thank you notes and other things
marshall and i have been working on our thank-you notes. we've simply split the list down the middle. some people will get thank-you notes written by me and some will be written by marshall. we're balancing a thin line between highly personal and detailed and slightly impersonal and templated. even though it makes things easy for us, using a boilerplate letter doesn't really help connect with the person to whom we are writing. we really want to show our appreciation for the many and very generous gifts, but we also don't want to have this take forever. it would've been really cool to have gone with our original idea and using our instant printers from the wedding and give everyone a picture of us using our gifts. yes, that would've been awesome, but it would've taken us forever. so, we're going with the standard thank-you note, but with just enough flavor to make people feel special. :)
marshall mentioned last night that he feels we've been ducking responsibility since we got back from big sur. we still have boxes left in the office and we have bags of stuff still to donate here and there, as well as items we need to pack up and either store or ship off to other people. our office has been a mess for a while now, even before the wedding. i still have stuff from the bridal shower, planning materials, magazines, books and other wedding-related things. we've been planning the wedding for over a year, it's going to take a little while to clean things up. i mean, i've been enjoying the time now that we have. it's the first time in months when i've had absolutely nothing to do. it's really nice. i don't have school and i haven't logged into WoW for over a month. i'm reading more and taking my time when it comes to cooking dinner. it's great. anyway, i'm relishing this time right now when i have nothing to do.
anyway...
tonight i'm trying out a recipe from one of my new cookbooks. i got 2 of them as shower gifts. one is a brunch cookbook, which we've already cooked from and the rest of the recipes in it are simply amazing. the other cookbook is a wine pairing cookbook, organized by different meals. it's really cool and definitely promotes seasonal cooking and ingredients. unfortunately, winter doesn't always provide the most variety when it comes to food, but they have a great "winter's meal" which includes roasted garlic and rosemary chicken with spicy sweet potato spears and a simple salad (it's pretty much 3 different lettuces and dressing). the chicken sounds great with whole heads of garlic and chunks of red onion roasting with a whole chicken. the garlic comes out soft and gooey and it's recommended to be spread on thick slices of bread. don't have to tell me twice! i'm looking forward to cooking and eating this meal. we also can pop open a bottle of wine we got from spitemeat and his wife, too! :)
+_+_+
for months now, i've been trying desperately to finish michael pollan's omnivore's dilemma. the book is very dense and dry and oftentimes very technical. i find it interesting, but there have been parts of the book which take a long time to read. the one part i have LOVED so far has been the portion of his section on organic farming/food about earthbound farms. you may be familiar with their baby green and other salad mixes. the couple that owns earthbound has been growing organic baby lettuces for over 20 years now. they started in carmel valley and then after costco started ordering from them, they've expanded into the salinas valley. they now make the vast majority of organic lettuce in the country. i feel a sense of pride because they're local and they really do promote healthy eating. now, i'm not a huge nut about organic farming, but when it's available and the price is good, i will pick the organic item over its conventional counterpart. pollan visited their farm in salinas and explained how they grow organically, which is a mixture of knowing how to grow healthy plants without the use of chemical fertilizers and harmful pesticides. even though they grow on a very large scale and use industrial farming methods for harvesting and processing, at the heart of their operation is truly organic. they use biodiversity to keep the soil full of nutrients. they use flowers and other plants to attract the good bugs and those that deter the bad ones. it was a wonderful story and something that was necessary after hearing about how other organic farms work and how a lot of other places who say "organic" are just toeing the line just enough to be organic. when your "organic" TV dinner contains more chemical agents than actual food, you can't call it organic. the thing is, though, according to law - they can. it doesn't hurt that one of the company's execs was on the committee who wrote the law, but that's not my point. after reading about earthbound, i was then thrust head-first into learning about how my favorite chicken farm raises and keeps their chickens. like all the other schmucks out there, i thought "free range" meant the chickens have a field to run around in and peck for worms and grass. free range actually means that the chickens in the giant hen houses have a few more inches in which to move around and there are little doors on either side of the house to give the chickens the OPTION of going outside. do they? no, because they don't open the doors until they're 5 weeks old and then, of course, the chickens are slaughtered only a few more weeks after that. by the time the doors are open, the chickens are already used to the idea of being indoors with all their food and water handed to them all the time, so why would they venture into a world they don't know? turns out the workers who raise the chickens are GLAD they don't go outside, because chickens are prone to infection and they aren't given any antibiotics. one infected bird could spoil a whole hen house. unfortunately, petaluma poultry is one of the few "free-range" chicken farms in the area, so unless i want to raise my own chickens, i don't have much choice in the matter. compared to foster farms, or *shudder* tyson, i'm happy to buy from them. their chicken is much tastier than FF or tyson and their chickens are raised slightly better than those places. plus, petaluma is only a hundred miles from where i live. i just wish that the farms illustrated on the package were real.
this book angers me in a way that i'm guessing it's meant to. i'm mad that more farms can't simply adopt organic methods. you don't NEED to use chemicals. it's been shown time and time again that fruits and vegetables grown organically have MORE flavor, BETTER texture, AND contain tremendously MORE nutrients than those grown using chemical fertilizers and pesticides. i don't understand why more farms can use biodiversity in order to keep their soil fertile. growing corn and soy is not diverse enough and more and more chemicals are needed to inject the soil with enough growing power for the next crop. these same chemicals, of course, then get watered and rained upon, which move them from the soil into the waterways and into our streams and rivers which eventually come back to our water treatment plants and into our drinking glass. i've heard countless stories about farm workers and citizens in neighboring towns getting horribly sick from "pesticide drift", where pesticides are sprayed on crops and get carried by the air currents to towns downwind. that's not OK and it doesn't need to be done! farmers who grow vegetables and fruit from the largest companies don't call themselves farmers anymore, they call themselves growers. it certainly make sense because all the farming has been taken out of our industrial farms. it's disgusting. honestly, if i had the room, i'd grow as much of my own vegetables as i could. i would honestly be a happier person if i knew that my chickens were given room to run around in the outdoors, my beef and milk came from cattle which were taken care of properly and given grass to eat and not corn feed. unfortunately, i don't see this happening in my lifetime and that makes me sad.
i try and do my part, but i know that i can do much more.
+_+_+
in other news, i went for a swim today. it was our first swim of the season and it was freezing outside. luckily, the pool at the community center is much warmer than the pool at SJSU and i didn't have to sit in my own chlorinated stink on the light rail to get home. :P
marshall mentioned last night that he feels we've been ducking responsibility since we got back from big sur. we still have boxes left in the office and we have bags of stuff still to donate here and there, as well as items we need to pack up and either store or ship off to other people. our office has been a mess for a while now, even before the wedding. i still have stuff from the bridal shower, planning materials, magazines, books and other wedding-related things. we've been planning the wedding for over a year, it's going to take a little while to clean things up. i mean, i've been enjoying the time now that we have. it's the first time in months when i've had absolutely nothing to do. it's really nice. i don't have school and i haven't logged into WoW for over a month. i'm reading more and taking my time when it comes to cooking dinner. it's great. anyway, i'm relishing this time right now when i have nothing to do.
anyway...
tonight i'm trying out a recipe from one of my new cookbooks. i got 2 of them as shower gifts. one is a brunch cookbook, which we've already cooked from and the rest of the recipes in it are simply amazing. the other cookbook is a wine pairing cookbook, organized by different meals. it's really cool and definitely promotes seasonal cooking and ingredients. unfortunately, winter doesn't always provide the most variety when it comes to food, but they have a great "winter's meal" which includes roasted garlic and rosemary chicken with spicy sweet potato spears and a simple salad (it's pretty much 3 different lettuces and dressing). the chicken sounds great with whole heads of garlic and chunks of red onion roasting with a whole chicken. the garlic comes out soft and gooey and it's recommended to be spread on thick slices of bread. don't have to tell me twice! i'm looking forward to cooking and eating this meal. we also can pop open a bottle of wine we got from spitemeat and his wife, too! :)
+_+_+
for months now, i've been trying desperately to finish michael pollan's omnivore's dilemma. the book is very dense and dry and oftentimes very technical. i find it interesting, but there have been parts of the book which take a long time to read. the one part i have LOVED so far has been the portion of his section on organic farming/food about earthbound farms. you may be familiar with their baby green and other salad mixes. the couple that owns earthbound has been growing organic baby lettuces for over 20 years now. they started in carmel valley and then after costco started ordering from them, they've expanded into the salinas valley. they now make the vast majority of organic lettuce in the country. i feel a sense of pride because they're local and they really do promote healthy eating. now, i'm not a huge nut about organic farming, but when it's available and the price is good, i will pick the organic item over its conventional counterpart. pollan visited their farm in salinas and explained how they grow organically, which is a mixture of knowing how to grow healthy plants without the use of chemical fertilizers and harmful pesticides. even though they grow on a very large scale and use industrial farming methods for harvesting and processing, at the heart of their operation is truly organic. they use biodiversity to keep the soil full of nutrients. they use flowers and other plants to attract the good bugs and those that deter the bad ones. it was a wonderful story and something that was necessary after hearing about how other organic farms work and how a lot of other places who say "organic" are just toeing the line just enough to be organic. when your "organic" TV dinner contains more chemical agents than actual food, you can't call it organic. the thing is, though, according to law - they can. it doesn't hurt that one of the company's execs was on the committee who wrote the law, but that's not my point. after reading about earthbound, i was then thrust head-first into learning about how my favorite chicken farm raises and keeps their chickens. like all the other schmucks out there, i thought "free range" meant the chickens have a field to run around in and peck for worms and grass. free range actually means that the chickens in the giant hen houses have a few more inches in which to move around and there are little doors on either side of the house to give the chickens the OPTION of going outside. do they? no, because they don't open the doors until they're 5 weeks old and then, of course, the chickens are slaughtered only a few more weeks after that. by the time the doors are open, the chickens are already used to the idea of being indoors with all their food and water handed to them all the time, so why would they venture into a world they don't know? turns out the workers who raise the chickens are GLAD they don't go outside, because chickens are prone to infection and they aren't given any antibiotics. one infected bird could spoil a whole hen house. unfortunately, petaluma poultry is one of the few "free-range" chicken farms in the area, so unless i want to raise my own chickens, i don't have much choice in the matter. compared to foster farms, or *shudder* tyson, i'm happy to buy from them. their chicken is much tastier than FF or tyson and their chickens are raised slightly better than those places. plus, petaluma is only a hundred miles from where i live. i just wish that the farms illustrated on the package were real.
this book angers me in a way that i'm guessing it's meant to. i'm mad that more farms can't simply adopt organic methods. you don't NEED to use chemicals. it's been shown time and time again that fruits and vegetables grown organically have MORE flavor, BETTER texture, AND contain tremendously MORE nutrients than those grown using chemical fertilizers and pesticides. i don't understand why more farms can use biodiversity in order to keep their soil fertile. growing corn and soy is not diverse enough and more and more chemicals are needed to inject the soil with enough growing power for the next crop. these same chemicals, of course, then get watered and rained upon, which move them from the soil into the waterways and into our streams and rivers which eventually come back to our water treatment plants and into our drinking glass. i've heard countless stories about farm workers and citizens in neighboring towns getting horribly sick from "pesticide drift", where pesticides are sprayed on crops and get carried by the air currents to towns downwind. that's not OK and it doesn't need to be done! farmers who grow vegetables and fruit from the largest companies don't call themselves farmers anymore, they call themselves growers. it certainly make sense because all the farming has been taken out of our industrial farms. it's disgusting. honestly, if i had the room, i'd grow as much of my own vegetables as i could. i would honestly be a happier person if i knew that my chickens were given room to run around in the outdoors, my beef and milk came from cattle which were taken care of properly and given grass to eat and not corn feed. unfortunately, i don't see this happening in my lifetime and that makes me sad.
i try and do my part, but i know that i can do much more.
+_+_+
in other news, i went for a swim today. it was our first swim of the season and it was freezing outside. luckily, the pool at the community center is much warmer than the pool at SJSU and i didn't have to sit in my own chlorinated stink on the light rail to get home. :P