Cleaning out the freezer and other exciting pastimes, and some thoughts about interdependency

In anticipation of spring and gardening, hubby and I went downstairs and took inventory of our big chest freezer. We still have carrots, squash, kale, beet greens, rhubarb, and a lot of green beans left from last year's harvest. We're running low on strawberries (you would have thought 45 pounds would be enough, but I guess not) and we're out of asparagus. And of course I still have quite a lot of bottled stuff left (apples, pears, peaches, grape juice, jams and jellies). Maybe 25 heads of garlic left. If we pace ourselves correctly, all this should be running out just as the new harvest is coming in.

I always have arguments with myself about how much I can realistically do versus what I want to do. I know I don't need to grow all my own food or make my own soap or weave my own fabric...but it's fun to do and it's confidence-building to know I can. There's also something deeply appealing about the idea of living the hard-work-and-exhausting-but-creative life of our great-grandmothers. With that kind of life, you can see at the end of every day what you have accomplished and what your hands have made.

Someone I know on Facebook was complaining about the time it took to make a certain dish from scratch (I think it was an hour and a half). I couldn't help responding and telling them about our homemade lasagna that takes about three days to make (homemade sauce from the garden produce, homemade pasta, homemade ricotta, homemade sausage) and ten minutes to eat. And then it occurred to me--it actually takes much longer. Someday I will write a cookbook that starts each recipe with "First plough a field, plant wheat, and start some tomato seedlings indoors..." Or maybe it should start earlier with "mine and smelt the ore to form a ploughshare and then raise a horse..."

And then I'll follow it up with "First grow an acre of cotton, harvest and spin it, build a loom, and weave a tablecloth... Dig some clay and cast some pottery plates... Plant a tree and wait twenty years until it's big enough to make a table..."

Everything we do, something as simple as lasagna, really depends so much on what others have done before us to make it possible.