This is a coyote:

And this is a Shiba Inu:

In Kentucky, a stray dog was picked up by a police officer and taken to the humane society. The shelter told the police that it was a coyote and they couldn’t take it in. Despite some hesitations about their verdict, the police officers weren’t the animal pros here, so they called a wildlife expert for advice, who told them coyotes needed to be either put back in the wild or killed. So, they took the canine behind a home improvement store and let her go.

Problem is, this wasn’t a coyote. The dog they released was an 11-year-old, AKC- registered Shiba Inu, who is now out in the wild (presumably in an area that has real coyotes), fending for herself.

Maybe I could see someone thinking a Shiba Inu is a fox, especially if they don’t see very many dogs. Or thinking a husky or malamute is a wolf. But a shelter worker thinking this dog is a coyote gives me just one more reason never to let Juno out of my sight. I guess the only good thing is that they didn’t opt for putting down the “coyote,” so maybe she’ll still make it home safely.

Clearly, I’ve been remiss in my CSA blogging. And, after learning that some people are using salad spinners to save lives, my weekly lettuce adventures kind of, well, wilted in comparison.

But for those of you who aren’t looking to create centrifuges out of kitchen gadgets and just want to know how a person wrangles a weekly farm share when her cooking prowess really needs no more than an easy-bake oven, or for my friends who wonder how I manage to survive without the pizza delivery guy on speed dial (he’s not … I swear!), here’s an update from weeks four and five.

Week Four’s Share:  carrots, zucchini, pac choi, broccoli, purslane, arugula, basil, lettuce, parsley, rainbow chard, scallions and,  yes, kale.

So, the problem with having limited abilities in the kitchen is that you’re, well, limited. I had a lot of the same this week – more concoctions involving kale, scallions, olive oil and rice. It’s good, it’s easy, but it’s not the most exciting dish by the eighth time in four weeks. However, this week did mark the introduction of my farm share to my George Foreman grill. I made sandwiches of grilled zucchini with a little parmesan that were excellent. I’m a big fan of grilled zucchini … fingers crossed that there’s more to come.

Interesting newsletter tidbit of the week: “Last week, we sent 80 beautiful leaves of Rainbow Chard to a former CSA member’s wedding … to be used in the table bouquets! There was a chard theme throughout the wedding, even with small drawings of chard leaves gracing the invitations.” That’s some serious chard love. (I was hoping for a chard bouquet photo for this post, but when you put “chard bouquet” into the creative commons search, it basically tells you that combining those words is crazy talk.)

Week Five’s Box o’ Goodness: celery, eggplant, potatoes (yay!), carrots, beets, cabbage, pac choi, lettuce, chard, scallions and more kale.

First, the newsletter, because it featured … me. In case you missed it, I wrote about the incredible animal welfare history of Frog Holler Organic Farm over at Change.org, which they shared with the handful of people who read the newsletter as closely as I do (thanks!).

This week, our third CSA-buddy was back from Africa (really), which took a bit of the kale/chard/scallion pressure off. As we divvied up our share in the middle of a parking lot, some sacrifices had to be made. There’s just  no good way to third a head of cabbage or an eggplant on the hood of a car. I let those go. But somehow I ended up with all the beets. The roasted beets had worked out okay the other week, but the problem with beets is that you need something to go with them. You can’t just cook them all up, throw them on rice and call it a meal. Last time I had leftovers I could add them to … this time, I was stuck.

At the end of another week of veggies stir-fried with rice or sauteed with pasta, with a drawer full of beets, I’ve come to the realization that I might need to resort to recipes. It will probably involve grocery shopping, too. And, thus the CSA adventure becomes adventurous once more. I’m not sure I can handle it. So, if anyone knows what to do with beets in 5 ingredients or less, let me know.

Photo credit: eflon

Hoarding, particularly of animals, fascinates me. I’ve addressed the issue a few times over at Change.org: on relapsed hoarders, rescuers-turned-hoarders,  How to Avoid Being a Compulsive Hoarder, The Truth About the “Crazy Cat Lady” and, most recently, on Animal Planet’s Confessions: Animal Hoarding.

Ever since witnessing my first hoarding cases while working at the local humane society, I’ve tried to understand how something like this happens: What makes someone fly past the tipping point of having multiple animals to having an unlivable situation? It’s one thing not to notice the dustbunny in the corner or the recycling that’s a few days past needing to go outside, but piles of feces and dead animals laying around the house? I remember one case in particular where there were so many dirty dishes in the sink and so much garbage piled around the kitchen that the homeowners had rigged up a hose from the sink, run it through the house and tied it off in various spots where they’d want access to water. At what point did that contraption make more sense than doing the dishes, or even just throwing the dishes out?

That desire to fathom the unfathomable is what had me looking forward to the new Animal Planet Confessions series that premiered on Wednesday.

Did the show meet my expectations? For the most part, yes.

One thing that I admire about these intervention-type shows is that they introduce you to the people as, well, people. They’re no longer reduced to headlines and statistics, but they’re human beings with feelings and families and very, very real problems. In the world of animal hoarding, that’s huge. Typically, all you know about an animal hoarder is that it’s someone who caused the suffering – and often death – of dozens or hundreds of innocent animals, who lives in squalor and in an incredible state of denial. All those things are still true when you watch the show, but as with any life, there are layers. Don’t get me wrong: nothing can make up for what these animals endure. But whether you’re looking for a sliver of compassion for the humans involved or you just want to stop it from ever happening to another animal, you need to get into those layers, as uncomfortable as they may be.

I know many people watch these hoarding shows from a voyeuristic standpoint. But for many of them, they’ve experienced a serious reality check by the end of the show. A New York Magazine article said, “The concept, from a distance is kind of amusing: Animal Planet jumped on the hoarding trend and tailored it to their specific, animal-loving audience … But what we saw was anything but funny.”

So, this first show followed Don and Bonnie. The juxtaposition of these two cases was really interesting because they each combined stereotypes with the unexpected. Don had what you may think of as your typical hoarder’s house – he had a lot of animals (30 cats) who had ruined everything from clothes to the walls. However, he didn’t have the “I love my animals more than anything else in the world” mentality that prevents a lot hoarders from changing their ways. His wife was his world. In this case, it was more like he got in over his head with unspayed and unneutered animals, and didn’t know how to turn back. He wasn’t scared for the animals’ future, but for his own – would he get arrested if he tried to get help?

Bonnie, on the other hand, had the textbook mentality (well, if a textbook existed…). She made several comments about how she’d die without her animals, how they were more important to her than any human in the world. The humane society had raided her house before, taking 100 animals and she had started acquiring again (at the end of the show, even after she was in therapy, she added another dog to her pack). Her house was in the state it was in because she refused to let her dogs outside for fear that they would get hurt or attract the attention of authorities who would take them away. The part that some people may find surprising? Bonnie only had eight small dogs at this point. (Okay, that may seem like a lot to some of you single-pet households, but for those involved in rescue, that’s not necessarily an absurd number.) It was her all-consuming paranoia and compulsion when it came to her dogs, and her willingness to ignore her house being used as a toilet, at the expense of everyone’s health, that raised the red flags that this was not your typical multiple-pet household. I think she’s going to have a much harder time than Don in overcoming her hoarding in the long run.

Each of the six episodes will highlight people who hoard different combinations of animals for different reasons. Keep watching.

If you, like me, are really interested in wrapping your head around the hoarder mentality, I highly recommend the book Stuff: Compulsive Hoarding and the Meaning of Things by Randy O. Frost and Gail Steketee. The book combines case studies with commentary from these therapists to provide a truly unique insight. Among other revelations, the book points out that we all have attachments to objects that don’t make any logical sense; it’s when the objects (or the desire to rescue animals) takes over one’s life that hoarding becomes an issue. (In addition to Stuff, the Tufts University Hoarding of Animals Research Consortium and Animal Planet’s website for the show are also excellent resources to learn more about animal hoarding.)

There are still a lot of unanswered – and perhaps unanswerable – questions, but at least these shows are bringing the issue to light. It’s estimated that a quarter-million animals are victims of hoarding each year; that’s a number we can’t just turn our  backs on.

1) You don’t have to do everything together. A little separation is a good thing. Not every human activity is compatible for canines, and vice versa. Do you roll in dead things just because your dog does? (If you answered “yes,” I’m not sure you should read further. We may not have much to talk about.)

2) Looking the part isn’t enough. That’s great that the dog has all the gear — his little suit and helmet that he looks perfectly miserable in — but that doesn’t mean he’s ready to be a diver. Hint: When there’s an activity where you have to bring along your own oxygen supply, it’s not a natural behavior. That fine if you want to make the choice to B.Y.O.O. (bring your own oxygen), but don’t force your dog to do it, too.

3) This isn’t The Little Mermaid. Your dog isn’t singing along with flounders and crabs under the sea. He has no idea what’s going on in that world. He doesn’t understand why he “feels a little discomfort from the pressure.” He can’t even use any of his normal senses to assess what he’s encountering in this strange new environment. Vision has nothing on a dog’s sense of hearing and smell, but with his head is trapped in a bubble, he can’t use any of those senses; he has no idea what’s going around him, what’s safe and what’s not.

4) This really isn’t The Little Mermaid. Remember how to Ariel and her sea creature pals weren’t really very afraid of the prince’s dog in the Disney movie? That’s not real life. (Yeah, I’m the type to break the bad news that life isn’t a Disney movie. Also, there’s no Santa). Any other creatures you encounter on your human-canine scuba excursions will be freaked out. They’re not fooled into thinking that’s a dogfish. How many species need to partake in the panic of your hobby? And, depending on where you take your pup, his flailing dog paddle could even injure animals or their habitats.

5) A dog wetsuit. Really? How miserable does that dog look? Most dogs are humiliated enough in light sweaters and jackets; no dog wants to don a suit that requires a technique somewhere between shaking a pillow into a pillow case and shimmying into leather pants. And all that rolling on the ground at the end of the video clip? That’s the sign of a dog trying to shake it off.

The dog is not “comfortable” just because his suit keeps him dry and he’s not “calm” because his helmet is see-through. He’d be a lot more comfy and calm at home on the couch, just call him when it’s lunchtime.

When a 75-year-old Dutch woman was pulled over for not wearing her seat belt, she tossed something out the window. The evidence she unsuccessfully tried to ditch was a package of cocaine. She admitted she had marijuana on her, too. Drug dealing isn’t your usual retirement plan, but this woman said she needed the cash to feed her cats.

According to Radio Netherlands Worldwide, the cops let her off with a warning when she promised to find a more legal means of meeting her pet food tab. This story raises a lot of questions – How many cats did she have? Did anyone check on her to see if there was a hoarding problem? Anyone call social services? Anyone try to find out who her supplier was? Or were they all too busy being flabbergasted by the drug dealing crazy cat lady to get to the bottom of the situation?

For the record: I’m not calling her a crazy cat lady because she needed a cocaine-sized salary to feed the number of cats she had. I tend to see that a slur against people who have legit – albeit devastating - psychological issues and brushing them off as “crazy” doesn’t get us any closer to resolving the issues and saving animals. And we don’t even know how many cats this woman had – maybe it was just one or two who subsisted on imported sushi-grade fish. No, I’m calling her a crazy cat lady because Grandma dealt drugs to buy cat food.

That’s dedication, but there have got to be better ways. I mean, I’ll go pretty far for my animals, but I keep it legal. My cats and dogs wouldn’t do well if I was locked away in prison.

Photo credit: foxypar4

Okay, how much kale can one person eat?

I have nothing against kale; it’s just not the first thing I grab in the fridge. The CSA newsletter this week was pretty kale-focused, admitting that “there is a slightly unusual presentation of kale in the box” (I assume they’re referring to the big chunk of kale on the stem instead of just getting the leaves) and offering up a blog called 365 Days of Kale. I guess that answers how much kale one person can eat. More power to the blogger, but that’s probably about 300 days of kale more than I can handle.

I had a backlog of last week’s curly kale in the fridge and there was more regular kale this week. With Russian kale on the list for tomorrow’s box o’ veggies, you can probably guess what dinner was tonight. Kale. Okay, not just kale, I threw in the beet greens, garlic scapes, olive oil and pasta. (Ingredient Count: 5)

This week’s share, in addition to kale: cabbage, rainbow chard, scallions, lettuce, romaine, beets, garlic scapes, arugula, radishes.

Find of the Week: Whole Foods has these awesome salad shakers. I don’t know about you, but I love salad with a lot of stuff on it – different veggies, grains, nuts, olives, whatever. I’m into everything-but-the-kitchen-sink-or-meat salads, but obviously, unless I hit up a salad bar, creating one of those concoctions exceeds my internal ingredient limit. That’s why Whole Foods salad shakers rock my world – one cup with half a dozen pre-chopped ingredients, plus dressing. They’re pretty good on their own, and they add a whole new level of excitement to CSA greens and cabbage.

The last two big accomplishments of Week #3:

1) Thanks to a Mom-internet tag-team, I successfully roasted raw beets. But the real accomplishment? I did so without tie-dyeing my clothing or making my kitchen look like a crime scene.

2) There was more bartering of HBO for cooked veggies. What can I say? I put the “share” in CSA-sharing. And there’s a good chance this will be an ongoing deal.  Makes this whole CSA thing a lot more palatable (literally and figuratively).

Photo credit: Darwin Bell

If you love books and you love vampires, and you find that a British accent never hurts, then you’re probably with me in loving Giles, the vampire-fighting librarian on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, played by Anthony Stewart Head. I loved Giles since Day One, but once he started singing in Season 4, it was all over.

After the snippet where he sang The Who’s Behind Blue Eyes, a little quest to find the full song (it doesn’t exist) led to a little cyberstalking of Anthony Head. Never found the song, but I did find a section on his official website labeled “Foster Animals,” with some ridiculously cute pit bull puppy pictures. With his wife, Sarah Fisher (who runs Tilley Farm, a TTouch center) he rescues horses, dogs and other assorted animals.

As if that wasn’t enough to make him my favorite person, Tony (because now we’re on a first name basis, of course) has a whole list of animal welfare charity work that he’s done. The latest addition to his list of good animal deeds is his adoption of a chimpanzee named Naika. Through Care for the Wild International, he sponsored a chimp who was rescued from a circus and now gets to live out her life in Sweetwaters Chimpanzee Sanctuary in Kenya. Tony just keeps getting better.

And now I find out he’s vegetarian, too … Why are all the good soulmates already taken?

p.s. My initial cyberstalking is also what brought me to the joys of Repo! The Genetic Opera, a wonderfully twisted rock opera meets horror meets graphic novel. The unlikely cast not only stars Tony and his amazing voice, but also Sarah Brightman of Phantom of the Opera fame and Ogre from the band Skinny Puppy. I’ve included the trailer for your viewing pleasure:

photo credit: vagueonthehow

The second eleventh hour (for the vegetables, not for me) achievement was my quick fried rice. A little olive oil, chopped up garlic scapes and the rest of the scallions. Add brown rice (the three-minute microwave kind from Trader Joe’s – I’m not waiting all day for rice to cook!), toss in some soy sauce, and voila! Yeah, I came up with this one all by myself. So big! And it was tasty, too. (Ingredient Count: the Big Five)

I started off Week 2 with a little cheating … I mean, bartering. Bartering is all in the CSA spirit, right? Right? My co-sharers were both out of town this past weekend, so I traded my HBO and some veggies for someone else to pick up my share from the farmers market. I also conned her into a little cooking and got an awesome rice and kale and random other stuff dish (but I’m pretty sure it stayed close to my five ingredient limit).

This week’s share included: curly kale, scallions, beets, radishes, garlic scapes, spinach, sweet basil, purslane, strawberries, red bibb lettuce, and parsley.

What the f#*% is purslane, you ask? (At least, that’s what I asked…) Apparently the dish in the photo I’ve included is sauteed purslane. Whoever made that wins, because that’s not what my dinner looks like. According to this week’s CSA newsletter: “Purslane’s leaves are tender and succulent; its flavor has been described as peppery cucumber.”

If they say so. I can’t say I have any strong feelings about purslane so far; it’s just little green leaves to throw in other dishes.

However, I am excited about the fresh basil. Going to whip up some pasta with basil, spinach, tomato and olive oil for dinner tonight (Ingredient Count: 5).

Sorry, no fun fact from the newsletter this week. There was an article on the history of the salad share, and if you’re that interested, you can read it here. But I can smell that basil, so it’s time to sign off and get started on dinner. Maybe I’ll even throw in some purslane. (Nah, too many ingredients!)

It’s been awhile since I’ve had a foster kitten, mostly because of a couple of rules I have to keep the relative sanity around here. Rule #1 is that my animals, the ones I’ve made a lifetime commitment to, always come first. We’ve had a rough couple of years with one animal after another battling cancer. So, no fosters when one of The Pack needs my attention.

I usually don’t have more than one foster at a time, and Wilbur is still here, but after almost ten months, he’s settled in enough for our routine to handle a little disruption. 

That disruption’s name is Raymond. He was the perfect foster opportunity for me right now: a single kitten with your basic upper respiratory infection who needed to get out of the shelter for 3-4 weeks. And Raymond has reminded me how fun it is to foster kittens. So, if you’ve never had the pleasure, here’s what you’re missing:

1. It’s Like Being Grandma. It’s not that being around these tiny critters who have only been in the world for a few weeks makes you feel old and worn out. A foster home is like going to grandma’s house — all the fun, none of the responsiblity. Okay, you have a little responsibility as a foster parent, but since your job is mostly to spoil them if they’re sick, fatten them up if they’re too young, and/or play with them if they’re undersocialized, it’s a pretty good deal.

2. All Play, All the Time. You know those people who are so easily amused that you know they’ll always laugh at your jokes and think whatever you’re doing is the funnest thing ever? Kittens will play with any thing, any time. Since they’re so much smaller than Puppies of Destruction, you don’t have to fear as much for your personal belongings or your extremities. Sure, they may toss something off a shelf but, more often than not, they’re the ones that go tumbling. They’re just that uncoordinated at this age. So, if you’re ever stressed and just need to be with someone who’s ready for brainless entertainment, hang out with the kitten.

3. Who’s the Itty-Bitty Bad Ass? Most baby kittens are fearless. And when they are afraid, they put on this whole routine where they puff up their already-puffy fur and let out these little hisses like you’re supposed to be afraid of the 16 oz. can of whup-ass they’re threatening to open. It’s really pretty cute — I mean scary … yeah,  you’re a real punk, little guy!

4. And They Lived Happily Ever After. Most kittens get adopted pretty quickly once they’re in the shelter. When you foster an older dog, there’s not that same guarantee; they may be in your house for months (not to mention any names) or, if you bring them back to the shelter once they’re healed from whatever injury they have, they may sit for a long time before finding a home. And then you have to worry: what if the new home doesn’t work out? But kittens fly off the shelves (literally and figuratively). Most people adopting a kitten can’t resist the charm (see #2 and #3) and they know what they’re in for, so the love will last. Foster kittens are almost a guaranteed happily ever after … and who couldn’t use that in their lives?

For the first time, I’m splitting a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) share with some friends. It’s a pretty monumental deal for me. It’s not that I don’t support local farmers, or that I have something against sharing, or even that I don’t love veggies (I could live off broccoli!) it’s just that mounds of fresh vegetables in the house require preparation. And I don’t cook.

So, the goal with my share of the CSA share is to put good veggies to good use with as little effort as possible. I’ll even include the ingredient count for everything I try to see how many times I get beyond five ingredients. Believe me, this is no Julie & Julia knock-off. This isn’t going to be a daily blog topic and, besides, we’re talking a kitchen acumen somewhere between the Swedish Chef and Moby, my big-pawed, year-old pit bull who likes to try and help with the dishes. It’s not my mom’s fault.

I know, this is more vegetable rescue than animal rescue, so it’s a little out of the norm for what you see on this blog. But it’s not totally irrelevant. For one thing, these veggies will stay vegetarian. As my friend Lauren (farmer’s market maven who I will no doubt rely on for quick prep tips) would say, nothing with a face will be on this menu. What’s even more interesting is that my friends and I chose Frog Holler, a local farm that’s not only organic, but has a big-time animal welfare tie-in.

… which brings us to this week’s Fun Fact from the Newsletter (paraphrased by me):

Frog Holler was owned for a couple of decades, back in the day, by the Gesell family. Dr. Robert Gesell was the chair of the department of physiology at University of Michigan’s med school, and he rocked his colleagues’ world by publishing a paper calling for the humane treatment of lab animals and an end to vivisection.. His daughter, Christine Stevens, carried the torch and became known as the “Mother of the Animal Protection Movement” for her work on many of our major federal animal welfare laws and founder of the Animal Welfare Institute.

So, yes, there’s a newsletter each week that tells us what we’re getting and, sometimes, what to do with it, plus some other random bits of information. Now, on to the main event.

This week, our share included: red salad bowl lettuce and red romaine or salad mix, red russian kale, spinach, scallions, French breakfast radishes, broccoli (yay!), garlic scapes, rhubarb, and strawberries.

Day One: The newsletter suggested slicing up the French breakfast radishes onto a sandwich, which is a good thing because I would have had no idea what to do with them. I tasted one in the raw and it was nice and crunchy, but on the bitter side. I added it to an English muffin with a bit of cream cheese and it was quite tasty. I will probably get rid of the rest of the radishes tomorrow with the same breakfast. (Ingredient Count: 3)

For lunch, I mixed up the salad-y stuff, chopped up some scallions, drizzled a little olive oil and cheese, and had a big salad. Easy ’nuff, though my big adventure there was digging out my old salad spinner. (Ingredient Count: 4, maybe higher if you counted the salad-y stuff separately, but since it all came to me in a big box and that’s how I grabbed it, I’m counting it as one.)

For dinner … I ordered take-out. I’ve got to pace myself here. But I did slice up some of the strawberries on top of a brownie for dessert, and that was a definite win.

My next meal adventure was dinner on Day Two. I sauteed broccoli and garlic scapes in some olive oil and poured it over pasta with a little Italian seasoning. (Ingredient Count: 5!) If you’ve never seen garlic scapes, they’re kind of fun. Apparently they’re the curly flower stem produced before garlic bulbs mature. They have a scallions-meet-curly-straw look and the flavor is, as you might guess, garlicky.

Oh, and I managed to use both a pot and a pan for this meal without setting off the smoke alarm. But the alarm batteries might be low (seriously).

The rhubarb still taunts me, but I have some ideas from friends on how to conquer it.

My final thought for my first few days in Produce Land: Olive oil is a farm share’s best friend.

photos by: sciondriver and grongar