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Inspirations and Influences: Sweet Strawberries

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Sweet Strawberries is the first in a series of patterns, called collectively Crochet Cornucopia, that will be coming out this year involving food.  I want to talk about why this series of patterns is important – and why I’m passionately committed to releasing them seasonally – as each of the fruits and vegetables comes into season.

My mother is a registered dietitian.  In addition to working as a clinical dietitian (working in a I gave them to her for Christmas, and she was overjoyed (like many mothers would be when their children make them stuff).  But it got me thinking about other people, who might want children-safe playfood or just beautiful crochet pieces to put on display.
hospitality making sure that patients get the right food in order to become well), she is also passionate about children’s nutrition. Just before Christmas, she jokingly said to me that she wanted me to make her some fruits and vegetables – not realizing that I’d already started making some for her.

Meanwhile, Michael and I belong to a farm share.  You might remember some of our adventures in using the food from our farm share from last year.  Eating locally and seasonally is something that Michael and I are passionate about.  Not only is the quality of the food so much better, but belonging to a farm share (or finding another way to eat local) cuts down on transportation pollution  in addition to supporting local farmers and communities.  Even in the winter when our farm share isn’t running, we try our best to eat as many seasonally appropriate fruits and vegetables as possible.  We also do a fair amount of canning, freezing and preserving to hold us through the winter.

Food is important.  Where it comes from, what we eat – it’s not only about nutrition.  It’s about culture, history, values, economics, ethics and choice.  At least once a day – if not two or three or five times – you take time to feed yourself, and every single time you make choices about what you eat and why you eat it.  This, for me, is fascinating stuff – and important!

Sneak preview of the next pattern!

Michael and I weren’t always as fortunate to be able to eat at a farm share.  The first year I was out of college (Michael was still in college), we were on a tight budget, and we had to sometimes choose between the ethical and healthy option or the economic and convenient option.  It is a shocking state of affairs when it is cheaper to buy a doughnut than it is to buy a piece of fruit.  It is cheaper to buy processed and canned food than to buy fresh and local.  In other places that isn’t the case – the cheap option is the local option – you pay more for ease of use.

Crochet Cornucopia isn’t just about making cute fruits and vegetables – though that is part of it.  I’m releasing them seasonally to correspond to the growing season for each piece of produce, aiming for the beginning of the seasons so you have time to make them.  I’m using a yarn that is made in the United States – my effort to use “local” yarn.  And as part of my release schedule, I’ll be doing blog posts connected to the fruits and vegetables.  It’s my form of meditation on where our food comes from.

I’m looking forward to taking you along for the ride.

We Made out Like Bandits, I Tell ‘Ya

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Michael and I belong to a CSA, Spiral Path, which we pick up once a week from the Silver Spring Farmer’s Market.  Every once and a while Spiral Path will have an open farm day for its members.  It’s a cross between a harvest festival and a good backyard party, and we’ve been wanting to go for a while.  The only drawback is that the farm is 3 hrs away in PA.

However, this last weekend Michael and I had Ray visiting (who has a car that gets double the miles to the gallon that our car does). Coincidentally, there was an open farm day.  We decided to make a day of it, and got up REALLY early (before the sun rose) and drove to Spiral Path.

The drive was well worth it.  There was a fabulous pot-luck, tours of the farm, heyrides and other wonderful events.  Michael and I hadn’t quite realized how big Spiral Path is – they service 2250 members.  Just for perspective, most CSA’s have around 200 members.  Spiral Path is huge, but still very down to earth.  All the growing they do is organic, and you can see the values they hold in every choice they made about how the food is grown and prepared for shipment.  Michael and I feel very passionately about supporting efforts like this, and it’s great to know that we not only are getting great value for our food, but that it is going to a solid business model.

The most lovely part of the open farm day is the goodies that you get for free.  Spiral Path has a chunk of produce that it grows that for whatever reason isn’t considered sell-able – either it has blemishes, is too small, or has something else wrong with it.  Normally they donate the “reject food” to the local food shelter, but when they have the open farm days, they make this extra produce available to the members for free.

Our bounty from Spiral Path (the veggies) and Rock Hill (the apples)

Take a look at our haul:

We took home: 2 pumpkins, 2 butternut squash, 2 spaghetti squash, yellow squash, green beans, eggplant, summer squash, and a whole bunch of peppers, of various sweet and spicy flavors.

Finally, Spiral Path also had a herb garden where members could cut their own herbs.  We brought home mint, sage, and lots and lots of basil (for making pesto).

The event ended at 3, and by that time I was pretty tuckered out.  But we weren’t done yet.  On the way home, we stopped by Rock Hill Orchard, and picked up some Empire and Jonathan apples.  Just because it’s the beginning of fall, and that’s what you got to do.  Go apple picking.

Farmer’s Market Sushi Recipe #2

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As I mentioned last week, I’ve served Michael a challenge: to make me a sushi roll using ingredients from the farm share each week. This week’s farm-share was filled with greens, carrots, strawberries and lettuce of various sorts.  I’ll be sad to see the strawberries go, I think next week will be our last week.

Week 2 Sushi Recipe

The Sauce:
1 tsp mayo
1 spash soy sauce
1 dash sugar
2 pinches ginger

Mix sauce and serve with or over the Sushi.

Filling:
1 carrot, shaved
frisse (basically, frilly baby endive)
green onion
2 strawberries

Arrange ingredients on mat, add sauce, and roll.

My thoughts: the ginger went surprisingly well with the strawberries. I’m still not sold on strawberries in a roll, I don’t think their lack of structure goes over well (on the other  note, avocado doesn’t hold structure  well either, and I like that just fine).  I think this roll worked better than last week’s.

Inspiration

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 I’ve been thinking lately about inspiration, and color.  It’s sometimes hard as a designer because I’m already supposed to be thinking about winter designs.  Such is the turn around process for publishing that it takes that long from design to actualization.  This can be hard, as the weather is warming right now, the air spring-like.

For instance, I broke out my sandals this evening for a run to pick up what is god-help-me-please the second-to-last piece of furniture we’ll be taking up to our eighth-floor apartment.  There’s cherry buds on trees, not yet bloomed.  The daffodils are out full force, Bradford pears are on the cusp of blooming, and the tree I’ve always thought of as the tulip tree (I’ll post a picture in a couple of weeks) is also out.

It means I have to be creative when trying to get myself in the mood, and the mindset of winter.  I have to think warm things, cool or cold nights, and heavy knitting on my lap.  Practically the opposite of what I’m thinking of now.

One of the ways I try to get myself in the mindset is visual images, and color.

Michael was transferring and organizing all the spices this afternoon.  He’s taken the week off before his vacation days end, and is taking the opportunity to get most of the packing we haven’t done yet.

I glimpsed a look at the spices he had put out on our (brand-new-to-us!) dish-hutch, and snapped some pictures.  I liked them because most of the spices are ones I normally think of as warm – the browns, the reds of curries and nutmeg, turmeric and other things.

These are the perfect things for me to draw me into the thought of winter, combating my growing certainty that it’s spring.  Spring spring spring!

On a side note, to prove that i’m right, and it is spring, Michael’s celebration dinner for us moving and settling into this new place was all about light flavors that move us away from winter.  We did have beef… you can see it poking out of the soup, but it wasn’t in a beef stock, rather a thinner stock, full of the last of the root vegetables.  Our salad was full of spring-ish things too… the mushrooms we’re growing in our closet (courtesy of my future mother-in-law – white buttons and Portobello).  There were cranberries, invoking the color we’re seeing in the fours, and lots of other delicious things.


And still, I must try to think, Winter.

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