Is the Red Delicious or Eye Candy?

I’m on a broom. I work in a high school and there are a lot of vending machines. The machines make money for the student body for dances and assemblies and I have a problem with them best left to another rant. When I was a teenager the only vending machine we had was one which vended cold, crisp, juicy Red Delicious apples. It was nice at the end of the day to stop at the vending machine and get an apple for a dime to munch on the way home. I always liked Red Delicious apples and the fact that they were grown in Washington was handy.

Twenty years or more ago I noticed that Red Delicious weren’t so delicious anymore. They looked pretty, but they had no taste. Our household has long since switched its loyalty to Fuji and the occasional Gala apples. This morning I read a letter to the editor of Grit Magazine that explains why. According to former orchard owner Carol Coddington of Alexandria, Pennsylvania, the reason Red Delicious apples don’t taste as good as they used to is American public demand? Did we ask growers to great tasteless apples? No, but we did demand redder, more picture perfect apples. Apparently with apples you can’t entirely judge a book by its cover so those beauties that make for great pictures are more eye candy than taste treat. Now, says Coddington, growers are beginning to mess with Gala Apples. If they start messing with Fujis I’m going to be really mad! This is one more reason to eat locally. If you can find someone with an apple tree in their yard, bang on the door and ask if they will share or go to a local farmer’s market and buy direct from a small farmer. That’s the view from my broom.

Oregon Lavender Festival 2010 Day Two

We did not get as early a start today as we usually do during the festival. It being Sunday, Gail had some obligations at church that could not be escaped. Had it merely required attending a church service I would have gladly gone along with her since I was raised in the Episcopalian Church and can discern little difference in her Evangelical Lutheran, which despite its name, is pretty mainstream. No, she had to go and rehearse music with the organist and singing is not one of my talents—I would have been sent out the door to the curb promptly I opened my mouth—and it involved a meeting following the service which would have become boring for someone not enmeshed in the doctrine and goings on there so I stay at her house and amused myself by reading an article by Harper Lee’s biographer, it being the 50th anniversary of the publication of that wonderful novel To Kill a Mockingbird. Uninterrupted time can be as much of a blessing as any church service.

So following a hastily eaten lunch at Gail’s home in Mt. Angel, we set out, but unfortunately had to back track to Yamhill to exchange some lavender festival t-shirts she’d purchased. The expense of time was soothed by more lavender snickerdoodles and some may even make it home to my grandson. Hopefully at least one. We visited Lavender Thyme, but they seemed depleted on items and vendors and it was hot. As has happened before our best farm of the day was the last one which we barely made it to before closing. Parrot Creek Herb Farm in Oregon City has a beautiful setting and because all the other festival followers had headed home the owners had time to chat. This happened two years ago at a farm no longer even on the tour. The end of a hot day, when it begins to cool a bit can be magical and we enjoyed our chat before turning the Civic towards Mt. Angel. The best part of the day may have been the rum cake we had at a German restaurant there.

Another Oregon Lavender Festival has been appreciated and will be thought of and talked about next year when we go again. It was not as hot as two years ago, but not as comfortable as last. We did not go to any farms that were unpleasant and this is the year I got to see my friend Marlys. Undoubtedly the cold lavender milkshakes at the end of a hot day will be mentally appreciated for years to come, too!

Oregon Lavender Festival 2010

My yearly trips to Oregon for the Lavender Festival are about more than lavender. They are a chance for me to go to a pretty part of the world, relax and recharge with a friend I’ve known and loved since I was six. That is more years than I care to own. I love my big household and doing homey things, but it is divine to come to a place where you can set a thing down with a reasonable expectation of it being in that spot minutes or hours later. A household of six and a small dog cannot be as peaceful as a household of one and a cat. It is nice to occasionally visit a different world.

This year arriving in Mt. Angel, OR was an even larger blessing because of the traffic on freeways between there and my home in Gig Harbor, WA. I have long had anxiety regarding freeways which HBP medication has helped to a certain extent, but does not entirely ameliorate. Although I left Gig Harbor at 11:30 AM, a reasonable time, a trip which I have made in 3.5 hours in the past took five in 90 plus degree heat and with an air conditioner that, like a couple of things on my car, decided to take a little break! So I was grateful when the air conditioning kicked back on and I was able to get off of I-5 and onto the back roads of Oregon. I am seriously considering taking the train next year!

A salmon dinner and a shower soon made me feel better although Oregon’s heat wave prevented me from sleeping as well as I might. Undaunted, Gail and I set out Saturday morning on our quest of all things lavender. Our journey began with a short ride on the Wheatland Ferry across the Willamette River. The ferry is quaint and adds to the ambiance of a beautiful rural area.

It would be impossible to say which our favorite lavender farm is although we have hit some duds in three years of perusing. Our first stop this year was Red Ridge which quite possibly has the most beautiful prospect. As its name implies it sits on a hill top with fields of lavender sloping away from the house and gift shop. From there you can see the surrounding bucolic countryside and our visit there is always pleasant.

Willakenzie is another favorite. It, too, has a beautiful setting, an extensive gift shop that includes hand-knit items from the wool of the alpacas the farm raises along with lavender. We always find treasurers there and this year was no exception. After we’d done some retail therapy we enjoyed lavender sorbet on the porch of the shop and took away lavender lemonade and lavender ice tea for the road to Yam Hill.

After a brief stop at the Carlton General Store where I purchased sunscreen (having left my own bottle in my car in Mt. Angel) we got to Yamhill and the festival in the park there. Booths with crafts and art line the edges of the park under ancient trees while a band played on the bandstand in the center. We particularly enjoyed an extensive display of local paintings of the many lavender fields that surround the countryside of Yamhill. At a picnic table we unpacked our picnic lunch which we might have enjoyed were it not for a couple of people who seemed to think that the area we were in was the smoking area. Although our chicken salad sandwiches were good (if I do say so myself) they might have been better appreciated somewhere else. Before we left the festival grounds we purchased two lavender snickerdoodles to enjoy on the road.


Helvetia Lavender Farm was eagerly anticipated by me. It is always the busiest stop on our lavender journey with lots of booths, music and food, but this year it held the special attraction of another childhood friend, Marlys Violet Spencer, seamstress extraordinaire who lives and creates “wearable art” in Hillsboro, OR. Marlys a year ahead of me at Sammamish High School in Bellevue, WA and unquestionably the most entertaining of my acquaintances. She has done work for large and small theater groups as a costumer around the Pacific Northwest and in Hawaii. She returned to her childhood home of Hillsboro to care for a dying father and create yet a new chapter in a very interesting life. She sews wedding dresses, kitschy shirts that truly are art, and beautiful scarves all made from repurposed fabric she finds at garage sales and Goodwill. When we first stopped at the booth where I quickly spotted her wares, Marlys was nowhere to be seen, but the farm and festival is extensive so we wandered the many booths and before we left found her returned. Big hugs and introductions ensued along with a lengthy chat to catch up. When a customer needed Marlys’ attention we moved toward the car and I was dismayed to realize that I’d not gotten her picture. Before we left she told me to choose a scarf since she reckoned she owed me 40 years worth of birthday presents. I was already determined to buy a scarf for myself and one for my daughter-in-law who loves pretty things so I eagerly chose a purple and gold one for myself and one featuring shades of orange for Ana.

We ended our lavendering at Mountainside Farm where we had a barbecue chicken dinner that featured lavender potato salad. It was quite possibly the best potato salad I ever ate and since I have culinary lavender at home I am determined to add it to the next potato salad I serve. Please note that I did not say “make.” Costco sells a very good potato salad which I doctor up to suit myself saving time and effort. Potato salad is not important enough to me to labor over.

Our day was not done. We stopped at a large berry stand that included an ice cream parlor where we ordered lavender milkshakes which we enjoyed in their outdoor eating area. A cool breeze had come up and it was the perfect end to a lovely day. Gail said that the milkshakes were even better than the lavender sorbet we had at Willakenzie. That’s a tough call and I’m glad we had a day that included both.

Looking for Organic Beets

Today Dave and I went looking for organic beets. Sometimes I feel like I’m the “hunter/gatherer” in my quest to find healthful food for our family.

We are committed to eating as organically as possible and to that end try to buy from local farmers and organic stores and even have organic produce and dairy delivered to our home in Gig Harbor. We seldom/never shop at Whole Foods because of the attitude of CEO John Mackey who came out against health care reform. Yes, eating healthful food can help you stay healthy, but people get sick even if they exercise and eat right. My sister-in-law died young of pancreatic cancer despite years of eating organic and exercising. A coworker has been organic forever and a day and within weeks of retirement was diagnosed with breast cancer, so it happens. Mackey thinks were stupid if he thinks shopping at Whole Foods is better than health care reform.

On the Long Beach Peninsula, where our “someday retirement” home is, finding organic food is more problematic than at home in Pierce County. Still, it is possible. Today we set out and started with Green Angel Organic Farm on the back road. They sell to the little organic market in Long Beach, but I like to cut out the middle man if I can. We wanted beets, but got skunked and settled for summer squash instead. Next stop was the Organic Market where we found potatoes and hotdog buns.

Seeing how the mist seemed to have settled in hard enough to discourage yard work we decided to sneak over the bridge to Astoria and see the new digs for the Astoria Co-op Community Store. I liked their funky old store located in one of Astoria’s aged downtown buildings. Their new place is nice, slightly bigger and they have an eating area they didn’t have before. They don’t have a deli like Marlene’s in Tacoma, but they do have some packaged salads that can be purchased and consumed on site. During the 1970s my first husband and I joined a co-op that grew out of a play group our children participated in. We didn't have a store front, but took turns going to Seattle to the industrial area to pick up large quanities of food stuffs the members wanted, then took it back to Kirkland where we lived to be divided into orders for members. Getting healthful food without breaking the pocketbook has always been a problem. The agribusiness likes it that way. Thank goodness that there are getting to be more and more organic store fronts and that mainstream markets are carrying more and more organic products!

Because I have a guest coming early Wednesday morning for tea while her husband is down the road at physical therapy, I wanted scones to serve with the tea and so we stopped by The Blue Scorcher Organic Bakery where I bought hamburger buns, but no scones. I finally resorted to buying a scone mix and will brave my screwy oven that seems to run hotter all the time. Fingers crossed that I don’t scorch the scones!

A New Teacher Launches

One of the nice things about having a blog is sharing other interesting blogs. Recently I was turned onto the blog of a young woman who is just starting out in life and teaching for the first time. Sadie Newell is the daughter of a friend from my days as a Special Education paraeducator at Ocean Park Elementary School on the Long Beach Peninsula. Sadie was a toddler in those days. It is hard to believe that she’s all grown up.

Following graduation from the University of Washington Sadie was one of 8,000 accepted applicants, from 46,000 for the Teach For America program and will be spending two years in Tulsa, Oklahoma far from the beach community where she grew up or the Puget Sound Area where she attended college. Along the way she is doing training and teaching summer school to low income students in Phoenix, AZ. She’s keeping a blog that I’m sharing. What a wonderful thing this bright young woman is doing. Check out her blog and maybe drop a note of encouragement or teaching tip.

Two Very Different Stories of Family

A REVIEW FROM MY BROOM

My Uncle Dick always said that the Ozark Mountains are the oldest mountains on Earth. The Internet says that geologists don’t know for sure, but nominate the Appalachians and Urals as possible candidates. I was never of a mind to argue with Uncle Dick. Besides, the Ozarks feel ancient—primordial. Human beings may have come out of Africa, but the Earth came out of the Ozarks. You can feel it.

Although I have never lived there I am of the Ozarks. Our people have been there since well before the Civil War. I study the Ozarks like it was a foreign country because for someone raised in the Pacific Northwest it is foreign. The food is different, the notion of time is different, the language is different. When I come upon something having to do with the Ozarks, specifically the Missouri Ozarks, I sit up and take notice. That’s why my summer reads have been Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell and The Moonflower Vine by Jetta Carleton. Both of these books are set in my father’s beloved Ozarks and are very, very, different books. I believe they show two different aspects of life in the Ozarks. Both authors were born and raised in the Ozarks, separated by 40 years. Both novels are about family and loyalty and tradition. These families face different challenges that they handle differently, but in the end it is that “blood is thicker than water” belief that draws them together.

The Moonflower Vine is a re-release of a novel first published in 1962, again in 1990 (don’t know how that slipped by me) and again in 2009. Set in the 1950s, it is the story of a family and their lives outside Renfo, MO. The adult daughters come home together in the summers although they are scattered as far as New York. The Ozarks call them back, not unlike they called my family back over and over. It’s a family you wouldn’t mind visiting, sitting on the porch and watching the moon flowers bloom. It has the heat and humidity of summers back there—those days that are two shower days, although the Soames don’t have indoor plumbing and in the summer bathe in the creek. By the 1950s my grandparents were living in Washington State, but the Soames are a family not unlike the Friezes—especially those relatives who remained there. Although Renfro is in Moniteau County, reading the Moonflower Vine is like a step back in time and south to Dade County. Jetta Carleton was born in Holden, Missouri, not far from Renfro.

Winter’s Bone is a contemporary novel about a family with problems that many Americans may believe are the province of big cities. In Woodrell’s Ozarks methamphetamine has replaced moonshine and fifteen year old Ree Dolly’s daddy is a crank cooker. Dad has put up the family farm as bond and disappeared. Ree needs to save the farm to care for her mother, who has escaped to more peaceful places in her mind, and her two younger brothers. Living in a holler that’s populated by family who are distrustful of the law at best and outlaws at worst, Ree’s world appears different as can be from that of the Soame’s in Moonflower. As the title suggests, it is set in the winter and the language is as jagged and raw as the winter wind. It bites at you. This is not my father’s Ozarks, but yet it is. We may or may not have had our moonshiners and outlaws, but the bond of blood was the same.

Winter’s Bone got the attention of director Debra Grankin as well as the Sun Dance Film Festival where the movie version (Ree is 17 in the movie) won Best Picture and Best Screen Play. Filmed in Taney County, my cousin predicted that anything filmed there was going to be a “yawn.” If the movie is anything like the book, it is anything but. It opens at the Grand in Tacoma on July 26th and I plan to be there.

Old Mother Frieze and the View from Her Cupboard

Gradually we have switched over to eating as much organic and local produce and meat as possible. The factory farms are the agricultural equivalent of BP. They are only interested in making money regardless of the risk of genetically engineered food, the chemicals used in processed food or the inhumane treatment of animals. You do away with all that by buying locally grown and organic food.

I wrote a blog about this on the Tacoma News Tribune blogspot “In Your Neighborhood” a couple of years ago and was accused of being un-American and seeking to bring down capitalism. Now this guy is a Rightwing wacko who likes his Big Macs and I know that. Buying meat from the farmer down the road if you can or organic meat at Costco or your local market, if you’re lucky enough, ensures that fewer animals are leading miserable lives. Cooking from scratch or at least finding organic versions of processed foods is the most healthful and humane thing to do. And it isn’t that hard.

Safeway and Fred Meyer carry organic products and the more people buy them the wider the variety is. For a mainstream store, Fred Meyer is the best with an extensive selection of organic product, even in bulk, at reasonable prices. They carry organic chicken and some beef, although organic beef is expensive. Some, but not all, of the Costcos carry organic meat. If you can find a local farmer who raises beef cattle at least you will know how the animal was treated. If you are in doubt as to who factory farms treat animals you can find videos of it on the Internet, but it’s not for the faint of heart or queasy of stomach.

We are fortunate enough to get fresh organic produce delivered to our door by Terra Organics. They have farms all over. I have a friend who gets their produce down in CA. Smith Brothers Farms, based in Kent, WA, carries organic milk to our door, too. We shop at Marlene's Market in Tacoma where we enjoy meals in their deli while we shop the store. They make the best vegan chocolate cake you ever put in your mouth.

You can find coupons for organic foods on the Internet. Organic Valley has coupons for milk, butter, eggs, and other dairy products. If you visit the websites of organic products and email them how much you like their products you can get coupons for all sorts of things. I have received coupons for carrots, organic chips, dishwashing liquids, etc.

There are local health food stores and co-ops like PC in King County and Marlene’s in King and Pierce County. I don’t like Whole Foods because the CEO, John Mackey, is against health care reform. His opinion is that if you do your shopping at his store you won’t need health care. I have a sister-in-law who ate all organic and still got pancreatic cancer so you can still get sick, your chances are just less if you aren’t putting all the chemicals that come in factory farmed meat and produce and processed food into your body.

The best thing you can do for yourself and family is to cook from scratch and then sit down together. It does more for the body and spirit than anything else you can do. Yes, it takes a little longer, but it's worth it. That's the view from my broom and my cupboard.