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Lucy Cuddy Hall on the UAA campus, one of a number of Glacier Valley Farm CSA's dropoff locations in Anchorage

Yesterday I picked up my second order of produce from Glacier Valley Farm CSA. CSA, again, stands for community supported agriculture; I wrote a long post about it when I picked up my first produce order a couple of weeks ago.  I didn’t take as many photos of it this time, but up there you can see it was a pretty good sampling of fresh yummy produce.

This week’s goodies included:

From Alaska’s Glacier Valley Farm, VanderWeele Farm:

• Alaska-grown onions
• Alaskan-grown potatoes, a whole bunch of ‘em
• A big pile of Alaska-grown carrots, which are the best kind of carrots I’ve ever eaten.

This week 13 boxes were delivered by Glacier Valley Farm CSA to the Lucy Cuddy Hall pickup point.

From Outside (all certified organic)

• 3 Fancy Fuji apples
• 3 large navel oranges
• 2 bunches of Rainbow chard. I think one of these was supposed to be romaine lettuce, but that’s okay, I like chard well enough I won’t have problems eating it all.
• sunchokes. I don’t have a clue what to do with these, but I’m sure Google will have an answer.
• broccoli

And also:

• a really big squash.  I don’t know whether it came from Alaska or from the Lower 48.

I’ve never liked squash, so I took mine over to my friend Sylvia, who really loves it.  I like everything else.  Had one of those oranges in my lunch today.

GVFCSA includes stuff from the Lower 48 during the wintertime because, hey, it’s winter in Alaska so a lot of that stuff is out of season up here.  The Alaska-grown stuff they include in their produce boxes in the wintertime are storage veggies.  Thus, GVFCSA can claim to be the only year-round CSA in Alaska.  But there are some other really good CSAs in the Anchorage/Mat-Su area, too, including Arctic Organics, which is the oldest CSA in Alaska & serves about 150 families with its CSA program; and Spring Creek Farm, which belongs to Alaska Pacific University & began a CSA program in 2007.  They also have an Environmental Learning Center.  Like Glacier Valley Farm, these two farms are located in the Palmer area of the Mat-Su Valley.

If you live in another part of Alaska, you might be able to find another CSA through the Community Supported Agriculture page on the Last Frontier Locavores website (though I don’t know how up-to-date it is).  There’s a lot of them in the Fairbanks area! Also check out the website of the Alaska Community Agriculture Association. This is an organization of small Alaska farms which grow food crops for direct sale to the public, whose members are — per their mission statement — “committed to promoting, supporting, and working towards sustainable and regional local food systems. We want to encourage agricultural practices that benefit our environment, our communities, and our customers.” They’ve got a good page of links to CSAs, farmers’ markets, & other community agriculture resources.

My first order of produce from Glacier Valley Farm CSA included a humongous Alaska-grown cabbage.  Somehow I didn’t get a photo of it when it was still whole, but take my word for it: it was big & beautiful.

I used it last week to make sauerkraut.  I also had some red cabbage that I’d bought at the Natural Pantry, my usual grocery store.

Making sauerkraut is easy, but it can take awhile. Took a long time to chop all that cabbage up, mixed in a bit of salt & caraway seed, then kinda pound it down to bring out the brine. (For lack of anything better, I used my metal Kaladi Brothers car cup: worked great.)

Here’s my sauerkraut the night I made it.

There’s no water added other than about four or five tablespoons of lactic-acid rich “water” from some fruit kimchi my ex-partner Ptery (then named Rozz) made three years ago, that’s still in the fridge (& still good!). All the rest of the fluid is simply the brine from the cabbage itself, which I guess the salt helps to draw out. That kimchi fluid had the stuff to begin the process of fermentation that makes cabbage, salt, & good guy bacteria into really tasty sauerkraut.

I took a bunch of other pictures of the sauerkraut that night because macros of it made some really nice abstract sauerkraut art.

Here’s the same batch of sauerkraut two days later. See all those bubbles? Fermenting nicely.

Fermentation had also caused the cabbage to rise up in the jar (an Italian-made jar with a lid that provides a hermetic seal).

You might also notice how much more purple the lower region of the sauerkraut is than the upper region. That’s because when I first cut up the cabbage, I didn’t think all of it would fit, so I kept about a third of the light green Alaska-grown cabbage out. Then looked like it’d fit after all, so I put in the rest of the light cabbage.

I first tried out some of my cabbage last Friday while I was watching “Caprica” (hence my Daily Tweets post that day, “Caprica w/ sauerkraut”). That was about three days after it was made, & it was pretty good! But sauerkraut is even better after you’ve let it age a bit. Here’s what it looked like tonight, when I had a small bowlful with my dinner. See how the dark purple pigments from the “red” cabbage have mixed all up to make my sauerkraut pink?

Yummy good. And good for you too. Sauerkraut has tons of Vitamin C, & the fermentation process means there’s also lots of good guy bacteria to keep your internal flora all nice & happy.

Please enjoy my Sauerkraut Slide Show:

Related posts:

1. Partial locavore
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3. Local farmers, local food

• Moving AK capitol from Juneau is a really bad idea. Andrew Halcro explains why: http://bit.ly/bcoByV #
• MSNBC on Palin emails: why did unelected, unappointed Todd Palin exercise any political power at all? http://bit.ly/bqWGdy AK govt #fail #fb #
• How most Alaskans feel about Palin: sick & tired of her. Can’t wait for the rest of the country to catch on. http://bit.ly/aEtELk #fb #
• @SergeGraystone It’s a good thing for Zoe that the Graystones don’t know about Twitter. in reply to SergeGraystone #
• RT: @JanFlora49: is wondering why @SenJohnnyEllis only has 115 followers. // Thx for saying — he’s my state senator! Following him now. #
• @cadaverousapple: Or WRITING them. My problem too. #
• Working on a big damn post on good govt v. bad govt re: corps in both my invented SF world & the world we really live in. Later tonight. #fb #
• RT: @cadaverousapple: @yksin Hey, have you heard of this? Or, better yet, are you submitting? http://bit.ly/9ANkST // Yep, gonna submit. #
• About to watch Ep 3 of #Caprica accompanied by og turkeyburgers & my 1st helping of my homemade og sauerkraut. Oh yeah, & cabernet. #fb #
• RT @redrummy: Sauerkraut… & Cabernet? *headtilt* *blink* *blink* // _homemade_ sauerkraut, niot that nasty storebought stuff. Good w wine #
• Caprica is blowing me away w: every ep as much as BG did. Good on ya Moore & Eick & Espenson & everybody. #fb #

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• Most beautiful photo of the Mat-Su Valley of AK I’ve ever seen, by my friend @jansonjones. http://bit.ly/c44h7a #
• RT: @LambiFund: A good quick history of #Haiti Starting w/ Columbus http://bit.ly/bLpivW #
• RT: @CapricaSeven: Interesting recap of Caprica’s first post-pilot ep here: http://www.afterelton.com/TV/recaps/caprica/102 #
• RT: @JanFlora49: RT @jfkfan: I must be the only one who thought Ronald Reagan sucked as President. Shame on me.! // he sucked he sucked !!! #
• @gretchl2000 Good to see you on twitter again Gretch! in reply to gretchl2000 #
• @jansonjones Short hair. Buzzed to near-baldness. Easy to clean. Hard to comb. Nothing to comb. Combless. Easy. Clean. Less head itch. in reply to jansonjones #
• @gretchl2000 You been missed hereabouts. Good to hear Parker in grad school. My ex & bestie Ptery (formerly Rozz) coming for visit soon. in reply to gretchl2000 #
• @jansonjones I became a fan of buzzcuttedness b/c of prob w/ folliculitis ~6 yrs ago. Easier to take care of w/ v. short hair. in reply to jansonjones #
• @gretchl2000 Oh cool will look forward to seeing it! in reply to gretchl2000 #
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• @jansonjones It helps considerably that I’m on the “butchy” end of the dyke spectrum. I keep expecting to get genderchecked at the loo. in reply to jansonjones #

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… when they look as cool as this, anyway.  I caught these clouds one morning on the UAA campus at the beginning of October 2003, on the first of what I still remember so clearly as a two or three-day period of some really remarkable skies in Anchorage.

Even though I was feeling pretty crappy yesterday, I like the cloud pic in my yesterday post too.  I took it from my dentist’s office a few months ago.  I take a lot of cloud pics, because — well, yeah.  Clouds are not really all about bleakness.  It just feels like that sometimes, when one is inhabited by grey.  But the grey I feel when I’m in that state of depression I call the grey is not full of lifegiving rain, or a blizzard of snow, or even the destructive force of Job’s Voice from the Whirlwind — like that Oklahoma tornado I posted last week.  The grey is just this featureless, lifeless, blah.

But when it dissolves away… ahhhhh.

Or aha.

The aha! experience — that’s what I call the thing that happened to me in August 1984, when self-hatred went away — one of the central defining experiences of my life.  (But it was my sister-in-law Linda who first called it that — thanks Linda! & happy birthday!)  I wrote a brief account of it a few years ago.  Very brief account, which leaves out a lot.

As soon as it happened, it’s as if I could feel all the universe flowing into me, breathing in & out with me.  That lasted a long time, & I can still feel it on my best days.  I later came to call it the cool breeze — another one of those phrases for my various feeling states.  But here’s the deal: I found I could feel it even when I was sad.

One day, not long after the aha, I had a big falling out with a friend of mine who lived in that big trailer court that used to be at the corner of Muldoon & Debarr in east Anchorage.  Bang! — I slammed out the door & left her, & I walked a long ways crying about it, until I stopped and sat on Russian Jack Hill overlooking traffic.  It was late September.  I was still crying, but at the same time I could see the Chugach Mountains just to the east of Anchorage dusted with their first snow — termination dust, we call it here — & it was beautiful, & I could feel that beauty inside me instead of just perceive it intellectually. And here I was still crying. And I suddenly realized: This is what sadness feels like. Not depression: but sadness. I had never known that feeling before.  It was like other feelings I hadn’t known before, like beauty that I could see with my eyes & recognize with my intellect, but not feel at all.

Now I could feel it.  Ever since then, I’ve been able to feel it… except when I take one of those dips, long or short, into the pit or the grey — but now those times are the exception, rather than the rule.

But it still always feels pretty damn good when the blanket of yuck slides off me. & I can breathe again.

Day followed day, the old stream of time,
just the same as before.
But each day I saw the mountains change –
one day growing gold in the afternoon sun –
one day dusted white by the season’s first snow –
one day touched by clouds as soft as white roses –
I could see them and breathe them and touch them and feel them.
Each day I saw the mountains change –

so did change find me.

– from “Alaska Love Poem” (1984)

That was half my life ago.  I thought at the time that the depression/despair gig & I were entirely quits, which of course proved not to be the case; but on the other hand, I never returned to the self-hatred; & it was a fundamental step #2 in having the stuff I needed to deal with depression/despair ever after.  (The first step having been to accept my lesbianism five years previously.)

So… I’m feeling pretty good now.  Heading over to my friend Sylvia’s for our normal Wednesday night get-together.  Tonight, we’re re-watching the pilot for “Caprica” as a refresher for its season premiere this Friday.  I’m stopping to get some Bear Tooth food on the way there.  Life could be better, life could be worse — life goes on.  And right now, that’s just about right.

Here’s some more clouds from October 1, 2003, with some Chugach Mountains thrown in for good measure.

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“Battlestar Rhapsody” by The Great Luke Ski (parodying Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody”)

Singing was a bit uneven, & I had a hard time getting some of the lyrics, but luckily they’re online here. What diehard “Battlestar Galactica” fan could help but love this?

“Caprica” starts January 22. Yeah.  Even if they did rename the channel something stupid like “SyFy.”

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