Blue Rubber Bands

You know, the really thin ones that hold bunches of green onions together. And then there are the wide purple ones that arrive around bunches of broccoli.

Today, contemplating a handful of rubber bands, it occurred to me how much I value those little blue guys. I use them for all sorts of things. I am also fond of the plastic bags that hold potatoes. I use these instead of buying trash bags. I figure they're going to be thrown away anyway, I may as well use them one more time before they go. The incredibly long strings that come off new bags of animal feed get tucked away in a kitchen drawer for all kinds of wonderful projects. I buy my flour in cloth sacks and make the sacks into hankies. I can only find one brand of jam that doesn't contain high fructose corn syrup, and it happens to come in beautiful jars. We fill those with homemade feta to give away.

Looking at the rubber bands this morning, a funny thought popped into my head. I wonder if I will miss the little useful bits when green onions, broccoli, and such things don't come into the kitchen packaged, but are instead gathered from the garden. If the pounds and pounds of potatoes I plant this spring grow well, I will have to find a different solution for my trash bags. We recently bought a grain mill, so as soon as we run out of store-bought flour I will start grinding my own. I imagine we have plenty of hankies for now, though. This summer I look forward to putting up enough jam to last us all year, so I'll have to buy some jars for the cheese gifts.

I don't think I'll mind. It's just funny how the mind works sometimes.

Zo, zee znailz.....

We ate 'em! First we starved them for a couple of days, then we plunked the lot in boiling water for a minute. Once out of the bath they slipped easily out of their shells. We sauteed them with homegrown garlic and butter and then...












Aliana chowed down! Isidore and Elizabeth decided not to partake, but Aliana loved them. She is a big fan of clams and mussels, and we all agreed they taste just like clams. We will be collecting more next week to make a main dish meal with pasta.

Long Days, Crappy Food

Last month I signed up for Path to Freedom's 100-foot diet challenge. We have had a lot of fun dreaming up homegrown meals. We've scoured our cookbooks for egg recipes, stayed up late talking about ideas for dishes, remembering things our relatives made. We've all greatly enjoyed planning our meals.

The problem has been finding the time to make them. The past few weeks the shop has opened its jaws wide and eaten us. Sometimes owning one's own business kinda sucks. I love spending my days working with my partner. I really appreciate being able to bring the kids to work instead of dropping them off at daycare. But I don't like it when everything breaks and people get mad at me. There are days when the idea of punching out at five o'clock and going home sounds delicious.

I know there are people who work long hours and fit cooking from scratch into their busy schedules. I would like to be one of them. Some days I wake up early and use the pressure cooker to whip up some variation of rice and beans and vegetables. It makes everyone's day better to eat a real meal instead of something that came out of a box. It's the logistics of it that kill me, though. I have to get up early enough to have enough time to cook it, then I have to have clean tupperware to use for transport. At the shop we have to have clean dishes and silverware. Then after the food is eaten dishes have to be done at the shop and the tupperware have to make it back home for the next day's meal. It all theoretically works fine, but the reality is that usually one of the pieces of the chain end up missing. I didn't wash the tupperware, or get up early enough, or maybe when we get to the shop we don't have clean dishes at lunchtime. The result is way too much expensive, salty processed food for our meals at the shop.

So, we have lots of homegrown menus up our sleeves for the weeks to come.

I am sure that things at the shop will get easier, and we will find more time to cook wholesome meals again. When Patrick and I met and were courting, as he likes to say, we cooked together all the time. It was a wonderful way to get to know each other. We long for the kind of days that allow time to chat as one of us chops the garlic and the other stirs the sauce. Cooking with the kids is also such wonderful time together. I love to watch little hands holding giant spoons.

So... stay tuned for more 100-foot diet meals. Such plans we have in store!

No picky eaters allowed!

My family is amazing. The bunch of us are all weirdos, but we either don't care or don't know, depending upon the individual in question. That's really why we're homeschooling, to avoid the embarassment of sending them out into public. Just kidding. I think.

This morning Isidore was complaining because we were having fried eggs and sliced oranges for breakfast again. Ever practical (see my post from March 26) Aliana pointed out that we have lots of homegrown eggs right now, so we should enjoy them. She explained that eggs are healthy protein filled food, and that oranges help our bodies fight colds and lower cholesterol. I simply stated, for the seven hundred twenty fifth time (so maybe I'm exagerating) that I will not tolerate picky eaters in my family.

Did either of these attempts sway dear Isidore? Nope. Breakfast was eaten under threat of force.

After he managed to finish his meal without dying of boredom from eating eggs and oranges for the third time this week he scampered outside with his sisters to collect snails from the garden for tomorrow's dinner.

Yes, the child who fights over consuming two of the most common items on an american grocery list thinks it's a great idea to eat a creature not many people on this continent would even consider food.

The kids are all very involved in what we eat. They eagerly peruse the seeds catalogues just as I do. They help to plan the garden, plant the seeds and as it grows they water, weed and harvest. Some of my very favorite memories of my time with my children are in the garden. When I signed us up for the 100 foot diet challenge they cheered me on. We have been brainstorming, and realized that in the spring the snail population explodes. In years past we fed buckets of them to the chickens. This year we're going to cook them with a little garlic and butter and eat them ourselves.

Yum.

Another Omelet!?

As I considered my options for our second 100-foot meal, I was at first sort of annoyed that my ingredient list this week isn't any different than it was last week. "What am I going to write about if we just eat the same thing again? How boring. 'Look, here's another omelet. End of post'."

It occured to me only when I was photographing the meal that eating eggs again is anything but boring. It is in fact miraculous. I happen to think that eggs may well be the most beautiful thing found in mother nature. I never tire of finding a warm egg nestled in the hay in the barn. It really actually makes me feel excited and special every single time I find one. I never just rush it in the house and stick it in the egg carton in the refrigerator. No, every time I come across a newly laid egg I cradle it in my palm and marvel at how perfectly designed such a thing is, from a human or a chicken perspective.

For a hen, an egg is a way to raise a whole lot of babies at once and therefore insure that some of them will survive to make more chickens. It amazes me that an egg can wait weeks in the cold before a hen decides she has laid enough to spend a few weeks sitting on the nest. Her warmth helps the previously dormant creature inside that shell quickly grow into a perfect little chick, ready to walk and peep and eat the day it hatches.

For those of us with opposable thumbs and slightly larger brains, the egg is no less awesome. Here is a portable food storage device like no other. Eggs keep much longer than most of us think, and really don't need to be stored in as cold a place as our refrigerator. We keep them there out of habit, but a farm-fresh egg will keep in a cool place like a cellar for weeks and weeks. And for those of us who eat with the seasons, the egg is a celebration of spring. Though supermarket eggs are available 365 days a year, our hens only recently began laying again after taking a break during the short, dark days of winter. The first few eggs felt like tiny miracles! We carefully considered how to prepare them. As the days lengthened the girls gave us more eggs each day. Now we find between 6 and 8 every morning.

This morning I sauteed some of the volunteer arugula that just grows in the yard and tucked it inside the omelet, and sprinkled chives on top. I took some pictures, then Aliana and Ellie and I sat down to eat. It was delicious. It tasted just right. It sounds kind of trite, but it tasted like spring, like what we ought to be eating on a morning in march. The girls and I felt really fortunate to be eating such tasty food from our own homestead. It's not a glamorous life, but it is satisfying and fun.

Victory Garden

Planting and caring for the garden this year is a little tricky. We will be living on the mountain by the end of the summer, perhaps even sooner, so I am planting things up there this spring. I’ve run into a bit of trouble because I'm not up there every day to plant and because watering is not as easy as turning on the hose anymore. Up there I have to find a way to get the water from the spring that's halfway down the hill to the thirsty plants at the top.


Right now the way I accomplish this is to use a plastic barrel to haul the water up in the back of the truck and park slightly higher than the garden. I connect a hose to the barrel. What I hope to be doing by next year is using the strength of my darling mule, Dina, instead of the truck. She is eager to work; I just need to find more time to train her to drive. That, too, will be easier when we are living there full time.


The opportunity for the kids to grow up smack dab in the middle of nowhere sets my soul at ease in a way I thought would never happen, but the chance to feed my family also thrills me. In a few years we will probably be close to self-sufficient. I’ve been working on this goal all the years we’ve been in the little red house, but now I have acres to work with! Each year we set aside some money to spend on edible plants and necessary tools. Last year we added 12 fruit trees to the yard. I have moved them to the mountain, and most of them seem to be in good shape. This year I ordered lots and lots of seeds so that I can have enough for this year and the next in case my seed-saving attempts don’t go well. I am saving the extra in tightly sealed jars in the refrigerator. In each jar I have a silica packet to keep them dry. I’ll put them to the fridge at the shop after we move up to the land of no electricity.


Up on the mountain I am planting lots of different edible perennials. I’ve already put in hazelnuts, huckleberries, strawberries, rhubarb, and wintergreen. On the way are seaberry, honeyberry, fig, red and golden raspberries, elderberry, kiwi, wolfberry, and a green tea plant.
Most of what I ordered this year came from Territorial Seed Company in Oregon. They come highly recommended for their care with seed trials and seed storage. I am using two books written by the former owner of the company, Steve Solomon. One is called Growing Vegetables West of the Cascades, the other is Gardening When it Counts: Growing Food in Hard Times. I like the first book because the climate he writes about is like mine, not like most gardening books whose authors assume you actually have a summer and a winter. I just have a wet season and a dry season. The latter title has very good advice about growing vegetables with little or no irrigation.

First 100 foot diet meal

We didn't have our customary special Friday night meal last night, so our first 100% homegrown meal was breakfast. An omelet was the natural choice.

Our ingredients were eggs from our faithful hens, homemade feta cheese, and some chives snipped from the garden. We also made a nice pot of homegrown chamomile tea. It was simple and wonderful. We had a bright, sunny morning meal before we all headed off to work.

Under the teapot there you can see the table runner that my genius sister (we dropped the in-law part awhile ago) Francine made. She is the crazy quilting queen. She creates one-of-a-kind pieces for sale, if you are interested.

100 Foot Diet Challenge

I have decided to participate in an online challenge proposed by the gang at Path to Freedom. If you don't know who they are you should. They give me hope even on days when I can't bring myself to listen to the news because it's all so dismal. Click the link on the top left of this page to go to their site.



The challenge is called the 100 Foot Diet Challenge. Check it out here:



http://urbanhomestead.org/journal/2008/01/06/100-foot-diet-challenge-launch/



The idea is to grow a portion of our own food because having cheap food filling our grocery store shelves all the time depends on an infrastructure that isn't going to remain stable over the coming years. For an explanation of why I say that, see one of the other links at the top left of the page, Casaubon's Book. She writes far more eloquently than I do, and presents news and information about climate change, peak oil and the economy, as well as practical ways to deal with the changes ahead of us.


:: Guidelines ::


A meal must be comprised of food grown on your property or garden plot (literally or figuratively within - 100 feet - of your front or back door). If not from BACKYARD, then Locally produced (PTF’s addition)If not LOCALLY PRODUCED, then Organic.If not ORGANIC, then Family farm.If not FAMILY FARM, then Local business.If not a LOCAL BUSINESS, then Fair Trade.

I hope we will be eating at least one meal per week created from foods grown in our garden or barnyard. We could actually probably manage more than one, even this time of year. We have created a tradition in our family of sharing a special meal each Friday night. I am planning to try to make our Friday meals out of home-grown ingredients.

So... it's March, and in the garden right now we have some collards that are going to go to seed pretty soon, a few straggly leeks, some volunteer greens and assorted herbs. The chickens are laying six or seven eggs every day and our dear goat Joanna is blessing us with about a half a gallon of milk every day. That milk can be magically turned into yogurt, mozzarella or ricotta. In the freezer we have several packages of frozen home-raised goat and chicken. In the pantry we have home-raised chicken broth and canned chicken.

What wealth! Our family has been reading the Little House books aloud for more than a year now. We are making our way through the last one now. Have you read The Long Winter? It causes one to appreciate food in a new light. It should be required reading for picky eaters.

I'll tell you what I come up with for tomorrow's dinner!