Distraction #3, Gardening and Canning: How I've kept from getting too depressed during the 2016 Presidential Campaign

Cassie at the greenhouse door

I should have noted in the past two posts that these techniques to avoid depression during a more-than-usually contentious presidential campaign are ones that work for me; other people will have their own ways of coping. What I'm promoting here is the need to step away from the 24-hour news cycle, whether one accesses it on the Internet or cable television, to maintain one's equilibrium during these divisive times. I am also referring to depression as a general feeling of powerlessness and sadness in response to the focus on hatefulness in the news. Do we really need another conspiracy theory to rile up a mob of voters? Can we stand another video of so-called patriots screaming "Lock her up," suggesting that it's a good idea to prosecute one's political opponents? 

Those of us committed to facts, logic, and spirited but thoughtful and respectful debate have been bombarded with headlines throughout this campaign season that suggest our commitment is a delusion. Sometimes I think that if I hear or read one more "opinion" with no supporting evidence, I'll scream. But then I head to the garden to gather produce or just to look at the plants still surviving here in late fall. Fortunately, the presidential campaign will be over by winter and the first snow.

I find solace in a garden. Part of that comes from the heavy work early in the season; nothing quite pulls one's focus away from a spiral of worries than good, physical labor. Then there is the magic of germination; I never fail to be surprised every year as those hard, tiny seeds I planted break apart and push that first bit of green above the soil. Plucking the spring greens or gathering the first tomato is occasion for celebration. Who can be sad in a garden?

Our first full summer of gardening in Arizona brought us more bounty than we expected. Since Tom re-purposed an old chicken house into a greenhouse in which we planted tomatoes and peppers, our tomatoes there were turning ripe long before those in the larger, open garden. And we still have tomatoes blooming and producing here in mid-October, Sungolds in the outside garden, Celebrities, Sungolds, and even Black Krim in the greenhouse.

I have described in earlier posts some of our Arizona gardening experiences--here, here, here, and here--so there is no need to reprise those. We ate well from our garden this year, and then we began canning our produce for later consumption, learning as we went. 

preparing to make and can apple chutney

Tom started first on the tomatoes; he canned a total of about 53 pints. Then we began canning the apples from our apple trees; we had so many that we shared boxes of apples with neighbors. I first tried an apple chutney recipe. Tom began with apple sauce and then apple jam, discovering after the first batch of jam that we should pulse the apple pieces in a food processor for a prettier jam. With apple slices, apple jam, apple chutney, apple sauce, Red Hot apple jelly, and apple-serrano-pepper jelly, we have enough canned apple products to share over and over again.

canned apple slices

apple jam

draining apple juice for jelly

apple-serrano pepper jelly

When the first snows manage to get above the mountains and  settle into the dryer Round Valley, we will still be eating tomatoes from our garden, in soups and salsas; spreading jam and jelly from our apples on our morning toast; making apple pie from apple slices we canned; topping our ice cream with apple sauce and adding the sauce to recipes for muffins and pancakes. When the 44th President of the United States moves out of the White House and the 45th is sworn in, we will be enjoying the sweetness of our summer garden--and forgetting, I hope, the bitterness of that same summer's presidential campaign.

our summer canning

October knew, of course, that the action of turning a page, of ending a chapter or shutting a book, did not end the tale. Having admitted that, he would also avow that happy endings were never difficult to find: 'It is simply a matter,' he explained to April, 'of finding a sunny place in a garden, where the light is golden and the grass is soft; somewhere to rest, to stop reading, and to be content.'

--Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol, 4: Season of Mists

Distraction #2, Food and Wine: How to Keep from being Depressed by Today's News

Early summer garden salad, with mesclun mix greens and radishes from our garden

When Tom and I were first married, I did a lot of cooking. We were undergraduates at Texas A&M University, and my dishes then were family comfort food favorites (potato soup; Cowboy Stew), recipes from my grandmothers (Grandma Dugat's Sweet Potato Casserole), recipes exchanged with friends (Fruit Pizza) and recipes I would pick up in a local grocery store (Shrimp Victoria, from the Texas Agricultural Extension Service). This latter dish I made many, many times as I went from being an undergraduate to a graduate student to an instructor at Louisiana State University and beyond. You could gain weight just looking at the (now food-spattered but still clearly legible) recipe: 1 pound raw Texas shrimp, peeled and deveined; 1 cup sour cream; 1/2 cup finely chopped onion; 1/4 cup margarine or butter; 1 can (6 ounces) mushrooms; 1 tablespoon flour; 1/4 teaspoon of salt; dash cayenne pepper; 1 1/2 cups cooked rice. Sauteed, gently cooked, and served over rice, that shrimp dish was for years the fanciest dish I prepared for company (along with Shrimp Couscous).

As the years passed, however, Tom took over a great deal of the cooking. He introduced hand-gathered (by himself and a friend who was Anishinaabe) wild rice for the dishes I learned to cook in Minnesota (wild rice soup; wild rice casserole). He created many variations on veggie stir-fries and Indian curries; lentil and sweet potato soup; tofu, fried with his special spice blend, sauteed with veggies; homemade sushi. I stuck with my old favorites, such as my family recipe of potato soup, modifying it over time: adding sausage and garlic to the simple potato-onion-salt and pepper-liquid (milk and water) recipe; taking out the sausage as two members of the family became vegetarians and adding cheese; carmelizing the onions before adding to the soup; adding homemade vegetable stock to the milk base. 

But this summer I began cooking dinner every evening, looking for ways to prepare fresh vegetables from our Arizona garden. Spending time looking for likely recipes online, bookmarking the best ones, thinking of how to modify them to our tastes or to the ingredients on hand were wonderful distractions from focusing on Internet news that was guaranteed to bring up my blood pressure.

And so, when the veggies started coming in, I found recipes to fit our palate, such as Mexican Pepper Casserole from The Moosewood Cookbook. To the original recipe, I added garlic and one thinly sliced yellow squash.

Mexican Pepper Casserole, recipe from the 2014 version of The Moosewood Cookbook, by Mollie Katzen

While in Phoenix one weekend, we went by Whole Foods, and I bought some fancy packages of jello powder. Some fresh strawberries (with real whipped cream, not Cool Whip) made a nice touch for dessert with the casserole above:

Strawberry jello with little strawberry hearts

I also baked a tomato pie for the first time, with fresh tomatoes from our garden and a homemade butter pie crust.

Fresh vegetables from our summer garden

My first tomato pie. The butter pie crust shrank a bit and burned at the edges, but...

YUM!

When Tom and I cooked together, I would often make a salad, and he would stir-fry vegetables from the garden; I might put on some squash to steam, sprinkled with dried tarragon. But as the summer progressed and the 2016 Presidential campaign became more heated, you can see how my cooking became a bit more calorie-laden.

I battered our garden-fresh squash in egg, flour and spices--and fried it.

And I set about improving dishes I had tried before and others I hadn't made in a long time. (I used to make apple pie from scratch fairly frequently.)

My second attempt at tomato pie; I achieved a more uniform, less blackened crust. I added a nutty bread crumb and Parmesan cheese topping.

I managed to make one of the prettiest apple pies I had made in a long time, with a double butter crust and apples from our small orchard.

I loaded up fresh vegetable casseroles with various cheeses.

Squash Casserole

A friend suggested that I try to make tomato tarts since we had so many tomatoes from our garden. I experimented first with a few tomatoes and with butter pie crust left over from the apple pie I had made a couple of days previously.

My first experimental tomato tart

I tried a full-sized one next:

My first "real" tomato tart

Last night I made another tomato tart, using a butter pie crust recipe because I didn't have the ingredients for the crust of a fancier recipe I found online.

Rolling out the dough for the pie crust--I added fresh rosemary to the dough.

The final result: perhaps the last tomato tart of the season

Why I now need to get back on the elliptical every day

It took me almost three hours to make that last tomato tart, from gathering the green onions and parsley from the garden to making and rolling out the dough to cutting up the tomatoes and placing them on top of the Grey Poupon, sauteed onion and Serrano peppers, cheese, and fresh herb layers. Cooking from scratch takes a lot of time, time that otherwise might be spent brooding over the news, the days events, all one's past failings....whatever. 

I do, however, caution about the wine: too much, and you're likely to leave that message on a Facebook page that you have long avoided doing. Please be a bit sparing with the liquor in drowning your political angst. Screaming into your pillow may not wake your neighbors, but it's likely to upset your partner, as sympathetic as he may be. 

Another undesired result can be weight gain. Tom and I are going to be eating a lot less cheese-laden casseroles and vegetable pies with butter crusts. I'm looking for simple recipes for canned tomatoes, since Tom canned 53 pints of our summer produce. I just found a cool Gazpacho recipe in The Moosewood Cookbook, just right for winding down after the presidential election, all emotion spent.