A Tribute to Tamara

We buried Tamara last week. A grey-tabby cat, she came into our lives in mid-February, 1988. The litter was purported to be six weeks, by our friend Ace, but I think he might have been pushing time a bit, because they were really tiny. In spite of that she thrived, in human years making it almost to 100.

“That one’s crazy,” Ace said when I stooped to look at the kittens he had brought in a box to our town’s little cafe. He was right about that anyway. Tami, as we called her for short, always did have a bit of a wild streak. But she was sweet, too, and I miss her terribly.

Though she definitely showed her age in recent years, she remained pretty spry and happy until just the last week before we made the hard decision. She would go outside and still catch mice. Ken and I would laugh that those mice must be pretty dumb, and just run into her mouth. She purred madly whenever she was getting pets until the last two days of her life. There was no sign of cancer, and or anything like that. What took her down at last was an abscessed tooth. The infection moved into her eyes and her sinuses, and she couldn’t eat anything solid. Were she a younger animal we would have taken her to the vet, had it extracted and put her on antibiotics. But at her age, she couldn’t have handled that. So Ken dug a hole. I carried her outside. He shot her. She was dead before she knew what hit her. Ken placed her gently in the hole, covering her gently with the rich dirt in a small corner of perennial bed adjacent to the house. We both cried. I carried rocks to protect her resting place. Our friend Tami was gone.


The reason I decided to write about Tami is because she was, in a way, a canary-in-the-coal-mine for our personal environment. She has lived with us so long, breathing the same air, drinking the same water, sleeping on the same furniture and linens. We try to feed our animals as naturally as possible, and with the highest quality food we can, too. So, I think our coal mine must be pretty clean for her to have lasted so long and in such generally good health. We quit using most household chemicals, avoided any use of pesticides or herbicides (no Weed-Be-Gone here), and have eaten mainly organic for the last couple decades. We didn’t start for our health, but because we wanted to help protect the environment. Yet based on our animals’ longevity (we run an old-age home now, with all our animals getting on in life) and generally good health, I hope it bodes well for our own health. And the science supports that it does! More and more research shows that what we have done will indeed reduce our risks. You too can make these decisions. Although our food budget may be higher than some peoples, cutting out all those other chemicals and reducing the amount of other stuff we buy has more than offset it. For example, my trusty gallon jug of white vinegar—the main cleaning product in our house—costs less than $2.00 and lasts a couple months. So start eating as much organic as you can. Avoid those perfumed, synthetic cleaning products. Quit using pesticides. And think of Tami as your inspiration for living to 100.

You are what you eat

If health is like a three-legged stool, with environmental exposures, lifestyle, and genes representing the legs, than food is the seat, overlapping all three legs. So, food seems like an important topic to cover here. Ken and I prioritize the food choices we make in this order:

Our first choice is to grow a fair amount ourselves, organically. Due to where-and-how we live, this isn’t as abundant a portion of our food supply as it once was: when we farmed we grew about 85% of what we consumed! But we still manage to grow several bushels of potatoes and all the garlic we consume (which is saying something since I love cooking with garlic). During the summer the garden supplies us with a wide mixture of goodies and we even grow greens and herbs in the house to help us through the long winter months. Last year we added a banana tree to our indoor plants, and though it won't produce fruit for at least five years, I'm hopeful it will someday. In the meantime, it's a cool looking plant! Our own little flock of laying hens supplies most of our eggs.

Our second choice is purchase from local growers. We can buy local grassfed meat from several nearby ranchers. We try to hit farmer’s markets or farm stands when the hitting is good, and give preference to farmers who are seriously employing sustainable practices. With seasonal purchases, we often buy a larger quantity and store it or use it in recipes that can be frozen for later use (think tomato season=spaghetti sauce or salsa). This week, for example, Ken brought home a bushel of Golden Delicious apples from Cañon City.

When we need items that aren’t available by method one or two, our third choice is to shop at the small natural food store in a town about 30 miles away when we go there for errands, or if I am in the city, I hit Whole Foods or Wild Oats on my way home. I stock up on canned goods, some produce during periods when its low or unavailable, dry goods, coffee and tea, and the like.

Once in a while I go to a major grocery store, like City Market or Safeway, but its actually kind of rare. When I do, I still give preference to organic and natural products.

I can just about hear some people saying, ah, you are a yuppie. I can't afford to eat that way. To which I say, poppy cock! We are not rich. We drive old vehicles, we don't take expensive trips, and we live very frugally in most ways. But, food is just too important to our health, and our pleasure of life, to eat badly. Everyone can grow some food, even if it's in pots on a deck or in a window, and the food you grow yourself is wonderful and very economical. Buying directly from area farmers and ranchers is often far less expensive than the grocery store. For example, the bushel of apples cost just $15.00, and will last for a long time.

Buying real food, and doing some food prep, even at Whole-Foods prices, is less expensive than eating out or buying highly processed foods. However to make eating organically and naturally economical does require a return to the kitchen, but food prep doesn't have to be hard, or take a huge amount of time. I don't have a large, fancy kitchen with all kinds of gadgets; hell, I don't even have a dishwasher. Yet I cook dinner from scratch almost every night of the week. I'm big for searching out easy recipes that taste good and don't take too much time, nor too much cleanup!

So here's a recipe that I found in the latest issue of The Joy of Cooking cookbook (if you can only afford one cookbook, then Joy is what you want!) that epitomizes my cooking attitude, and was decadently delicious: Baked apples with sausage.

Wash the apples and cut the top half-inch off so the top is flat. Core the apples, then scoop out some additional pulp so the apple is about 1/2 inch thick all the way around. Chop the pulp fine, place in bowl, and mix the pulp well with some sausage. Sprinkle brown sugar or drizzle maple syrup into the apples and over the apples, then stuff with the sausage/pulp mix. Bake 45 to 50 minutes at 350 degrees.

I used five apples and two large links of hot Italian sausage, stripped from the casing. You can use just about any kind of sausage. It was perfect for two of us, beyond delicious, and the prep time was only about 15 minutes. How can you possibly beat that?