Monthly Archives: July 2023

 A Journey with no End #1

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Jack’s next few posts are a bit personal – – –

People often ask how Wendy and I met and ended up married. I mean – age difference, from different sides of the Atlantic, she’s a storyteller and I’m a singer, etc. (Although I will say she’s become a great singer and my song introductions have turned into full-blown stories!)

Our meeting is quite a story and I’ll tell as much of it as possible over the next few weeks in the lead up to our 25th Anniversary.

In July 1995 with my musical buddy George, I was playing a Celtic festival in Jonesboro, Tennessee and staying with friends nearby who had helped arrange the booking. Recently divorced, the last thing on my mind was to get into another relationship. But there she stood on the other side of the square with two small children in tow that I recognized as the very young son and daughter of the friends I was staying with. They asked her to come for an evening get-together with a few other friends and said I had lots of stories. It turned out that she was a storyteller!

She arrived with a cassette recorder and proceeded to capture the whole evening on tape. During the soiree it was obvious to everyone else that I was smitten, despite all my attempts to hide it (there was much hilarity at various points much to my embarrassment).

There was some talk of us all going to visit her at the cabin she was staying in out in the woods. George and I had various other gigs in the area so we were staying with our friends for another few days. But as the days passed I wondered when I would see this beautiful kindred spirit again. Every day I gently (I thought, anyway) brought up the subject but couldn’t get any sign it was happening until the very last day (of course everyone else was enjoying the drama as I grew more and more insistent!). We sat on her porch and chatted amiably then she served us a great lasagna! I wrote out the words of a song she liked and all around the edge I wrote my contact details.

George and I headed off the next day to Maine for more gigs and when we got there the first thing I did was send her a postcard. Meanwhile our friends explained that they usually phoned me to make sure I’d arrived back safely to my home in Scotland. When my phone rang it was Wendy who’d been urged to take on the task. I was so surprised I hung up on her – but luckily she called again.

Next week – the saga continues, to Newfoundland – – –

The Zero Waste Kitchen Blog

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Running a zero-waste kitchen isn’t all that hard. And it’s super-cheap. All it will cost you is your sanity.

Once you realize that just about every green thing in your garden is edible, you will never sleep again. I don’t mean kale, spinach, lettuces, where the leaf is the crop, or even the famous “yes you can eat that” broccoli stalks and turnip greens. I mean carrot tops, the weed known as lamb’s quarter, even the frigging clover.

Caveat: don’t eat rhubarb leaves and don’t mess with pokeweed. After that, you can google it all and see just how easy it would be to spend the rest of your life cooking down all the edibles into stews, soups, and broths redolent with vitamins. Making pestos to hide bitter herbs behind bright cheeses. Mixing that patch of ground elder that escaped weeding notice with cucumber and lemon before canning—and you haven’t lived until your mother has brought down a mason jar from your shelves and read aloud: ground elder, serve chilled, and then looked at you.

Gardening isn’t my forte; I tend to spend March drawing diagrams on graph paper and dreaming of trying wasabi this year. By the time planting starts in May, I’m sick of thinking about it and eyeball plant the whole thing. The results look like someone sneezed while carrying open seed packets.

But once I discovered those weeds that sprang from nowhere were edible, well, hey, even a sad little garden is productive. The radishes grew big as bushes and flowered while I was away for a week. Did you know radish pods are delicious when charred with lemon butter? Radish flowers taste great straight.

The problem is, busy people trying to keep one simple patch of carrots from taking over the world thin the carrots and are done with it. A zero-waste kitchener (also known as OCD) will take them inside, dive to the bottom of the freezer for the black walnuts she collected from her backyard last fall and made her husband shell all winter long, and make vegan pate. She will throw the entire overgrown radish bush into a blender for vegetable broth.

Things that can be bought for $3 (last week, it might be $5 now) can be made at home for about an eight hour time investment. Most days my laptop is running next to my canner or fermenting crock so I can jump up and adjust foodstuffs before I go back to adjusting words.

Zero waste – not even a waste of time, because underneath the “not one pea shall fall” lunacy, I know where my food came from (that crazy overgrown garden) and it was fun to make it. Is it worth it, this zero waste kitchen?

That’s a question with two answers for every person. I’m having fun. Go by, mad world.