Runner beans (warning)

 I have a strong stomach. Yesterday I ate some undercooked fresh runner beans and a couple hours later did some pretty serious projectile vomiting!! Backstory. Winter beans I have figured out pretty well. Favas I can eat fresh raw, fresh cooked later in the season, and cooked dried throughout the year. Garbanzos I eat fresh raw or cooked dried. Summer beans I'm still figuring out. Green beans raw or cooked seem fine. I've grown a number of varieties of beans to dry and cook later. I wanted to try cooked fresh beans as it seems that picking the plant when they are mature but far from dry will encourage the plant to produce more. But I made a really big mistake, I didn't cook them much, kinda like how I treat favas when they are only just beginning to toughen up. This was the only time I've puked because of eating something that wasn't spoiled. It was gnarly. I remember reading somewhere that there was an issue with runner beans so I approached them slowly. Small raw green pods seemed ok. It's my understanding now that fresh beans you have to boil for 10 min in order to render the phytohaemagglutinin inactive. Only 6 beans did it to me! The flowers are pretty and the beans are pretty, whether I can ever stomach them again is an open question.

 I'd like to turn this smile upside down

There's a rule in nature that colorful things are often poisonous....

RIP Lizzy Girl Part 2

 I've been managing the garden since the beginning of 2011. One of the most important jobs was to feed Lizzy the cat every morning. So many interesting interactions over the years. One of the strangest is when she was losing her fang, 2012-ish, it started pointing more and more straight out of her mouth, she used to slobber when she was pet, and one day out came the tooth in a puddle of saliva. I still have it. There was a phase where she'd forget to retract her tongue into her mouth and walk around with it poking out a little. She generally stayed near the greenhouse but would walk the garden with me sometimes. She was a real free spirit, and provided comfort/entertainment to lots of people over the years. In terms of her early years, the earliest mention of her in old garden emails was March 2010, but she's older than that for sure. A blog post in 2005 suggests at least two of the late 90s garden cats (Smokie, Blondie, Cali, Mamma Grey) were still around. Garden management folks Kristen Labonte and Abbie Peairs both said she wasn't around in 2007. Alan Sechman who was manager spring 2008 - spring 2009 thinks he remembers a small quiet cat, so sounds like Lizzy. It makes sense that he didn't know her that well because her caretaker then was "Skypilot" Al, who was a real character. A true wanderer, he would go on walkabout throughout the West - he walked from SB to Reno, for instance. Lizzy kept pulling him back, until he finally had to quit the garden cold turkey around 2010. My guess has been that she was around 15 y.o., that seems about right if she came to the garden as a grown cat sometime in 2008, a pretty good, long life for an outdoor cat! Here are some pics thru the years:

May 2011

Aug 2011, she would sometimes venture out to our plot in the other side of the garden (taken from GBH 2, looking towards GBH 1)

Oct 2012

July 2014

 

May 2015, probably my favorite photo of her

 

Circa 2015, she used to like being up on the tables outside cause she could sleep and be away from any danger

 

Spring 2016

 

Nov 2016, the 1 fang, and her cute tongue 

 

Feb 2017

March 2017

March 2019, rainwater was always the beverage of choice

May 2019

 

June 2019, checking out her portrait

 

July 2019

 

Dec 2019

 

March 2020, she still had a healthy weight here, her last year her body slowly failed her

 

Nov 2020

Dec 2020, rainwater again

Feb 2021, she was a good eater

 

day before yesterday, nap in the shade

yesterday

Some more text after a few days worth of reflection

 In 1983 my family got 2 calico cats. My cat lived to be 17, my brother's cat 18. Cats are obviously fiercely independent, and mine was particularly so - it wasn't uncommon for her to go on walkabout for days at a time. Lizzy's independence was on a different level. She didn't really like to be picked up, and certainly not held. Very, very rarely she'd approach the idea of getting into my lap. She'd scratch me often - after happily being petted for minutes. She bit me occasionally. She didn't purr that often. I didn't consider her as a pet, and referred to her as the garden's cat. But damn I'm mourning her hard.

I began gardening at GHGP in the spring of 2009 thru using the plot of other Geography grad students; I have no recollection of Lizzy during that time, although I didn't use the greenhouse or the toolshed cause of my unofficial status, so wasn't in her territory. She grew on us quickly, though!

 She was a survivor. Aside from itinerant bobcats and coyotes she also had to deal with raccoons - she once got bit on the butt when one got too close (she was super patient/calm when going to the vet). Her safe place was incredibly hard to get to, there is a small gap in the upper wall from the greenhouse into the toolshed, then she'd walk along a "ledge", the 1/2" wide top edge of a piece of plywood, and sleep on top of the cabinet in there.

 The funny thing is despite her independence she was super dependent on humans for food, she wasn't a hunter at all! I saw her chasing lizards, but the only thing I ever saw her catch was a mouse. She caught it in the greenhouse and was so proud of herself she brought it to me at my plot. She then proceeded to drop it and it ran away. 

Sound was an important part of our relationship. Sometimes she'd visit our plots on the west side of the garden, meowing loudly to let us know she was coming. When I arrived at my plot by the greenhouse to feed her I had a whistle tone to let her know I was there. Our intern Hanna was telling me that when she hears a rustle in the leaves she turns around expecting to see Lizzy but instead it's one of the many garden lizards. Lizzy's spirit lives on! 

 

Lizzy, God light, April 2021

 

RIP Lizzy Girl Part 1

This is one of my best memories of Lizzy, originally from November of 2015.

 

   Lizzy is a piece of work. She likes to be petted, but she has a limit, at which point the claws come out. At which point the catnip mouse comes out for her to burn off the crazy.

 

 

 

 

 

  particularly wild eyes

 

 

  calm again, 1 min later

NWC art

Got an email from Steinbrueck Gallery today about some new pieces. I really like this one and the story associated with it.

this is the story: Fck Ur Colonial Gaze was created during the removal of colonial monuments that occurred this past year. It envisions an Indigenous woman riding victorious after the "big one" (Mt. Rushmore) is removed. It is also a rebellion against the statistics faced by Indigenous women. The energy behind the painting continues to be relevant with the recent discoveries in Canada."

Alligator lizard skin

 super cool. I dig that you can see a front and rear leg.

French Cooking, Bill Buford Dirt, Julia, etc

 I generally find french cooking to be overly fatty and fussy. My folks had Mastering the Art of French Cooking in their book shelf, so I was aware of it from an early age. When we were in Monterey, so I would have been around 17, my dad made a meal out of Bistro by Patricia Wells, basque chicken and potato leek soup. One of my strongest food memories. I remember getting up the next day and finishing off the cold leftover soup, and vinegar-y bell peppers/onions with bread for breakfast. Fast forward to being in San Diego for master's degree, I read Mastering quite a bit, a lamb moussaka was one of the best things I made. I was always put off by soup recipes, where they'd make a soup base out of interesting things, then strain away all solids and throw them out. Also peeling and trimming/shaping vegetables. These activities struck me as being wasteful. So there are some french influences in my cooking, but I've always been a little distrustful. 

In 2011 my ex's friend + french boyfriend visited. Super fun. We ate, and talked about food while we ate, and planned our next meal before the current one was done. Felt really good to share food with people so interested in it.

 Lately I'm eating less and less meat and cheese, flirting with going vegan, but doubt I ever will. Also dealing with animals in the garden makes me non-vegan... Anyway I got a little vegan french cookbook, Tres Green, Tres Clean, Tres Chic. I haven't made that much from it, but it's inspiring. Though still quite fussy :)

A while ago Bill Buford wrote a fantastic book about learning to cook in Italy, called Heat. His latest book is about french cooking, called Dirt. It really ramps up the fatty (butter everywhere; quite a few people in the book die of diet related issues in their 40s/50s) and the fussy (haute cuisine kitchen) but I loved it. Maybe it's because it allowed me to live vicariously with food that for sure I know I'll never cook or eat. But there also was some accessible food. And I really identified with how obsessed people were with food. The book started off a little rocky for me as he didn't seem too modern with sharing parenting responsibilities. Then when the family moved to France he started off trying to get into kitchens based on his literary/journalistic bona fides, it seemed disrespectful. The book turned around for me once he started interning with Bob the baker. Learning about the pride Bob took was inspiring, I also liked his focus on ingredient quality, for instance he got his flour from specific small farmers in a specific region of France. After that Buford attended the Paul Bocuse culinary school, paying his dues both literally and figuratively, and got into a haute cuisine kitchen. What a strange social dynamic, I'd read elsewhere (I think in Pepin's book, the Apprentice) about how abusive people can be. Super interesting if a little uncomfortable. The rest of the book concerned little anecdotes from the 5 years the family lived in Lyon. Charming. Oh, one last thing. There was a recurring theme of linking the cooking of Italy and France. It's a trope of food historians that the Medici's brought chefs from Italy to France during the renaissance. The french apparently don't acknowledge this, I found that kinda funny! One interesting tidbit was that the french word 'ragout' begat the italian word 'ragu' and not vice versa. Perhaps this is too in the weeds but I find food history super interesting.