A New Adventure and a New Blog on Sustainability and Faith

Apologies to anyone who was trying to get to the blog in the last week. I was moving domain hosting and there was a snag, but it's all fixed now. 

A picture of Boulders to make us all feel good about adventures.

I wanted to send you over to Darren's blog, Momentary Delight, where he shares about a new blogging adventure that Eug and I are excited to be part of. 

Darren shares the goals of the blog:

• To explore how living more sustainably can be shaped by our faith in Jesus.
• Make the conversation around sustainability accessible to people from diverse backgrounds.
• Encourage experimentation, risk taking and small steps.
• Pursue authenticity, humility and grace in our dialogue.

The blog is open for collaborators of all kinds, and Darren's vision (which we are embracing with glee) is one of inclusivity, adventure, and fun. 

When I started Concrete Gardener, I was interested in "social responsibility in context", where context was everything- the right choice at the wrong time doesn't do us any favours. Along the way, I've sometimes veered towards taking positions rather than telling my/our story, and I think the danger in taking positions is legalism, lack of compassion, and self-righteousness. I'm sure I'll keep making mistakes and expressing myself poorly, but I hope this new blog will give me a new opportunities to consider context. I would like to think of readers and writers and co-creators of meaning, where together we learn. 

At the same time, I think it's important to DO something, no matter what our context. To act, to be conscious of where we think we might stand in the world, to consider our responsibilities to one another, even if it turns out we're wrong. In a recent interview Wendell Berry said about sustainability "the question is not 'will it make a difference?', the question is 'is it the right thing to do?'" I would add that the right thing to do must be in the right place and the right time, and I really want to develop my sense of place here in the Western Cape of South Africa. 

My peer group is in danger of knowing a little about everything because we are so geographically dispersed and have such a range of experience. The internet makes it seem like the world's problems and solutions must always be so big and complex, and we must be so smart to have our abstract opinion on what to do in the abstract. I love that our family has roots in three continents, maybe four, and that we read widely and deeply and have a pretty huge range of experiences. We've experienced extreme wealth and extreme poverty, at least second-hand. But few of those experiences are ours, exactly. We're a bit outside of them exactly because they don't feel defining or restraining. Sometimes faith adds to that feeling of being outside of something because I embrace the notion that there's a world i can't see. I'm mixing ideas terribly here, but I guess my point is that I want to explore the problems right in front of me more deeply- from the perspective of both what is seen and what is not. All this is still rather abstract, so I guess we'll just have to dig in and see where the adventure takes us! Stay posted for more updates. 

Concrete Gardener will stay up and running, and I'll still update friends and family here even as the new blog takes shape. 

Sea foraging

After getting bolder about foraging for nettles and herbs around our neighbourhood, we've started getting mussels and seaweed when we go to the beach. 

We ate a lot of seaweed back in Boston- packaged, dried, salted and with sesame oil. Here in Cape Town, Korean-branded seaweed is pretty expensive and packaged with a lot of plastic, so it's pretty exciting to try out drying our own. Noah and Eli love picking it out of rockpools, and now is the perfect time to forage- the sea lettuce is plentiful but there's less likelihood of red tide etc.- apparently that tends to happen late summer.

As for mussels, we just get enough for Noah and Eli (10-15 at a time), as an extra source of protein and for the excitement of eating them soon after we get home from the beach. I choose places where they're very plentiful and where the clean waves wash over them. There are a few spots in Sea Point that are perfect.

Smoothies, Sweet Potato Gnocchi, and Nasturtium Pesto

Here are some random things:

1. Nasturtium Pesto. My unadventurous palate had it's doubts, but it's really good stuff. Not as good as basil pesto, but almost. Given that the nasturtium is free, I calculated the total cost of making it at around R50 (using local parmesan, garlic, olive oil, and macadamia nuts as the other ingredients), for the equivalent of 4-5 bottles of what you'd buy at the shop for R35-R40 each. So while it's not cheap to make, you're getting much, much better ingredients than store-bought pesto, and you're saving at least R100 in the process.
2. Simple Sweet Potato Gnocchi. (steamed sweet potato + as much flour as you need to make a workable dough, roll out into worms, cut into 1.5cm pieces, flip on a fork, boil until they float, and you're done) Sweet potatoes are very cheap at the farmer's market right now, and few people seemed to be buying, so I got a lot and we're using them for everything.  



Noah squeezes the orange juice and picks the spinach. Which means it takes a really long time. Which is fine with me. 

3. Smoothies. We somehow don't have an ice tray right now, but bananas, oranges and strawberries are in season so I cut and froze bananas and strawberries, and each morning we have the best smoothies with about 3 leaves of spinach from our garden, about 8 strawberries, between 1 and 2 bananas, and the the juice of 2-3 oranges. It's worth experimenting with: we're also trying out frozen guavas occasionally. Anyway. I'm really into it because usually I just feed the kids most of the good fruits and don't end up eating enough fruits myself; this way we all benefit.
4. Strawberry ice-cream. We ran out of frozen bananas and the kids were going crazy, so I tried blending about a cup of milk, a large cup of frozen strawberries, a little plain yoghurt, and a teaspoon of honey. The result was a great strawberry smoothie, but when I ran it through the ice-cream maker, it immediately became the best strawberry ice-cream ever. I suppose you could also just freeze the smoothie a little, but we were in a hurry. 



A ball taped to a string hanging from the doorway is the best thing ever. Until the kids start fighting over it. But still.