Although I don’t particularly like cold weather, there is a silver lining here in California – it’s citrus time! Our Bearss Lime has been producing (prolifically) for several weeks now and just this week our Owari Satsuma trees acquired enough orange color for the boys to begin harvesting.
Tate wasted no time in working towards his yearly quota from our home garden; he’s probably eaten ten already and I had to stop him from venturing out a THIRD time last night to get his preferred dessert (fruit). As a parent, I felt off-kilter saying “enough fruit, go have something sweet and fattening!” but that’s because I have been gifted with a darling, 11-year old semi-fruitarian. I love his passion for vegetables and fruits, don’t get me wrong. It just can be difficult to keep up when he comes home from school craving a mixed green salad with champagne vinaigrette and said ingredients were all used up in Sunday night’s dinner.
Do any of you get into this seemingly endless cycle of promoting fresh, organic food that needs to be purchased frequently and eaten quickly before it spoils and then life intervenes and you haven’t gotten to the amazing fruit stand or Farmer’s Market and you have hungry children who want what you normally have on hand but don’t and what you DO have just won’t do?? Whew! I’m tired just thinking about whether or not that sentence is gramatically correct.
Paul tells me I am my own worst enemy when it comes to primarily cooking from scratch and he’s right. Every day there are piles of dishes, pots and pans and those darn Henckels knives I love but that need to be hand-washed AND dried every time. No wonder I just give up sometimes and go out three nights in a row (not a good financial investment, to be sure, but sometimes my sanity depends on it).
Does anyone else ever feel stressed by how hard it is to live an old-fashioned, backyard garden growing, mindful-of-the-environment-and-our-consumptive-impact type of lifestyle? I’m still 100 percent for it; I’ve just found myself up against a wall time-wise so many times. I love how we try to live but am very cognizant of HOW MUCH TIME it really takes every day. If anyone has any great tips for better time management, I would greatly appreciate it!
Kathy- this blog hits way to close to home for me. I was cooking chicken marsala last night and Sophia was eating the mushrooms faster than I could get them into the sauce, all while I was trying to maintain composure about the fact that my sinuses were clogged and unhappy. I spent the evening doing dishes and hand washing my Wustof knives and wondering why it is that I try, while working, to cook every night. Then i remembered the look on Sophia and Cyrus’s faces when i brought the fresh food over. Both were thrilled and Sophia even told me it was the best food ever. So, I figure even if there are weeks of lots of takeout and adventures into other culinary places, it is amazing that we cook enough for our kids to request our food at any hour of the day. P.S. I am now craving a satsuma!