TracyFood

Monkey Monday: back to basics 26 February 2007 5:37 pm

Posted by Tracy in : Morning Glory,cooking,eating,environment,eugene,kitchen gear,monkeys,restaurants,school,soup,sustainability,work , trackback

Ack! I just realized I’ve been trying to shape this post into cohesive paragraphs, but that’s not what Monkey Monday is about at all! It’s about giving myself permission to post random lists of disjointed thoughts! Here goes:

I got myself a present today (on that page, it’s the knife third from the top, only picture it with a pretty red handle). So awesome, especially the part where I put it in my bike bag and rode home feeling like I was armed to the teeth — or, to borrow another Ani DiFranco lyric, like every tool is a weapon if you hold it right. This new knife of mine is a wonderful tool indeed; functional, not too pricey, and best of all lighter than most knives in its class (8-inch chef).
I bought my present with less than a third of this weekend’s tips: I worked both Saturday and Sunday, and according to Gail, covering the closing shift on Sunday made me part of the busiest day she’s ever seen in her four years of owning the cafe, and that includes the week of crazy hippies that fill Eugene around the time of the Oregon Country Fair. Holy monkey gods were we swamped, but I sure can’t complain about the cash.
The weather, it is making no sense, but as long as the seeds I planted last week aren’t killed by the cold, it’s okay. Maybe if I make split pea soup for dinner spring will finally warm everything up just to spite me. Or maybe I’ll have to go to Iraila for rosemary-honey lamb skewers after all (I ran into Mark and Kenne at the library today and they of course thought this an excellent plan).
I got home exhausted on Sunday, almost as tired as I was during my first few days at Morning Glory; it’s hard to believe those were less than a month ago, but I guess I’m getting back into the swing of the line. Peter got me a beer and coaxed me into the shower, where I scrubbed and scrubbed but for the life of me couldn’t shake a certain smell of onions. I’d prepped a metric boatload of the stinkers earlier in the day, but surely the smell had been erased by the mad rush of other food…. I did my best to make sure I smelled like nothing but soap and Tracy and eventually convinced myself that the mystery smell must be my wonderful partner making dinner — and sure enough, as I emerged from the shower and the bathroom, that’s exactly what it was! What a relief! Also, Trader Joe’s pesto-filled tortellini are still delicious.
Check out this article about food miles and how maybe they’re an overly simplistic way of measuring the environmental impact of agricultural products. I’m still reading it myself, but I remember an interview with Peter Singer awhile back in which he criticized food miles for their adverse effects on farmers growing export crops in developing countries. My big problem with food miles in addition to both of these is the fact that they’re only applicable to individual crops. Once you get into products with more than one ingredient, how do you average the distance traveled? By weight? Volume? Calories? What?
After Sunday’s Morning Glory and mystery onion smell excitement and deliciousness, I was in no state to think about writing a reading summary for my sustainable agriculture class. Instead, I finally wrote my field report about the Small Farms Conference, based in no small part on last week’s Monkey Monday writeup about that awesome food geek weekend.