by Becky "The Cerebral Rat" on July 29, 2010
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So—you’ve grown your own produce or been given some by friends or relatives and you’ve cooked all you can eat—now what? Why freezing or canning, of course. That way you can save some of the summer goodness for your fall and winter meals. You might even be able to stretch your supply of home grown produce until the spring.
I remember helping my mother and father can and freeze–cleaning green beens, shucking corn, anything that didn’t require a knife. However, for some food preservation is a lost art. That’s why we hosted a food preservation workshop given by the Ohio State University Extension Service  on Saturday, July 24th. Marisa Warrix, who lives in South Euclid , was the presenter and the program was very well attended. In case you missed it, she will be coming back to the area to do a couple of workshops at the Whole Foods Market in University Heights on Cedar. On Tuesday, August 10th she will present a workshop on ‘Canning Garden Produce’ from 7:00 pm-8:00 pm. She will present a workshop on ‘Freezing Garden Produce’ on Tuesday, September 14th from 7:00 pm-8:00 pm followed by another hourlong workshop two weeks later on Tuesday, September 28th–also from 7:00 pm-8:00 pm. You may make reservations by calling Whole Foods at 216-932-3916.
If you can’t make any of the workshops, or want to get a head start and can’t wait, you may go to the Ohio State University Extension web page and scroll half way down the page to the ‘Food Preservation’ section. There you will find power point presentations and the documents that Ms. Warrix uses in her workshops. There are also links to helpful fact sheets. I would also suggest taking a look at their blog, ‘Eat, Save, and Be Healthy,’ They have a lot of dietary, child care, nutritional, and other good-to-know things having to do with improving one’s quality of life.
Of course, we have books here at the library that will help you with preserving food. Some of the newer ones are:
Homemade Living:Â Canning & Preserving with Ashley English
Canning and Preserving Your Own Harvest:Â an Encyclopedia of Country Living Guide
Grocery Gardening:Â Planting, Preparing, and Preserving Fresh Food
Joy of Pickling:Â 250 Flavor-Packed Recipes for Vegetables and More from Garden or Market
In addition to saving money and insuring the wholesomeness of your food, canning and freezing can be a bonding family experience. You could start a whole new tradition!
by Becky "The Cerebral Rat" on July 23, 2010
One of the newest movements in cooking/eating is obtaining food locally–purchasing foodstuffs grown as close to where you live as possible. The Library started participating last year with our herb garden at Lee and, when harvest time came, made the produce available on a table in the lobby and encouraged our customers to take what they needed and bring in what they had too much of for others. It was a big hit. Folks came to get fresh parsley or tarragon and dropped off extra tomatoes and squash.Â
I myself took the opportunity to use some of our herbs for our Southern Garden Tea. I used collard greens to decorate the sandwich platters, the dill on the smoked salmon sandwiches, the tarragon and parsley on the cream cheese sandwiches. Much more handy, and cheaper, than getting them from the grocery store.
This year, with the help of a grant and a lot of dedicated volunteers, we expanded our efforts to include all of the branches. We are offering cooking demonstrations at all of the branches which will feature Robin Blair, a personal chef, who will show how to prepare meals using home grown produce. We have also purchased gardening books to help those who wish to grow their own food and cookbooks with recipes for those who have started to harvest from their gardens.
If you are interested in growing your own produce, you might try one of these:
Grocery Gardening:Â Planting, Preparing, and Preserving Fresh Food.
Vegetable Gardener’s Bible.
Garden Wisdom & Know-How:Â Everything You Need to Know to Plant, Grow, and Harvest.
If you have limited space:
From Container to Kitchen:Â Growing Fruits & Vegetables in Pots.
One Magic Square:Â the Easy, Organic Way to Grow Your Own Food on a 3-Foot Square.
Small Plot, High Yield Gardeining:Â Gro Like a Pro, Save Money, and Eat Well from Your Front (or Back or Side) Yard Organic Produce Garden.
For cooking the ‘fruits’ of your labors:
Edible:Â a Celebration of Local Foods.
Farm to Fork:Â Cooking Local, Cooking Fresh.
Eating Local:Â the Cookbook Inspired by America’s Farmers.
Fast, Fresh, & Green:Â More than 90 Decicious Recipes for Veggie Lovers.
Cooking from the Garden:Â Best Recipes from Kitchen Gardener.
These and many other books we have on the shelves will help you grow and cook your own produce. Click on any of the above titles to reserve a copy for yourself. You can take advantage of our herb/produce table when you come in to pick up your books. Happy eating!
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by Becky "The Cerebral Rat" on June 26, 2010
So, I was perusing reviews the other day and came across a review of The Deadly Dinner Party & Other Medical Detective Stories  by Jonathan Edlow. I could not believe that I had missed this book.  I am a sucker for programs like House,  Dr. G., Medical Examiner,  Mystery Diagnosis—you get the picture. Things like these just fascinate me so I hurried over to the shelf and was happy to find the book there. I settled in with the book (over lunch, I might add) and I was not disappointed.
Although the book jacket advert bills it as E.R. and House meet Sherlock Holmes, I found that to be somewhat of an overstatement. In fact, if it did fit that bill it might be a bit cheesy. It is actually a low key but very engaging volume of fifteen medical detective stories written by a practicing physician and Harvard professor.Â
In the first story, from which the book takes its title, a stomach bug turns a suburban dinner party into a disaster that almost kills its host. In another a young business executive is diagnosed with what appears to be lung cancer, but the nodules on his lungs wax and wane (along with his symptoms) and no one can figure out what is causing his illness. Still another gives the account of several patients in the same area of Massachusetts who present with different symptoms and are of varying ages but all have dangerously elevated calcium and vitamin D levels. The trick is to find what they all have in common.
Dr. Edlow goes through these cases, explaining complex medical concepts in a manner that the intelligent lay reader can readily understand. He gives insight into how doctors go about solving difficult medical cases–the detective part of the job–and along the way relates some of the history of various treatments and medical history in general. If you like your medical stories based in reality and can suspend a hypochondriac’s tendency to ‘catch’ illnesses as you read about them, give this one a try.
by Becky "The Cerebral Rat" on June 8, 2010
I have a long standing interest in history and women’s history, so when I had the opportunity to go to the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage for a Backstage Pass Tour of their newest exihibit Women & Spirit: Catholic Sisters in America I jumped at the chance. The Museum is partnering with the Library and several other organizations to present programing in conjunction with the exhibit and one of my friends, Dr. Judith Cetina who is the manager and archivist of the Cuyahoga County Archives, will be speaking at the Lee Road branch on Monday, June 14th at 7:30 pm. Her topic is Works of Mercy: Women Religious, Benevolence, and Healthcare in Cleveland (click to register). I’m really looking forward to hearing her speak and I thought it would be interesting to see the exhibit beforehand.
It is wonderful. It is a combination of a timeline of United States  history and a look at the various areas in which sisters and nuns have had an influence, and they are many. If you go, and I encourage you to do so, you will find out the difference between a sister and a nun, how they arrived in the United States, how they chose their work, the derivation of their habits. There are artifacts from several orders in the form of letters, journal entries, tools, and habits. There is a short movie in the exhibit where several nuns and sisters discuss why they became religious, why they do what they do. The paths they have taken are myriad, but tend to center around education, healthcare (you will find out about the order that was instrumental in founding the Mayo Clinic) and orphan/childcare (ever read about the orphan trains?). In addition, there is a section devoted to the orders in Northeast Ohio and that is what Dr. Cetina will be lecturing about.Â
If you want to read something ahead of time, there are several titles that you could pick up at the library that are featured at the Museum:
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   Sisters: Catholic Nuns and the Making of America by John Fialka
   
Stalking the Divine:Â Contemplating Faith with the Poor Clares by Kristin Ohlson (local author)
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Pioneer Healers: the History of Women Religious in American Health Care. (Dr. Cetina wrote a chapter for this book).
Click on any of the above titles to request the book or on any of the highlighted phrases to visit the web site and get to the Maltz Museum if you can for both the exhibit and some interesting programs they have coming up connected to the exhibit.
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