Garden plot, really coming along

Jonathan’s and my plot in a local community garden is really coming along! We’ve been getting vegetables planted, a few plants at a time, and it’s great to see our crops getting bigger with each visit to the garden. (Face masks are an omnipresent requirement due to COVID-19 shelter-in-place, but tending our garden is a productive opportunity to get out in fresh air.)

SRCS to serve meals on Mondays and Wednesdays

Effective Wednesday, April 15, Santa Rosa City Schools (SRCS) will serve meals on Mondays and Wednesdays, 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m at all nine meal distribution sites. A total of five breakfasts and five lunches will be served each week with fewer pickups. “Fewer pickups with more meals keeps families and staff safer. See you soon!”

Community garden plot

While Jonathan and I shelter-in-place to help avoid spread of COVID-19, we’ve been using that some of that time to work in a community garden.

During the past couple of days, we’ve worked to clear weeds from our garden-plot. We’re looking forward to planting crops that will give us fresh vegetables.

We’ve also met other people involved in the community garden.

Making connections with other people doesn’t come easily to me, so I greatly value the chance to build greater community involvement.

You can read more about COVID-19 by visiting my main blog (Cynthia Parkhill : Library Technician, Volunteer, and Advocate).

Grab and go meals during suspension of classes

Santa Rosa City Schools is working with community partners, under the guidance of the state, to provide meals to students during this unprecedented crisis. The following sites will provide, for all children under the age of 18, a drive-thru/carry-out lunch service from 11:30 am - 1:00 pm Monday through Friday, beginning Monday, March 23 (after Spring Break).

Essential tools for bread-cutting

I love artisan bread, so it made sense to purchase kitchen-products that aid in bread consumption. (Sawing into hearty, robust loaves of bread took a lot of effort, but whenever the stores sliced it, they always threw in an extra plastic bag to wrap around the now-cut bread. And no, the stores wouldn’t accept bags brought in from home; believe me, I tried.) So, we set out to assemble what we needed to duplicate sliced-bread convenience but without the extra waste: the Cuisinart electric bread knife, CEK-30; the Bambusi Bread Slicer with built-in-cutting guide; and Dowellife Cut-Resistant Gloves. The items work great: the electric bread knife works effortlessly to saw through the bread, and cutting guides along the sides of the bread board help me line up my cuts. As for the gloves, I’m purposely trying to avoid cutting them in the first place, so I’m not able to relate how they work when cut with an electric knife. So far, one glove has sustained one cut (with a manual knife) and, while the knife-blade cut into the glove, the cut did not reach my skin.

Sauerkraut and jalapeño on vegetarian burger

For years, I restricted myself to eating burgers that are “plain and dry,” so I thought I’d share news of notable progress via the food-chaining route. Here’s a vegetarian burger patty, paired with Dave’s Killer Bread. To it, I added sauerkraut and slices of jalapeño. These added items are cold (a long-standing problem texture for me), but the warmth of the heated vegetable patty and the toasted bread enfold them and reduce their intensity. I trace this progression from being able to select ingredients at a build-your-own sandwich franchise. I would ask that wait-staff heat those toppings along with the bread and the protein.

Round Table’s ‘Gourmet Veggie’ without cheese

Aaah ... pizza! We love Round Table’s Gourmet Veggie: artichoke hearts, zucchini, spinach, mushrooms, garlic, and red and green onions on a Creamy Garlic Sauce. We leave-off tomatoes on my half, and add Jalapeños to the entire pizza. But the most important modification we make is to completely omit cheese. I really cannot emphasize this enough, which is why it bears repeating: We love pizza, but eating so much cheese always made us feel horrible afterward. And without the cheese, we find all the other flavors so much richer and more fully enjoyable.

Salsa verde, eaten cold

If you‘re familiar from past entries with my sensory history, you‘ll understand what a triumph in food-chaining it is for me to dip a corn chip in salsa verde. The idea with “food chaining” is to start with a food considered “safe” by the problem eater and then slowly introduce foods with a similar taste, temperature, or texture. The eater progresses from a food considered safe to the final “target” food. In this case, the food problem I’ve been addressing is an aversion to cold, clammy textures. No, this does not mean I am now desensitized to all foods that are cold and clammy. But I like to savor what feels, to me, like a moment of victory.

Making pizza at home

Spent our Friday evening making pizza at home. We used many of our favorite pizza ingredients: Olives! Two types of peppers! Zucchini! Chopped-up mushrooms! Broccoli! One thing notably absent from our masterpiece was any type of cheese. We love a pizza heaped with veggies, but we hated the bloated, even “icky” feeling that eating the cheese left us with. Lately, we’ve asked to “Hold the cheese” at the local pizzeria. The result is an even more flavorful presentation for all the other ingredients. Talk about “addition through subtraction!”

Bouchon olive and walnut batards

Olive batard from Bouchon Bakery

Caught up on correspondence that was interrupted by the northern California firestorm: a thank-you note for my receipt of a gift card to Bouchon Bakery in Yountville.

The gift card arrived just before the fires broke out and my family ended up being evacuated. During the aftermath of our return and subsequently moving into our own apartment, the card got temporarily overlooked.

Bouchon Bakery supplies fresh breads to the grocery store in Calistoga.

Since moving from Oregon back to California, briefly staying at the family homestead, I really enjoyed routine access to Bouchon’s olive and walnut batards.

The breads have a musky aroma and flavor, punctuated by the “nuggets of goodness” that are olives and walnuts. I look forward to using my gift card to purchase olive and walnut batards.

Smoothies mitigate difficulty eating fruits and vegetables

All my life, I’ve struggled with eating food that had the wrong taste, appearance, color or texture. In extreme duress, eating the “wrong” food could make me retch or gag.

More frequently, but perhaps more damaging, I faced condemnation and ridicule because of my limited diet.

Eating fruits and vegetables is where I particularly struggle. There’s something about this food that is difficult for me to handle.

Fortunately, we know that the way food is prepared can drastically change its “eatability.” When cut raw, tomatoes are grotesque and slimy. But what a difference to eat sun-dried tomatoes on pizza or in pasta, with a smooth creamy marinara sauce.
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Flavor Bible, essential resource for researching new foods

I rely on “food chaining” to help with my transition from foods that are familiar and comfortable, but what about those foods and ingredients that I know nothing about?

Tactile sensitivities related to food taste, temperature and texture, make trying new things difficult. As a risk-averse person who wants to know ahead-of-time if new foods are “safe” to try, I find the idea of The Flavor Bible to be very empowering.

Written by Karen Page and Andrew Dornenburg, The Flavor Bible (Little, Brown and Company, 2008) offers an alphabetized listing of foods and ingredients with essential details about taste.

Page and Dornenburg explain that many factors go into the experience of flavor: these are taste, “mouthfeel” (temperature and texture), aroma and the “X Factor,” which they describe as the emotional response to food. “When we are present to what we are eating,” they say, “food has the power to affect our entire selves.”

Eating can be one of toughest challenges

Eating is easily the most difficult sensory task for this woman on the autism spectrum. Risking unfamiliar tastes and textures, trying new food takes time and fortitude.

El desayuno y el almuerzo gratis para niños este verano

(In Spanish)
Vía Santa Rosa escuelas de la ciudad: ​Los niños, 18 años y menores, comen el desayuno y el almuerzo gratis este verano.

También publicado en Cynthia Parkhill: Paralibrarian and Editor
Número de clasificación en el sistema Dewey: 463. En medios sociales: #EnEspanol


(En inglés)
Via Santa Rosa City Schools: Children, ages 18 and younger, eat free breakfast and lunch this summer.

Also posted to Cynthia Parkhill: Paralibrarian and Editor
Classification number in Dewey system: 463. On social media: #EnEspanol

Summer ‘Lunch at the Library’

For the third year in a row, Sonoma County Library (SCL) will host free meals for youth this summer, every weekday at six library locations.

Olive pitter, a gourmand's essential product

I'm unabashed in my enjoyment of olives -- I'd gladly eat them every day -- and recent adventures have led to intact olives served in restaurants and "olive bars." As a serious connoisseur, I wanted to cleanly and easily remove the olive pit.

My quest for optimized olive-enjoyment led to the Squeeze2Pit olive and cherry pitting tool. It arrived attractively packaged in a lavish presentation box with foam-padding interior.

The classy presentation earned high marks, and the tool itself is more than worth the investment.

Upon first trying it, I found the pitter very easy to use. The grip handles offer good leverage for effectively removing the pit with very little exertion. The pit ejects cleanly with little-to-no skin and pulp, and I'm left with a freshly-pitted olive that I can then enjoy.

Thin Bins, collapsible food containers that fit in a pocket

Compact storage is important when you a) travel by bicycle or on-foot and b) want to bring your own take-out containers to combat wasteful restaurant practices of too-large, disposable boxes.

Too much box for these left-overs

Seriously?

Among wasteful and ridiculous practices associated with dining out: was it really necessary for three tiny slices of pizza to be packed in such an enormous box? This is why we’ve placed an order for reusable, collapsible, easy-to-carry containers. No more depending-in-vain upon restaurant wait-staff to responsibly select our containers (which are still, ultimately, disposable).

Can’t we just enjoy water?

Source of image: Pexels, under Creative Commons Zero Universal (CC0 1.0) license

On Friday afternoon, walking around Medford, Ore., we stopped in at a local eatery. From experience, we knew that if we didn’t speak up immediately, water glasses would be deposited on our table, and those glasses would be clogged with ice. So we quickly told our server, “We’d like water with no ice.”

Unwanted chocolate carries burden of punishment

Public domain image by George Hodan

At Personal Branding Blog, Maria Elena Duron cautions against gifts that hurt the giver’s personal brand, by “shouting” to the recipient that the giver doesn’t know him or her.