Sometimes reality hits you in the face whether you’re ready for it or not.

I didn’t take a picture and that’s probably a good thing. I’ll cut to the chase and then flesh out the detail. People eat animals. Sometimes those animals might be what we would consider to be pets.

Here’s what happened. I was walking to the Chinese store for tofu, coming up on the house where the rust-colored dogs hang out, when I noticed two men doing something in the grass between the ditch and the compound wall. One of the men was picking up an animal. He held both front feet in his left hand and the hind feet in his right. The second man was holding a big woven plastic bag just like the one we bought a load of charcoal in.

I immediately identified the animal as a dog and because it was the same color as the dogs who habitually sleep outside that same wall, a scenario developed in my brain. A cherished pet had been struck by a car and was being rescued. Or it was dead and the body was being removed by city employees to wherever road kill dogs go.

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the men look my way so I turned and getting a better look, there seemed to be some life in the unfortunate animal. Maybe there was hope for the dog after all. My face reflected my internal narrative with a mixture of sorrow and hope. As I met his gaze, the man swung the dog into the bag and reached down for something else.

I think my look of concern made him smile. Picking up a second dog, this one a black one, he asked in English in a slightly teasing voice, “You like this?”  He held up the dog and its head swung back to reveal a gaping gash where the throat once was. Obviously, the dog’s throat had been cut. Cut the way I’ve seen deer hunters bleed out an animal before butchering. Probably hacked with a machete or “chopped” as they say here.

Confused, I answered “No,” and kept walking, stepping aside to miss a small puddle of drying blood. It was unclear whether he was asking if I liked dogs in general or as pets or did I like dog meat. It was pretty clear these two dogs were headed to someone’s kitchen and it was best that I continue on my way.

A couple of weeks ago our housemate, Jeremy, told me he saw our next door neighbors handling a dead cat in the same way one handles a piece of meat. “Are you sure it wasn’t a dead pet?” I had asked. “No” Jeremy shook his head, “They were treating it like food.” The next week both Bob and Jeremy saw them handling a chicken in the same manner.

To be fair, I’ve often joked that I’d eat roadkill if I were hungry enough and feel better about it than eating factory-farmed meat. I’ve never been squeamish about meat. The neighbors raise chickens for food and the goats in our yard are being raised for breeding with the intention of eating the kids. After we leave Kumasi, Jeremy intends to sell his Nigerian Dwarf goats, Go-At, Aponche and Nwansane, for meat.

My attitude had always been: animal protein is animal protein, no matter how you slice it and I’ve chosen not to partake.

Our vegan diet has taken a hit since moving to Africa. We can’t get Veganaise so we use the mayonnaise made with eggs on sandwiches and in slaw. We eat a lot of beans to make up for the absence of processed garden burgers, soy chick’n nuggets and home made tempeh, and seitan.

Fortunately beans are abundant, soy milk readily available and fresh tofu is delivered daily to the Chinese shop just a few blocks up the street. Peanuts, soy protein nuggets and nutritional yeast (brought in suitcases by visitors to Kumasi) round out the vegan menu. Bean fritters, Kentucky fried tofu, chili, falafel, hummus and fried soy protein figure heavily in our menu.

We all voted against the local margarine “Blue Band” which refused to melt and so I’ve begun buying real butter. Tonight’s meal for example, the Kentucky Fried Tofu meal, will depend heavily on butter for the gravy, mashed potatoes, candied carrots and sauteed mushrooms.

The guys supplement their diet with eggs, tuna and cheese. When we go out to eat, they sometimes order chicken or tilapia. The addition of tuna to the Casa Kumasi pantry created a dilemma for me. I didn’t feel right about buying fish even if I didn’t intend on eating it myself. But it was my job to stock the house and this had become an item to be stocked. In the end, I agreed to add tuna to the list of things I buy and pack home from the store.

Last Saturday Bob and I discovered a new shop in the neighborhood that stocks good cheese, delicious beans, bread, spices, dried fruit and our favorite mayonnaise. We had heard about this unmarked shop on the other side of Melcom Road and Andreas, a German ex-pat who has been living in our neighborhood for over a year knew where it was. He generously invited us to join him while he ran his shopping errands and we happily hopped in.

Andreas’ errands took us out past the abattoir for a case of beer. “Here is the slaughter house,” he said, “I’ve been inside this. It is horrible.” I asked him what was so horrible and he replied, “The attitude. They slaughter animals and how they treat it.” Two stops later we were back at Atinga Junction. “I know you don’t eat meat, but this butcher is very good.” Andreas said, pulling into a tiny shop for a package of ground beef.

We returned home with 101 cedis ($50) worth of food, including three packages of cheese. So now grilled cheese sandwiches are the latest culinary craze around here. I tasted the Swiss and one of the cheddars and was reminded how much I once loved cheese. I have yet to eat a grilled cheese sandwich but I have to admit that today Bob’s sandwiches smelled mighty inviting, even after the trauma of seeing what I saw a couple of hours earlier.

I realize there’s a lot of wiggle room between grilled cheese and dog meat. But my nonchalant attitude towards meat has been shaken by the haunting image of a black dog with a hacked throat. When I arrived home, the goats gathered around like pets and I felt a pang of sorrow knowing that they may one day end up on someone’s dinner plate.

All of this comes down to one realization – we all have to make our own decisions about what’s right for us. Some of us eat fish but not meat. Meat but not beef. Beef but only grass-fed beef. Eggs in mayonnaise but not fried in a pan. Butter but not cheese. Cheese but not a whole sandwich of melted cheese, bread grilled in butter (horrors!)

Only I can decide where to draw the line.

It’s been awhile since we’ve made tempeh or seitan cutlets so we’ve been cheating with processed foods. Mostly because Bob has been working 50 hours a week between his full time job and his volunteer work at Chatham Marketplace.

Quorn chick’n patties are delicous but made of  mycoprotien and egg whites and a pinch of whey protein concentrate and buttermilk powder. So, they are not hardly vegan and we’ll be looking into vegan patties next trip to the store. As well as looking for time to make some breaded cutlets!

I had an hour until dinner, so I got right to work.  First, I pulled a container of chick peas from the freezer.  I chopped the onion and garlic and began sauteing them in olive oil in a big pot.  I started some water boiling for brown rice and turned the oven on to 350 degrees.

While the garlic and onion sizzled away, I chopped the okra into 1/4 inch rounds, tossed it with olive oil, minced garlic, and a light mixture of corn meal, onion powder, salt and pepper.  I put the okra into a 9″ x 13″ pan and set it in the oven for 45 minutes.

Next,  I went to my cupboard and got a can of coconut milk and one of tomatoes.  I cut the carrots, green beans and sweet potatoes into bite-sized pieces and added them to the curry pot.  I added the coconut milk, tomatoes and two cups of veggie broth.

I started rinsing and chopping the greens.  First, I removed the stems, chopped them and threw them into the curry pot.  Then I stacked the greens on the cutting board and sliced them into thin strips about 2 inches long and put them aside.

When the curry came to a boil, I added the peppers (in big pieces) and the chick peas and turned the pot down to simmer.  Then I added one tablespoon each of curry powder, cumin and cinnamon and some salt and cayenne.  I checked the okra and flipped it with a spatula.

As soon as the carrots and potatoes were fork tender, I turned off the heat, added 1/2 a cup of peanut butter, adjusted the seasoning and stirred in the greens.  I sliced the basil and cilantro into thin strips to use as garnish.  By now the the rice was done, so I opened a can of sweet peaches that we’d put up in July, pulled the crispy roasted okra from the oven and got out the peanuts.

Then we sat down to one of our favorite meals.  We scooped some rice into a bowl, sprinkled it with basil and cilantro, ladled thick, rich curry on top and garnished with okra, peaches and peanuts.

Curry is the perfect fall meal!  It feeds a lot of people so we trotted the leftovers out for a potluck later in the week.  And it freezes very well for those times when we don’t have a potluck lined up.

When you find yourself with a mish mash of fresh vegetables, don’t worry – just make curry!

No mater how many hours I worked outside or how careful I tried to be about not over eating, those pounds were stuck on my hips and thighs.  I did yoga, I went on walks, I ate sandwiches on dry bread to no avail.

Worse, I was hungry all the time, picking up boxes of crackers at the store to bring back to my office to see me through until dinner.  I often went back for seconds.  Let’s face it, I was eating like a teenaged boy!  I woke up thinking about food, planned my day around it, and dreamed about it.

When that little voice in my head suggested that this is what happens to fifty-something women and that it’s completely normal and to be accepted, I realized I was in trouble.  So I bit the bullet and put myself on my version of a real diet.  The Liquid Diet With Dinner Diet.  It’s worked for me all my life and I was hoping it would this time.

I like to think of this diet as a food attitude adjustment, but the simple fact is I needed to eat less if I wanted to lose weight.  No amount of exercising was going to achieve the same result.  Humans are designed to survive famine but we weren’t designed to survive constant feasting.

I set a target of ten pounds and stocked up on fruit juice.  Every time I got hungry, I’d take a swig of juice.  I was hungry all day but kept telling myself that dinner was going to be my reward.  I reminded myself that I had been hungry all day when I was eating breakfast, lunch, dinner and crackers and cake and all that stuff I was eating before.

I lost four pounds the first week.  By the third week, I no longer craved second helpings at dinner and was able to start bringing solid food with me to work.  A cup of leftover greens would hold me all day.  I’d just eat a couple of bites every time I got hungry.  I remembered to drink lots of water and juice.  The pounds continued to go away.

Two months later, I’ve lost thirteen pounds and my clothes are comfortable to wear again.  I’ve long since resumed my normal eating pattern but am no longer eating teenaged boy portions.  I’ve come to realize that I don’t have to eat everything I cook and that the compost pile needs to eat sometimes, too.  That my eyes are nearly always bigger than my stomach and most of the time when I think I’m hungry, my body is really just asking for a drink of water.  And I’m learning to slow down and stop eating when I’ve had enough.  I’m glad I bit the bullet and let myself get hungry enough to reshape my attitude about food!

It wasn’t long before our conversation turned to food and gardening and we remembered Farmer Jason telling us that parnips were on his top five list so we decided to come up with our own list.  We asked ourselves, “If we could only grow five vegetables which five would we grow?” Here’s what we decided on:

TOP FIVE MUST-HAVE
Beets
Cabbage
Onions
Potatoes
Tomatoes

Beets do double duty, providing greens as well as the sweet beet root.  Cabbage is magic and extremely versatile.  Much of the world subsists quite nicely on a diet of beans, rice and cabbage. Nearly every meal in our home begins with an onion.  We both have Irish roots, so potatoes are a must.  Plus they are delicious, satisfying and store well.  Tomatoes are indispensable for TLTs (Tempeh, Lettuce and Tomato Sandwiches) in the summer and spaghetti sauce in the winter.

Well that only whet our appetite, so we went on to create four more top fives.

TOP FIVE RAW
Butterhead Lettuce
Salad Turnips
Spinach
Sugar Snap Peas
Sweet Red Pepper

TOP FIVE COOKED
Artichokes
Asparagus
Mushrooms
Shishito Peppers
Sweet Corn

TOP FIVE EASIEST TO GROW
Cucumber
Green Onions
Lettuce
Okra
Tomatoes

TOP FIVE DRIED
Black Beans
Chick Peas
Rice
Soybeans
Wheat

We already have more than twenty five vegetables and herbs growing in our garden and have yet to add artichokes, cabbage, or sweet corn.  And we’d need a bit more acreage to grow enough beans and grain to replace what we currently buy.  Lucky for us our neighbors at Edible Earthscapes are growing black beans and rice!

At the end of the day, it’s fun to make lists and I feel confident that if we were limited, we would live a healthy, happy and sustainable life eating our top twenty-five.

This week Bob and I found ourselves with a couple of pounds of parsnips. I wasn’t sure what to do with them, but decided to give them a chance. So I went to my computer and found a recipe which looked promising:

Sweet and Gooey Parsnips

1 pound parsnips
2 Tablespoons butter
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
Salt and freshly ground black pepper

Preparation:

Scrape or peel the parsnips, then cut them into sticks about the size of your little finger. Dry well.

In a heavy skillet, melt the butter; then add the parsnips, shaking to coat. Sprinkle with nutmeg. Cover tightly and sauté on medium heat for about 5 to 10 minutes. The parsnips should be tender and gooey, and slightly caramelized. Add salt and pepper to taste.

I got right to work, peeling and chopping up the hard, little roots. I spent enough time with my pile of parsnips to begin seeing pictures in the horizontal lines. I superimposed the face of a farmer atop one craggy, dirt-stained root in an attempt to visualize the person who grew these pale, pithy wonders. All it needed was a tiny straw hat!

Meanwhile, farmer Jason of Edible Earthscapes came over and was enjoying some of his home brew on the back porch with Bob. As the parsnips simmered away in the pan, I walked outside and asked Jason “What do you do with parsnips?” Bob laughed because he had just asked Jason the same question.

Jason had told Bob that Fall parsnips were one of his top five favorite vegetables and that Spring parsnips with their winter-hardened root cores were only good for the compost pile. “Great,” I said, “I find this out now!” As I turned to go back inside the house, Bob was already making plans to plant parsnips for Fall harvest.

I checked on my pan of parsnips. The nutmeg complimented their flavor nicely, and some of the pieces had indeed turned sweet and gooey. Unfortunately, nearly all the gooey parsnip morsels were hiding an inedible, woody core. Unwilling to throw them on the compost pile just yet, I put them in the refrigerator.

The next day, I decided to turn those parsnips into soup. Soups are something I’m really good at and this would be a cream of chard/kale soup with pureed parsnips. I started re-heating the cooked greens and on a whim, added in some acorn squash I’d frozen last fall. I heated up the parsnips and pressed them through a sieve, leaving all the hard cores behind. Adding soy milk, I pureed all three vegetables and added a few spices.

Voila! I had made a big pot of something resembling Baby Food! Well, there’s no baby in our house and I don’t know anyone who would feed what I made to their child. My “soup” had bad color, consistency and flavor. Well, I could thin it down some, I though, reaching for some vegetable broth.

I was on the verge of chopping up some chives to add in when Bob walked into the kitchen. Seeing what I was up to he said, “Let it go – it’s enough already!” Putting the knife down, I picked up the pot of gooey green puree, walked outside and poured it over the compost pile.

Compost piles need to eat, too, throwing good energy after bad is never a good idea, and if you are afraid to make mistakes, you will never learn anything. Knowing when to let go is as important as knowing how to dive in. And I’ll probably be ready to give parsnips another go in the fall.

“Guantánamo” was the name I chose for the 250 square foot garden I created in front of our house at Oilseed Community where we spent the first two years after moving to North Carolina in 2007. There were three underlying reasons for the choice.

The first was due to my profound disappointment in my country’s choice to incarcerate and torture human beings without due process of law. I understood that some of the inmates at the prison in Cuba were criminals, but that does not demand a rescinding of legal and human rights – concepts previously supported by the United States of America.

The second reason was  due to the name my friend Lyle chose for his garden some years back. Lyle’s garden is named “Cuba”, a name chosen by the inspiration he gained by learning about how the island nation of Cuba responded to the abrupt ending of their petroleum addiction after the demise of the Soviet Union in 1991. Cuba reacted to the loss of its Soviet supply line by instituting land reform, and encouraging farmers and agronomists to retool Cuban agricultural production to methods that did not require petroleum inputs, for fuel, fertilizers, or pesticides. This amazing story can be learned though a documentary produced by The Community Solution  entitled “The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil”

In North Carolina, if you want to take more food off your garden than the deer do, you need to fence your garden in, giving it the look of a place more suited toward the incarceration of edibles than the nurturing of them. Lyle’s garden, surrounded by it’s eight-foot high fence, provided him and his family a space to produce their own food, without the need for fossil fuel inputs. My first exposure to gardens with tall fences was at Lyles’ when he provided Camille and me a room for a couple of nights on an exploratory visit we made to the area in April 2007. Needless to say, I was captivated by the concept.

The third reason for my name selection was due to the influence of a master kumu hula, Hokulani Holt-Padilla, who I had the pleasure of working with back in 2000- 2001 while working with the Kaho’olawe Island Reserve Commission. One of the many pieces of wisdom I gained from Hoku was that place names are important. She helped me understand that place names are part of what defines the spirit of a place, and its people.

Guantánamo was the name originally bestowed upon the southeastern area of the island by its original human inhabitants, the Taino. Columbus landed at the bay in 1494, promptly changed the name to Puerto Grande, and started the systematic decimation of the indigenous population.

When I told one of my Oilseed neighbors that I was considering naming  the garden Guantánamo, their response was “Oh, don’t say that word!” For them, you see, that word represented the unjust incarceration and torture of human beings, and was something not very pleasant.

So there you have it. My little fortified garden was, from that point forward, known as Guantánamo. I wanted people (at least a few) to associate the name with a place of life, beauty, and sustenance rather than a collection of incarcerated and tortured humans. I was hopeful that our new president would stand by his campaign promise to close down the “detention camp” at Guantánamo Bay in his first few months in office. Since he didn’t, I did, with Lyle’s help. We moved the containers, with food growing in them to their new home next to my new garden, christened “The Sunken Gardens of Moncure”, since it is housed in an abandoned swimming pool.

That story will need to be told, in its own space in its own time, and will likely be titled “A Moveable Feast.”

Vegans don’t eat Kentucky Fried Chicken! Regardless of how many buckets they may have consumed in a previous life.

But wait, it was okay! The little sign on the sample table said that the woman smiling behind the electric fry pan was cooking tofu. Bob picked up a fork and pierced the crispy coating on a succulent bite of fried tofu. “You better have some,” he said, handing me the fork.

So I did. And handed him the fork so he could have another taste. We passed the fork back and forth for a little while before asking for the recipe, then passed it back and forth a few more times. After that, we went and bought four pounds of tofu, some local greens, stocked up on canned tomatos and picked up the twenty-five pound bag of soybeans that had brought us to town in the first place.

We were hardly able to contain our excitement in the check out line. We were hungry from cleaning stalls and itching to get home and fry us up some tofu! Which we did, and it was fabulous. We steamed up some kale, boiled some noodles, made gravy from the pan drippings and stuffed ourselves.

About six hours later, we fished the leftovers out of the refrigerator and chowed down again. Honestly, this stuff tasted like cold Kentucky Fried Chicken. We were so impressed, we added the recipe to our Website here.