This weekend is shaping up to be a whiz-banger. In a few hours I’ll be hopping into a truck and heading for Clear Lake State Park for the annual Heron Festival. Here’s to hoping that this year it doesn’t rain…especially since we’re camping. Camping in the rain = much suckage. I’ve done it too many times to count. At this point in my life, I’m perfectly content not trenching before bedtime. There’s nothing more depressing than installing a moat around your tent in the hopes that you can redirect the water towards somewhere other than your nice absorptive sleeping bag.

I’m hoping that my bird systematics skills are unrusty enough that I will be able to identify species more accurately this year. Half of the birds we encounter, we only get to hear and not see. Identifying birdsong is therefore extremely crucial in those cases. Last year I got about 1 in 5 right. I’ve spent an entire year working on understanding and memorizing this stuff, so. We’ll see. Obviously I need to get laid, since this is now a hobby of mine. Dear god.

Buttered Buns

The nicest thing about being forced to buy a new refrigerator is that you get to start from scratch with all of your foodstuffs. This pleases me to no end because I don’t feel like I have to consume all the stuff I had crammed into my freezer, be it healthy or not. Since my life is relatively hectic and at the end of the day I prefer to keep my time in the kitchen to a minimum so I can focus on my schoolwork, I had a lot of frozen vegetables, Amy’s Organic dinners, cook-in-bag pasta mixes, and other sundry items stashed in my freezer. Yeah, losing it all sucked fat balls. But now my freezer looks awesome, filled only with The Roommate’s normal crap, a fresh loaf of banana bread, the requisite package of frozen peas (don’t need the frozen spinach; my farm box comes with fresh spinach almost year-round), and individually-wrapped chicken breasts in marinade.

This last item is one of my favorite freezer tricks. You get those half-pint Ziploc bags, a package of boneless/skinless chicken breasts, and either a bottle of your favorite marinade or make your own. I use Newman’s Own Organic Italian dressing because I have yet to make one of my own that tastes as awesome as that. Cut your chicken into proper portion sizes (3oz. of chicken equals one serving…about the size of an average female fist) and place one portion in each bag, then fill with a couple tablespoons of marinade per bag. Push the air out as you’re sealing it up, massage a bit to goosh the marinade around, and pop in the freezer. Voilá! Easy single-serve chicken! Be sure to wash the bag after you consume the chicken. You can reuse it if you scrub it up with a bit of antibacterial dish soap and hot water.

I’m hoping that this year I will be able to can enough tomatoes from my summer farm boxes to turn around and make batches of tomato sauce in the fall. Last summer I came into the program midway and could never amass enough tomatoes to outright can any of them, so I was mostly making and consuming tomato sauce and pasta sauce within the same week or two that I received the tomatoes. Same with all the basil. If I can get myself organized enough in the next couple of weeks, I’ll be ready to rock and roll. Theoretically. You know me. I tend to mostly roll. Downhill. Into a pile of fresh runny dogshit. My life, it brings the lulz.

Aw, you poor thing. You were reading up to this point, feeling all good and warm. And then I had to drop a disturbing visual on you. Honestly, you should’ve learned by now. Tsk.

Ok, so I’m a few days late with this, but somehow I don’t think any of you were crying about it.

Here’s a picture of this week’s CSA box. This time around we have a slightly different offering, yet still slightly the same. Oh trust me, it’s still exciting to pick up the box each week and dig through to see what’s going on. You can’t imagine how sexy it is to have fresh organic fruits and veggies (and herbs!) every other week. Though I’m getting a bit too exuberant, because I’m consuming my CSA box allotment in about a week’s time as opposed to the two weeks I had anticipated it would take me. I think that will even out here with fall semester starting tonight. I won’t feel like getting all funky fresh in the kitchen once the new workload catches up to me…

From the left: Melons, onions, heirloom tomatoes, radishes, summer squash, nectarines, Roma tomatoes, plums, basil, and Yellow Finn potatoes.

There was also a container of cherry tomatoes that came in this box, but I gave those up to mom immediately. The Romas and heirlooms I can do something with. Cherry tomatoes simply make me play a lot of Bau Haus and make me ponder suicide entirely too much. There are of course a half dozen organic free-range eggs with this lot, but you already know what eggs look like, right? So. Yeah.

I do feel the need to point out how gorgeous the heirloom tomatoes are. If you can see that little green fellow on top of the big dark red one, you’ll see that it looks like a tiny watermelon. It’s gorgeous. Heirlooms come in all shapes and sizes, and this little dude is actually supposed to be green, believe it or not. I’m debating on what to do with him because he’s just so damn pretty. It would be a shame to cook him into a sauce. Maybe I’ll draw a face on him and give him a name. Let him sit next to me at the dinner table.

And Now For Something Completely Different

T minus two hours until bio class tonight. Apprehensive? Yes. Always apprehensive with a new class. Especially one where there is NO TEXTBOOK LIST POSTED. I’m not sure I’ll ever get over it. So just deal. Anyway, I’m kind of stoked for the new course as I do crave the classroom interaction thing. Plus each new term means a fresh start at another 4.0 which is always lovely. Each perfect quarter and semester makes me feel just slightly more godlike. Yes, I am just a little proud of myself. But why shouldn’t I be? Half the people I encounter can’t even spell, let alone pull an A average. I think I get to gloat just a little considering I can do both and not even break a sweat. People always ask why I didn’t get my baccalaureate degree right out of high school, and I have several stock answers, all part of the whole story. But the biggest reason is that I’d never felt all that challenged by my education. And so for a short while, school bored me. I stopped trying. It started somewhere toward the beginning of my senior year and continued on through the first two years of college. I still took a lot of classes and got good grades, but I just didn’t care. Getting an associate’s degree was way too simple…that’s why I hold four. And I do nothing with any of them because they mean nothing. To some people I wasted fourteen years just to come ’round full circle and do exactly what I’d wanted to do all along. But for me, I finally found a space in my life that fit not only what I wanted but also how I felt. So it all evens out. Yeah.

I got too deep for y’all there, didn’t I? Heh. Um. BOOBIES!