As I’ve gone back to my roots and started growing some of my own food again. I’ve become very aware of the growing market for books about food. While not quite Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, the food genre that looks at how our food is produced is interesting. The agribusiness of my childhood has fallen by the wayside. So I’m exploring current food production trends in my summer reading list.  Here’s a few the things on my summer list for reading and viewing.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life (P.S.) by Barbara Kingsolver. This book focuses on Kingsolver’s experiment with her family to eat as locally as possible for one year. I thought this was a fabulous read. Kingsolver writes the bulk of the book but her eldest daughter and husband contribute as well.

In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto by Michael Pollan. Michael Pollan talks about the slippery slope of food labelling in this book. I’m in the middle of this one as we speak. And will report back on it later.

The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan. I’ve been looking for this book for a while at Half Price books, but when R. mentioned that at some point in the future he wanted to check out Food, Inc., I thought I’d order it for the both of us so we could read it together. I’m interested in seeing it as well and I know Pollan was a contributer to the movie.

Food, Inc. and Food Inc.: A Participant Guide: How Industrial Food is Making Us Sicker, Fatter, and Poorer-And What You Can Do About It -  While I’ll probably not end up seeing the movie until this fall when it comes out on DVD (R hates movie theatres), after watching the movie King Corn (Green Packaging) and getting back into gardening. I’m very interested in what the movie and the book has to say. I’ll have to order the books for R and myself when I get paid in a few weeks.

Fast Food Nationby Eric Schlosser. It looks at how we became a nation that eats much of it’s food at fast food joints and how it affects our economy.

Another book by Schlosser is also on the list. Chew On This: Everything You Don’t Want to Know About Fast Food. This book is an expanded version of Fast Food Nation. It provides a history of fast food. Schlosser then examines the agribusiness and animal husbandry that supports the Fast Food industry.

More books and movies coming soon because this is not all of my list by a long shot!

When we finally made the digital transition, I lost access to my local PBS station. It became non-existant. And I missed it. I don’t care about NBC, CBS and ABC. But I miss Nova, Nova Now, Globe Trekkers and my Saturday Morning Cooking shows (which hopefully will work this Saturday).

So when I did the scan the other night and realized that yes indeedy, I had my PBS station back I was excited and enthralled. I’ve spent the past few nights with my butt mostly parked in front of the boob tube indulging in educations TV. I spent Tuesday evening revelling in the wonders of the mind when music is involved, learning about CAPTCHA and ReCAPTCHA and a documentary about a gay man killed in France by Skinheads. Last night was spent watching Garrison Keller on American Masters, and tonight has included the aforementioned Globe Trekkers, and WorldFocus where I learned that the level of c-14 in the atmosphere has increased since they did the Nuclear testing back in the 1940s and 50s. This means they can date ivory to determine if its antique or comes from an animal that has been killed more recently.

This is where the categorization on the web site gets a little fuzzy. Technically this post could be a Zone 9 Gardening or a Retro Kitchen post, so I’ll put it in both. Because people I have Tomatoes - ripe, juicy, luscious heirlooms to be exact.

It started a week ago Friday when I noticed that one of the Old German tomatoes had started to turn. Then I looked at the Cherokee Purple tomato I had been eyeing and low and behold it was turning too!

So I carefully picked them and took them home so they could finish ripening. Unfortunately with the birds and bugs, this is often the safest option on the Texas Gulf Coast.
And a few days later, I had beautifully ripened tomatoes.

Which I promptly sliced up.

Then I carefully arranged them on the plate and put a little bit of sea salt on them.

They made a fabulous meal. After tasting the heirlooms, I can never go back to the sad version of a tomato that we find in the grocery store.

With my job as a senior business analyst - which is really a lump-all category for technical communicator, process analyst and sharepoint administrator for my department’s site collection - I’m heading back into the world of Information Architecture. So here’s the technical reading list for the summer:

Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become by Peter Morville

Information Architecture for the World Wide Web: Designing Large-Scale Web Sites by Louis Rosenfield and Peter Morville

Designing Web Usability (Voices That Matter) by Jakob Neilsen (read this one before, but it never hurts to review the foundations)

Prioritizing Web Usability (Voices That Matter) by Jakob Neilsen and Hoa Loranger

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Best Practices by Ben Curry and Bill English (while directed at Server Admins, there’s a lot of good information for SharePoint Services Admins)

SharePoint 2007: The Definitive Guide by James Curry, Piotr Prussak, Christopher Regan, Christopher Buechler, Bob Fox, Murray Gordon, Michael Lotter, Jason Medero, Nilesh Mehta, Joris Poelmans, Christopher Pragash

SharePoint 2007 User’s Guide: Learning Microsoft’s Collaboration and Productivity Platform by Seth Bates and Tony Smith

When I was a kid, we lived on 4.5 acres and had a ton of gardens. My Dad always used to till along the fence row and let the cucumbers climb the fence.  It made them super easy to harvest. Mrs. B uses a stack of tomato cages made of fencing for her cukes, but it can take a bit of manuveuring to harvest the cukes.  I knew I wanted something more like my Dad had for cukes in the long run.

A few weeks back, R and I went down to Alvin to pick up some parts that R had ordered for his lawnmower. Since R used to work for the man he ordered the parts from, we got a tour of his garden. In it, he had a cool little fence for his cukes to climb. His fencing was made from electrical conduit and driveway rebar, and I knew I’d found the something close to the solution I was looking for. 

So with a little help from R, we created something similar for my cukes to climb. Here’s what you need to make a cuke fence that is about 10 feet long (we got our supplies at Home Depot):

2 pieces of 1/2″ electrical conduit.
2 pieces of bent 1/2 electrical conduit
1 package of BLACK zip ties (Per R the reason that you need black zip ties is that they don’t degrade over time due to sunlight)
4 1/2″ diameter couplings (the package we got had 5 couplings in it)
1 roll of Fencing
Screwdriver
Wire snips

Cut one of the long pieces of conduit in half. These are legs of the fence.
Lay all the conduit pieces and the couplings out so you can make sure you have everything you need.

Take the long piece, one of bent pieces of conduit, and two of the couplings and lay them out as shown below:

Put the coupling on the long piece.

Tighten the first screw but don’t snug it up just yet.

Add the bent conduit.

And tighten the screw for it.

Again, don’t tighten the screw all the way since you might need to make adjustments later on.

Add the second coupling at the bottom of the bent piece of conduit

Tighten it. and then add the piece of conduit that will act like the leg and tighten the screw for it.

Repeat on the other side.

Once you’ve got the conduit together, your frame looks like this:

For the next part you’ll need the fencing, the zip ties and the wire snips.

Unroll the fencing.

Take a zip tie and losely bind the fencing to the frame. You don’t want to make the zip tie tight. You want to be able to adjust their position when you put them in the ground.

Put a zip tie about every 2 squares until you get to the top.

Roll the wire out to the other side and snip the fencing so there’s a square at the other end. You need to square so you can secure the fencing to frame.

Secure the other side with zip ties and then secure the tops with them.

Carry it to the garden and put it in the ground

And when your cukes get big enough, they’ll start climbing the frame

Martha tweets and as of a couple weeks ago, Oprah tweets too. Do you tweet?  I do.

If you don’t know what a tweet is by now, it’s a message sent via the social network twitter.com. Along with the word tweep (a person who tweets) its one of the words entering the vocabulary of the hip and happening folks who use twitter to talk about their lives, their business,  network with people interested in the same things as they are, and drive people to check out their content on their web sites.

The only time I get a message from Twitter is if someone has added me as a contact or sent me a direct message. With Facebook, I had to go in and edit my settings so that my inbox didn’t get flooded with messages. I really don’t want to have to work that hard with my extra-curricular computing.

Of all the social networking tools out there, I like twitter the most. It’s short, it’s sweet, and it lets me communicate what I want without having to deal with a bunch of messages from applications I don’t use. The Twitter folks also seem to have the spam tweeters under control as well.

So try twitter. You just might have some fun.

At the end of April, I found myself pulling cabbages out of the garden. Houston at the end of April is when the hot weather begins. Cabbages just don’t like hot weather.

So I found myself with several beautiful heads of purple cabbage.

The question was then what to do with them. The answer - Freezer Slaw. Freezer slaw is a yummy, delicious concoction that my mom used when I was a kid. This recipe comes straight out of a local church cookbook. It’s a breeze to put together. Most importantly, freezer slaw stays crisp after thawing.

What you need to make this wonderful side dish:
1 large head of cabbage
2 Carrots
1 onion
1 red or green pepper
1 Tbsp. Salt
2 Cups Sugar
1 cup Vinegar
1/4 Cup Oil (It said salad in the original recipe but I used Extra Virgin Olive Oil since its heart healthy)
1 Tbsp Celery Seed
1 Tbsp Mustard Seed

Shred Cabbage carrots onions and peppers.

Add salt and mix it into the shredded veggies. Set aside for 1 hour.

Mix sugar, vinegar, oil, celery seed, and mustard seed and bring to a boil. Boil for one minute and chill until cold. Mix well with cabbage and divy it into whatever size containers are appropriate for your family. Freeze.

Thaw and place in the bowl of your choice for serving.

I had approximately 5 pints of salad that I put in the freezer.