You go.

On our way home, they suggested we stop by the self-serve Greens Garage — a tiny organic “Farmstand and More” that operates solely on the honor system. It’s so out off the beaten path that it doesn’t even have a sign — not unless you count the peace sign and the pieces of cardboard announcing that the peaches were in.

We bought a beautiful and heaping bag of baby lettuces for $4, another bag of sugar snap peas for $2, along with a few other goodies. Amazingly, we resisted the temptation of Nastasha’s cookies, made by a former Oddfella’s chef — but only because we were already so full from Rob’s marvelous Belgian waffles. (When he admitted that he snuck a Tablespoon of flax seed into the buckwheat/white-flour blend — see most excellent recipe below — I tried to pawn off my flax-seed oil on the spot, but sadly he declined.)

Everything in the Garage was fresh and locally produced, including local honey, regional cheeses and grass-fed beef and pork. We helped ourselves to two of the patty pan squash, which were free for the taking from a box outside the door.

We wrote up our own receipt, consulting the sales tax chart on the wall — and stuffed the cash into the provided envelope. A tabby cat wandered in and out while we were there but dutifully filed out as we left. Everything was fresh, well-marked and tidily organized — in a cinderblock building no bigger than a doublewide. 

The flier says the Greens Garage was designed for “Friends and Neighbors,” but I’ve a hunch the operators wouldn’t mind a few “come heres” showing up — as long as they adhere to the honor system.

The garage is operated by local-food movement gurus Tenley Weaver and Dennis Dove, who own Full Circle Farm and do the marketing and distribution for a larger cooperative of growers called Good Food, Good People.

Between this place — I see now why Rob only buys his lettuce greens at the Garage — and the new farmer’s market on Grandin Road, I think I’m convinced, finally, to go see the movie “Food, INC,”  although I’ll admit it’s so much easier to remain uninformed.

Our teenager is even seeing the movie today, compliments of his employer, The Isaacs Restaurant. Manager Nicole Coleman is taking her entire staff there so they can learn more about the local foods they’re promoting at the restaurant.

I fully expect him to come home and declare our house a Tyson-free zone. As long as he empties the dishwasher, I’m down.

 From Roanoke, take 221 South. About six miles miles before you get to the town of Floyd, turn right onto Roger Road, which is immediately past Ingram’s Marathon gas station. Drive exactly one mile — it feels longer on the gravel road — and you’ll see it on the left. Open year-round every day from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m. For more information or to place special orders, call 745-3182.

Rob’s Waffles

1  3/4 cups flour

1/4 cup buckwheat flour

2 tsp. baking powder

1 tsp. baking soda

3 T sugar

Pinch salt

1 T flax seed, ground

Cinnamon to taste

2 eggs beaten

1 tsp. vanilla

3 T melted butter

3 cups buttermilk

Mix dry ingredients. Beat eggs, add vanilla and butter (slowly). Add to dry mixture. Add buttermilk. Mix together and let rest. Use cooking spray on waffle iron. Enjoy. Smack lips.

— Rob Neukirch

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Posted in Local food

Kamikaze cooking

Posted on July 24, 2009 | 5 Comments

 Inspired by Mark Bittman’s recent column on 101 great salads, I’ve set out to do some Fridge-cleaning-out before our move North. I hope to employ a system my chef-friend Michelle calls Kamikaze cooking.

 That is, I’m trying my hardest to create some edible meals from the food that’s been lingering near the back of my shelves and in my freezer . . . without, in theory, buying more.

The process is humbling — a reminder of how much we want and waste.

Does a family of four really need five cans of canellini beans? Three half-bags of lentils? Five stalks of rhubarb (but no companion strawberries)?

Fish sauce and flax-seed oil? Really?

 I know I’m being my mother’s daughter when I insist on freezing little baggies full of recipe surplus ingredients — partial cans of adobo sauce, tomato paste and coconut milk. Did I really think I would remember, five months later, what that crap actually is? 

 But back to Bittman, the New York Times blogger/columnist who presumed to know “How to Cook Everything” in his bestselling cookbook. I’ve been a fan ever since I made his crazy-simple cabbage salad. Bittman focuses on simple, seasonal and fresh — not the stuff of year-old lentils.

Nonetheless, his ability to take disparate ingredients and turn them into something you crave for weeks on end is amazing. That blueberry/carrot/sunflower-seed salad, for instance. And that tomato/basil combo where you take a crusty grilled cheese sandwich, cube it and let it pinch-hit for the croutons. And that peach-tomato-red onion number. I haven’t tried these latest Bittman creations yet — they definitely require another trip to the store — but, seriously, I can’t wait.

 Tonight’s dinner involved a salmon I scored two of during a half-price sale at Kroger last month, baking one and freezing one for later. I placed the fillet in a Pam-sprayed baking dish, slathered a healthy layer of brown mustard and then honey, mixing the condiments together with the back of a spoon. I topped the fish with a healthy sprinkling of Panko (Japanese bread crumbs), which had been sitting in the pantry so long I don’t even remember why I bought it.

 I got Tom to peel the potatoes, which is my wifely right, in preparation for my favorite mashed potatoes, which used up most of an already opened block of cream cheese and was heavy on the horseradish.

 For salad, I pulled a handful of cherry tomatoes and a cucumber from the garden, added some walnuts and a huge handful of blueberries picked by my husband, his mom and sister yesterday at Crow’s Nest Farm in Blacksburg.

I used up my last 4 cloves of garlic for the dressing, which I’ve adapted from a recipe in an old Junior League of Colorado cookbook: Boil cloves in water for 10 minutes, squeeze the soft garlic into the food processer. To that, add: the juice of 1 lemon, a tsp. or so each of mustard and Worcestershire. As you whir, stream in olive oil (1/2 cup or so), which will net you the world’s most fantastic lemon-garlic vinaigrette — enough dressing to last you the next two suppers. (Just don’t let your husband mistakenly toss those dressing leftovers down the sink when he does the dishes. . . which, seriously, since you cooked, I hope he does.)

 With just three weeks to go till the moving truck arrives, I don’t want to throw this stuff away, I definitely don’t want to move it and let’s face it: I’m cheap. So. . . 

 Favorite canellini bean recipe anyone? Ideas for the bat-sized yellow squash Dan insisted I bring home from his garden? Where are Ian’s lovely eggplants when you need them (roasted, in Amy’s Moroccan chicken stew recipe)? Is there a good home out there willing to adopt a $15 bottle of organic flax-seed oil?

 I’ll throw in the fish oil as a bonus, for free. Maybe even the smidge of red curry paste from my short-lived love affair  with Korean chicken noodle soup. Come to think of it, there’s a pack of rice noodles in it for you, too.

 

No butter? No milk? No problem. I used vegetable oil and orange juice as substitutions in this recipe for peach muffins this morning.

No butter? No milk? No problem. I used the last bit of vegetable oil in my pantry and orange juice as substitutions in this recipe for peach muffins this morning.

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Posted in food and cooking

The real faces of journalism

Posted on July 22, 2009 | 3 Comments

Charles “Hap” Fisher is pushing 103. He doesn’t hear well, he’s got a bum hip, and he needs a pacemaker to keep his ticker beating right. And yet every day he still pulls out his calculator, trying to bring new chemistry formulas into being, trying to do good in the world. “People who don’t work 10 hours a day are sissies,” he says.

One of a growing number of centenarians, he also happens to be the oldest living resident of Brandon Oaks retirement community, the oldest alumnae of Roanoke College and more than likely the oldest scholar still actively publishing research.

My profile of him, which ran in Tuesday’s paper, was essentially a trend piece. I used one very extraordinary individual to reveal one slice of an aging America, a place where the term “senior citizen” can’t begin to capture the diversity of this demographic.

As a Nieman fellow this fall, I’ll get to learn more about the age boom — how it fits into health-care reform, its impact on programs like Medicare and Social Security, and all the other personal and political challenges that present themselves when 76 million baby boomers prepare to turn 65. I’m unspeakably grateful that I’ll get to sit in on classes taught by some of the world’s greatest brains — cutting-edge Alzheimer’s researchers, health-care economists, architects and urban planners who are trying to design the retirement communities of the future.

But I doubt I’ll meet many like Hap, who reads voraciously — The Economist being his favorite publication. When he indulges in a novel, he prefers to read it in Spanish, to keep his mind sharp.

I won’t be spending time with people like Lucille “Big Mama” Blackwell, who died a week ago Friday at the age of 85 and whose obit I had the privilege of writing Sunday. The great-granddaughter of slaves, Big Mama dropped out of school in the third grade to help her parents work a white man’s tobacco farm. She never learned to read, but there was a wisdom about her that I doubt I’ll bump up against at Harvard — or anywhere else. “I have no spirit of fear, and I thank God for that,” she told me last year. “See, when it’s my turn to go, I’m ready to stand before the King and hear him say, ‘Well done, Lucille.’ “ 

I won’t be a five-minute drive from the home of Linda Rhodes, whose struggle to take care of her dementia-diseased husband, Tommy, has been the subject of some of the most heartbreaking and most rewarding reporting of my life.

These are moments you don’t get to witness every day, which is what keeps so many journalists plodding away still — despite all the industry red flags, despite the so-so pay, despite all the times we bolt upright at 3 in the morning worried about a possible layoff, or a possible mistake in the next day’s story, or how we’re going to get our kids to school and practice and music lessons — and still get that story turned in on time. 

I won’t miss the anxiety and the second-guessing you create for yourself when you’re in the middle of a complicated project — and, even though you’ve been there hundreds of times before, you’re still not sure you can pull it off again. (“You’re full as a tick with this one,” my friend Mary told me once, mid-project.)

But I will miss people like Hap, Big Mama and Linda Rhodes. No matter how complex the conversation or how heady the academic vibe, they are the teachers I want to keep foremost in my mind.

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Posted in Aging issues, Journalism, longevity

Staycation, with company: Recessionary rules for being a good houseguest

Posted on July 20, 2009 | 5 Comments

Summertime in a recession. My friend Melissa was bemoaning it just the other day. Many of her extended family members and friends can’t afford to go on vacation, so they’re visiting HER instead. “The first year we lived here  no one came to visit,” she said. “But now we’re spending so much money feeding our house guests that we can’t afford to go on vacation ourselves!”

It’s a phenomenon I know all too well. Here in Roanoke, I don’t have as many visitors as I did when I lived on Tybee Island, Ga. — where distant cousins of ex-boyfriends of fifth-grade best friends tended to rear their heads on my ocean-view veranda, thinking that a six-pack of beer and a bucket of KFC would net them free lodging for the week.

But this summer, we’ve already hosted three separate groups. We’ve done a fair amount of freeloading ourselves, too. Week before last, I showed up on a cousin’s doorstep in Los Angeles for a homemade meal and a next-day sight-seeing tour (never mind that we never made it past the bar where Janis Joplin had her last meal).

Over the Fourth of July, my family overtook my mom’s small Ohio condo, with the boys sleeping on opposite ends of her L-shaped couch and their stuff strewn in every corner of her meticulous house. We even took her bed! (In our defense, she insisted.) Still, I could feel her sighing as we backed out of the driveway.

So I’ve decided to develop a list of houseguest do’s and don’ts. Feel free to send it to the next incoming invader — er, I mean guest. And, please, I hope you’ll feel free to add your comments and suggestions to the list.

1. Follow the fish rule: After three days, you start to stink. (Even if you’re staying with your own mother. OK, especially if you’re staying with your own mother. If you don’t like the way she makes coffee — meaning, it’s so weak that you can see through it all the way to Indiana — take your own. If you don’t like her cancer-in-a-jar creamer, bring your own Half-n-Half, too.)

2. If you’re the visitor, bring a gift. At the very least, offer to take your hosts out to eat. Melissa said she spent $400 in one week feeding all the people in her house.

3. One name: Cathy Armer. She was a friend of a friend who stayed with us several years ago on two occasions. At the time, she called herself a professional houseguest, flitting cross-country as she did from one town to another, usually staying with friends or friends of friends. She set the house-guest bar high, by following these basic tenets:

4. She helped around the house. When we came home from work, she’d have supper started. She said things like, “Why don’t you guys go out to a movie, and I’ll watch the kids tonight?” She did her own laundry — and ours too. She pitched in for groceries. 

5. When she left, she put her sheets in the washer on her way out the door. And, seriously, we begged her to return.

6. Our pals Jenna and Jane, who stay with us sometimes to work on the documentary they’re producing with Tom, set the bar pretty high themselves. When they arrive from Blacksburg to work on editing their film, “A Gift for the Village,” they bring a cooler full of vegetarian food, which they share. Jenna, an elite cyclist/white-water rafting guide/[insert-extreme-sport-here], also brings her mountain bike — and doesn’t even mind going slow so I can keep up.

7. Lab puppies and small but lovingly tended gardens: Don’t even think about attempting that again, Uncle Mike. (Although the plant gift certificate you sent later as apology was really quite nice.) After three years of babying, that oak-leaf hydrangea that Ollie nibbled down to an inch finally bloomed this year.

8. When you click with a new friend and she invites you not once or even twice but several times to bring your family to her cavernous Upper West Side apartment in the fall, put her on speed-dial immediately. And follow the above rules to a T.

9. Which brings me back to the gold standard. We hadn’t seen Cathy Armer in years, wasn’t even sure where she’d landed. But when a mutual friend found out we were moving to Cambridge this fall, she informed us that Cathy was now living in Boston and married with a young child — pretty much the same formation we were in when she first stepped so gracefully, with duffle bag, into our home.

I friended her on Facebook immediately. Weeks later, when Tom and Max went on a fact-finding mission to see our new digs, Cathy was there to pick them up at the airport. She gave them a place to lay their heads for three nights, cooked for them and generally treated them like kings. They’re still bragging about her beautiful little girl, Ana Lucia.

10. Whether you’re freeloading or hosting, remember: It’s all about karma.

Which is why we plan to have Cathy and her family over for dinner as soon as we settle into our new place.

I’m not even going to let  her do the cooking, I swear.

 

A picture of our fold-out futon in Cambridge. But we want you to visit us, really, we do!

A picture of our fold-out futon in Cambridge. But we want you to visit us, really, we do!

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Posted in Houseguests

In praise of our friends the photogs

Posted on July 15, 2009 | Leave a comment

At last weekend’s Pictures of the Year International program, the winner of the Best Photography Book Award said it took him 10 years to publish his book, which documents the fall of the Soviet Union. In the meantime, Brooklyn-based photographer Jason Eskenazi made his living working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art — as a security guard.

And then there was Balazs Gardi, the winner of the Global Vision Award. He gave a gut-wrenching presentation of his work, which chronicles marginalized communities in Afghanistan and elsewhere around the world. But he makes his living shooting commercial work for the likes of Red Bull.

The most haunting session I attended was a slideshow presentation by Danish photographer Jakob Carlsen, who won POYi’s World Understanding Award for the decade he spent photographing dalits — the so-called Untouchables of India, Nepal, Pakistan and Sri Lanka. He pays his bills by cobbling together grants and freelance assignments, and self-publishing books.

It was an assembly of the world’s best photographers. As winners of POYi’s Documentary Project of the Year for our Age of Uncertainty series, photographer Josh Meltzer, online producer Seth Gitner and I were invited to talk about our collaboration on the series. I was the only non-photog in the bunch; the sole person for whom “multimedia” still means a Steno book and a very fine Pilot Precise pen. For now anyway. 

Astonishingly, our trio from the Roanoke Times — by far the smallest-circulation publication spotlighted — was the only newspaper represented amid the presenters, not counting Emilio Morenatti, Newspaper Photographer of the Year (though technically he works for a wire service).

Was this a glimpse into the future of newspapers, with their shuttering bureaus and increasingly thinning staffs? What’s it say when most of the top winners of photojournalism’s top competition just happen to labor piecemeal on their own, for little if any pay, and often for years at a stretch? Who but the viewers of their self-published books, Web sites and gallery shows will see these important images?

Sitting in the cushy, surround-sound conference space at the Annenberg Space for Photography, I wondered about the fate of our industry, the fate of empathy — who knew it was such a bad word? — and, yes, the fate of my own career.

Even College Photographer of the Year Tim Hussin won not for assignments he’d completed at newspaper internships but for the picture stories and sound slides he’d undertaken completely of his own initiative — after the pictures he was getting paid to take were turned in: a family trying to recover from a devastating house fire; a photo essay on the microcosm that is Coney Island.

His work had depth and detail, purpose and passion. And it gave me a glimmer of hope. For it was exactly the kind of work that I believe can save newspapers — the ones that still believe in offering readers in-depth content that they can’t get anywhere else.

Should the last printing press turn silent, I hope I’m still standing next to these driven picture-makers, no matter who, if anybody, is footing the bill. 

To do good journalism, I need their curiosity and their insights and their competitive spirit. I need their unwavering belief that the world needs to see what it is they have captured — the intimate and the ugly and all those other honest moments that, there but for the photogs, would not be seen.

IMG_0417

The Age of Uncertainty team at POYi: Josh Meltzer, me, Seth Gitner.

(Not pictured: Terri Macklin, Alec Rooney, Matt Chittum, Tracy Boyer, Meg Martin, Grant Jedlinsky)

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Posted in Journalism, Photojournalism, Reporter photographer collaboration, The Roanoke Times

Not quite Romy and Michelle. . .

Posted on July 7, 2009 | 10 Comments

 Expectations for my recent class reunion in Urbana, Ohio weren’t high, but driving through the cornfields on the way to my hometown, I was full of nervous excitement, wondering how my two selves might converge: Would people only remember the class partier/clown who was always scrounging rides? Or would they see me as I see myself now — a wife and mom and journalist; someone who has, finally, learned not to care so much about what other people think?

 Why do we still allow ourselves to care, anyway, about people we haven’t seen for 25-plus years? 

 Because they are the same people who believed us when we were four years old and told fantastic tales about our power to magically make the wind stop blowing from the back of our trike. 

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 Because only they know that we climbed into Joy Ware’s car for the ride to high school every morning — sporting wet hair and a homemade bacon-cheese sandwich.

 Because we still remember the time Debbie Copeland dropped her majorette’s baton and it hit Mr. Martin, the band director, square on the head. “I don’t even have to look over to know that Copeland did it!” he barked.

 Because we know that Debbie and Anne, thick as thieves for lo these many years, still get together for drinks every month. Our version of Romy and Michelle, they weren’t even mortified when a classmate’s wife asked Debbie, 45, if she was pregnant. Together, they laughed it off. Debbie even posed for a snapshot, with Shaun Stewart’s hand on her faux-pregnant belly.

 Because when Amy Puglia says her sweet Republican dad, Dick, died of Alzheimer’s this spring, we remember his fine violin-playing like it was yesterday. . . and know that her mother, Rosemary, really meant well when she “helped” him cast his last presidential vote — for Obama.

 Because  it’s fittingly cute that Dave Curnutte, the class goof-turned-firefighter, married a nurse named Jackie — after meeting her on the job in the hospital emergency room.

 Because when Marcia Ware says she’s a professional backup singer, we know she’s not pulling a Romy and Michelle, claiming she invented the Post-It Note. And when she whips out her cellphone to show us PETER FRAMPTON’S NUMBER, we remember where we were the first time we heard “Frampton Comes Alive.” (In the dim apartment of one Nancy Dodson. . . who, in a fit of daring, pierced our preteen ears.) 

 Because Brian Johnson amazed himself when he delivered his second child — in the bathtub — and we know: If we couldn’t make it to the hospital in time, we’d want his steady hand playing catch for us, too.

 Because not only does Shaun remember the time we stole our brother’s car and drove through Dicky Pooh’s Drive-Thru — at 15 — to buy an eight-pack of Little Kings. She also remembers that we wore baseball caps as our disguise. 

 Because when the jocks gather in their usual circle 25 years after they won the state baseball championship, it doesn’t matter that half of them are sporting beer bellies now.

 What matters is that we are, all of us, together again.

 We know how far we’ve come and we remember, for better or worse, the people we once were.

                                                      * * * *

IMG_0404Debbie Copeland, not pregnant at all, but good-naturedly posing with Shaun Stewart, anyway. “I’m freakin’ 45!” she said. Note Amy Puglia’s gorgeous college-age daughter in the background and know that only Rosemary Puglia’s daughter could pull off being best friends with one of her own.

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Posted in high school reunion, Urbana Ohio