This Month: Swapping, Skillsharing, and Sunchokes

Celebrating Imbolc by hiking on an obscenely-warm February 2nd in my cute new thrift-shop dress: it haaaass pockets!

January began quietly, and quickly snowballed into a very full schedule… but it was all good stuff, so I'm coming into February energized instead of drained, which is a wonderful feeling.

A few notable things from January…

Two swap meets

I hosted a "Swap n' Shop" party at my house, and had a lot of fun giving away stuff I no longer needed and picking up a few items in return! (Most notable: a copper candle holder and a book titled "How to Stay Alive in the Woods.") The next day I attended a seed swap hosted by StL Seeding Frenzy, and in return for a bag of sunchokes, some kale seeds, and other miscellaneous seeds I'd saved, I now have packets of seeds for tomatoes, peppers, turnips, radishes, Italian dandelion, wormwood, marigolds, cosmos, heirloom melons, and more! 

As if that weren't enough swapping, I'm also co-organizing a swap meet with my church later on in February! My local friends will get more details about that soon.

Skillsharing classes

Zach and I co-taught two different classes in January: one about sauerkraut, and one about milk kefir, water kefir, and kombucha. We had a ton of fun hanging out with friends, discussing ferments, and poking at blobs of symbiotic colonies of bacteria and yeast! Moments like this remind me how much I love teaching. (I mean, yes, I teach for a living, but teaching online isn't the same.) It's my goal to offer about two in-home classes a month this year, and hoping I can stick to it.

Sunchoke bread! 

As mentioned in a previous post, I did in fact dig up sunchokes (Jerusalem artichokes) from our backyard, scrub and clean them, blend them into a slurry with water, dehydrate them, then grind them into flour in a blender. We made our usual whole wheat bread, but substituting 10% of the flour with sunchoke flour. The result is a complexly-flavored loaf that was slightly denser than usual (I think I'll add some white flour next time for extra gluten in hopes of getting it to rise a bit more): overall, a success! It was a ton of work, but I'm proud of it.

The sunchoke slurry after I dehydrated it

I used the blender to blend it into flour. Here it is on top of the whole-wheat flour for bread-baking

Loaves ready to go into the oven! Of course I forgot to take a photo after
they came out of the oven, and now both loaves are eaten. #badblogger

My first "zero-waste" grocery shopping

Because of our linear economy (materials become goods become waste), living with "zero" waste is literally impossible. However, I use the term because it's become mainstream enough that it's the name of a movement of people trying to create less waste in their lives. So I finally did one of the basic ideas of zero waste: brought my own containers to a local grocery store (Local Harvest in Tower Grove), had them tare the containers, and then filled up from the bulk section. It was a bit more time-consuming than usual, and I didn't get much since I was schlepping it all home on a bus and a mile-long walk from the bus stop, but it felt good to be able to support a local grocery and bring my own containers.

Some notes on this: I would never drive all the way across town to Tower Grove just to buy groceries; the fuel I would burn (even in an electric car) would not be justified, in my opinion. But, my best friend now lives right by the grocery store, and I will justify burning fossil fuel to see her. So I get the grocery store thrown in for free!

Eco anxiety, eco action

Mid-winter is always a tough spot for me to get through, and this year a lot of my feeling bad centered around eco anxiety, as I wrote about in this blog post. I was heartened and encouraged by several responses to that post, ranging from simple sympathy to a detailed analysis of community psychology as it relates to environmentalism.

Now that the days are lengthening and Celtic spring has begun with Imbolc on February 2nd (their seasons line up with St. Louis's far better than the North American seasons, anyway), I can look back at January and see the things I've managed to set in motion to help me keep fighting for the planet even when I feel exhausted or discouraged. I'm finding ways to share what I've learned, whether that's waxing eloquent about sauerkraut or putting together an upcoming blog post about how to make more ethical buying choices with grocery store meat. I have a lot of goals and plans for the rest of 2020, and I'm excited to see how many of them I can reach.

What have you been up to this month?

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