Ordinarily at this time, I would be en route to my kid’s art class, probably hustling across Delancey Street right now, but seeing as she feels a little sniffly, I’m using this time to catch up on the things I’ve been neglecting.

Like this.

And you, reader(s), assuming I am still nestled into your RSS feeds somewhere.

So… hi. How are you? How have you been lately?

Me? I’m good. I’m kind of crazy busy lately, but in a good way, you know?

For example, between this sentence and the last one I just typed, I had to reply to an email about the compost situation at our garden. Basically, we have a lot of food scraps and not enough leaves (or other “browns”) to make a good carbon-to-nitrogen ratio so we’re scrambling to come up with a new source.

Garden stuff like that, repeated 5, 10, or 20 times over the course of a day, really kind of takes up a good chunk of my day.

Oh, speaking of compost, I’m now very nearly officially a Master Composter with the NYC Compost Project!

Not that it got me the compost educator job I applied for last week… but it’s still something I am really incredibly proud of. I’m still not completely official until I complete 30 hours of compost-related volunteer work, so yeah… there’s that on my schedule now, too.

And then there’s my kid (who took the photo at the top of this post) who is still homeschooled and still as rad as ever.

Plus there’s my own writing work. Oh, and I’m writing reviews for Kirkus now. I think I’m supposed to stay anonymous or I’d totally post some of the reviews here. A couple of the books have been such utter crapfests that I would love to share the reviews I wrote for them.

One thing I will say for being this busy…  America, if I ever busted your chops for your shitty food choices, I just want to say I’m sorry. 

I see the appeal of the drive-thru, the frozen foods, the nearly instant dinner. Because sometimes it’s suddenly 6:30pm and everyone is famished and all you want to do is shove food in your face and then collapse on the couch for a couple hours. I have been there several times of late and those moments do not usually lead to very good food choices.

So, if you have had occasion to roll your eyes a little or ever mutter “must be nice to have so much time on your hands” at me, I do not begrudge you for it.

Because I totally get it now.

I know a lot of posts lately have started with a well, I never thought I’d be HERE theme but come on: that is me shoveling into a pile of rotting food and I am super happy just to even look at it. 

Right now, I’m about a third of the way through the NYC Compost Project‘s course to become a certified Master Composter and I have yet to get through an entire class without coming dangerously close to bursting into holy-shit-how-the-fuck-did-I-get-here laughter at least once.

I’ll be standing around with my fellow classmates, making a pile of old, wet straw mixed with moldy food scraps and we’re all sticking our hands in up to the elbow into what normal people throw out, nodding thoughtfully and asking things like, “…and that’s supposed to smell like that, right?” — and after the second or third classmate whips out their phone to get a photo of the pile of compost, I just about crack up.

Back at home, a third of my freezer now consists of shopping bags full of food scraps, used paper towels, and the dead leaves off my geraniums — all to be taken to the garden’s compost bins. I’m also trying to find a good place to store some red wiggler worms in my apartment (under the couch? in the closet? under my bed?) so that some of these food scraps can be turned into worm castings (read: worm poop) which I can then use as fertilizer.

AND I GENUINELY LOVE THIS.

Hacking a wrinkled cantaloupe into squelchy chunks with a shovel! Picking up a mass of writhing worms! Without squealing or throwing up!

I don’t know how I got here, but I’ll take it.

One last thing before I go: in somewhat related news, our garden was featured on Grist.org and in The Epoch Times recently. Check it out!

Poor little blog: you really get the short end of the stick, don’t you?

What with trying to launch more freelance work, homeschooling my kid, and all the community gardening stuff (e.g. a huge opening day party to plan for next month), dinner has strictly been of the hurry-up-make-food-go-in-mouth-now-and-then-watch-Community variety — which is fine but not of much interest to anyone beyond those actually getting fed.

So, what you’re looking at above are two beloved (if not very attractive) meals I’ve made this week.

First up, pictured on the right, is something I look forward to making every year: corned beef fried rice, based on this recipe. Before making a traditional corned-beef-and-cabbage dinner for St. Patrick’s Day, I pick up an extra head of cabbage as well as a huge corned beef (which is always on sale that week) and then use the leftover corned beef (rather than the canned stuff) and the extra cabbage to make the fried rice. Depending on how salty your corned beef was you may want to skip the soy sauce in the original recipe in favor of rice vinegar, too.

And on the left… a tostada with refried beans. I admit, I am somewhat in love with tostadas of late. They’re like huge unsalted tortilla chips and everything tastes better on them. I am also unequivocally in love with the salad you see perched on top of that tostada, which comes courtesy of Elise at SimplyRecipes.com, and consists of the following: shred half a head of iceberg lettuce and dress it only with vinegar and salt. Seriously. That’s it.

You can be a lettuce snob and try a different lettuce if you want (in fact, that’s actually romaine in my photo) but take my word: it will not be as good. The cool, watery crunch of iceberg is the perfect counterbalance to earthy beans or the umami of ground beef on a tostada.

I said it because it sounded better than admitting I would probably forget all about it or just go through the same garden envy/lust combo again the next year (and probably for years to come, for all I knew).

I did not —I could not — imagine that within a year I would be presenting a workshop on how to gain access to land for community gardening, which is exactly what I was doing this past Saturday at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden’s annual Making Brooklyn Bloom conference.

It was fun and frankly exhausting. For an introvert like me, meeting dozens of new people and giving a presentation and answering questions to a roomful of people is on a par with… maybe not a marathon, but at least a 10K run.

But I did it — and I still got up the next day, went to the garden and hauled wheelbarrows full of topsoil around, finally filling in my garden plot and getting it ready to plant.

Hello, spring.

It really never gets old, does it?

Eventually, those tiny shoots will be dill plants and be used in the pickles I am certainly going to make this summer with all the cucumbers I’ll have.

But for now, they’re just these tiny sprouts reaching for the sun — and I can’t stop looking at them.

I don’t know how to love you

What to do, how to use you

You’re some yeast

You’re just some yeast

And I’ve had so many breads before

In very many ways, you’re just one more

I’ve made cupcakes and cheesecakes and carrot cakes, pie crusts and brownies and  yeasted bread of all sorts, but I cannot — I can not — manage to get a good sourdough starter.

They erupt out of their vessels like frothy wet volcanoes or fling themselves off the warm spots of my kitchen in showery spatters of goo. This one you see here first blew up all over my kitchen and then apparently died and turned gray.

So… you win, sourdough. I give up. You are an unholy mystery that I will never grasp and I will go to my rest without having ever mastered you.

If it’s been an especially long day, all the conquistadors begin to blur together into one vague Francisco Ponce de León de Cabeza Pizarro Cortés… and honestly? I read that book because I find it  less overwhelming than the seed catalogs.

Perennial. Annual. Biennial. Hybrid. Open-pollinated. Organic. Heirloom. Determinate. Indeterminate. Semi-determinate. Gynoecious. Monoecious. Parthenocarpic. Mycorrhizae.

My sister’s neighbor’s cousin’s friend said that this one time she said mycorrhizae three times in the bathroom mirror in the dark and then… okay, fine, sorry.

But really, it’s like a whole other language to learn and then — AND THEN — you still have to decide which actual seeds to buy. Pickling cucumbers or slicing? Cherry tomatoes? Beefsteak? Paste? Full sun? Part shade? Full shade?

Which brings me back to the title of this post: gardeners, how do you ever choose? 

I think I have finally narrowed my options down to the following:

• two varieties of cucumber (one for slicing, one for pickling)
• Charentais melon
• a sweet pepper and a medium-hot pepper
• cherry, beefsteak, and green zebra tomatoes
• tomatillos
• snap peas
• string beans
• lettuces
• napa cabbage (hello, homemade kimchi)
• kai-lan a.k.a. Chinese broccoli (if I can find seeds)
• cilantro, basil, parsley, mint, and dill
• and maybe butternut squash if I still have room

PHEW RIGHT?

At any rate, any and all advice is appreciated. Whether I will manage to follow it remains to be seen.

This is one of those times.

Fortunately for me (and you!), Wikimedia Commons had a photo of this Greek tomato-and-bean dish which means I can now share one of the best recipes I’ve tried in ages.

A while back, I bought a pound of large lima beans because… well, because that’s just what I do: I sometimes buy random packages of dried beans because I think they look cool and then they vanish into the backs of my cupboards until I pull them out later and go huh, large lima beans… okay, WTF am I going to do with this?

After browsing through a ton of lima bean soup recipes (meh, no thanks) I stumbled upon a recipe for gigantes plaki. Large limas are apparently not the same traditional Greek gigante bean but they are pretty frigging gigantic, all the same. Dried, these beans are about as big as the end of your thumb and once soaked and cooked, they’re probably double that. GIGANNNTTTTTE.

Gigantes plaki seems to be one of those foods that has as many recipes as it has cooks [see also: adobo] but they all have a few elements in common: giant beans in a tomato and onion sauce that gets cooked (at least partly) in the oven, which is the plaki (meaning baked) part of the name. It’s traditionally served as a meze — a small dish served with drinks, a bit like tapas — but it makes an excellent vegetarian (or vegan) main dish.

The recipe is somewhat time-consuming, between the soaking time and the longish cooking time, but for all that time, it’s not a lot of actual work — and the results are so, SO worth it.

Here is what I cobbled together from a variety of sources:

Gigantes plaki (Greek-style baked beans with tomato)

Start by soaking large lima beans at least 12 hours, or even longer if you can, changing the water at least once if it starts to smell slightly fermented. Drain and cover beans with fresh cold water by at least an inch and bring to a gentle boil. When the beans are nearly done, with just a little crunch left to them (anywhere from 45 minutes to an hour), start the tomato sauce.

In a dutch oven or oven-safe skillet, heat 1/4 cup olive oil over medium-high heat. Add two red onions, chopped, and saute until onion are soft and starting to brown. Add 2-4 cloves of chopped garlic and saute another couple of minutes. Add two 15 oz. cans of chopped tomatoes with most of their juice, about a tablespoon of oregano, and about 2 tablespoons of red wine, if you have it. Let simmer for about 20 minutes while you preheat your oven to 350.

By this time, the beans should be just about done and you can either drain them (reserving the bean liquid) or just scoop them out with a slotted spoon, add them to the tomato sauce, and then add the dish, uncovered, to the oven, for about 45 minutes or until the beans are completely tender and there’s almost no liquid left in the pan. (If the pan looks dry before 45 minutes are up, add some of the bean liquid you kept.)

Stir in about 1/2 cup red wine vinegar and a big handful of chopped parsley and let it cook for another 15 minutes or so. Remove the dish from the oven and let it sit for at least 10 minutes (mostly because it’s like freaking lava at that point). Serve warm or at room temperature with crumbled feta cheese on top (or chopped olives for vegans).

And right now, the garden job is getting way more attention than the writing job because… well, I don’t know exactly why.

Is it because it’s winter time and my brain is not at its best?
I really do struggle with staying focused on any one task during the winter. At least a week ago, I sat down to write a draft of this post and then somehow ended up playing with this garden design tool for, oh, an hour and half or so. #hahawhoops

Is it because the gardening stuff is more exciting?
There’s always something that needs to be done at any given time [email the sanitation guys! finish those bylaws!]  and even when there’s not, it’s not hard to invent something [order more seed catalogs!] on the spot that suddenly needs doing.

Is it because… well, is it because  the gardening stuff is something you can’t really fail at? Um. Well. I guess, if I’m being honest with myself (and with you)… yes.

If I write up an application for a grant on the garden’s behalf and get turned down? “Well, that’s too bad, but no big deal, right? I’ll just find another and try again.”

Now, if I write a query for an article or submit a piece somewhere and THAT gets turned down…? “I’m not cut out for this. Oh god, I must suck at this. Maybe I’m not actually a good writer and no one will ever publish me and I think I’m going to go watch TV or something so I don’t have to think about this any more.”

Why is that? Why is one rejection no big deal but a similar rejection crushes me under its boot heel? 

Maybe I’ll never know why, exactly — and maybe the why doesn’t even matter. Maybe, if you get right down to it, I need to learn how to tap into my inner honey badger and just not give a shit.