Holidays aren’t big on this blog. You won’t see me doing a week of Easter recipes, mainly because I can’t be arsed to make dishes beforehand. However, I’d like to put in a word for today’s secular holiday, Earth Day.

Nearly 20 years ago, I took a biology class. It was an introductory course, so we looked at everything from cellular reproduction to continent-wide habitats. One topic that loomed large was climate change. We saw the papers and the data. Even back then, it was undeniable that since the Industrial Revolution, the amount of carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere has been rising exponentially.

For Earth Day, we split into groups to do a presentation project of our own choosing on the environment. No matter what topic the group chose, climate change affected it in some way — one group looked into rainforest destruction, another into the impact of melting polar ice on arctic flora and fauna. Our group looked at the unique lemurs of Madagascar; one part of that was their changing habitat.

That’s why it saddens and frustrates me to see the willful ignorance and often outright lying on the part of climate change deniers. Even 20 years ago, it was clear that something was going on. Scientists are apolitical by training. They’re simply reporting the numbers they see.

stand up for scientists

I’m here today to stand up for the scientists. They’re what’s primarily in my thoughts this Earth Day. Attacks on science and reason wound my faith in the goodness of humanity — I have difficulty fathoming why anyone would oppose facts, data or logic. I’m Spock-like in that way: failure to comprehend logic is utterly unfathomable to me.

This Earth Day, Stand up for science. Stand up for scientists. Argue about policy and solutions, but accept facts — or disprove them using the scientific method.

From National Geographic:

• Average temperatures have climbed 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (0.8 degree Celsius) around the world since 1880, much of this in recent decades, according to NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies.

• The rate of warming is increasing. The 20th century’s last two decades were the hottest in 400 years and possibly the warmest for several millennia, according to a number of climate studies. And the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that 11 of the past 12 years are among the dozen warmest since 1850.

• The Arctic is feeling the effects the most. Average temperatures in Alaska, western Canada, and eastern Russia have risen at twice the global average, according to the multinational Arctic Climate Impact Assessment report compiled between 2000 and 2004.

• Arctic ice is rapidly disappearing, and the region may have its first completely ice-free summer by 2040 or earlier. Polar bears and indigenous cultures are already suffering from the sea-ice loss.

• Glaciers and mountain snows are rapidly melting—for example, Montana’s Glacier National Park now has only 27 glaciers, versus 150 in 1910. In the Northern Hemisphere, thaws also come a week earlier in spring and freezes begin a week later.

you can do little things

Most of us can’t devote our lives to changing the world, but we can make it a better place to live in. Try doing some of the following this year:

• patronize farmer’s markets
• buy locally when you can
• purchase humanely-raised and slaughtered meats
• put food scraps into a compost pile or straight to the garden
• grow something you can eat — herbs or even cherry tomatoes or peppers can be grown in containers if you have no room (you still need light, though!)
• eat seasonal items

We don’t have to be perfect, and our little changes probably won’t change the planet. But being mindful of our food and where it comes from can make a household, neighborhood, or city a happier, more environmentally-friendly place.

Be mindful of food, and stand up for the scientists!

What happens when you squeeze fit all the leftover pancakes into one Ziploc container? You get branded pancakes, that’s what, in two senses of the word. Other than the branding, they’re pretty neat orange cloud pancakes from the King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking cookbook, aka The One I Yap About All The Time. I’d write it up, but, you know, I accidentally made them without the butter. I wouldn’t want to deprive you of a description of the butter-ful version of the pancakes, you know.

Why are things so slow here lately on Shiny Cooking? Well, server and server-moving problems keep annoying me and making me want to stay away. I know, I should just fix them, right? Also, taking pictures in winter is a pain. And on top of all that, I’m working on more immediate payoffs so I can pay for the tooth I’m getting in March.

You heard me. To pay for my new tooth. Yes. I am officially now a hillbilly. Sigh. Anyone got a banjo for me?

On the bright side, my favorite new recipe basically begins with, “First, open a bag of Fritos,” and ends up being pretty healthy in the end. It’s win-win!

Looks like I fell off the edge of the world for a while there. It was an unplanned hiatus, brought on by minor crises and busy-ness. Here’s the tale, and a “recipe” for blueberries and cream.

Mainly it was the June Dental Crisis

For months I’d been having problems with “sinus infections” and tooth sensitivity and swelling/pain in my upper left jaw. “Sinus infections” is in quotes because I thought they were at the time; now I’m fairly certain some of them were caused by the tooth and not the other way around (“Your tooth hurts? Oh, that must be from a sinus infection”).

It all began with sensitivity in an upper molar last fall. Since I did have a raging sinus infection at the time, my dentist logically ascribed it to that, and told me to get in touch again if it didn’t go away. Go away it did, a few weeks later. Yay! I thought. It got better!

But then from that point on, that area of my mouth was odd. The gums there were prone to infection and swelling, and I babied that tooth’s area with constant flossing and brushing. Then one day, a sliver of the tooth broke off, inexplicably. My dentist had to replace the filling in that tooth and then it became really painful. It all seemed weird.

The new filling came loose after a few weeks and my dentist referred me to an endodontist for a root canal. When I arrived at his office I saw that some of what the $1,000 root canal fee was paying for was mood lighting and leather dentist chairs. However, I’m not complaining, because it was also paying for some really advanced equipment and the endo was not only very skilled and good at explaining things, but also quite relaxing to look at.

After some high-tech x-rays the endo did a football-style play by play for me, drawing lines on the monitor that had my x-rays on it to help illustrate what he was talking about.

That was probably my favorite part.

The giant top molar — you have one too; it’s the one 2 in front of your wisdom tooth, or 1 in front if they’re out; go touch it with your tongue now. I’ll wait. Welcome back. So the top molar was cracked, and cracked so deeply he couldn’t work on it.

“You said you experienced strong sensitivity last fall?”
*nod*
“And some weeks later it just went away?”
*nod*
“Yeah, that’s when the tooth died. All your problems since then are because of that.”

I was very sad over my dead tooth. And sad that I still had to pay $540 to not get a root canal. And sadder still that it had to be extracted. The next day I had it pulled. I’m seeing an implant dentist in September to get that business going, which will involve more annoying procedures and more healing periods.

I shouldn’t complain. I rarely get sick. I have no health problems. I’m really glad the worst problem I’ve ever had was a dead tooth. But meh. I can still be annoyed.

This affected the blog

Two ways this affected Shiny Cooking:

1. I didn’t want to post. I couldn’t eat properly, because of pain before the extraction and because of healing gum tissue afterwards. So I didn’t want to cook or try new things or talk about something I couldn’t enjoy much anymore. This was pretty much all of 2010 really, given that I was having constant little infections all winter/spring. It kept me from posting much or wanting to post. I was just sad every time I checked in here or read other food bloggers and wanted to try and do things but couldn’t.

2. Money. Cooking and taking pictures while cooking takes time, but that’s not too much worse than non-blogging-oriented cooking. The posts themselves though, they take quite a bit of time, from writing them to picking out photos and optimizing them to formatting the recipes properly in WordPress.

I get paid for none of this. I get a pittance from my sponsor’s advertising and usually when I post Foodbuzz-themed events I’m getting a stipend that’s quite nice for one post’s work but it’s not enough in the long haul.

Normally this isn’t too huge a problem but with the recent spate of medical expenses plus over $2,000 coming up for the implant I’ve been pushed to neglect Shiny Cooking in favor of other projects that provide some money. I don’t want to have to do that, but that’s the way it is. I’ve been considering some ways I could generate some revenue through Shiny Cooking, but that’s a topic for another post.

For now, you know what’s been going on. As for the future? I have dozens and dozens of post topics saved up, literally dozens. Shiny Cooking will live, because I can’t stop posting forever. In fact, the bug to document everything I eat is coming back.

blueberries and cream

We went blueberry picking at Montrose Orchards last Friday. It was hot and muggy and generally pretty miserable, but I got a little over 10 pounds of blueberries.

The first thing I did with the blueberries, after eating gobs of them by the handful, was make fresh blueberry pie in a walnut-oat pie crust.

The second thing I did with the blueberries was “make” blueberries and cream. I noticed I had a half-pint of unopened heavy cream in the fridge and knew I had no plans for it. So we poured a bit of it over a big bowl of blueberries, spooned on a teaspoonful of sugar, and it was good.

And that’s my return-from-hiatus recipe. Blueberries. Cream. Sugar. Ripe, taut-skinned blueberries bursting under your bite, bathed in silky cream and sweetened just a bit.

Go try some.

In terms of making new beginnings and forging new paths, New Year’s takes a distant third on my internal clock. New Year’s is the new beginning of the earth’s rotation, marking the end of the year’s shortest day and looking forward to lengthening ones.

New Year’s is a quiet time, as far as heralds go. Party revelry aside, it’s marked by a sunrise a wee minute earlier than the day before, sunset a wee minute later. We are inspired to set plans in motion, but the still-long darknesses encourage long nights under the covers and slow-cooker meals.

First place for new beginnings, for me, is autumn. School is starting, whether we are still going or whether we are 20, 30, or more years out; it’s in us to buckle down, get harvests in, plan for those winter holidays that are designed to ease the tedium of winter’s darkness. Still full of summer’s energy, autumn is another time when plans are made, definitive and time-delineated.

Spring, though, while it takes second place, is a time of special beginnings. Everything is growing, blossoming, and we blossom too, even if it’s confined to a tiny space deep in our solar plexus. We can’t help it; we are bound to nature as nature is not bound to us. The apple trees don’t need our help. The bees will gather and spread the pollen. The currant bushes send up wild canes whether pruned by our hands or not.

Spring is when this blog began, last year. It didn’t emerge fully formed in June. It began in March, April, with research and reflection and coding.

Lots of coding.

what are your spring projects?

I’ve always had luck with projects begun in spring, and I think you will too. Form your plans in spring, work on them through spring and summer or however long it takes. Dream. Write down goals. Then write down the steps you can take today or tomorrow or next week that will go towards achieving those goals.

And that, that is the most important part. Dreaming is vital, recording goals is vital, but none will ever come to fruition without real, tangible steps you take towards those goals. Just so, pear trees will never bear fruit without the bees pollinating them, much as their blossoms’ goal is to become a pear.

What are your goals for this spring/summer? A garden? Reading some books? Canning? Making pie? Do share in the comments.

Spring has sprung, and flora are stretching, budding, opening for their sun. This is a forsythia’s flower. Forsythia are wild bushes. Lanky as a teenage basketball player, they lengthen and sprawl, and reward our patience with their disorganized antics by bursting into yellow blooms in spring, spring only.

It may be Easter, but for some there’s still work to be done before dinner, because tomorrow it might rain.

It might always rain tomorrow.

New shoots are most noticeable on the fruiting trees, maybe because we watch and train their shapes so closely. We bend them to our wills, in a promise: we know you want to grow, but you want to create fruit even more. Let us snip these branches. Trust us. And trees, being slow to move, have no choice but to assent. We prune, and their fruits get light and air, and repay us in volume.

The garden, early April, is just one very long row and change. Shelling peas, sugar snap peas, kohlrabi, parsnips, and finally lettuce are in the ground, nestled in cool earth. See how little space they are taking up. These early vegetables keep to themselves. Peas like to climb, yes, but cold-weather vegetables are stoic, self-contained; they would not dream of being so blithe as to send vines willy-nilly across the garden in a lazy sprawl, as the warm-weather melons are wont to do.

The young Dutch willow. Where once were three ancient trees, trunks two people could hug without touching, there’s now only this five year-old sapling, at one time merely a branch off the last of the surviving old ones, shoved bare into soft spring earth.

That last tree was blown over onto the house in a windstorm a few years ago. It fell gently, with only a low boom, and was polite enough to leave the roof unscathed save for a few shingles.

The grapevines are old, no one’s told me for sure just how old. Linda prunes them every spring, stripping them clean of wandering vines. They look bare and worrisome when she finishes, but the grapevines are pleased; in two months the new shoots will have covered the supporting wires and poles in a wall of vines and leaves.

Beneath the grapevines, tiger lilies poke up. I don’t know why they’re there, but they’re pretty. And “they’re pretty” is as good a reason there is to plant something.

plant something

If you can, plant something this Easter, or this week. Because it’s pretty.

What will you plant?

5:06:55 PM Amy: my tweet
5:06:56 PM Amy: Whole wheat levain, day 3: http://bit.ly/cRM7Z6. I can’t help picturing microscopic wild yeast chowing down and farting in there.
5:16:46 PM Zach: ha
5:16:55 PM Zach: I always feel bad for yeast
5:17:51 PM Amy: i just did too, earlier today!
5:18:00 PM Amy: i was like, aww, when i bake, it’s going to die!
5:18:04 PM Zach: hehe, nod
5:18:05 PM Zach: it’s like
5:18:12 PM Zach: here guys! have this HUGE DELICIOUS FEAST, jut how you like it!
5:18:15 PM Zach: then you burn them all to death

i mean, merry christmas

Clearly, there’s no Festivus pole here!

Wishing all of you a lovely holiday. May you be warm and cozy this Christmas, with good food and good company.

Image courtesy Min Thu and Smashing Magazine.