Summer kitchen update

Saturday, August 31, 2013

22:42

By Michael

            I just wanted to update our blog with some pictures from the summer kitchen. Today we got the place ready for our friend Rick, who will be visiting us soon. Yulia and I are going to the city tomorrow, and we will be picking Rick up at the train station. We will bring him back here. He will be our first guest to spend the night. I sure hope we did a good job renovating the space. Since the last post about the summer kitchen, we covered the metal plates on the pichka with bricks and clay. When we fired the oven we noticed that smoke was coming through the slits in the plates. It’s an old pichka, so they don’t fit like they used to I guess. We also did not like the floor. It was too beat up and dirty to make for a comfortable living space, so we covered it with some carpet that we (luckily) had lying around. It softened up the space quite a bit. It sure feels cozy in there now!

Yulia hung some herbs off the unused gas pipe and put some nasturtiums she grew from seed on the table. She added firewood to the pichka, as well.

The evening light makes for a cool atmosphere in this picture. Pan Oleh was a sculptor. He sculpted that head on the table. It’s a copy of a Roman sculpture. We don’t know who he is, but we call him Nestor.

Well cleaning

Saturday, August 31, 2013

21:57

By Michael

            We had someone stop by yesterday to clean our well. Overall it was a good experience, and we got to learn a few things about wells from the man who came to clean it.

            First of all, Andryi—the man who cleaned our well—was a real pleasure to have come by our house. Yulia told me that she could tell he was a normal guy when she first spoke with him. He was a good communicator and very respectful. We were not sure what kind of people cleaned wells. We definitely did not want the cursing smoker type to come onto our property. Andryi is a good man though. We would definitely recommend him to anyone else who needs a well cleaned. We learned from talking to him that he used to work in Germany. Yulia said she could tell he was well educated and well traveled. I think it shows a lot that he is back in Ukraine after working for several years in Germany—Europe’s USA (that is, the country with the biggest economy). We need people like him to stay in Ukraine and make a difference here, not somewhere else. As Yulia and I like to say, Ukraine needs all the good people it can get.

            The process of cleaning the well is pretty simple and similar to what I wrote about in a previous post. First, the water is pumped out of the well. Then the sediment at the bottom is scooped out.

The sludge from the bottom of our well

It is preferable to scoop down to pure clay if possible. In the above picture, if you can tell, the unwanted sludge is darker and towards the top of the photograph while the gray clay is towards the bottom. If the sides of the well need any fixes (like patching up cracks), they put on a special suit and hard hat and climb down the tube to fix it. While they are down there, they paint the whole well with lime, which disinfects the walls and prevents bugs from crawling down into the water.

Our well painted with lime (you can see the white streaks if you look closely)

            According to Andryi we need to take care of a few things in the future to keep our well clean. The first problem is that the well itself is sitting in a low spot compared to the ground all around it. When Pan Oleh was digging out the small pond, he used the soil from the pond to make raised garden beds all over the property. They look beautiful, but they are not good to have around the well.

Our messy well right after being cleaned—as you can see it sits in a depression

When the soil is higher around a well, water drains toward that depression. If water runs down the sides of the concrete cylinder, it is likely to form channels, which only accelerate the speed with which water drains. That is, if water flows down these channels too quickly without being filtered through several meters of soil, the water that gets into the well at the bottom will be dirty. Water can also enter through and wear away the seams between the concrete cylinders. A well, after all, is made up of concrete cylinders about one meter long. They are stacked one on top of the other (I wish I had a picture to help better explain this image, but all of that is underground). A concrete pad around a well is not preferable either. Air cavities inevitably form under that pad from moles and rain water. This also encourages water to drain down the sides of the concrete cylinder with the aforementioned problems that go along with it. Instead, it is preferable for a well to sit at a high point relative to the ground around it. Clay should be packed on the surface around the well, again sloping away from the well. There shouldn’t be any trees for at least four meters around it. The one good thing about our well is that we have gray clay at the bottom. That is the best possible soil to have down there. It means that the water gets filtered though that clay, making it extra clean.

            Andryi shared a couple of other interesting facts about wells with us. After draining through two meters of soil, dirty water becomes potable again. Also, it takes water two weeks to drain ten meters. Yulia and I could tell that Andryi was passionate about his job. He even said that he feels like a professor of ground water. It was nice to be around a fellow intellectual—and one with such a hands on kind of job! It was like talking with a kindred spirit.

There’s no food in the kitchen…but we’re not out of food

Monday, August 26, 2013

21:12      

By Michael

            Yulia saw me looking for food around the kitchen the other day.

            “We’re getting low on food,” I told her. “We should probably go to the city soon and stock up.” Most of the food we buy comes from the city. We get fresh stuff like nectarines and plums that last us a few days and dried goods like buckwheat and raisins which lasts much longer than that. At this point, I noticed, we were down to maybe two weeks’ worth of lentils, buckwheat, barley, and millet. We were down to our last box of dates. And we luckily have a few lemons left. They’re a life saver. They will last a couple of weeks. It’s nice to have fresh food along with the dry stuff.

            “There’s no need to go to the city,” Yulia responded, knowing what I was going to say already. “We have plenty still. Take a look in the garden. Go eat some pears. We have more than enough right now.”

            As she usually is, Yulia was absolutely right. The kitchen is not an indicator of how much food we have. It is just my habit to walk into the kitchen and expect food. Our 25 tomato plants are spitting out tomatoes everyday now. Our two summer squashes are getting huge at this point in the season.

The summer squash (they’re about twice as big now)

 They’ve been consistently feeding us since we moved in at the beginning of July. No one can ever go hungry if they have a squash plant around. Our lettuce is slowly maturing, and we have apples pretty much all over the property—many different varieties. But the best part is that the pears on our big pear tree are beginning to ripen. They are very sweet and tasty. And unlike the apples, they have virtually no bug damage. It seems like every apple I find has already been feasted upon by a bug or worm. It doesn’t mean the whole apple is bad—just a tiny section. When slicing apples for drying it’s pretty easy to get around the bug damage.

Of course, if we had no food in the house and no food in the garden, we could always go to the local store down the street. It’s just not a very big one. And it’s more of a general merchandise store. Right now watermelons and tomatoes are the only fresh things they sell there. The price for watermelons isn’t bad. The same as in the city. We even saw a store in L’viv that was selling them for more than at our village. The rest of the food consists of candy mostly, though they do have things like oatmeal and raisins that we might buy from them in the future. We also get vinegar there, but we use that for cleaning, not eating.

It’s probably a good time right now to talk a little more about how Yulia and I do eat. Food is very important to us. Plus, we eat a non-conventional diet. That usually gets a reaction out of people in one way or another, so I will try to explain how we eat and why we have chosen to eat the way we do.

We are very fond of the term T Colin Campbell uses to describe a diet he follows. He calls it a whole foods, plant based diet. And that is the kind of diet that most accurately describes how Yulia and I eat. Most of everything we eat comes from plants and is not processed. We also never eat meat. I could get into the reasons why, but that doesn’t matter right now. Plus it tends to offend people, and I don’t want to do that. We don’t want to come off as telling others what to eat just as much as we don’t want other people telling us what to eat. Yulia and I used to eat meat, and we understand the culture around eating that way. We were pretty adventurous meat eaters ourselves. We ate things many meat eaters might consider too carnal to eat. I had a penchant for liverwurst while Yulia used to be fond of chicken stomachs. But we have also been vegetarians for years now. We understand both worlds and how each diet affects us. We’ve found that eating the way we do works for us, and we think that is what everybody needs to do. That is, we think everybody should have the right to discover and decide for themselves how they want to eat.

Right now I’d like to focus on processed foods because they are a kind of food we try to avoid for health reasons, and we find that they are easier to avoid in Ukraine. This topic also fits nicely with some of the themes of our blog (i.e. living at our new home, cross cultural comparison). When Yulia and I arrived in Ukraine two years ago we were vegetarians. But we were used to being American vegetarians. That conditioned us to going to the store for food. Even if we went to the health food store, we were still heavily reliant on processed foods—a kind of food we do not think is all that healthy. We liked eating all sorts of vegan ice creams and snack crackers with their “natural flavors” and preservatives. Why should any food we eat have a flavor enhancer anyway? If the main ingredients don’t taste all that good (which is what a flavor enhancer suggests), I would rather find something else to eat.

When we came to Ukraine, we had to go without all the health food stores and their processed food treats. We ate Ukrainian processed foods like halva (blended sunflower seeds with sugar—kind of like peanut butter), but found that most brands put flavor enhancers in their product anyway. Also, white sugar is a processed food, and all halva has sugar in it. We instead turned to places like the bazaar and the grandparents’ garden for food, which forced us to eat whole foods. We retaught ourselves how to cook and prepare foods from scratch with some pretty good results. We’ve become aware of certain things, like how acidity helps balance salt. Plus, eating whole foods is much cheaper (at least in Ukraine).

It’s much easier to go to the bazaar and get tomatoes one day, cucumbers another, and grapes on the third than to stock up on all of them once a week at the farmers market. We love to eat fresh foods. They make up the majority of our diet. It is hard to go a day without eating a raw fruit or vegetable (canned peaches and beets don’t cut it for us). If we eat too many cooked foods we begin to feel bloated and overheated. I’m proud to say that we jones for raw fruits and vegetables. It’s not the worst addiction in the world!

Since moving to Ukraine we have become used to eating this way. Even while traveling here it is so much easier to find fresh and local foods. It seems like every train station has a market right next to it. When we were traveling through California’s Central Valley this winter, we had a hard time finding any fresh food. When we did see a farm stand it was too late. We missed the exit and we were half a mile down I-5 already. I kept telling Yulia not to worry. That this is the Central Valley—the fresh food producer for all of America. We were bound to come across another place selling fresh, local food to travelers like us. I was wrong. The Central Valley doesn’t feed the Central Valley. The Central Valley feeds America. The system is made to feed people sitting at restaurants and shopping at grocery stores in Manhattan and Miami, not people passing through the farmland itself. If we wanted fresh food we had to follow the rules and get off the highway, drive down a four lane feeder road to the nearest strip mall, park in a gigantic parking lot, and purchase our oranges at the Target store.

Regardless of what the agricultural system is made to do in America, we eat the way we do and that is that. We’ve bought this land so that way can continue eating that way. This morning we had a delicious breakfast of fresh pears from our tree.

Breakfast pears

But we don’t eat only plain whole foods either. We mix them up all the time to make standard (and non-standard) culinary creations. I’ve become fond of making up my own barbeque sauce. I got the idea to make it when we were in the city a few weeks ago, and I saw a McDonald’s advertisement saying, “Сезон Американський BBQ [Season of the American Barbeque].” The advertisement stood out to me because it showed a picture of the desert, and barbeque sauce is not from the desert. It is from Kansas City. There is a Texas style of barbeque, but it uses a rub. The vinegar and ketchup based marinades come from the American southeast. But that is beside the point. The advertisement got me thinking of barbeque sauce, which made me hungry, so I made my own. To make my barbeque sauce, I mix together honey, oil, salt, pepper, molasses, paprika, cinnamon, nutmeg, and lemon juice. I recently ran out of molasses, so I have been substituting carob powder. It’s actually an OK substitute. Since we have way too many summer squash, I needed a way to give the bland vegetables some flavor, so that I could eat them faster. Adding this barbeque sauce to cubed steamed squash helps. I was skeptical that squash alone would mix well with barbeque sauce, but it has grown on me. I can eat it pretty much every day.

One good part about abstaining from processed foods is that processed foods become sort of a treat at restaurants. The vegan mayonnaise I had on my burger in Warsaw is definitely a processed food. Probably not much healthier than regular mayo. Maybe worse. It’s more of a curiosity, I guess. I was very excited, for example, to go to the Chicago Diner when we had just arrived back in the States from Ukraine last fall. They have a few interesting fake meat dishes there. I had the vegan buffalo ranch chicken salad and a vegan Reuben sandwich.

Me and my sandwich

They were very tasty, but I’m glad I don’t have the opportunity to eat them every day. And I’m grateful for the many raw restaurants that seem to be becoming more and more popular. If a raw foods chef knows what she is doing she can make a dish that outdoes any junk vegan food restaurant. The Green Boheme in Sacramento is one of these restaurants. Café Gratitude in Berkeley is another.

Me at Café Gratitude

But the best thing is to have a home garden. It’s nearly free and hyperlocal. And it’s more convenient than any store or restaurant. When I saw that we were low on food in our kitchen yesterday, at Yulia’s suggestion I went outside and gathered some dandelion and nettles. I put them in a pot with some water, millet, and flax seeds and made some soup. We don’t need food in our kitchen to feed ourselves!

Ukrainian American

Sunday, August 25, 2013

05:18        

By Michael

            Yesterday was Ukrainian independence day. I wish I could report that Yulia and I did something special, but, in truth, we did not. We did work though. I continued on what may very well be western Ukraine’s heaviest door (more on that in a later post) while Yulia worked on a path she is making out of bricks. She lays down two bricks at a time, making a sort of stepping stone. Eventually we plan to have a lot of our property made up of garden paths. We want the garden to not only be a place of work, but to serve as a living space as well, outfitted with outdoor rooms and corridors. Yulia’s stepping stones are the beginning of what will be an outdoor corridor. We plan to use plants—like flowers and herbs—to help define those corridors. Here is an example of what we would like one of our paths to look like:

A lavender path

We have a few outdoor rooms already. The well under the arbor is one. The patio under grapevines is another. And we already have a sleeping area—the hammock under the linden trees.

            But I think I should use the 22^nd anniversary of Ukrainian independence to talk a little about us and our blog being Ukrainian (and, conversely, being American). Namely, I want to discuss the language of our blog and our hope for both a Ukrainian and American audience (among other countries, of course).

It’s about time I say something about the language of our blog. We are obviously writing in English right now. That’s for a couple of reasons. Our computer, for one, is only outfitted with keys using letters from the English alphabet. We could, if we wanted to I guess, write our blog in Ukrainian using Latin letters. There is an established system for translating letters. Ale ya ne dumayu shcho to by lekhko bulo chytaty (But I don’t think that that would be easy to read). Google Translate does have an option that would phonetically translate Latin letters to Cyrillic ones. I guess if we really wanted to we could try translating blog entries like that. It’s an idea we’ll keep open for the future. It would take us much longer to do. Writing in Ukrainian using Latin letters is awkward, though I’m sure with time we would become more proficient. If we were to get access to a Ukrainian keyboard, both Yulia and I would have to learn where every letter on it is. Watching either one of us type in Ukrainian is painful. We are agonizingly slow at it. Again, maybe with time that will become a possibility.

I am also much more comfortable writing in English. I am used to expressing complicated ideas using the English language (over, say, painting or interpretive dance). I have taught college composition and have had to write many essays in the English language (I was an English major, after all). Over the years I think I’ve become OK at writing. Yulia is also really good at writing in English. She writes on the same level as me, with the same (if not greater) speed.

That being said, we plan to get something up on our blog in the Ukrainian language very soon. We are still not sure what form it will take. We could translate each entry, but because of the aforementioned problems due to typing, we’d need some time to teach ourselves the Ukrainian keyboard. I realize we could just plug our blog entries into Google Translate, but we have found that the translation of whole sentences using a machine is not very accurate. Translation involves interpretation and that requires the human touch. We could also split the blog into two sections—Ukrainian and English. The Ukrainian section would be much smaller because of the difficulty we have typing in Ukrainian, but at least it would be there.

We want a Ukrainian section (even if it’s short) because we want a Ukrainian audience. Even if they cannot read every blog entry of ours, our Ukrainian readers could at least find out something about us. We understand that our future neighbors will probably be Ukrainians, and we want to get the word out to them that we are here and searching for neighbors now that we are done with the search for our house. The short Ukrainian section could be for these potential neighbors. It would introduce me and Yulia, explain what we are doing here, and give our email contact.

Simultaneously, we want an English section because we want to share our joy in living at our new home with friends and family, and most of them happen to speak English. Like many other travelling bloggers, we want to share our thoughts and show where we are and what we are doing. Instead of sending out dozens of mass emails, the blog form allows us to do so in a convenient way. Ukraine is very different from America (and the other countries where our readers may be from), and we want to tell people what it is like and how it is different. Reading our blog could take on the form of armchair travelling, something me and Yulia like to do at times. I’ve always loved looking at maps and wondering about all the different places there are to see in the world. One of my favorite writers is Robert Kaplan, a journalist who has traveled the world writing about different cultures. He evokes a vivid image about the “edge of Europe” at the beginning of his newest book, The Revenge of Geography. In it his considers the Caspian Sea as the cultural border between Europe and Asia. On the western bank of the Caspian, he states, one sees the last remnants of Roman inspired architecture end. After crossing the sea and arriving in Turkmenistan, one is abruptly in cultural Asia. This description about the end of a continent is so much better than simply saying that Europe ends at the Ural Mountains, an almost arbitrary boundary. We want to evoke equally vivid images about Ukraine and get past the tired news media focus on business and politics. Ukraine is more than its politicians and the occasional athletes that attract media attention. Let us show you.