February 2012 – The Creative Salad

An Ethical Compromise

Here’s an example of how parenthood changes us, though perhaps not in the way you might expect.

Before having kids, my husband and I focused on eating locally. We shopped primarily at the farmers markets and would never buy produce from South America.

Here we are, four years later, with a fruit-loving daughter, and I don’t hesitate when I see organic blueberries grown in Chile for sale at Costco. In fact I’ll go out of my way and drive twenty-five minutes into town to buy more. Ethics, be dammed.

It’s hard enough to get our daughter to eat when we have all these options.

Perhaps a few years down the road, I’ll reclaim my dignity and let our Costco membership lapse. For now, I’m pretending I don’t know myself and hoping in the car… those blueberries taste good. (Of course, they don’t taste as good as those local Sonoma blues but we need to wait until the summer for those…)

My Hard Reality and Their Beautiful Kitchen Gardens

We’ve had an extrememly dry winter here in Northern California. Instead of doning rain boots each morning to combat the daily showers, we put on sandals as we savor sunny and 70 degree days here in Sonoma County. It’s nice, but, well, we really need the rain.

So here we are in February with fruit trees blooming, butterflies coupling, and my hugely overgrown and weedy garden is starting to grow anew.

This can’t be good.

In an attempt to encourage me to get outside and work in our yard, I thought it would be fun to share some particularly beautiful and inspiring kitchen gardens from my Garden Inspiration Board on Pinterest:

Featured above:
1. A Beautiful woven archway welcomes you into this garden featured in The Complete Kitchen Garden: An Inspired Collection of Garden Designs and 100 Seasonal Recipes. (pin/source)
2. A stunning kitchen garden with brick accents. (pin/source)
3. Raised beds, strategically placed shrubs and flowers, and generous paths give this Washington garden its unique style. (pin/source)
4. I love the addition of plants along the gravel path bordering the simple raised beds of this beautiful vegetable garden (pin/source)

View these and many more beautiful gardens on my Garden Inspiration Pinterest board.

(images obtained via Pinterest)

Organizing DVDs

I’ve started gathering the piles of discs, stacks of cases, and boxes full of DVDs from around the house and sorting them into CD binder pages.

Some movies are set aside to donate to the thrift store (that benefits our local hospice); the empty cases will be listed on FreeCycle; and other discs are boxed up to return to friends.

All the discs are being stored in a nondescript, PVC-free 3-ring binder containing one set of CD binder pages:

I find the process of moving the DVDs to be slow going, yet gratifying. (Thankfully I have a little helper! “Many hands make light work.”) I anticipate fewer scratched disks and no more piles of discs scattered throughout the house. And, oh, the space — I have a whole shelf to fill!

And about 100 more DVDs to move over. Where’s my daughter?! I need some help.

Handmade Watercolor Thank You Notes

You may be wondering where all of our craft project posts have gone. Well, instead of our typical morning craft project (that we LOVE to share with you here on the blog!), we’ve been writing birthday thank you notes.

Many, many birthday thank you notes.

Our daughter surprised us by announcing that she was going to hand-write her thank you notes. She’s doing a beautiful job, but because she’s, well, four years old, it’s taking a rather long time. She can only write about one thank you note a day. Make that, one note every other day. I don’t want to rush her, but that means we haven’t been doing that much else in the sit-still-while-we-do-a-project department.

We have many more notes to write. (Thank you all for your generous presents!)

Aren’t her notes precious?!

See our budget-friendly watercolor postcards tutorial for instructions on how we made the cards.

New Gluten-Free Goodies

Our family has been enjoying two new(ish) gluten-free products:

Jovial Rice Pasta truly tastes better, much better, than the competition and comes in a variety of shapes. (I particularly like their capellini that cooks in seven minutes flat.) In addition to being organic, whole grain, and incredibly tasty (I honestly feel this is the best gluten-free pasta on the market!), I love that the inner bag of their packaging is compostable:

How cool is that?! Eco-groovy and tasty, you can’t go wrong with this pasta.

FYI: If you get hooked on the Jovial pasta and, like us, exclusively eat it, then know that Jovial pasta is much more affordable at Amazon than in the grocery store. I try to pick it up locally when it’s on sale, but even then the price can be 50 cents to a dollar more per box than the price Amazon is offering.

The other product we recently found and adore are WholeVine Gluten-Free Cookies made right here in Sonoma County. While I feel that totting health benefits from grape-extracts in the cookies may be a bit gimmicky, their product is first rate. David and I both enjoyed this batch of 2-Chocolate Chips cookies.

If you don’t live in Sonoma county (where they’re available at a growing number of stores), you can order from them directly at their website. I’m excited to try their other flavors… not that I should be eating sugar or anything. Whoops!

p.s. You don’t have to exclusively eat gluten-free to enjoy these products! My husband particularly likes these cookies and he’s a hard sale on any cookies. Bon appétit!