Author: girl

upset the setup

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Lately PJ, a friend of mine from college, has been rockin the local scene with DC Upset the Setup gear. Whenever I see the stickers on utility boxes around the city I am reminded both of him and of the music of my youth, ‘Kiss Me, Son of God’ and ‘Upset the Setup’ going through my head on a loop with PJ’s ‘This is DC.’

It’s hard to not have ‘Kiss Me, Son of God’ be the first thought whenever I come to face to face with politics here in our nation’s capitol. I am at heart a luddite, so I lack the equipment I would need to make a digital recording of the song from my cassette tape and convert it to an mp3 that I could give you. However, because it’s the two Johns we’re talking about here, you can still listen to the song, direct from their little corner of the web.

The song that always pops into my head when I see the stickers, ‘Upset the Setup,’ does not appear to live anywhere on the interwebs. Since it’s a 15 year old recording by a local Indiana band, Icemakers of the Revolution, released (as far as I know) only on cassette, that’s not surprising. I can point you to two former band members, Tammy — who married another one of my favorite local musicians and continued a career in music — Stephen — who’s now a professor.

The thing that strikes me the most listening to these old songs is how little things have changed. The Icemakers, along with the other local artists I loved, wrote dozens of songs — and participated in gazillions of actions — protesting the Bush policies and war of the early 90s. I could pick those songs up and plunk them down in new Bush era without having to tweak a single reference: war, unemployment, illiteracy, corporations taking over our food supply…it’s all still relevant. I try to be heartened by the acts of resistance I see around me every day, but they pale at times in the face of the constant and ongoing acts of lunacy.

On those days, it’s stickers on utility boxes that keep me sane.

upset the setup

high fiber muffins

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Over the past month we’ve been shifting to a high-fiber low-saturated-fat way of eating in our house. Because of my eating choices — no mammal flesh, no dairy — we largely ate this way already. Largely hasn’t been good enough, though: my partner’s cholesterol is unacceptably high. Not just high overall, but inverted on each individual measure (high triglycerides, low HDLs, high LDLs). So, we’re (as my students used to say) taking it to the next level.

The next level, such as it is, involves no butter, egg substitutes, and whole wheat flour (we already bought whole wheat bread and high fiber cereal, just because those generally contained the smallest amounts of sugar). It also involves salads every day, which isn’t difficult with the food from our farm share and the community garden streaming in, and fish oil supplements. In addition to boosting fiber and shifting to exclusively using non-animal fats, I’ve also been trying to include things like rhubarb and walnuts in our meals, both of which are purported to specifically contribute to lower cholesterol.

In the course of trying to find something that’s tasty and moderately sweet that meets these criteria, I have been baking variations of the muffin recipe from Moosewood Restaurant Cooks At Home (one of my favorite cookbooks for food that’s delicious and easy to make). While the recipe doesn’t call for whole wheat flour, I find that I actually like the muffins better when made that way. And, most of the variations call for walnuts!

Muffin Madness

wet ingredients
1/2 cup egg substitute (equal to 2 large eggs)
1/2 cup vegetable oil
3/4-1 cup brown sugar
1/2 tsp vanilla extract

dry ingredients
2 cups whole wheat flour
1 tsp baking powder
1/2 tsp salt

additional ingredients
blueberry lemon
1 1/2 cup blueberries (add to wet ingredients)
1 tbsp freshly grated lemon peel (add to wet ingredients)

banana nut
1 1/2 cup mashed bananas (add to wet ingredients)
1 cup chopped walnuts (add last)
optional: handful of blueberries

zucchini
2 cups grated zucchini (add to wet ingredients)
1 tsp cinnamon (add to dry ingredients)
1/2 tsp cardamom (add to dry ingredients)
1/2 cup raisins (add at end)
3/4 cup chopped walnuts (add at end)

apple
2 cups grated apples (add to wet ingredients)
1 tsp grated lemon peel (add to wet ingredients)
1/2 tsp cinnamon (add to dry ingredients)
1/2 cup chopped walnuts (add at the end)

rhubarb
1 1/2 cup diced rhubarb (add to wet ingredients)
1/2 to 1 cup chopped walnuts (add at end)
1 1/2 tsp cinnamon (add to dry ingredients)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. In a large bowl, mix together the wet ingredients, then stir in the additional ingredients and mix well. In a separate bowl, sift together the dry ingredients. Combine wet and dry, being careful not to overmix the batter. Spoon the batter into oiled standard muffin tins, and bake for 20-25 minutes, until puffed and golden (test with toothpick; they are done in my oven, which tends to need more time, after 23 minutes). If you are using mini-muffin trays, only bake for 10-15 minutes. Each plain muffin is listed as having 220 calories; I don’t know how much the adjustments to the recipe might change that.

Finally, the recipe emphasizes that the basic ingredients do not make a plain muffin: you must choose a variation to get the delicious end product!

I’ve been making a batch of these at least once, usually twice a week. We eat them warm for breakfast or as dessert in the evening, and then with our lunches through the week. I like each of the variations in their own way. The banana ones are sweeter, and I tend to use less sugar (more like 1/2 cup, especially when I’m putting in blueberries). The zucchini ones require more sugar because of the strong spices; they were more like a savory bread when I used only a minimal amount of sugar. I’ve made the rhubarb ones most often (and tucked away chopped rhubarb in the freezer, for when the season’s over), and the tartness of the rhubarb is nice. Maybe you have to have grown up in the Midwest to appreciate rhubarb? At any rate, we like it.

My serving recommendation: warm, with a big cup of strong coffee.

high fiber muffins

cycling expeditions

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Over the past few weeks I’ve been out on Pearl for three longer rides, in the range of 15-18 miles. I’m not my friend Frances, who’s been racking up hundreds of kilometers per week on her bike, Lucky. Nonetheless, after those two years when Pearl languished in the back room looking sad as her tires slowly deflated, I’m feeling pretty good about my efforts.

A few weeks ago I accompanied my friend all the way to the Beltsville Agricultural Research Center, instead of branching off at Lake Artemesia as I’d been doing. The ride was good, along a clear route, with plenty of space on the streets to ride out of the stream of traffic. Except for Pearl’s chain coming off when I downshifted too suddenly—my own fault as it desperately needed to be cleaned—everything went smoothly. There are a few decent hills, and I got a workout, as this was the first ride longer than an hour that I’d been on this year. We paused briefly at Lake Artemesia, and were able to see a mother Wood Duck and her brood of ducklings paddling along through the lilies. On the way back I saw some Baltimore Orioles, as well as several Goldfinches, darting around just at the exit of the research park.

The weekend after that ride, I joined a neighbor and her friend for another two hour ride on a Sunday morning. We first went up to, and around, Lake Artemesia, where we were again lucky to catch sight of two Wood Duck mamas with ducklings. From there we did the loop I’d done last month, down the Northeast Branch to the Northwest Branch and back up to the University Hills pond. Along the Northeast Branch Trail, south of Riverdale Park, we spotted a Belted Kingfisher, a life bird for me! My neighbor has seen it (or one of its relatives) there quite regularly, so I hope to catch another look on a future ride. As we went north again on the Northwest Branch Trail, I learned that my neighbor’s friend is undertaking a river bank study that involves reestablishing native plants in the hope of aiding with flood control. I hadn’t realized that aster, which we’ve planted in our front bed, is a wildflower native to this area, so that was a nice piece of information. Later on in the ride, in the stretch near East-West Highway, we heard what my neighbor’s friend identified by ear as a Yellow-Breasted Chat. I really should take my binoculars and field guide back to that stretch of woods one morning, as we saw a Baltimore Oriole not far from where we heard the Chat.

Most recently, I played hookey from ditch digging weed pulling last Friday and enjoyed the gorgeous afternoon from atop my bike. The day before, I had (finally!) cleaned Pearl’s chain and derailleur, so I was spared the guilt-inducing grinding and scraping I’d been hearing more and more. I rode the Sligo Creek Trail from the Northwest Branch (this is the trailhead that I’ve passed a few times, so I knew how to get on it from this point) to Wayne Avenue, and then back from there. The trail itself is fine, if a little winding with all of the switchbacks over the creek which make it difficult to build up speed. Or rather, make it difficult to build up speed without fearing that I’ll steamroll a dog or small child when I come around a blind turn.

I didn’t go quite early enough in the day to avoid all the dogs and small children, nor to miss the beginning of rush hour traffic. At most street crossings I had a light, but the first two (Riggs Road and East-West Highway) were a little hairy. The path itself was relatively deserted when I headed out, but all of the after-work crowd was out two deep on the way back. I did get a cup of pink lemonade from an enterprising child and her dad in Takoma Park. I hope I didn’t scare her too much with my talk about weathering spills early in life. I meant only to extol the virtues of my trusty helmet, forgetting that words like ‘smash’ and ‘crash’ can loom large in the minds of small children.

Despite not really looking for birds, I saw a Baltimore Oriole on the Northwest Branch, in the same stretch just south of East-West Highway where we’d heard a Yellow-Breasted Chat on my previous ride. I haven’t yet seen so many orioles in my life that it’s not a thrill to catch sight of one, so that was nice. The other high point of the ride was my skill at unwrapping and eating a semi-melted Luna Bar without either getting off my bike or littering. A feat which, sadly, no one was around to appreciate.

cycling expeditions

extreme gardening

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I’ve been busy lately, and hadn’t realized how much time had passed since I’ve gotten it together to write up anything I’ve been doing. The thing that’s been keeping me busy has been gardening. Although gardening is a far too genteel way of describing what we’ve been doing. Yard work is really too tame as well. In both cases, maintenance of an already-existing yard or a garden is implied. That is not what we have.

What we have is a temperate jungle. I have never had much empathy for the Europeans who came to occupy this continent, as their single-minded fixation on clearing the land and beating into into a replication of their homes seemed a little maniacal. However, as I spend hours digging out overgrowth — English ivy and kudzu and poison ivy and honeysuckle and Virginia creeper and sumac, to name a few — I am starting to feel for them. I still think their goal, to convert perfectly good forest into mediocre farmland, was out of whack with their context. But I am starting to understand how they could have gone very quickly insane, through working all day to clear one meager patch, only to turn around and see that the patch behind you had shot up another foot. That, in a nutshell, is what we’ve been doing. We like to call it ‘extreme gardening’ to try to make it more cutting edge. But really it’s just laboring away under the hot sun trying to dig out 20 years of neglect from the circumfrence of the yard.

Our main challenger in this effort has been a tenacious indigenous plant that we now know to be pokeweed. We purchased special equipment — a landscape bar — just to deal with this beast. Okay, not only to deal with this beast — we also have about a dozen stumps of various types of scrub to clear out of the yard — but it certainly came in handy. Pokeweed quickly grows to over 6 feet tall, and produces berries that birds love to eat and then poop all over the place. We didn’t get to it fast enough last year, so we have little mini pokeweeds coming up all over the lawn. Those aren’t actually the problem. The problem was — and I am happy to say that we’ve licked it — the weeds that had been establishing roots for the past two decades in the back corner of the yard. The stems and leaves die down each year, but the root mass is amazing in comparison to what’s above ground.

In the end, we had to dig down about two feet to the clay layer, and even so we left some smaller pieces of root that just refused to be dislodged. We had three roots this size to get out, and maybe a half dozen half that size. Plus innumerable little new ones from the berries. But we did it, and we now have a bare, soon to be mulched, area across the back of our yard where we previously only had crazy big weeds. Go us!

My goal is to have the invasives cleared out of the yard — side beds the length of the backyard and beds all around the house — and under mulch by the fall. We’ll be doing a little transplanting, such as moving the bulbs and the lily of the valley to more suitable and less crowded spots, but mostly this is the year of killing. Since it’s now officially summer (a belated happy solstice!) and we’ve cleared maybe a fifth of what needed to be done during the spring, I think we will be lucky to make it by the first hard frost. Granted, we started with the worst fifth, so there’s hope that the rest of it will go more quickly. And, we won’t have to do this again after this year. Or at least that’s the hope, that once we get things cleared out the whole thing will be much easier to maintain.

extreme gardening

Sabriel, Lirael, & Abhorsen, by Garth Nix

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On the whole, I was disappointed in this series by Garth Nix. The first book, Sabriel, was decently engaging. I didn’t love it, but it was clever and the level of the angst of the teen protagonists was bearable. It reads as a stand-alone book, and I enjoyed it more than the latter two books. In the interest of not giving away the plot, I’ll say that it shares elements of the early Chrestomanci books, the His Dark Materials trilogy, Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell, and Harry Potter. Of course, if I told you which elements, I’d be giving away the plot, wouldn’t I?

Lirael and Abhorsen are a single book split into two volumes (this being, perhaps, before J.K. Rowling acclimated the world to the 700 page children’s book), and as such don’t hang together as well. The plot of the latter books are also slightly more preposterous — even for fantasy — and the teenagers more filled with angst. Overall, I wish I’d stuck with Sabriel and imagined any further adventures on my own.

Sabriel, Lirael, & Abhorsen, by Garth Nix