Yesterday, it seems, I caught the Christmas spirit, and it came from a very unlikely place—by the Kennebec River in Augusta, Maine. With its empty storefronts on main street, its strip development, and its labyrinthinian malls that aren’t quite malls, Augusta must come close to being the shabbiest community in Maine. On the other hand, what more appropriate place to be visited by the Christmas spirit, which always moves unexpectedly?

Because we only have one car, I must bring my husband, Clif, to work and of course pick him up again so that I can go to the Cancer Center for treatment each day. (I do want to add that two special friends—Sybil and Alice—have been giving me rides two days each week, which has been a tremendous help.)

Yesterday was a “tired” day for me, when all I felt like doing in the afternoon was spending time on the couch, alternating between reading and napping. This is hardly surprising. I am nearly at the end of radiation treatment, and fatigue is perfectly normal. But not much fun, especially during this busy time of year. Let’s just say that wanting to spend each afternoon dozing on the couch doesn’t exactly lead to holiday cheer.

Even after my nap, I was still tired, and I drove rather bleary eyed to Augusta to fetch Clif. It was dark, and this only added to the tiredness. I decided to bring our dog, Liam, along. Now that it gets dark so early, he doesn’t get half as much outside time as he would like, and I thought a trip to Augusta would give him a little something to think about.

Clif works in an office building on a small hill overlooking the Kennebec River, and when I parked the car, I noticed a blue and white shimmer from a park below. Five or six bare trees—good-sized ones—were strung with lights, and they looked lovely in the dark. Since I had about ten minutes or so to spare before Clif got out of work, I decided to take the dog for walk in the park. Down main street we went and down several flights of newly constructed outside stairs—me going in a choppy fashion because of my arthritic knees and the dog trotting nimbly ahead of me. (May he have many more nimble years!)

This is going to sound like a cliché, but so be it. As I walked among the trees, I felt as if I were bathed in a shimmer of blue and white. All was quiet except for the murmur of the river. There was just the dog and I, and it seemed as though we were in some kind of enchanted place. Now, in the many, many times I’ve gone to Augusta, I think it’s safe to say I’ve never felt as though it was some kind of enchanted place. But that is how I felt last night after being among the trees and the lights.

After the best night’s sleep I’ve had in a long time, I woke up this morning feeling very nearly like my old perky self, full of bustle and plans. I felt so good, in fact, that after going to the Cancer Center, I decided to treat myself to a donut at Tim Horton’s, to a Canadian maple glazed donut. Then it came to me: Why not have a treat a day until next Friday, December 10, which will be the last day of radiation? What better way to celebrate coming down the homestretch? None that I can think of, and that’s what I’ve decided to do.

For a foodie, the best celebrations are ones that involve food, and my plan is to have something special every day. Since our budget is modest, and Christmas is approaching, the treats will be small. But that’s just fine. I love little treats.

From now until next Friday, I’ll be having a “treat a day.” On the blog, there will be pictures and little descriptions about the treats.

Was it the Christmas spirit that perked me up or a good night’s sleep? Who cares? What fun to plan a week of treats.

It’s that time of year, the time of turkey and thanks. As a rule, it is common to give thanks for loved ones—family and friends—and I am thankful for them, especially after being diagnosed with breast cancer, which has a way of paring life down to its essentials. It is not something you want to face alone, and I am very grateful for all the support I’ve received.

But I would also like to give thanks to something that often gets overlooked, especially in households with, shall we say, a modest budget. That something, of course, is the kitchen.

On the face it, my kitchen is nothing to brag about. My husband, Clif, and I live in a ranch-style house built in 1969. Originally, it started out as a “cracker box,” with a long, narrow kitchen and living room and three small bedrooms. Then, the previous owners added a large, bright dining room at one end and two good-sized bedrooms on the other. (For these additions I am very, very thankful. Without them, we probably wouldn’t have bought the house.) Thus the cracker box became one long, narrow house. A freight train, if you will.

But back to the kitchen. It is dark with too few cupboards and not enough counter space. Because of its narrowness, only one person at a time can work comfortably in it—two is a squeeze but doable. Three? Forget about it. My kitchen has a tiled floor, probably its best feature only slightly marred by my foolish choice of color—white. (It seemed like a good idea at the time for a dark kitchen, and the white tiles did indeed brighten it up. But every footprint and paw print show up in bold relief on this white floor.) The cupboards were the classic dark pseudo-wood cabinets so common in the 1960s. We have gotten around this by painting them red.

My pots and pans? Nothing special. They are Revere Ware—a cut above average but again nothing to brag about. The same could be said about my mixer, my food processor, my toaster. Really, there is nothing about my kitchen or its equipment to strike envy in the hearts of fellow foodies.

But over the years, this kitchen has literally fed hundreds of people—young, old, and in-between. We’ve packed them into this freight-train house with its imperfect kitchen and its Revere Ware. We’ve made bread, chili, pies, crackers, soup, fish, chicken, beef stew, biscuits, pizza, and many, many other dishes. We have had appetizer nights, standing-room only parties, barbecues, and sit-down dinners. In short, this kitchen has helped nourish friends and family.

So I give thanks to my kitchen, and I hope readers will do the same with their kitchens, too. If you have a big beautiful kitchen with granite counters and expensive pots and pans, give double thanks. If all you have is a crockpot, a hot plate, and a toaster over, still give thanks. Whatever you have, you can cook for and nourish the ones you love. Need I add this applies to both men and women? Sons as well as daughters? I hope not.

This piece has included pictures of my kitchen. After the New Year, I am hoping nearby friends and readers will allow my husband and I to come into their kitchens and photograph them. And perhaps share a recipe or two. Please do let me know if you are interested.

And finally, happy Thanksgiving to all!

Today is an important day for me. It marks the halfway point of my radiation treatment for breast cancer. So far, everything is going fairly well. Last week, I had problems with fatigue—so bad I felt as though I could barely get through the day—but blood pressure medicine seems to have been a big help. (It’s been high ever since my diagnosis, and my doctor decided the time had come to do something about it.) I’m much better now, and I’m grateful to have some (if not all) of my old energy back.

Not surprisingly, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about cancer, and I recently read a terrific book called Living Downstream: An Ecologist’s Personal Investigation of Cancer and the Environment by Sandra Steingraber. In October, I had the opportunity to hear Steingraber speak at Bates College in Lewiston, where I learned that New England has one of the highest rates of breast cancer and prostate cancer in the country. Later in the month, I also saw the documentary Living Downstream at Railroad Square in Waterville.

Anybody who cares about personal health, family health, and the health of the planet should read this book and see the film. Steingraber, like Rachel Carson, with whom she’s been compared, is both a good scientist and a good writer, and she makes an eloquent, compelling case for how the West’s use of petrochemicals has so polluted our environment that cancer rates are going steadily up. Yes, cancer has always been with us, but there is more of it now than there ever has been, and it’s not all due to early diagnoses and to longer life spans. Steingraber wonders “why so much silence still surrounds questions about cancer’s connection to the environment, and why so much scientific inquiry into this issue is still considered preliminary.” (There’s a recent New Yorker article about cancer that asks the same question.)

Steingraber had bladder cancer when she was twenty and a college student. (She is now in her fifties.) It seems that cancer runs in her family. But here’s the interesting thing— Steingraber was adopted at a young age, and it is her adopted family, not her birth family, that has the high incidence of cancer. After her own struggle with the disease, Steingraber turned her attention to the environmental causes of cancer, and, she eventually decided to devote her professional life to spreading the word about cancer and the environment, about how DDT, dioxins, and other endocrine disrupters harm our health.

This, of course, is a complicated subject, and while Steingraber tells stories from her own life to illustrate her point, she also gives readers plenty of science, data, and statistics. (I admit that my eyes glazed over from time to time.) The book made me sad and angry. It also made me determined to do what I could to help, to join the symphony, as Steingraber would put it. At the end of Living Downstream, she asserts, “I believe we are musicians in human orchestra. It is time now to play the Save the World Symphony. It is a vast orchestral piece, and you are but one musician. You are not required to play solo. But you are required to figure out what instrument you hold and play it as well as you can.”

So here is what one musician is going to do. It’s a song I’ve been playing for a while, but I’m going to play it louder and stronger than ever by writing, by eating as much organic and local food as I can, by not flying unless it is absolutely essential, by driving as little as possible, by recycling with a vengeance, by carrying my own cup and silverware wherever I go so that I don’t need to use disposable ones.

Small actions, small song. Right now it is what I can do, and I hope to do more as time goes by.

In my last post, I wrote about the recent elections and how discouraged I felt by the results. The Far Right and the Tea Partiers made real inroads, especially in Maine, and this is a worry for progressives who believe that individual responsibility must be combined with societal responsibility. The two are twined, and to my way of thinking, it is impossible to have a decent society if they are separated. Yes, individuals should work hard and be thrifty and resourceful. But there are some things that are too much for individuals—roads, trains, schools, and health care come immediately to mind, but there are other items as well, which are for the common good and should be overseen by the government. (Other things, such as the sale of chocolate, shoes, and books should be left to businesses.)

Unfortunately, the common good doesn’t seem to be first and foremost in the minds of the Far Right/Tea Partiers. In the New York Review of Books, I read a piece about Rush Limbaugh, the Far Right’s de facto leader, and the piece clarified some of the motivations behind that group. There is no other way to put this—Limbaugh et al. seem to be older, affluent white people who are at the top and who want to stay there. They don’t want to share, and they see their authority and status threatened by uppity minorities and poor people. If society is too equal, then who will serve Limbaugh and Company? So they sneer and tear down and bully the public, making enough converts to influence opinion and elections.

What to do? As a member of society, I will, of course, continue to vote, supporting candidates whose views match mine. However, I know very well that as a “hobbit,” as someone who lacks power and money, my influence is small. This is not to downplay the importance of voting but rather to be realistic about my role in shaping politics.

Yet I need to do something to lift myself out of the doldrums the past election has put me in, and here is what I have decided to do: I will make bread, and I will give it away. I have even come up with a title—the Let Them Eat Bread project. (This is, of course, a twist on “Let them eat cake,” which Marie Antoinette supposedly said to her starving subjects. True or not, it represented the indifference those at the top felt for those at the bottom, and it seems to me we have a similar situation right now with the Far Right.)

This project has been brewing for quite a while. It’s taken me about a year to learn how to make decent bread, and one of the reasons I started making bread was so that occasionally I could give it away. But now it’s time to get serious, to give bread away on a more regular basis.

With bread being “the staff of life,” I am very much aware that giving it away is a symbolic act. However, we are a symbolic species, and this action of mine is meant both as a way to share with others and as a way to rebuke those who are not inclined to share. Opening the hand, so to speak, rather than clenching the fist. (And if we are going to survive as a species, we’d better damned well open our hands.)

Every project needs some guidelines, and keeping simplicity and flexibility in mind, here is what I have come up with:

1. Starting on January 1, 2011, I will give at least one loaf of bread away every week. (I want to wait until radiation treatment stops.)
2. If possible, I will give away more bread—2 maybe even 3 loaves a week. Since my mixer will only make enough dough for 2 loaves at a time, this is more time consuming than it sounds.
3. It counts to give bread to family and friends.
4. It counts to give bread as a thank you.
5. However, I will never take money for the bread.
6. As I get more into the habit of giving bread, I will branch out to acquaintances. In fact, I will try to branch out to conservatives. Just as with the Buddhist loving/kindness meditation, it will be good spiritual practice to include those who are not “kindred spirits.” They might not like my politics, but they’ll probably like my bread. (Who knows? Perhaps one day I’ll even be able to bring myself to give a loaf to Paul Lepage, our new “Tea Party” governor.)

And that’s it! It would be fun to come up with some kind of label to stick on the bags of bread. I’m not graphically inclined, but Clif is, and I’ll ask for his help.

Anyway, come the first of the year, let them eat bread!

What a day Tuesday, November 2^nd was! For progressive liberals (yes, that is what I am) it was very depressing, and there is no way to put a good spin on it. Nationwide, Democrats were trounced, and while they are far from perfect, the alternative is much worse.

Maine, unfortunately, followed the nation, and the new year will bring us a tea party-backed governor who, with a Republican controlled House and Senate, will be able to cause plenty of mischief. (Perhaps misery would be a better word.) For example, these are the same Republicans who decided, in their recent platform, that health care is not a right. It seems that only those lucky enough to afford insurance have the right to health care. And what about those who can’t afford it? Too bad for them. Better luck in the next life.

Now, I know this is supposed to be a blog about food and eating. Be patient. In the next post I’ll be getting around to food, and this post is relevent to what will follow. 

Since I’ve been diagnosed with breast cancer, health care is very much on my mind. The bill for the lumpectomy I had last month came to $15,000. That’s right. Fifteen thousand dollars for a relatively simple operation where I was in and out of the hospital in the same day. This charge doesn’t include any of my pre-op or post-op visits. It doesn’t include visits to the oncologist or the radiologist. It doesn’t include treatment. It was just for the operation.

I am one of the fortunate ones. My husband’s work provides excellent health insurance, and our out-of-pocket expenses have been minimal. Also, my husband’s contribution to this policy is affordable, much different from when he was self-employed, and we had to buy our own insurance directly from an insurance company. With that policy, the monthly premiums cost as much as our monthly mortgage payments, there was a high deductible, and only catastrophic illnesses were covered. Still, it was better than nothing. If my cancer had come then, even though we would have been in debt, we wouldn’t have lost our house paying for my treatment.

However, my thoughts keep coming back to those who aren’t covered through their work and who can’t afford to spend the equivalent of a monthly mortgage payment on health insurance. People have a right to health care, even if they are poor, and no Republican rhetoric can convince me otherwise. As far as I’m concerned, every human being on this planet has the right to health care as well as the right to have enough food, decent housing, clean water, and an education.

But here lies the problem: There are a lot of us, and our numbers keep growing. Unfortunately, Earth’s resources stay the same, and the more there are of us, the less there is to go around. With globalization thrown into the mix, jobs have become as scarce as resources.

I suspect many people haven’t really put the pieces together—that we live on a crowded, heated-up, polluted planet where corporations can easily move to countries with cheap labor. That the era of inexpensive oil has come to an end and thus a way of life that—let’s be honest—has been sweet. (At least for those living in rich countries.)

But I also suspect that deep down, most Americans know something is wrong, that the cost of living keeps going up, and there simply aren’t enough good jobs to go around. They might not be able to articulate exactly why this is so, but they know it all right, and it makes them feel insecure. And with this insecurity come fear and anger. (Author Sharon Astyk has written quite a lot about this.)

To put it bluntly, when people are afraid and angry, they often clench their hands into fists, both in their personal and political lives, and make bad decisions. Thus we get tea party candidates who win. In a way, I understand. When I think of the future, I am often afraid and angry. What in the world is going to happen to our species? Are we ever going to wise up and stop consuming so much, wasting so much, polluting so much?

So what can one middle-aged, non-affluent woman do in the face of widespread fear and anger amoung voters? The discouraging answer, aside from voting, is not much. But I have an idea, a scheme. It’s more than a bit gimmicky, but just thinking about doing it makes me feel better.

Stay tuned for Part II, where I outline my scheme.

As some readers know, in August I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I had surgery in September, and my outlook is good—right now I am undergoing radiation treatment, but I will not need to have chemotherapy.

But for all of August and most of September, I was not what you would call “a good eater.” Not surprisingly, I was very nervous during that time, and it affected my appetite. All I wanted was bland food—plain chicken, plain fish, poached eggs on toast. Even the thought of anything spicy made me a little queasy.

The end of August, when I had an MRI, was my nadir. While the test is not painful, for someone like me, who is claustrophobic, it is a misery. For an hour or so after the test, I felt dizzy and disoriented, and I was shaken for the rest of the day. It just so happened that around the time of my MRI, I was reading Man & Time by J. B. Priestly, which is, as the title suggests, a book about the human concept of time. The night after my MRI, I read the section about precognition and dreams, and when I went to bed, I wondered what in the world I would dream about. Cancer? Death? Loved ones who have passed?

No, instead I dreamt I was making chili for my friends. Nice spicy chili in a rich tomato sauce. When I woke up, I felt refreshed and hopeful. It seemed that my unconscious was telling me something, that soon I’d be back to spicy eating, that maybe, even, I’d be all right. Right then and there I decided that after my surgery I would invite some of my friends over in the fall for a chili party. It would be a dream come true, so to speak.

Last Saturday was the day of the chili party, and what a day it was! My husband, Clif, and I each made a batch of chili. He likes it hot, and he made his using four Jalapeño peppers from Farmer Kev’s garden. I like mine not so hot and used hot pepper flakes instead. Both batches had sausage and ground beef as well as lots of black beans and kidney beans. In addition to cooking we cleaned, we moved furniture, and we brought out spare chairs.

Over twenty people came to the chili party in our little house in the big woods. And of course everyone brought something—more chili, salads, wine, desserts, corn bread, garlic bread, apples, pies, and cider. A real feast and a real celebration for me. I even made a little speech, recounting my dream and thanking everyone for coming to share this special day with me. And readers, I ate chili. My friend Kate Johnson’s chili—smooth, smoky, and full of white beans.

But one of the best parts of the day was the surprise concocted by my daughters Dee and Shannon. Dee lives in New York, and together the sisters conspired for Dee to come home, unbeknownst to me, for the chili party.

On the day of the party, Shannon called around noon and said, “We’re in Winthrop, just up the road from the house. You and Dad go into the kitchen. I have a surprise for you.”

“How mysterious!” I said, but naturally we did as she asked.

As Clif and I waited in the kitchen, Shannon and Mike came into the dining room followed by—ta da!—Dee.

“Wow!” I exclaimed, and Shannon later recounted how gratifying my reaction was.

It truly was a surprise and a wonderful day. Chili with family and friends. A return to spicy eating. And a feeling of hope as I go forward with my treatment.

Since we live in a little house in the big woods, I can’t really have a proper vegetable garden. We bought this house many years before I got the urge to grow vegetables, and the time just hasn’t been right for us to move. (If we ever do move, then a house with a large sunny yard for gardening will be a priority.)

Thank goodness for vegetable stands, farmers’ markets, and orchards. Because of them, from July to December, I am able to buy a lot of local food. This year, before Stevenson’s Vegetable Stand on Route 202 in Winthrop closes on October 24th, I decided to stock up on crops that wouldn’t spoil quickly—squash, carrots, and potatoes. I also purchased a few things that I would need to use in the upcoming week, and also some sweet red peppers, which can be frozen if it looks as though they are starting to go.

When I got the vegetables home, I was struck by their beauty. My husband, Clif, and I arrayed them on a wicker chest in the spare bedroom, which also serves as a cold storage room if we keep the door closed.

As for next year, we are planning to buy a CSA share from Farmer Kev. We can’t decide whether we should start with a small share or go all out with a large one. But small or large, next summer much of what we eat will be coming from Farmer Kev’s garden.

In the meantime we’ll have carrot soup, and squash soup, muffins, and pies. Recipes will follow.

A day or two ago, my husband, Clif, and I were heating some soup for lunch, and we discovered that the cracker jar was pretty much empty. Clif is of the opinion that soup without crackers is not worth eating, but we had some choices. We could drive to Hannaford, which admittedly is only a couple of miles away, and we could buy a box of crackers. We could also bike to the grocery store. Or we could rummage through our cupboards and take stock of what we already had. We chose the last option and found a half stack of stale saltines as well as some stale oyster crackers.

Clif said, “Let’s do what my parents always did with stale crackers. Spread them on a cookie sheet and bake them in a 350 oven until the crackers are brown.”

This we did, and the crackers were pretty tasty. In fact, I liked them better that way. Baked and browned, they were very crispy and had a toasted flavor. So, chalk one up for Clif’s Yankee parents, a frugal couple who didn’t believe in wasting things.

My Franco-American parents were that way, too. I suppose it had something to do with growing up poor in Maine. From an early age, they learned to take good care of the things they had and to use what was on hand whenever possible. (They were also very generous, thus proving that frugality and generosity are not mutually exclusive.) My father was also a scrounge extraordinaire, and he passed on his love of scrounging to me.

Regrettably, I did not inherit my father’s knack for being handy. I am about as handy as our dog, Liam, and if we were both stranded on a desert isle, I don’t know how long we would last. Luckily, I married a man who is handy, but he has the unfortunate habit of whining whenever I come up with an idea for a project.

On the same day that we roasted the crackers, I told him that the time had come for him to make me a new container for the clothespins. The old bag was so torn that it wouldn’t be long before it would rip from its hanger and spill the clothespins on the ground. I had tried patching the bag with duct tape, a Mainer’s first line of defense when things fall apart, but that bag had defied duct tape and had continued to rip. We needed to proceed to Plan B.

I spied an empty laundry detergent jug and said to Clif, “If the top were cut off, two little holes could be punched in the side, and we could recycle the metal hanger from the old clothespin bag. Then, voilà, we would have a new clothespin container made from things we have on hand.” I handed him the jug and the old clothespin bag.

“Why does it always have to be me?” he whined, true to form.

“Here’s how it works,” I briskly reminded him. “I’m the idea person. You’re the handy one. You should be proud that you have these skills. You would not die if you were stranded on a desert isle.”

“Right,” he muttered, but he took the jug and the old clothespin hanger and made me a new container. Total time for this project? Ten minutes, max.

To say that I was thrilled with the results is an understatement. I was so pleased with the way the container turned out that I had Clif take a picture of it hanging on our line. Now, even though we are family with a modest income, we could have sprung for a new clothespin bag, just as we could have driven to Hannaford for another box of crackers.

But that was not the point. With both the crackers and the clothespin container, we used what we had on hand, and it gave me a great feeling to have done so. No new resources were required, yet we had what we needed in the end.

And the colorful afghan hanging next to our nifty new clothespin container? Made for me by my grandmother many years ago, when I was a teenager. Over and over, it has been washed and used, but this sturdy afghan looks nearly as good as it did when my grandmother gave it to me. My kind of afghan.