Green Options

I’m no licensed child psychologist.  My kid-rearing experience stems from a sample size of one young, lanky legged son.  Still, I feel confident in proclaiming, after these past seven years of Wisconsin gardening with Liam, that kids will eat anything they have a connection to growing or harvesting themselves.  A simple equation:  the more we can get kids into the garden, the better we eat and the more our nation’s health improves.

Engaging kids in the garden requires a sprinkle of extra thought toward ways to create a child-friendly growing space.  With a dash of creativity, edible education opportunities can grow as quickly as a Midwest zucchini in July.  Here are some five easy, bite-sized ideas:

1.    Plant Easy Pickings
Plant vegetables that are low-level, easy picking for kids. 

I confess, I’m slow to change.  At least when it comes to cooking.  A devout recipe follower, I measure my cups and teaspoons and follow recipe direction as if they were sent from above.

Until this week, when I finally took our new solar oven out of the box.  We bought this Global Sun Oven last winter to use at our farm and B&B, Inn Serendipity, with all good intentions.  No plug in required, just open it up and heat up and bake.

Which is where I got stuck, as I would not only be cooking out of my box, I’d be cooking out of my kitchen.  But my husband, John, helped by setting it up for the first time, conducting a mini-science project that even our seven-year old could handle of angling it to garner maximum solar gain.  I had one of my new favorite pies ready to stick in the oven (“Strawberry and Rhubarb Streusel Pie” – recipe below), and took it outside instead.

June on our Wisconsin farm and B&B, Inn Serendipity, ushers in a few weeks of chaos.  Tending everything from gardens to B&B guests, June packs in a cornucopia of duties that take time away from the kitchen and savoring the abundance of the early summer season.

Don’t get me wrong as I truly relish this time of year, when both the days and work lists are long but satisfying.  Which is why we need quality fuel, good food to provide energy for the day.  This Spring Spinach and Asparagus Pasta ranks our new seasonal favorite, as it blends the tender seasonal flavors of asparagus and spinach with a filling dose of pasta, nuts and cheese, seasoned up with a unique, savory soy sauce-based dressing.  Plus it makes a sizeable batch, perfect for easy leftovers throughout the week.

Read on for the recipe and enjoy:

That once-in-a-lifetime opportunity that both warms one’s heart and instills a swarm of nervous stomach butterflies came about for me last week:  giving a commencement address at my old high school, Glenbrook South in Glenview, Illinois. 

While it ranked an honor to receive the distinguished alum award, the five-minute speech proffering advice for the 2009 graduating class proved to be a unique challenge for me, requiring me to think about and process the “Lisa Kivirist” from 1985 when I graduated, when the only “green” I knew was the one in the padded paychecks I aspired to earn, to the green rolling hills of our Wisconsin farm and B&B today, Inn Serendipity and helping others launch green businesses through my book, ECOpreneuring.

Detours with a dose of serendipity quickly arose as the theme song for my last twenty years, a refrain that I wanted to leave with the graduating class.  Life may take unexpected turns, but remember, as I learned, to keep connected to the core values, your earth mission, figuring out ways to craft a life and livelihood based on your passions.

Here are some excerpts from my speech:

Talk about a recipe for potential disaster.  Combine a down economy, changing agriculture practices, rising unemployment and the end result looks grim.  But here’s the secret ingredient  revitalizing and greening our countryside:  young people under 35.

Profiled in the new book, Renewing the Countryside: Youth, this new generation is making their mark on rural areas, from starting new farms to putting out their own entrepreneurial shingle in small towns. Renewing the Countryside: Youth showcases fifty case study stories, one from each state in the United States, cooking up a super-size serving of inspiration for what can be done in similar communities throughout rural America.

Renewing the Country (RTC), a Minnesota-based non-profit organization, specializes in championing such stories, telling the story of the small-scale but big impact individuals and organizations that are creatively crafting livelihoods that positively impact their rural communities. While other RTC books focus on stories within specific states such as Wisconsin, this latest book project, published in partnership with the Sustainable Agriculture Research and Education (SARE), uniquely celebrates rural youth.

In addition to the case study stories themselves, the engaging writing and photography also came from a team young artists across the nation. But beyond the inspiring read, this book serves as a starter blueprint for others looking to either return to or plant new roots in rural America, no matter one’s age.  Looking at these case study stories collectively, five themes emerge that identify why this particular group of young people are succeeding in the countryside:

As our gardens start to deliver, as I harvest my first spring veggies this time of year, I always make the same resolution:  This year I’m going to eat more fresh out of the garden.

It sounds obvious, but the truth of the matter is I always get wrapped up in the garden work, from watering to weeding, and food preservation, from freezing to fermenting, that I get too busy and loose sight of the key reason why my family started the garden on our Wisconsin farm and B&B, Inn Serendipity, in the first place:  to savor and celebrate fresh, local, healthy food.

Once again this year, I’m on a mission to feast on the bounty, to not get so wrapped up in the process that I miss opportune feasting moments.  As inspirational fodder, I researched this idea further, resulting in an article for the upcoming July/August issue of Hobby Farm Home magazine:  Farm-style Fast Food:  If the growing season has you too busy to prepare well-planned meals every night, follow these tips for healthy “fast-food” eating.” In addition to that article, here are a few more tips I found helpful:

Wendell Berry once proclaimed:  “Eating is an agricultural act.”  In this spirit, recipes can serve a broader purpose than just a means to filling our stomachs at mealtime.  Think of recipes as edible blueprints for change. Think of the whole culinary process, from ingredient selection to end result, as an opportunity to showcase how our individual food choices can help both our nation and the world cultivate self-reliance through sustainable agriculture by focusing on what’s local and seasonal.

“Food Independence” champions this idea by celebrating and sharing summer’s bounty as we head towards the Fourth of July holiday.  The Food Independence Day campaign promotes this idea by encouraging folks to eat local on July 4, as well as petitioning our country’s state governors to do the same.

How do you define “Food Independence”?  What things do you do (or would like to start) that, from your perspective, make a statement about fostering a healthy, local food system?  Starting a Victory Garden?  Shopping at your farmers’ market?  Which of your favorite recipes celebrate the flavors and bounty of your region and also manifesto your values and beliefs?

The Spinach Balls (which can be made with various greens) we serve at our Wisconsin B&B, Inn Serendipity, for me exemplify my take on food independence and how conscious eating can inspire a new take on “edible activism.”    Three symbolic reasons why I think eating Spinach Balls can change the world:

Before I can fully jump into savoring all the tempting, fresh flavors of the spring garden, there’s one last chapter I need to wrap up from last year’s growing season:  finishing up what’s left in the freezer.  My taste buds may be craving that tender new asparagus, but my rational mind reminds me to first finish that shredded zucchini, Swiss chard and whatever else may be lingering in my freezer first.

Frozen shredded zucchini is not a bottle of nice red wine.  Age does not improve the zucchini, it only ushers in freezer burn.  On my family’s Wisconsin farm and B&B, Inn Serendipity, I typically freeze most of our garden harvest for the simplicity and efficiency.

All summer long I shred, blanch, or tray freeze my garden goodies, packing the produce into square freezer containers and lining them up in our thirteen cubic foot chest freezer in the basement.  Chest freezers, when full, can run quite energy efficiently as not as much cold air escapes when you lift open the lid, versus the vertical type freezers.  All winter long we defrost and eat through our garden harvest, ideally letting these freezer containers slowly defrost for a few days in the refrigerator, using the defrosting process to cause our refrigerator to run less.  As we “eat through” the freezer and space opens up, I fill the empty space with recycled milk jugs filled with water to help the freezer run more efficiently.

By this time of year, I’m down to the last few freezer containers and a freezer in need of a good clean out, but need a dose of culinary motivation to use up those last lingering items from last year.  Here are three strategies I use for that that final “freezer finale”:

Together, we all helped symbolically dig that new organic kitchen garden on the White House lawn, firing off a message in support of local, fresh food that has been heard around the world.

So, what’s next?  How can we channel this White House garden victory into a bigger, broader message that continues to plant seeds of self-reliance and sustainability and healthy food access for all?

Look to our country’s historic roots for inspiration [...]

Rhubarb must often feel like the underdog of the gardening world. While everyone lusts after things like the first greens, peas and asparagus, rhubarb tends to fall into more of a love-hate relationship with folks: Either you crave it and know exactly how to transform it from pie plant to something amazing, or you had it once and swore off it forever.

But rhubarb takes on a deeper meaning for me each spring, as it pops up ruby red and ready in my Wisconsin garden on our farm. Call rhubarb my Yoda in the garden: if I take the time to be mindful, rhubarb reminds me of all those big picture life values I always need a gentle nudge on, especially during the busy spring gardening time. Here are some wise nuggets from rhubarb (followed by my favorite rhubarb recipe: Rhubarb Custard Bars):

1. Perennials Rock (and Simplify Life)
Every spring, without any shout out from me, the rhubarb reliably pops up in the garden. Now I realize this observation isn’t anything new, but that concept of “perennial” was something totally novel to my husband, John, and I when we moved to our farm over a decade ago, leaving the Chicago urban scene behind. We grew up in the land of the suburbs where everyone planted the flats of petunias and other annuals every spring, so the idea that something regularly appears with no effort on our part ranked utterly amazing.