Oh, August…

There’s nothing like watching the sun set over Cape Cod Bay at low tide…

Every August, without fail, I have a mini ‘Oh my gosh, summer’s ending!’ panic and this year is no exception. What that means is that I try to cram all of my favorite summer things – going to the Cape, eating seafood, swimming, reading outside… – into the last few weeks of August while simultaneously eagerly anticipating the fall to come.

There isn’t a CSA update this week, and I won’t have one next week either, because in anticipation of spending last weekend at the Cape, I took a smaller, modified share (carrots, cukes and cherry tomatoes that were all used as unadorned easy snacks) and I took this week off from volunteering which means no share for me. The break has been nice and I’m looking forward to the late summer/early fall bounty to come.

When I’m not busy summering-it-up to the best of my ability, I have been participating in the Merrimack Repertory Theater’s Cohort Club which is both a fascinating experience and a nice bridge to the colder months to come. Rehearsals have begun for the first show of the season, 45 Plays for 45 Presidents and I’ve attended the first read-through of the script and one rehearsal.

CSA: Midpoint!!!

Apparently we’re halfway through the season, I can’t believe it! Our first half has been lovely but, honestly, I feel like August is when the produce here in New England really gets good… We’ve had local tomatoes in our shares and we should be getting corn soon *swoon*

I’m still on a big salad kick, with because it is an efficient way to make a big dent in my weekly share and because it has been awfully hot and humid here in Massachusetts this summer. I found the salad above here and it was delicious and refreshing.

CSA Catch-Up

World PEAS CSA: Week Five

This week’s haul included gooseberries, fennel, zucchini, bok choi, garlic scapes, lettuce, and raspberries. Here’s what I made…

World PEAS CSA: Week Four

As promised, here’s what I did with my radishes, kale and garlic scapes (and zucchini, because there’s always zucchini…)Most of my radishes went into this Greek Salad with Marinated Radishes. This comes from one of my favorite CSA inspiration cookbooks: A Year in a Vegetarian Kitchen by Jack Bishop.

CSA Panic (it’s a thing, and I’ve got it…)

The last time I had a CSA, in 2009, I blogged about what I got in the share and what I did with it and it was really helpful with keeping me motivated and inspired. It was so helpful that now that I once again have a CSA, I’ve been searching my archives to see how I managed the CSA produce windfall in the past. I’ve been coming up short, so I’ve decided to post again, and hopefully future me will be grateful.

I had a CSA for a few years and then took some years off and focused mostly on the farmers market during the growing season. The farmers market is easier for me because I’m a menu planner but a CSA, while a lot more challenging, is also a lot more fun and stretches me as a cook and meal planner.

As in the past, I’m doing the World Peas CSA, and I’m getting my CSA as a workshare. So, in exchange for a small share, I spend two mornings a week packing CSA shares and doing other things at the Food Hub.

I’m currently in my fourth week (my shares for the weeks are posted above) and I’m really enjoying both the workshare experience and the (literal) fruits of my labor. I’ve been posting a lot of stuff on Instagram which, sadly, isn’t searchable (but this blog is!) so if you follow me there, there will probably be some duplication.

Anyway… Here’s what I’ve been making:

More about bikes…

MassDOT tweeted about a new Bicycle and Pedestrian Safety Awareness and Enforcement Program that was announced today. The program is going to give cities money to make transportation for all users safer. The funding will be used to help pay for stepped-up enforcement, raising awareness about all forms of transportation, and creating safer infrastructure. Twelve communities have been chosen for the first round of funding with Haverhill representing for the Merrimack Valley.

I would love to see some of this money come to Lowell, but I won’t be holding my breath. Opportunities for funding such as this seem to be the wave of the future, and it’s quite disappointing to see my city sliding backwards (and potentially cutting itself off from funding opportunities in the process.)

I am also hoping to attend the City Council meeting to discuss why I think bike lanes are important, but just in case I can’t make it, I did send the following letter to the City Council:

Dear Councilors,

I am writing in regard to the motion to remove bike lanes from local streets. I do not support this motion.

I have lived in Lowell for ten years. I have worked in Lowell for seven years. I own a home in Lowell. I am active in the community: I am a Pollard Library Trustee, I volunteer for local organizations, and I participated in Public Matters. I am also a bike commuter who uses the bike lanes to ride to work; to PML meetings and events; to volunteer activities; to visit local restaurants, bars, and shops; and to visit my friends. Basically anything I am doing, I am doing via bicycle.

Safety is important to me and it makes me happy that I live in a city that is concerned for my safety on a bicycle. Since the bike lanes were painted a couple of years ago, I have felt much safer riding my bike in Lowell than I did in the past. I have found that drivers are more aware of my presence and less likely to find it strange or shocking that I am on the road. I have also found that the response that I get from drivers has been positive. People wave to me and say hello. Maybe I have been lucky, but most drivers have been friendly and polite (although they are a bit amazed when they see me riding in winter.)

I watch the City Council meetings most Tuesday evenings and I know that a couple of hot topics of conversation have been parking issues downtown and economic development. Now, I am obviously not an expert on either of these issues but I can speak to my personal experience with both. As far as parking issues downtown are concerned, well, I don’t have any. I lock my bike up and head to my destination. I am not taking up a coveted parking space that someone else could be using and I am not contributing to traffic. Because I am on a bike, I am also eating, drinking, and shopping at places that are easy for me to get to on my bike. Instead of heading to Nashua, Salem, or Burlington to spend my disposable income, I am dining out in Lowell’s restaurants, drinking in Lowell’s bars, and shopping in Lowell’s stores. I even get my bikes serviced locally at City Bicycle on Market Street.

Having a variety of ways to get from one place to another, including transit, pedestrian, cycle, and, yes, automobile infrastructure have helped other cities in both the Untied States and Europe alleviate parking and congestion issues and increase economic development. I think that instead of doing away with the bike lanes, our city should look to what bike lanes can do to help us with our parking and economic development issues.

If you would like to discuss this issue, or even go for a bike ride, I would be happy to hear from you.

Respectfully,
Marianne Gries

If you’re local and want to support the bike lanes, please consider contacting the City Council. The City’s website has a handy form that can be accessed here, the last item under the Department Facts tab on the left.

Thanks to Learning Lowell, Left in Lowell, and RichardHowe.com for your thoughtful posts on both the bike lanes and the Sun kerfuffle. I haven’t heard anything from the Sun and I can’t say I am particularly surprised. It’s easy to steal things from the internet and it seems the Sun is not immune to that temptation which is obviously really unfortunate.

In other news, I did get this text from a friend who lives in Long Beach:” We love bikes in Long Beach.”

Lowell has embraced Long Beach’s awesome Cambodia Town idea, maybe we’ll soon be embracing their Bike Long Beach idea. Bike Lowell has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it?

Oh, Lowell… (Or, why I’m afraid we’re not ready to have nice things…)

Our (obviously very classy) local paper, The Lowell Sun, stole a (pretty crappy, taken with my mobile phone) picture from this post praising our bike lanes to illustrate an article condemning said lanes. No, the irony is not lost on me. Stay classy, Sun.

Post edited to add that the picture was also used in the print edition. Hey, it got me to buy a paper, right

There’s a first time for everything…

I love roast chicken (who deosn’t, right?) It has always been one of my favorite foods. True confession time: up until this point, I had roasted one chicken in my life and it was a miserable failure. When I tell people this, they are shocked. I get a lot of “But roast chicken is so easy…” and “I don’t even cook, and I can make a roast chicken.” For many of the years when I was first learning to cook, I was a vegetarian. As a result, I am really comfortable cooking vegetarian meals but I am kind of intimidated by meat and poultry.

Now, I haven’t been a vegetarian for over a decade, but it’s only been in the past few years that I’ve started cooking meat and poultry at home. One of the first things I tried to make was (you guessed it) a roast chicken and it was too soon. I had a hard time getting past handling the raw chicken, I didn’t have a meat thermometer and was worried about under-cooking the chicken (so I over-cooked it) and I had no idea how to carve so I pretty much decimated the poor chicken. It was pretty awful but I hoped that someday I would be able to do it right.

Getting out of ruts (culinary and otherwise…)

I have been in a couple of ruts lately. I haven’t been posting here as much as I would like, and we have been eating a lot of the same things for dinner. To kill a couple of proverbial birds*, I decided to spend some time looking through my cookbooks to find something interesting and post about one of my meals. Yay for setting and meeting goals, because I have three new recipes in the dinner rotation for this week and I am going to write about one of them right now.

Risotto with Roasted Butternut Squash and Kale