Creative Homesteading

Walking Away!

2011-08-22T08:50:00.000-07:00

We just got back from a camping trip last night and my house is so messy it is making me feel confused. Like I have no idea where I am sort of confused.

First I decided to paint the trim in my room so I could put curtains back up so my husband can stop making me have lots of conversations about fishbowls. The breeze coming in the windows was really nice. I have to pick the kids up in a few minutes from the first day of their last week of camp. Then I think we'll just stay out for as long as possible. We'll go into the woods where the mess all around is called "natural beauty." Maybe it will give me some perspective on mine.

Good Enough

2011-08-13T05:21:00.000-07:00

Three or so years ago I was in one of those cute shops that sells handmade gifts, vintage things, soaps and cards. You know the kind. There used to be a whole bunch of them. They seemed to be the first rank of stores to go down when the country's money broke. Anyway, I saw there an adorable bench made out of a head and foot board of a full-size bed.

"I am going to make one of those!" I said.

I had a constant lookout for a real wooden bed frame--which is hard to come by--in the trash or on freecycle. I finally found one while out on a walk with my kids. I shooed them out of the stroller and precariously strapped the bed pieces into my double stroller and wheeled it home. Where it sat in my basement for about a year. Then I cut the foot board in half and even cut the pieces of 2x4 I was using for the frame into the appropriate sizes. Those too sat in my basement for another year. I recently did an unholy purge of the basement and nearly threw the bed frame away, but held on.

Then yesterday, I decided to just make the thing. I no longer had my nicely cut pieces , as the wood was used for some other project ages ago, but I had enough scrap wood to pull it together. My bed frame is a twin size, so the seat measures 35"x19"

It took me about 30 minutes to build the thing. 30 minutes when it's been hanging over my head, the wood being shuffled around the basement for three years. I think this happened for two reasons. One is that when I first got the idea, I didn't quite have the skills I do now. And even though it seems painfully simple construction to me now, three years ago I didn't have the experience or confidence. Indeed even my husband's confidence in my skills has improved. Always encouraging, he nevertheless would sit rather gingerly on what ever I had just finished. Last might when he saw the bench on the porch he just sat right down! The other reason for my delay is the problem of thinking it will take too long, or that it has to be perfect. I'm learning the simple art of "Good Enough." I'm learning that "good enough" usually looks pretty great!

It never seems to take as long as I imagine, and defiantly shorter than the three year's procrastination!

I put it together, the girls and I sanded it a bit, primed it and put two coats of exterior purple paint (purchased for another undone project). In between waiting for the paint to dry we gathered scraps of foam and some fabric and made the cushion. My new trick for making cushions is to not machine sewing the cushion cover, but to wrap the fabric around the cushion like a present and hand sew it together. This saves a lot of time and hassle and saves the fabric too. If I were to grow tired of that particular pattern (chosen by the girls) I could just undo the stitches and it would still be a big piece of uncut fabric. The stitching you see above was carefully done by my five-year-old!

So I carried it to the porch where it has become part of my porch mini-remodel. My porch is something of an eyesore and needs a lot of help that would include major construction, so I'm doing what I can.

I think I will paint the word "sixteen" (my house number) in teal and black on the back of the bench...when I have the time.

Eggplant -or- Why Does Baba ghanoush Have To Be So Ugly?

2011-07-31T05:17:00.000-07:00

If you're like most people, you don't really like eggplant. That is unless it's breaded, fried, and covered with sauce and cheese. I hear you. It's weird. It has a strange texture, color, and small when it's raw. I wasn't a super fan of it growing up and didn't pay too much attention to it when I was an adult. When I started getting buckets of it from my farm share, I figured I would try to find another way to eat it other than eggplant Parmesan. By the way I use the recipe from the Joy of Cooking and it is wonderful.

You can bread and fry the eggplant pieces and then freeze them. Then all winter long you can pull out a slice here and there and put them on pizza, make eggplant parm or eat them with ranch dressing like my friend used to do when she was little...or not.

However, if you've ever fried eggplant you know that it soaks up oil so effectively that I'm kind of surprised they didn't use it in the Gulf. I don't really need to have that much breaded and fried stuff in my life so I ran a series of eggplant experiments. First I made this really delicious dip with eggplant and butternut squash. You actually make it in the slow cooker. It is really tasty but it doesn't freeze well. So that was out.

Then I started making Baba ganoush. Seriously, this stuff is all gray and weird looking, but it is really yummy, but I expect that doesn't freeze too well either, so it's not really a preserving methods.

This photo is from One Green Tomato. I use her recipe, and I know what you're thinking, "that doesn't look ugly." Well, she's a really skilled photographer, so don't be fooled, people don't want to eat gray food unless they already know it's delicious.

Then I came across a recipe in the book Preserving the Harvest for roasted eggplant and roasted red peepers layered with basil in an oil and vinegar garlic dressing. The first year I made twelve jars and thought, "What the Hell am I going to do with twelve jars of canned eggplant?" I'll tell you what, eat the ever-living life out of it!! It is so good. Even though it's made with vinegar it doesn't really taste pickled. You can use them on sandwiches, pizza, salads, or chop it up or blend it in the food processor, spread it out in a shallow pie pan cover it with feta cheese and warm it up as a spread for pita chips or bread. This stuff is incredible. I gave a jar to my husband's grandfather for Christmas and he loved it. I planned to make cases of it the following year (last year) but we didn't get a lot of eggplant, I'm not sure I got to make any. This year I'm on it, though.

Another thing I want to try my hand at is caponata. Seeing as though this is a Sicilian dish and I am Sicilian by marriage I figured I ought to. People say it freezes well, and I believe them. It ca also be canned, and everyone seems to love this book for the recipe. I'll let you know how it goes.

Happy Eggplanting!

Can Stilts

2011-07-20T20:01:00.000-07:00

When I was little my mother used to make us toys out of junk. This was before it was the hip thing to do. I loved coffee can stilts the best. She would use the big cans of coffee. These are pretty hard to find these days as large amounts of coffee now come in plastic tubs with a handle. When we ordered huge cans of coconut milk from our coop I was all psyched to make the stilts for my kids. It's taken quite a few months to get through enough coconut milk to make a set for both of them but today was the day!!

My super safety-conscious five-and-a-half-year-old asked me, "Are these safe?
"No," I said, "But when I was a kid fun was really dangerous."

Wild Wednesday

2011-07-20T05:20:00.000-07:00

Plantain!

Do you have this plant in your yard? I bet you do. It's a common weed. The leaves are thick and if they are not mowed down they get pretty big. This plant is a super healer. It can be used of all sorts of things . It's great for wounds, bruises, eczema, and rashes of all kinds. It can be used fresh or dried in a poultice, in tincture form, or in oil. I prefer to use it in oil form as the base for salves.

To make the oil simply grab yourself a mason jar (or similar) and fill it two thirds full with cut up plantain. I use the entire aerial portions of the plant...the leaves, stems and flowers. I cut the pieces pretty small (the more cell surface that gets in contact with the oil the better) and cover it with olive oil. If you can afford it, use organic oil, but otherwise just use the best you can.

I have read a lot of conflicting advice about the best way to steep herbs in oil. Some people heat the herbs and oil in an oven at a very low temperature for a few hours. Some people let it sit in the sun. Some put it in a paper bag and let it warm in the sun that way. I don't like the idea of the sun hitting it directly, nor do I like the idea of turning my oven on in July, so I generally will either put it in a paper bag and set it in the windowsill, or I will just set it out of direct sunlight on my kitchen counter and let it sit for one week, and then strain it out. It should be a great color green.

You can now use this oil for rashes, eczema, bruises, or scrapes. Or you can melt it together with some beeswax and make an oil. I will have a tutorial on this in about two weeks.

A couple other herbs that make great oils to use on their own or as a base for a salve are Yarrow and St. John'sWort.

Chicken Coops

2011-07-18T17:26:00.000-07:00

We built more chicken coops. We've been through quite a few designs and placements.

The first one we built was a chicken tractor. A chicken tractor is a great design that lets you carry or drag your coop around your garden or yard, letting your chickens get at eat, de-bug, and fertilize a variety of different areas on your property. We were starting with 6 chickens and felt this was a good design. Problem was our design was a little heavy...especially after I shingled it with leftover roofing shingles to make it look adorable. It took like four people to move, so it didn't work out so well. I have since taken the shingles off, and we do use it, but primarily in the spring/early summer when we get new chicks. It is just the right size for the little ones.

The second one we built was a more typical stationary shed-like coop. It was going in the back yard which tends to get really wet. So I had the great idea to place it on a platform 4 feet off the ground. Then we made a metal cage that went around it. It was like the chicken Thunderdome. The chickens had the coop, a bit of the platform and the entire underside to roam around in. The platform is 8x8 feet and the coop is 6x4 feet. We had to walk on a plank to get the eggs, couldn't get into the bottom if there was any need and the chickens didn't have quite as much space as we liked. So my (wonderful) husband and some (amazing) friends dismantled the coop (it was built in sections, so this wasn't so bad) took it off the platform and lowered the cage to the ground which then served as the run. This has been working out pretty well, except that the area that they were using as the run, which is 8x8 feet is spent. There seems to be no amount of hay or wood chips that will keep it from smelling. I guess we could dig it all out...but I just don't want to go there. So we built another coop.

This is the best one yet. So easy to make, we finished it in an afternoon--or could have if we didn't have kids. It's built like a mini hoop house.

First we made the frame out of 2x4's it is about 10 feet long by a little less than 4 feet wide. We left the end pieces long so we could use them to carry or drag it around (which is a breeze!)

Then we bent four pieces of re-bar to form the hoops. My husband suggested we bend them like this. I told him I would bond with him some other way. We ended up bending it by putting the end against the curb. We also tried just putting it into the frame and bending the other side in. Both ways worked fine.

We attached the re-bar with two pieces of metal strapping.

Then we attached the wire fencing. This is a bit tricky because you need to take metal wire (with spikes on it) and curve it around the frame. It doesn't want to do what you say and you will most likely get your hair caught a few times and if you get a little frustrated you run the risk of looking like you're in a fight with a role of metal fencing. Which is funny for everyone but you. But once you have the hang of it, you'll be fine. Also, once the first piece is up the others sort of get in line and you have something to attach them too. The important thing here is to remember not to space your four pieces of re-bar farther apart than the width of your fencing. We had four foot wide fencing so we spaced them at just under four feet so there would be some overlap. This makes attaching the fencing a little less ridiculous.

We stapled the fencing to the wooden base and "tied" it with 16 gauge wire to the poles.

We made the ends by bending the fencing over the sides and sort of sewing it with a smaller gauge wire to the re-bar. I had to make something of a patchwork because I was running out of fencing and I wanted to use all my scraps.

The hardest part was the door. I have tried two different styles. One I made with a piece of chicken wire folded in half and then framed at the bottom with two pieces of wood. The wood weighs it down. I then screwed two pieces of wood together over the "wall" part of the front and left some screw heads out about a half inch. I just pull the chicken wire door over the screws to close it. it works pretty well. I did the same basic thing for the other door except I used a different kind of wire that is more sturdy but has larger holes. I recently tired to put in my pullets, but found out they were still too small for it since they could just walk out of the closed door. Lame. I will either have to wait until they are a bit bigger or put a smaller wire over the door. I think this is what I'll probably do so I can also keep small egg-stealing animals out.

For the perch I just took a small tree I had cut down and screwed it into a small piece of wood. The fencing is sandwiched in between. It is a little wobbly and I wasn't sure if the chickens would fuss, but they don't seem to mind.

As for the nesting box. I will be basically building a little nesting box book shelf. It will be attached at the bottom between the two sides of the frame. Access is granted at the back by little "doggy flaps" in the wire. I cut it out and then attached a larger piece with metal wire . This can be lifted up to get the eggs.

Simple...at last!

On a similar note. One of the ladies in the new flock--the only barred rock out of the bunch of reds--was adopted by my oldest daughter. She has been named "Mackie" and was living in the kitchen for a little while. I used an old picnic table that I found in the trash and brought home. It had fallen apart as we were taking it out of the truck. I used a bunch of scrap wood and some nice purple paint to make this chicken a very fancy chicken chalet.

My little one is playing in it before I painted it purple. She's sitting in the nesting box, but hasn't laid any eggs.

Reassessing

2011-06-20T18:26:00.000-07:00

I am in a process of reassessment. I originally intended this space to be a place for tips, recipes, craft ideas and advice on what (not to do) when creating your backyard homestead. But in the spirit of my spirit, I guess, I have added my thoughts and feelings on mothering, life, and all that mushy stuff that comes along with reflection glimpsed in between maddening moments of failed experiments and lovey little kid hugs. I thought that with the start of the spring and summer, with all the projects already begun, failed, going well, and the yard coming together in a way that has yet to be seen, I would jump back in the this-is-how-we-do-it (and this is what you should probably do for yourself) swing of things. But, alas, I've been thinking again. I can't seem to help myself!

Wild Strawberries

And tame ones

I've been reassessing, again. A few incredible things have happened to me over the past few months. They have been both sad and miraculous, and I'm still not sure which was which. Some of these "events" have been quiet eruptions of self and heart, some trips to the past and all that can bring, others have been family events and still others are brought on by the changing of the seasons and all the work and fun that come along. I recently stayed with my brother through the night waiting to bring him to detox in the morning. Witnessing the pain, relief and bravery that accompanies making a huge life-altering decision was so powerful. I felt honored to be able to be the person to share this pivotal moment, and to be able to be support him without negative judgment. In the morning, we got in the car and drove up to the hospital.

The one blackberry bush that survived the aphids, we'll have to wait until next year for jam and juice.

When we were nearly there, I recognized the route. It slowly became clear to me that we were on the way to the same hospital I was involuntarily hospitalized in twice when I was a teen. It was like watching a car accident happen. I could feel the past sneak up behind me like that scary story about the knife wielding maniac in the back seat of the car. Luckily, I have (apparently) healed enough to know what my priorities were in that moment, and I just told myself, "Not now, baby, we have more pressing work to do." I was like a superhero of awesome zen love.

A table we found on the side of the road that promptly fell apart as soon as wee took it off the truck. It is now siting int he driveway as another piece of junk we'll have to dispose of somehow.

When that was all over, I packed up the car, drove back over the Tapenzee and headed home. I knew I was driving home to something. I knew there was a lot waiting on me. Waiting for me to let out. I knew there was a reckoning coming. I had told my heart to wait, and it wouldn't wait forever. I got home and cried. I cried for myself, I cried for my brother, I cried for the road ahead for my own children, I cried for my mother and for my father. I cried so much with love, pain, loss, and hurt for three days that I decided to shut it off. I knew there was more waiting for me. Deeper stuff, the stuff I piled new stuff on top of, and I wasn't ready. It was all too close. I used a couple of old coping mechanisms, and some new ones.

Forty or so paste tomato plants.

The new ones were a bit less harmful than the days of old. I gave myself about a week, maybe two. I lost myself in audio books, keeping that earbud crammed in my ear for about two weeks, pausing only to have the interactions necessary to be a mother, a wife and a friend. But when there was any chance of distraction, when there was any chance that I might slip into the present moment or the past, I had Harry potter in my ear. Man that Lord Voldemort is a real jerk, and thank God Harry has Hermione Granger to keep him out of trouble, and oh, Dumbledore... it is true what he says in The Prisoner of Azkaban: "If I thought I could help you by putting you into an enchanted sleep and allowing you to postpone the moment when you would have to think about what has happened tonight, I would do it. But I know better. Numbing the pain for a while will make it worse when you finally feel it." Man is he ever right, that guy.

But I guess it's not too bad when your "weeds" are all lemon balm and cilantro.

Even for this attempt to escape I judged myself harshly. I am now healed and conscious enough to know what I was doing. But I guess that's the difference, I knew what I was doing. I made a choice to leave my head, to run, temporarily, from what was coming for me. A coping mechanism is just that--a mechanism for coping with something to big and too scary for you. There are healthy ones that hasten healing, like yoga, writing, praying, loving, meditating. And there are unhealthy ones that bury the pain down so that it festers and poisons, like drug use, cutting, throwing up, starving, and compulsively eating. I have done all of this and more in my past, so all things considered, briefly revising the least of my unhealthy techniques, or making a conscious choice to compulsively listen to Harry Potter on audio book are not the worst choices I could make. I guess.

One mostly finished new chicken coop (more on the how-too of this later).

The past is breaking over me like waves crashing on the beach. It is amazing to experience this, not in the hurricane everything-flying-all-over-the-place fashion of my youth, but in the slow steady wash of past on stone. The wave comes in, covers me and recedes. With its steady pull back out to sea it takes with it some of what I'd like to let go and maybe some of the calm and safety I'd like to keep with me. But it comes back with the next wave, mostly.

A new house for the girls, made form most of the wood I'd like to clear out of our basement.

How does this relate to my homesteading adventure? What does this have to do with the chickens, the gardening, the kids, and the food? Well, nothing and everything. All these thoughts, of course, are informing the way I look at my kids, the way I see myself as a parent, and a woman. These experiences of pain and peace I have while I heal old wounds I thought had been healed has made me slow down a bit, and look at my life again with more conscious open eyes. I am realizing that a lot of the things I am doing I didn't actually agree to. Make no mistake, I haven't been pressured into doing something I didn't want. No passing strangers have pulled up to the house, a box of squawking chickens under one arm and a cudgel in the other. I haven't been given an "offer I couldn't refuse" to grow sugar snap peas and native flowers. I just haven't thought to ask myself what I want to be doing.

"Found" garden of motherwort and chickweed.

I suspect I do want to be doing what I am up to. I like the reasons we live the way we do. I like the outcome from a life lived as close to the ground as we can. It's comfortable, the rhythm is beautiful and the Spirit of Life is ever present. I am wondering, however, if I had consciously agreed to these tasks I take on how many of them I would still choose. What if I looked at a new opportunity (or job) with full understanding of the amount of energy it would take? What if I weighed it against the other things I might like to do, or am already doing, would I still say yes? How much more would I love what I'm doing if I had a memory of choosing with open eyes and an open heart? How much more forgiving of myself would I be when I failed to complete/succeed/start said project if I didn't feel the weight of responsibility, not only for myself but for my husband and kids also? What is my responsibility anyway?

Snow peas climbing on the old twisted frame that remained after we burned an old box spring.

I suppose I am re-choosing my life. Seriously, I do like what I do, I'm just not sure I like why I do the things I do. Or maybe I just feel uncomfortable not knowing if I actually chose them in the first place. It's not pleasant for me to realize I've let life push me along, even if it's pushed me to a beautiful place. Maybe. Perhaps the lesson is to be present for the pushing. To watch, enjoy, and live during the journey. Maybe.

For now I'll just wait here while another wave comes washing over me.

Spring!

2011-04-20T09:51:00.000-07:00

It's spring in New England. That means it's freezing outside, although not literally (most nights). We have started some seeds indoors and they are looking not quite as weak as they have looked in the past. Although I'm pretty sure that, as it is almost May, our tomato plants are supposed to be more tha three inches tall with only one set of true leaves. But they look better than they did last year and that's the important part. We haven't started too much more indoors. We do have some things growing in the cold frames: leeks, cabbage, lettuce, spinach. We have planted some things in the ground already too: peas, kohlrabi, beets, sugar snap peas, snow peas, sorrel, chamomile, borage, and mallow. We have things coming up, mostly flowers at this point, but also the strawberries look like they'll do well, the tarragon, oregano, chives, thyme, and savory are back. The garlic is up and that's pretty exciting.

Cilantro form the cold frame, this has been growing all winter

Blood root, these grow all by themselves in my back "wilderness"

Chives are up!

Strawberries

Leeks in the cold frame

Sugar Snap Pea Shoot

Lettuce coming up in the Cold Frame

Last fall's chard and some volunteer cilantro in the cold frame.

Garlic up!

Blue Bells

May Apple

Mint

Knotweed

Motherwort

Tarragon

What has also been exciting is the fact that this year we got to plant seeds into beds that were built last year. We didn't even have to buy, cut, screw, dig, have loam delivered, or anything like that. Not to say that that won't be necessary in a few weeks. The garden I made last year of some native perennials will have to be dug up, transplanted to an area that will also have to be dug up. This area will then have its soil go through a sort of spa treatment over the course of the summer, have a winter cover planted on it and be left to be the vegetable garden for next year. We have learned not to rush things (sort of). This is an exciting lesson because we have a tendency to count our chickens before their hatched, buy our chickens before their home is built and order enough seeds to plant a few acres when all we have are four 4x4 foot raised beds.

We're just excited. And incredibly, unbelievably, remarkably impatient. I am so impatient for all the experience it takes decades to have that if I were to be magically zoomed there, I would have missed two or three decades of my life. Like the whole middle. Obviously this is not what I really want. I don't actually want to miss my entire life. But things do seem to drag on so. However, when I look back, we've only been learning about this sort of thing for three years--this is our third year trying to grow and preserve to live--and we're doing alright.

The other thing that creeps up on me in the spring is the land we have. Oh the land we have! It is a small patch, located perfectly for our current needs. But it is small and it is covered in invasive species. Most notably japansee knotweed and goutweed. These are tricky ones because there isn't really a way to get them out other than patience (see above) or a back hoe and 50 yards of fill. There is a creeping marital (ahem) conversation that happens about our locale. It revolves politely around, money, needs of children, proximity to work, family, and friends, space, and our plans for the future. This conversation is a fat spider and her web is spun in between a lot of scary and potentially volatile posts. Whenever it is brought up I feel like a helpless fly. So it doesn't get brought up too often in earnest. But in the spring, when the land looks promising and it isn't overgrown in all the areas we haven't gotten to yet I feel so hopeful. But after a short walk around and I see all the plants coming up that will inevitably make it less possible for me to have as many gardens as I'd like, I think, "This place will not be able to do what we want it to do. And then out loud to my Hubby I say, "This land can totally do what we need it to do, we just need to be patient, you know." Recently I decided that two small pigs are the answer to my invasive woes. We'll see how that goes. That would be a project for next year, since this year I think we ordered like 4,000 chickens or something.

All in all, it is clear that spring is here and we are better prepared for her arrival than we have been in years previous. This shows that we do have the ability to learn and apply knowledge. This was not clear at first so we're thrilled to see this evidence!

Imbolc and a Happy Marriage

2011-02-14T05:13:00.000-08:00

I am a Unitarian Universalist. My family has been attending a UU church for almost two years; we love it, are highly involved, and our kids love it. It has added a boat-load of love and community to our family life that I don't know what I would do without. My journey to this particular church in this particular religion has been a long and meandering one, as is the case with most people's spiritual journey. Briefly, I was raised without a formal religion, with Catholic tendencies on one side, and New Age-y tendencies from my mother, during my teen years I dabbled in Wicca (isn't that one of the required courses to get your "I Was A Teenage Girl In America" degree?). I distanced myself from that when I started throwing out all the evidence that I was a fool-hardy teen. It was a pretty indiscriminate purging and a lot of babies went out with the bathwater. I shopped around for a religion I could pass on to my children and after many visits to many churches and temples I decided on Catholicism. I was baptized into the religion of my father's family when I was 19 years old. That stuck for a while, but when I did finally have kids, I found I was reluctant to pass on many of the ideas about this religion to my children. I realized that I would more than likely find myself saying that I don't believe this or that more than I would want to. The easiest to put my finger on begin my stance on gays and gay marriage (I'm for 'em) and my belief in the right to choose (I'm for it). But there were deeper spiritual beliefs that are harder to tackle in a few sentences, like my stance on hell and Divine punishment (I don't buy it), and there being only one true form of God (I don't buy that either). So I stopped going, worried about the kid's, and fretted about my own need for a spiritual home. Finally, after a score of 100% Unitarian Universalist on the Belief-o-Matic (a higher score than even our minister!), we decided to check out the church with the full parking lot, who's bell we can hear ring in our kitchen, it's so close. It was love at first sermon and now we're all hooked. What is especially nice is that my husband and I, who have slightly different spiritual views, can both find comfort and insight in the same place, and should our children hold dear something that we don't, they too are free to express their beliefs in this church.

So there you have the background. Now, I really love ritual. I love the idea of doing something over and over again, especially something that has been done over and over again since the dawn of the ages. It makes me all misty and swoony. To tell the truth, that was one of the things I loved the most about the Catholic Church, prompting my husband to ask me: "You know that everything you love about the Catholic Church is Pagan, right?" "Of course I do! Haven't you seen my degree in Teenage Girl?" I love ritual, but I wasn't raised with it, so it's sort of tricky for me keep up with, but I'm working on it. We say a blessing at meal time, and go to church every Sunday, where there are plenty of rituals throughout the year. I would love to start a daily mom-and-kid's prayer time but that's getting into Future Me's territory. Instead of going crazy, my friend and I have decided to bring into our families' circle all of the Pagan Holidays. These celebrations of the earth and of faith and renewal are super spectacular, with lots of symbolism, ancestral knowledge, and baking. I think they are a really tangible way for the kids to relate to the Divine. They see the earth changing, we talk about faith, there's a little bit of wonderment thrown in there..Viola! You have a sacred ritual.

We decided to start with Imbolc, the first celebration of spring. At this point in the winter the pregnant ewe's would start to lactate signaling the up-coming birth of baby lambs, spring, and warmth. Because winter can be long, cold and serious, and because there were no grocery stores way back in the day, it would have been a scary time, filled with hunger and sickness, and even death. Believing that spring will come, when it isn't readily apparent (East-coaster can appreciate that this winter) is a real act of faith. Now, of course, we know that spring is coming, it doesn't rely on gifts or offerings to a deity to make it come. As far as I know there is no actual Goddess-bride waiting for a Sun-God husband to come to her, but it's nice to take advantage of this time to clebrate something ancient and to infuse or modern-day hopes and faith in the things to come with the spring.

My friend and I ordered about a million pagan books from the library and searched over for kids' activities and stories about Imbolc. We picked and chose the rituals that resonated best with us and ones we thought the girls would like. We started the day out with a ritual cleansing (cleaning the house). We baked a gluten-free honey cake, a traditional Imbolc treat.

While that was baking we took a big stack of strips of red, orange, and yellow, construction paper and wrote, colored and decorated them with our hopes and intentions for the spring. These have everything from sentences like, "A healthy family," to "getting better at gardening," to a drawing of a baby giraffe (don't ask, somehow I was just being asked to draw baby animals on them for the girl's to color.)

By the time we were done talking about what the holiday means and what we want and hope for the future, the cake was done. At this point the kids were a bit stir-crazy from being inside most of the day and it being...well..the middle of the winter. I foolishly tried to get them to calm down so we could make the orange icing for the cake (not traditional, I'd guess). When they didn't calm down and got more incredibly out of control, I, in my infinite wisdom and sacred-ness threw my arms wide and yelled, "OK, I'M GOING TO START HITTING PEOPLE!" To which my friend responded with her more infinite wisdom and sacred-ness, "Why don't I take you girls in the other room and we can read a story. When we're done I think everyone will be ready to make the icing." She didn't give me a dirty look or anything, that's just how wise and sacred-ness she is.

We made the icing and had some cake, which was great. After that they played, we made dinner and when the husbands got home we ate. Now, that story thing definitely made the icing making possible, but it didn't really get the kids into a better head space. They were still kids in the middle of a stormy New England winter, cooped up and feverish of the Cabin variety. They were sort of driving everyone crazy. No matter, carry on with your sacred, bad-self says we!

When Dinner was over, I turned to my husband and asked, "We're going to do the ritual now, will you take pictures?" He said yes (eventually). We told the girls that in some parts of the world on this day girls would dress up like the Goddess Brigid in her wedding clothes and go around from house to house, she would be invited in and there would be treats. We put on some little veils I had made for them and sent them outside. Once outside, they knocked on the door, we invited them in and read a poem. Then we offered them a small piece of honey cake, lit the candles and set the cake on our little make-shift alter. Then we wished, silently, on some seeds, placed them as offering to the Goddess with the cake, and took some photos.

The plan at this point was to stand in the candle-light in silent contemplation of the things to come. Remember, the space was sacred, filled to bursting with sacred-ness. My husband, however, took is directive to take pictures very seriously and hadn't quite gotten the photo he was looking for.

His pleading with the girls to look contemplatively at the candles in their cute little veils got more and more demanding. "Keep the veil on, JUST keep it on for one more minute. Turn around, HUNTER turn around. Stand still. Stand still so I can take the damn picture. JUST stand still.." This went on for a little bit with me interjecting helpful things like, "Honey, it's not important. They're done. don't worry about the picture. You're missing the point." Which together sounded something like this:

"Just keep the veil they're just kids stand still I'm trying it's not worth Hunter honey turn around you're missing the point here Just. Keep. The. Veil. On. can you listen to me for a minute? Hunter!! Oh just give me that Damn camera!"
This last one was me, of course, said as I wrestled the camera strap from around my husband's neck. After which he stormed up stairs and I stormed into the kitchen crying and yelling something like, "You ruined Imbolc, this is just like the time we flew that kite!!" My friend met me in the kitchen giving me compassionate looks over the slices of honey cake while I sobbed. My husband had almost immediately come back down stairs, he was clearly retaining more of his sense than I was.
"Do you want me to take over the cake so you can go give hugs?" says my friend in gentle offering.
"No," I sobbed, "I want to do this."
It was immediately clear that I was incapable of serving up the cake so I opted the making it up job. I went to my husband who was sitting on the couch being not-as-mad-looking-as-he-felt and said in my most calm and conciliatory voice, "You know you ruined Imbolc, right?"
Despite this somewhat inflammatory attempt at reconciliation, my beloved husband heard me, and we talked it out. I think I said something along the lines of (through tears), "We should be having honey cake right now, but it's all ruined...ruined...whaaahahaaahaa..."
"We still can, honey, it's over. I'm sorry."

I retreated upstairs to stop all my blubbering and get back in the mood for the Pagan festival. When I was ready to come downstairs, where do you think I found my husband? That's right. In front of our make-shift alter telling those girls to stay still. He got his shot. He got it while I said, jokingly, "I will forever tell the story of the price of this picture!" Haha. (But seriously, I will).

We had cake, and put our favorite articles of clothing in a basket to be placed outside for the Goddess to bless as she makes her way 'round the earth turning the wheel toward spring. The girls went to bed and the adults followed shortly.

I will tell the story of that picture, however. I will humbly tell the story of two people who, in a moment, lost sight of what they were trying to accomplish and what the other was needing. This story happens in a marriage all the time. My husband and I are learning that happiness doesn't come from lack of conflict, but from the way it's resolved. This particular issue had to be brought up again, when we weren't attempting to have a reflective ritual. We talked it out with love and understanding. I had to sift through a little bit of feelings related to my own childhood, where there were many a holiday punctuated with shouting and acts of semi-violence. The Imbolc stunt we pulled wasn't quite the same thing. This was a (fairly humerus) argument between two individuals who love each other and want to not fight. My children, during this brief episode, where seemingly unfazed. They don't seem to feel frightened when my husband's Sicilian nature collide with my German side. They don't seem to worry about our union when I forget myself and chuck a spatula across the room. Don't get me wrong, these are pretty embarrassing losses of control over here. I'm not saying this behavior is ideal, but I think it might be more "normal' than I had originally thought. More normal and a lot less traumatizing than I would have thought. We can't really avoid conflict. We're both strong people with lots to do and we forget ourselves, and sometimes each other. We do make sure that we don't hide our resolutions either. Our kids hear us talk it out; we say "I'm sorry" loud and clear, and we mean it. A happy marriage looks different than I thought it would. In my made-up fantasy of a happy marriage I didn't think people would be yelling things like, "You ruined Imbolc." I guess I didn't think people would be yelling at all. I guess I didn't think there would be people in this marriage.

Life is filled with all sorts of lessons like this. Grown-ups make mistakes. Parents don't have all the answers. Your own kids sometimes seem like you they want to kill you. And marriages are made of people, who make mistakes and sometimes yell, and then say sorry, I love you, I will try to handle that differently next time. Despite it being a bit different than what I had imagined, I'll take it, with all its complications, yelling, forgetting and spatula-chucking. Really, for two people who don't have a lot of foundational experience with happy marriages, we're learning as we go and doing alright.

The Last Of My Carrots

2011-02-09T10:58:00.000-08:00

Since we have started our little semi-homesteading adventure carrots have been a bitter-sweet vegetable to serve for any meal. Mostly because they are super small, I mean really small. This past year we grew a bunch for ourselves and the years before that we were collecting all the leftover, unwanted, Charlie Brown Christmas Tree-type carrots. These things are an incredible pain in the butt to wash and cut (peeling will often leave you without a carrot at all, so that's out). But it's food, and it's food that is grown by us organically, so it's a labor of love, I guess.

This past year we grew some Jaune du Doubs and some Danvers we had ordered from Fedco. At first we just broadcast the seeds so we could thin them out. I found that to be really unruly. It seemed that if you pulled them out too soon it left the others all freaked out, and if you waited too long the leaves got tangled in one another and you pull out more than you intended. My husband said we should be using scissors like they do in the Square Foot Gardener. That sort of makes me feel like a lunatic, and however comfortable that feeling is to me, I do try to keep it at a daily minimum of 2-3 hours a day. So, for the fall run I compromised, I sowed the seeds in neat rows two inches apart and figured, at the very least, when I thinned them by snipping off the tops between my fingernails it would be a little easier to manage. That was half true, the other half of that truth is that I got distracted and didn't thin them, really. I also didn't dig them up until the ground accidentally froze around them (pesky, sneaky frost) and I found myself fully dressed in my nicer clothes and new clogs jamming a pointed shovel into the frozen earth pulling up icy chunks of earth with embedded crystallized-looking yellow carrots within. This would have been a great picture, by the way, but I was too busy beating myself up for being a lazy, forgetful wanna-be homesteader with no clue what she was doing to think to ask someone to come over and take a photo. **Update: I got over it. It's all part of learing the rhythmn and balancing act. And the carrots were fine also.

A friend of mine was admiring the long, thick carrots of another woman, and shared with her my carrot lamentations. She said that it took her quite a while to get a good carrot and her trick is to glue the seeds with a flour and water mixture one inch apart on a strip of toilet paper and plant that! Genius! I am now really looking forward to trying the carrot adventure again. This lady is a genius of many many talents, and you can check her out here and here, AND here by the way.

To see what became of those last precious carrots go here.

Veggie Pot Pie

2011-02-09T10:52:00.000-08:00

I used the last of my carrots in this recipe. It is adapted from a recipe by my favorite vegan chefs, Isa Chandra Moskowitz and Terry Hope Romero. The recipe is actually for a seitan pot pie, which sounds amazing, but my friend's daughter has a gluten sensitivity so our dinners are usually gluten-free. I just decided not to replace it with anything but some of our turnips (which were incredible, by the way. The variety was Gold Ball, we ordered them from Fedco).

This is my adapted recipe, all gluten and dairy-free with a non vegan option, if that's sometimes your thing. If you want the actual seitan recipe, I highly recommend the Veganomicon by the above authors. It is my new favorite go-to cookbook. This gem has politely and without violence to living things nudged The Joy of Cooking out of my number one spot. Sorry, Joy of Cooking!

Crust:
2 cups all-purpose gluten-free flour (or regular)
1/4 cup cornmeal
2 tsp sugar
1 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking powder
1/2 cold vegan shortening
1/2-3/4 cold water
2 tsp apple cider vinegar

Filling:

3 tablespoons olive oil
1/4 cup all-purpose gluten-free flour (or regular)
1 large onion, diced
4 large carrots, diced
1/2 pound of potato (your choice here--I recommend red or Yukon gold) diced
Frozen greens, chopped small (or fresh) I used a package from our freezer that I had helpfully labeled "Kale, about a bunch"
1/2 pound turnips, diced
1 stalk celery, diced
1 cup small sweet peas or corn kernels (I have only had these on hand once and have left the out the other times I've made this and it doesn't suffer too much).
2/3 cups white wine or vegetable broth
1 1/2 vegetable broth
1 tsp thyme
1 tsp mustard powder
1/2 tsp ground sage.
salt and pepper to taste
*another note here, I have found that using Bell's Seasoning in this is amazing. It's some sort of blend of sage, rosemary, thyme and maybe oregano...anyway, it's what we New Engenders use to make stuffing magic. It works in this. Use 1 1/2 tsp. I also put it in veggie burger recipes to give it a meat-like remembrance).
*one more--I have also added cooked turkey to this, I just mix it in at the end before I pour it into the casserole dish. It may make the gravy too thin, so I just add about a 1/4-1/2 cup cold water mied with a couple tablespoons of cornstarch.

Makin' The Crust

Combine flour, cornmeal, sugar, salt and baking powder in a large mixing bowl. Add the shortening in small chunks and cut into the flour with knives, a pastry cutter, or forks. Mixture should look like crumbs.

Pour 3/4 cup of the cold water into a bowl with a few ice cubes in it. Measure out 1/2 a cup and stir the apple cider vinegar into it. Add the Vinegar water to the dough in a few batches, mixing gently until it holds together when pinched. Add more, if needed, a tablespoon at a time.

Gently press together into a ball and roll it out on a piece of parchment paper into a similar shape and size as the dish you will be using for your pie (I use a 9 1/2 x 11 x 2 inch Pyrex casserole dish). Slide it onto a cutting board and put some parchment over top. Place it in your fridge until you need it.

Preheat oven to 375

For the Filling:

Heat a soup pot over medium heat and add 3 Tbsp of oil and stir in the flour. Stir frequently and toast the flour for about 10 min. Stir in the onion cook for 4 minutes, add the carrot, potato, turnip, and celery. Cook for about 8 minutes, stirring frequently.
Pour the wine or broth, stirring to bring up the brown bits on the bottom of the pan. Cook for about 2 minutes to reduce a bit then stir in the peas, corn, frozen greens, extra zucchini, whatever you have lying around. Pour in about half of the broth add spices. Bring mixture to a simmer. Stir in the remaining broth and bring to a simmer again. Cook for another 10 minutes until a thin gravy has formed and the potatoes are nearly cooked. Remove form heat, season with salt and pepper, and pour it into a casserole dish. Top with the crust, pressing down the edges a little. Place in the preheated oven and bake for about 45 minutes until bubbly and the crust is browned.

Let cool 10 min before serving.

This thing is pretty good, let me tell you.

Whew! It's Been A While

2010-12-13T06:07:00.000-08:00

I have a problem. Sometimes I have a project to do, a home improvement, or a thank you card to write and I build it up in my head until I feel like I have to block out an entire child-free day to get it done. Those days, of course, are relatively rare, and so the projects pile up, the house remains curtianless, and no one knows how grateful I am (really, really grateful by the way, thank you for all your kinds gifts and thoughts, All-The-People-In-My-Life).

I know no one else suffers from this sort of affliction, so just try not to judge me too harshly.

Most recently I have been neglecting this space. Partially because I have such a big and exciting arrangement to share. I would love to get into this in great detail and let you know all the thoughts, rules, discoveries, and joy in it, but partially because of this new arrangement, I am in a different sort of routine and haven't figured out where my computer time fits in. To top it all off, this new thing seems so big that I haven't really felt right going ahead and giving you information on my salt dough ornament recipe, the progress of our cold frames, our freezer full of grass-fed beef, toothpaste failures, and all the other things going on here until I let you know the big and interesting news.

So here it is, in brief. I'll get back to it someday soon, but for now, so we can all move on: Our dear friends and their two dear children have moved in with us and we are sharing (quite beautifully) the space of our 1,000 square foot home. Just when you thought it couldn't get more colonial over here, it does! So now, for the first time in approximately fifty years, my home has the grand total of eight souls living and loving within its walls. There really is so much to say about how this works, the numerous benefits, and the potential pitfalls (I say potential, because so far we haven't stumbled into them). Any parent can appreciate how wonderful it would be to have another set at hand to help when you get into the danger zone with your kids.

Just last night I had a horrifying bedtime showdown with my darling three-year-old. When I got up from giving her some pre-sleep snuggles she promptly lost her mind completely. Her sister had to be sent into my room so she could actually sleep and the little one had to be barricaded into her room by a mommy against the door. Just when I thought that maybe this was the day I would finally loose it and accidentally thrash my child to kingdom come (actually, I decided to read damnyouautocorrect.com on my phone to keep myself entertained and distracted and from twitching--that is one smart phone!) a vision of a mom came up the stairs to help me. Oh, lovely, lovely Other Mama! We proceeded to hang out in the hallway taking turns silently putting a hysterical three-year-old back into her bed while the other husband in the house (mine was still at work) fed us hummus covered pita chips from the stairs. When the hysterical child switched tactics from "I DON'T WANT TO GO TO BED!" to "I NEED TO GO THE BATHROOM" to "I FIRSTY!" to "HEY! YOU NOT MY MAMA, I WANT MY REAL MAMA" I had another mother there to keep my spirits up and my will strong. With pre-boxing match pep talks and quick neck massages, I was able to (after one hour!) lay my child down, now stripped to a diaper) in the bed, cover, her up and have her not get out of bed until 7am. Let me tell you how horribly this would have gone down if there had not been a friend around to help me hold my space. No, on second thought, I don't want to write anything down. Just in case I do finally go completely insane, I don't want the authorities to think any of my actions were premeditated. Let's just say that I'm not sure how I could have gotten through that particular night without help.

This makes me have a lot of feelings and thoughts about the nuclear family. These are the thoughts I'd love to go into in a lot more detail but haven't quite made the time for in my new day-to-day format. But basically I think the nuclear family is bunk. Really, what a rotten idea. I'm no sociologist, but it doesn't seem quite natural, and now that I have something a little different going on for a while, and even though we're all adjusting to sharing our space with double the people, it is so much nicer to have more people to help with the junk and expand the love and happy moments.

Beanballs...

2010-11-10T09:38:00.000-08:00

I know. I wish it had a better name too. But they are so, so good and I'd like to share them with you.

We are not vegans, but since we are a dairy-free family who tries to eat meat only one to two times a week I find myself turning to vegan cook books quite often. My favorite vegan chef by far is Isa Chandra Moskowitz, and my favorite book of hers (so far) is The Veganomicaon, and Vegan Cupcakes Take Over The World, and Vegan Cookies Invade your Cookie Jar. She is something of a vegan magician when it comes to deserts. Nothing is dense and chewy (when it's not supposed to be) and she even has a recipe for frosting that tastes just like frosting! It's a good feeling to watch someone devour a cookie and tell you it's great and then you get to say, "It's vegan!"

The thing I love about the Veganomicon is that she uses real food. There isn't a lot of fake, factory made "cheeze" or even an abundance of tofu. The recipes are all made with food, which means a lot to me because I've gotten basically all the food that isn't really out of my life and I'd hate to backslide now. Don't get me wrong, in order to make that amazing frosting you do need some earth balance or some other vegan margarine, but hey, it's a cupcake, you know? The other thing about this gigantic cookbook is that it's really funny. It's like the joy of cooking with a couple of glasses of wine and no animal carving how-to's. Anyway, I highly recommend it.

However, I rarely follow a recipe exactly, and this is a version of the recipe she has in this book. It's gluten free and I actually think they have a nicer texture than the ones that have wheat gluten and bread crumbs in it. They stand up a little better to sauce and reheating. I haven't experimented with adding veggies but I'll make them again in another couple of weeks and I'll give it a try. They are perfect transports for hidden (frozen) kale.

Beanballs:

Ingredients:
1 (20 ounce) can kidney beans rinsed and drained (about three cups)
2 Tablespoons soy sauce
2 Tablespoons steak sauce
2 Tablespoons Olive oil (plus some for baking)
2 cloves garlic grated or minced finely
1/4 teaspoon grated lemon zest (I have never had a lemon handy so I've always left this out)
1/4 cup potato starch flour
1/4 cup corn flour
1/2 teaspoon dried thyme
1/4 teaspoon dried oregano

Preheat oven to 375

Mash up the beans with a potato masher and get the stubborn renegades with a fork. It shouldn't be smooth, you should know that they are made with kidney beans, but no whole ones left. Add soy sauce, steak sauce, olive oil, garlic, lemon zest potato starch, and corn flour. Use a fork to mix everything together until it well combined and firm.
Roll the mixture into walnut sized balls (about 12-15) but don't make them too being, smaller is better for texture. Place them on an oiled cookie sheet and drizzles or brush them with additional oil. Bake them for 15 minutes, then flip brush with more oil and bake for another 10. Add them to warm sauce and serve.

I served them with broccoli polenta, and the sauce I canned this summer. The polenta went over so-so with the little ones but the bean balls were a hit for dinner and for lunch the next day too!

Tomorrow, Tomorrow, You're Only A Day Away...

2010-10-29T10:55:00.000-07:00

A super fabulous idea was suggested to me recently. A "Tomorrow Drawer" for my kids to put everything they will need for the up coming day. My kids share a pretty small room where there is only enough room for one dresser (don't ask me what they will do when they're teens). They have three drawers each so I can't really spare a drawer for staging the next day. I did however have two hot pink beverage tubs (leftover from the best 30th birthday party ever decorated in riot grrrl colors!). The girls are using these to put in everything they need for the following day. Their outfits down to shoes, any dance or swim stuff, even jammies. It's been working out really well. I am primarily filling the drawer of the soon-to-be three-year-old, but my oldest (the soon-to-be five-year-old) is having quite the time picking out her crazy fashions the night before!

Ahhh! Sweet, sweet morning sanity...

Parenting: Sometimes I'm Just No Good At This

2010-10-11T13:27:00.000-07:00

I don't read a lot of blogs. A friend once accused me of being something of a technology-phobe, and I blurted out that "I can't read the computer!" It's true, I have an astigmatism and it's tricky and a little annoying to read on the computer screen. (Now that I have glasses, so that makes it a little easier.) I also don't have a lot of time to sit and read anything. Shortly after this surprising observation I and went in search for some blogs I could read (I'll show her who's a techno-phobe!). I found the whole culture kind of scary and intimidating. You have to find these "bloggers" in the Internets and then "catch up" with them so you can get to know them a little. It's quite an investment, you have to start at the beginning so you can get a sense of where the person started from and where they're going. But I found a few that I started reading regularly. So regularly, in fact, that I started talking about these people to my husband like they are my close friends.

"You know what Hannah said? She said that she just uses a meat grinder to process her zucchini and then she freezes it like that."

"Who's Hannah?"

"She's my friend on the internet."

"Does she know who you are?"

"No."

"Oh."

What I have found in the internet is a community of women who are very similar to me. They homeschool, garden, can, craft, take pictures, and want to do their best at loving their kids. They just seem a lot better at that last part than I am. Admittedly just about all of these mothers have stated somewhere on their blog that they are intentionally leaving out aspects of their lives that they don't want to focus on. There are raised voices, tears and impatient moments, but these are not the moments to be reveled in and are left by the wayside.

I admire this so much, and gain a lot of focus and gratitude in my days with this philosophy in mind. Whatever your mind is on is the reality, you know? Your focus is your life and all that. However, in most of my days, these less than ideal displays of impatience or frustration are so dominant that to leave them out would be pretty much like lying.

I have a hard time with parenting (what seems like to me) most of the time. I have not-so-proud-moments more frequently than I would like to admit. I worry a fair amount about messing the kids up or missing my chance to give them the mother I thought I would be giving them.

You see, I've thought about "Jannelle the Mother" for a long time. Way before I was ever in a position to have kids I imagined the little dears, but more than them I imagined me. I imagined the things I would do with them, the way I would listen to them, the patience I would have, the hugs I would offer, the appreciation and interest I would take in them.

I fixated on this future dream mostly to heal the part of me that didn't get the things I felt I needed in my own relationship with my mom. We had a rough time when I was younger. We didn't talk for a long time after I left home. In the end, things were so bad that I had forgotten a lot of the good things, pushed them out of my mind like they were the painful memories. The good times were so jarring and incongruous that I couldn't have them co-exist with the hurtful memories of my childhood. I needed a clear definition--either it was good, or it was bad. It couldn't be both. So I chose all bad. I got angry, I got sad, I got older, and then I got pregnant. When I was pregnant the tiny, careful relationship that had been forming with my mom sort of exploded. She seriously called me almost every day. All of a sudden she was so there, and I found myself withdrawing. It was freaking me out! So with long letters, some miss-communication and a few phone calls, I explained that I was still carrying around some hurts and that it would take me some time to warm to this new way. All of this resulted in me remembering that it wasn't all bad, that my young mother absolutely did the best that she knew how. It left me with a new choice. And I chose the future instead of the past. She is a great grandmother and our sometimes cautious relationship becomes less so with every passing visit and conversation.

I figured with all this healing and fixating and planning that my heart's desire to be a patient, elastic mother would just, you know, happen. Doesn't that make nice neat sense? And it was true when I had one kid. Hunter wasn't born until Athena was 22 months old, and for those 22 months I was the best mother in the world. Well, it sure felt easy anyway. I had wells--no giant aquifers of patience. I could listen to a scream forever and not respond, making sure that the screaming fits never lasted for long. I could hold out on a tantrum longer than you would believe, so those tricks weren't tried very much either. After I had Hunter my patience started to stretch to uncomfortable lengths. I remember lamenting the loss of my patience to my mom friends. I was assured it would return once I got the hang of things. Well it's been almost three years now, is that going to happen? To be fair, I have gotten better at it. Much of my patience has returned. I even manage to find time with each of my kids alone which helps tremendously in actually seeing them and their person hood. Even when they're together I can hold it together for a good long while. I hear them screaming at each other--I've read the books, I know not to get involved--and I'm good, I know it's important for them to work it out themselves. I focus on whatever task I'm doing while I monitor from afar what's happening in the bedroom next door.

"I WANT TO KNOCK IT DOWN!!"

"no. No. NO! I'm not done yet. stop. STOP!!"

"But it's taking so looong..."

"AAAAAYYYYYYYYYYIIIIIIEEEEEEEEE!!! DON'T! GET AWAY! SIT DOWN!"

(scuffling, blocks begin thrown, the "FWUMP" of someone hitting the bed)

"High pitched screaming" (I'm not sure how to spell it)

"DON'T. KNOCK. IT. DOWN. YET!!!"

At this point I have a slight nervous twitch forming in my right eye and my upper bicep has gone spastic. I'm gritting my teeth and telling myself things like, "If I hear that scream one more time I'm going to go completely insane and have to be institutionalized."

"AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYYYYIIIIIIIIIIIIIEEEEEE"

And now I'm charging into their room, heading straight toward the tower-in-process. My mind has somehow laid the blame of this argument on the fact that this tower exists. Without thinking clearly (obviously) in any way at all I pull my leg back and land a kick right into the middle of the thing.

Before my foot makes contact, I know I am wrong, and can't stop myself.

Before you use your energy to judge me, know that I probably have it covered for both of us. Just take this time to feel good about how you handled this.

On days like this I have to console myself by pointing out that no one was physically hurt. Which wasn't always the case in my childhood or the childhoods of my parents. I have to make pleading prayers that sound something like, "Please make them able to see my effort."

Because, really, my effort is so tremendous. I am trying my very hardest to do something that I don't know how to do. I'm trying to be a parent that I didn't see in action. I am attempting to have a family that I have no model for. And when I'm pushed to the edge of my person by repeated accidental kicks to the stomach, relentless bickering and screeching, or nagging, or whining, or pinching, I snap out of the carefully crafted person I have created and into the well-defined grooves of my core patterns.

I'm not trying to give excuses for childish or impatient behavior. Really, I'm not. Neither am I being overly hard on myself. It's just that the older I get and the more I wittiness this sort of personal primitive behavior, the more I realize that my intentions are not stronger than my defenses. This news is a total bummer. It's a bummer because it means it will more than likely take (more) time to remedy. My imperfect person-hood will never be remedied, but I'm sure I will be able to learn how to not take my internal frustration out on my kids. But I won't be able to do it right this instant! And this is the time that really counts!

I knew I would learn from the mistakes of my childhood and that I would find new and exciting mistakes to make. (I am very creative, you know). But I didn't realize I would unwittingly take up some of the same patterns of my childhood, however faded they may be at this point. And they are faded. They were already beginning to fade when my mother took them up in her parenting with me. If any one out there is a child in a long line of what is now called child abuse, but used to just be discipline, maybe you have seen these tendencies lessen and fade over the generations. Maybe you have been lucky enough to see the Herculean effort in your mother not to make the mistakes of her mother. Maybe you've even heard her tell stories of how her mother attempted not to make the mistakes of what would have been your great-grandmother. If you haven't been one in this line, let me just tell you, it's harder than you think not to repeat these mistakes.

On really hard days, when I've screamed myself horse, carried children upside-down to their rooms for time-outs, or smacked my little one on the hand for pinching me for the 1,000th time, when I have completely lost myself in impatience and anger, I...well, I cry. But then, maybe the next day when I figure I'll try again because motherhood is one job that you really can't quit, I remember that no one in the house is terrified. No one is questioning whether or not I love them. No one is getting bruised or bloody. I imagine the tendency to loose control of my anger with the kids like poison in a glass. With each generation's effort of love toward their children and forgiveness of the past the poison is diluted. I had thought that I could just take up a new cup, but that now seems highly unlikely. My mother before me, my grandmother before her, and now I am doing my very best to pour so much love and understanding into my relationship with my children that the cup will overflow and wash the poison out forever.

Second Chances

2010-10-09T06:15:00.000-07:00

A while ago I spied in my driveway a fat little bug sitting upon a milkweed plant that had wriggled it's way up between the driveway and the border of a garden. It was a pretty poor specimen (the plant, not the bug) and wasn't going to provide this little guy with much of a buffet. I snatched him up and put him in the jar along with a new plants, a stick and a prayer.

"Please, Please, Please don't die."

I was still feeling the sting from our last try and didn't want to have to go through that again, so I didn't even tell the kids. I thought, "I'll give it a couple of days, if it seems ok, then I'll tell them." To be fair it was in plain view over their desk. But they didn't notice, I think because that's where the jar always sits.

It made its transformation into a chrysalis with no troubles this time and hung there for a few days. They should be in this state for 10-14 days. We checked every morning waiting to see the color of the wings through the clear casing. Then one day we looked up and there was a butterfly in the jar!

We took her outside and let her go. Athena had really wanted to hold her. It jumped onto her finger and flew away into a bush where it waited for a while before going wherever it went.
(The last picture is the face mask and skin casing that it shed in its last instar.)

Thank God for second chances of all kinds.

Herbal Medicines and Trips to Western Massachusetts

2010-10-06T15:03:00.000-07:00

When swine flu hysteria started making my world feel like Salem, Massachusetts 1692 style, I did two things. I stopped listening to the news and I decided not to give myself or my family the vaccine. I wouldn't put myself in the category of vaccine-fearing-government-conspiracy-believing-wacko, but I am wary about them, especially when there are signs everywhere shouting: "Vaccinate NOW!" "Get your free vaccine here!" "If you vaccinated here, you would be home by now," I mean, that doesn't even make sense. The news was just wiggin' me out and I didn't want to put my carefully reserved positive energy into worrying about the pig flu.

I'm a big fan of protecting yourself by eating dirt. What I mean by that is my kids get dirty. Despite evidence to the contrary, we don't actually eat dirt. But, we don't use hand sanitizer, we wash our hands but not obsessively, we play with other kids and sometimes those kid sneeze....in our direction. All that said, I had already been partially poisoned by the news I was listening to before I quit the junk. So, I was freaked out. Freaked out enough to imagine the system shutting down and needing to dig up Day Lilly tubers and heat them over a fire made from my dining room chairs. I thought if I was going to make the "crazy" decision not to vaccinate I should have some knowledge of what I would be in for were we to sweat out the flu.

When I was a kid my mom got into natural remedies. When we got sick there was always a piping hot mug of something bitter and sluggish to choke down (sorry mom), which we would do, dutifully. To my recollection, we were always cured right up. I didn't inherit this knowledge from her, but it did foster in me a love and interest in herbal medicine. It gives me a real witchy feeling and makes me feel like a natural woman, makes me want to wear a hooded cape and carry a basket instead of a courier bag. ...Anyway, I have a couple of medicinal wild plants field guides, and along with my wild edible forays, I have picked up some info about what I could use out there in the woods for various aliments. I am forever running out to the yard to grab some plantain for a poultice, but I wanted to know more. I wanted to know enough to feel comfortable keeping my kid away from the doctor's office were she to have a fairly high fever.

I stumbled across this website. Tony(a) Lemos runs Blazing Star Herbal School in western Massachusetts and was offering a workshop called "No Fear Flu." How's that for a made-to-order gift from the Universe? It's quite a hike from where I am, about a three hour drive. But as many of you mommas out there can imagine, a trip to beautiful western MA in the fall, with no kids in the car, a scarf, a warm mug of tea, and some historical fiction on cd is something of a beautiful nerdy mini-vacation. When I got there, I quickly realized that I was by far the least knowledgeable person in the room. It seemed like the class was full of people who (all knew each other) and who had been practicing either professionally or for a long time. This was great news because I was bound to learn a lot, especially if I could get over a childhood fear of "asking stupid questions."

Tony(a) covered a lot of material, and I'm no herbalist, so I won't be giving any medical advice. But I will say this, she made me feel really comfortable, and not crazy, with my decision to deal with potential sickness at home with plants. I guess that's no surprise given what she does for a living, but I am a New Englander and skepticism lives close to my heart, despite my fairy-loving beliefs. It was really down to earth with great advice. Like what?

Get Sleep. Get as Much sleep as your body needs. Not just when you're already sick, that's how you keep from getting sick in the first place! If you are going to get sick, you'll get sick when you are tired and your body is not getting a chance to repair itself when you're resting.

Take a hot bath. Like 98 degrees. Keep your kids in a bath over 98 degrees for over 20 minutes and it will kill the flu virus. So, if you're out an about and someone wipes their nose and shakes your hand (or kids do this or something even grosser) take them home and plunk them in the bath. They will complain, I can tell you, just read them a story or something, try to keep them in there for as close to 20 minutes as possible, and try not to giggle at their super red bums. That's pretty easy, isn't it? My older girl got in the habit of saying to the little one, "Hunter, it's hot for your health!"

Eat well. This is pretty straightforward, but it's easy to forget. Your body works only as well as the fuel it runs on, you know?

I also learned some other things like:

Don't suppress a fever up to 103 degrees. This is a healthy fever. It's doing its job, cooking out the virus, let it be. If the fever rises above that gently reduce it using lukewarm water and wiping the patient (a.k.a. whimpering child) with a rag. No ice, this can cause shock. I asked how long would you keep your feverish kid feverish before you started to worry about...what?...brain damage? I mean, I don't know about you, but I have loads of cultural images in my head from my full childhood of TV watching that tells me that fever=insane person in like, 2-4 hours. She said she would be pretty comfortable with a fever of 103-104 for three to four days. (Let me just say here that I am not offering medical advice here, I'm just a lady who believes the herbalist and would wait out a fever for a few days. You should do whatever makes you comfortable...just so we're on the same page.) I also know that a little peppermint essential oil on the bottom of a kid's feet will drop a fever, as will wool rags soaked in vinegar or lemon justice and applied to the calves.

Stimulate a low grade fever. A prolonged low-grade fever is something more to worry about and it might be helpful to stimulate the fever with a little cyan to induce sweating and get the circulation going.

When the fever is broken eat protein. Scrambled eggs are a good choice.

I also learned a few great recipes, some of which have become staples for my family. One of which is FIRE CIDER! I imagine this being advertised 1800's style with slogans like , "Dr. Stinky's Fire Cider! Impress your friends! Made from roots that come from the center of the earth! Breath fire! Grow hair on your chest! Keep the common cold at bay." Fire cider is an immune strengthener, you make this tonic and take a table spoon a day. Although, over here we like to down a shot glass every morning. Then we beat our chests and growl a little. It makes us feel like animals with super immune systems.

Fire Cider:

Fill a quart mason jar 1/3 full equal parts peeled and chopped:
ginger root
horseradish root
garlic
burdock root
pinch of cyan

then 7/8thfull of apple cider vinegar and 1/8th full raw honey.

You should let it sit for about a week and then use it until it runs out. You can cook the roots with some chicken once you've finished the cider.

Another standby in our house (just administered to the wee one this morning after) is sage honey. Sage is an antiviral, antibacterial, anti fungal. Taken internally, it will fight infection. Honey is awesome. I made a big 'ol jar of it this year.

Fill a jar with chopped fresh sage leaves.

Pour (preferably raw, local) honey over the leaves about 7/8th full. Mix it around as much as you can to get the honey over and through the leaves. Pour in more honey.

Fill 1/8th with brandy. This helps it mix a little better and pulls more of the sage-y goodness out of the leaves and into the honey. If you are doing a double take and reading back to make sure you read what you thought you read, yes I do give this to my children. When administered in tablespoon doses, there is more alcohol in an over-ripe banana than there is in this medicine. Probably.

It is also a great addition to a warm tea when you or your youngsters are feeling sick.

The same concoction can also be made with thyme. I believe I was told that sage is more for lower respiratory congestion, while thyme is more upper-respiratory.

I will be sharing more of our herbal experiments, but these are great stapes to start with.

And don't forget to eat some dirt.

Egg Pizza (commonly referred to as frittata)

2010-09-22T17:42:00.000-07:00

We don't have a lot of quick meal possibilities here. In my effort to create and consume meals made with food, I have somehow exiled all dinners that can be ready in under a half and hour. This would be fine with a little forethought, but, alas, there is precious lack of that in the summer days. The summer, with its overabundance of fresh food finds me cowering in my kitchen at 4:45 wondering how I can possibly turning all this raw food into dinner in 15 minutes! Last year it was even worse. In my exuberance to preserve food for the winter, I would accidentally process all the food and my kids would have to eat mac 'n cheese.

Now the problem is more that all my food is frozen or dried. Or still flour. I buy all my beans dried, which mean they're at least 45 minutes away from being food (with the help of a pressure cooker), or three days away from being food the old fashioned way. Rice, same--40 minutes. Polenta's a good quick meal...but with what?! I was even given an electric pasta maker and so it's pretty easy to make pasta, but at 4:45, it doesn't seem easy, and again...with what? I know I could just have some of these "prepared" foods on hand in case of emergencies...but 4:45 happens everyday! And it's always an emergency. When I am at the store I think, "I should just buy a can of black beans," and then I'm all, "No! I should get better at making sure I have beans soaking!" In the end the only ones who suffer are my mal-nourished children, getting scurvy among all this fresh produce.

Enter "Egg Pizza." This dish was recently anointed with this creative name by my daughter. It's really just a frittata. This has been a staple meal for us for a long time, but it has reached a new status since there is nothing else here a frazzled mom can make in a jiffy (besides peanut butter and jelly--but sometimes my bread is still flour). My oldest really loves this meal even though she recently started truing down eggs at breakfast time. She says she doesn't like them. Add potatoes and serve in a triangle wedge and everyone's happy. The greatest thing is it seems I can fill it with whatever vegetable I want and she will eat it all! She can practically (no, really she can) polish of an entire 8" skillet by herself. Chard, spinach, green beans, zucchini...whatever there is I throw it in there and it's gone in a minute. Of course if there aren't potatoes in it the other ingredients get looked at with a bit more scrutiny, but not much.

Once upon a time, I used to do the "Cook One A Month" thing and had all my meals planned out in typed-up calendars, in the freezer and ready to go. I haven't been able to do that since I had my second daughter was born. I made three months worth of meals before she was born. Just when I thought I had the hang of this two kids thing, I realized that I hadn't had to actually cook dinner yet and panicked a little. Clearly, I haven't fully recovered.

"Egg Pizza for dinner again!"

I will be planning at least a week in advance for the winter, and I will hopefully be sharing that plan here.

But for now, I trust in the glory and quickness of the Egg Pizza!

Directions:

Heat 1-3 Tbsp olive oil in a cast iron skillet.
Saute potatoes until browned and the veggies, onions (whatever you like) until soft.
Beat together 6 eggs
Pour over veggies.
Cook on low for about 5 minutes or until edges look cooked.
Place in the oven on low broil until the top is slightly browned (about 5 minutes).
Take out and let cool slightly, slice and serve. This is good hot or cold.

Of course this dish becomes magical with the addition of any kind of cheese. We are mostly dairy free over here but feel free to add about a 1/2 cup of whatever makes you smile.

The Best Tomato Soup IN THE WORLD!

2010-09-17T04:52:00.000-07:00

Well, I haven't had all the tomato soup so maybe I can't know for sure, but this soup is pretty awesome and we have eaten a whole mess load of it in the past month. I got the inspiration for it here. But we are pretty much dairy-free over here so I had to tweak the recipe a bit.

Ingredients:

About 6 pounds of tomatoes (any tomato will work, but Roma tomatoes will have more meat in them and give you a slightly thicker soup)
3 Tablespoons of olive oil
1 large onion
4 cloves of garlic (more or less to taste)
4 large carrots
1 cup cashew cream* (or heavy cream, or light cream)
salt, pepper, herbs such as oregano, basil, thyme, or whatever you like. I just put in an ice cube of pesto from the freezer

Preheat oven to 400 degrees.
Cut tomatoes in half, trim the stem end and place them on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper cut side down. Don't worry about peeling them, when they're done roasting the skins will slip right off. Roast for 30 minutes. Let cool slightly so you can handle the skins without damaging yourself. Pull off the skins.

Heat the olive oil in a soup pot and saute onion and garlic until soft. Add carrots. Add tomatoes. cook on a low simmer until carrots are soft.

Alternately you can skip all the steps after roasting the tomatoes and throw everything in the crock pot and cook on low for 2-4 hours until the carrots are tender.

Use an immersion blender or a blender in batches to puree the soup.

Stop here if you'd like to freeze the soup.

Add cashew cream (or the cream you're using) and drop in your frozen pesto, if using. Heat the soup back up slowly. If you use real cream make extra sure not to let it boil.

Yay!

Cashew Cream?

Cashew cream is the best thing in the whole world if you avoid dairy and even if you don't! I have used it in this soup and in a corn chowder and neither of the soups have that, "this should be cream, but clearly we're dealing with hippies with some sort of dairy-free notion and they refuse to use the good stuff" taste. Really, it adds something magical to soups. You make it using raw cashews , which don't have the strong flavor of cashews you're thinking about. It's thick and creamy and gives the soup a deep flavor.

This is how you make it:
Measure 2 cups raw whole cashews (pieces tend to dry out) and cover in cool water. Put bowl in the fridge over night. Drain the water and put the cashews in a blender and cover with water (about an inch over the cashews). Blend it until it's smooth. I have heard the suggestion to strain it if there are any tiny pieces in it your blender couldn't take care of, but I never had that issue and my blender wasn't the best. Try it! It's sooo good!

Reducing Waste, Going Over the Deep End, or Female Empowerment?

2010-09-08T04:05:00.000-07:00

***WARNING: Possible "Too Much Information" Alert!***

My Husband and I have read a fair amount of stories, articles, blogs and biographies about people living sustainably. Often, when you hear about people living off the grid, making their own cheese, and using a bicycle to power their washing machine, you have a few questions. What do they do for lights? What do they eat in February? How do they mail a letter? Me? I am always wondering what the ladies use during their menstrual cycle. What does this say about me? I don't know.

At the very least it says that I was born sometime after the 1800's. Mass manufactured disposable menstrual products have only been around for about 100 years. Before that women used natural fibers such as wool, sponges, and moss as tampons. Ancient Egyptian women used papyrus. Cotton rags attached by a belt or string were used as well. (Keep in mind that these would need a belt because we've only been wearing undies for a short while too!) And, ready? Lots of women just bled. Like all over the place, I guess. There were these cool menstrual aprons that would catch some of the blood but would presumably be there mostly to protect clothing.

This picture came from the Museum of Menstruation. The site's a little quirky, but filled with interesting information.

During world War I ingenious field nurses started making disposable pads out of bandages, and an industry was born. I guess most pad companies started out in the bandage business. Since then the industry has grown to the money-making machine we see all around us. Or, at least all around us in the pink and powder-blue isle of the grocery store.

I'm not going to get into the details about bleach and plastic so close (and in) our sacred parts. But just know that in using some of these products you have bleach and plastic on and in your sacred parts. I know many ladies are opting for the all cotton disposable products, but I can't afford to throw that kind of money in the trash (literally). Not to mention the trash itself. Well, actually, I will mention it. The trash itself!! Good Lord. I know that I fill about a small plastic shopping bag per month. Let's do a little math.

Let's see...I'll probably begin my menopausal adventure around 50...and I began my lovely journey into womanhood at 11....minus 18 months for my two pregnancies...say another18 months for my non-menstrual nursing time...

That makes 432 periods. Holly Cow!!

At about 1 cubic square foot per month, that means it would only take about 18 women like me to fill a 7.800 cubic ft Olympic sized swimming pool!

(I just did all this math by myself, it's not an official statistic, please don't quote me to your friends, I'm just trying to make a point here).

Before I go on, I would like to stress that I don't think there is anything disgusting about menstrual blood. I don't think it's gross. It doesn't make me queasy. I don't wish I didn't get my period. And I don't intend to tell my daughters it is a curse. I do, however, think trash is gross. I also think that it's interesting that nurses and doctors have to put bandages and needles in locked containers marked "bio hazard" but we can just toss tons of blood-soaked plastic and synthetic poly-fill in the trash. Don't get me wrong, I don't want bathroom trash to have to be picked up by a dude in a haz-mat suit, but maybe we should be thinking a little bit harder about what we do with our bodily waste.

So, for many reasons, (not least of which is to keep up my eco-friendly street cred) I have decided to investigate the merits of reusable cloth pads. Now wait! Before you get all cringy and disgusted, hear me out. I have had this conversation with a couple of people. Although as a rule I don't "get into it" with people--I'm happy with the way I live my life, and I'm happy with the way you live your life--I do think it's telling for people to be kind of appalled by the idea of using reusable pads that they would then have to clean, but they feel fine letting someone else deal with the very personal trash they create. Make no mistake someone is dealing with it. Someone is putting it in the trash truck, someone is dumping it in a land fill, someone is driving the truck that churns the trash into the ground, somewhere an aquifer is being polluted with runoff from that landfill and someone, somewhere, is drinking water that has some of your menstrual trash in it.

I mean, hypothetically speaking, of course.

I don't mean to sound like an environmental Nazi, really I don't. I also don't want to let you believe that I don't make any trash. I'm an American--I make tons of trash. We recycle everything that can be and try to consume as little as possible, but it's a process for sure. Nor would I want to give the impression that I think everyone should attempt to live the way I am trying to live. I firmly believe that the differences in people is what makes the world go 'round. But, if you find yourself thinking it's gross to deal with the clean up from your own period, it might be worth while to ask what you think is gross about it, and if it's ok to let that grossness go out into the world untended. Would you keep a pile of your menstrual trash in your own backyard? No? Because it's in someone's back yard. I mean, when you throw something "away" it only goes away from you, it's still there somewhere.

There is also the trash form the packaging, the boxes, the trash the factory makes, the oil used to get the products to the factory, the oil used to get the products out of the factory...it's all a lot of manufacturing madness.

Without getting too dancing-in-the-moonlight-naked-with-the-Goddess-y, there is also the issue of treating yourself and your cycles with love. Don't let your eyes roll out of your head, there! The thought of putting something on my body to catch my flow that will be thrown out makes the whole thing feel like trash and a chore. But picking out a fabric that looks pretty (I even picked out beautiful pearly-looking snaps) and is soft and comfy feels like caring for myself. It's a totally different attitude toward the event. The thought of my daughters making a supply in anticipation of their first period makes me kind of weepy.

Now let's get practical here. There's also the money. It's costs me about $140 a year to keep myself in menstrual products. That's at least half of the cost of the dance lessons I can't afford for my wee one. The point is, I could use 140 extra dollars. So, off I go on my adventure to make my own pads.

I looked all around on the Internet. The whole idea made me sort of nervous because I am a heavy bleeder. Lots of iron supplements and nettle/yarrow tea helps a bit, but I was afraid that this sort of environmental friendliness was only for the light weights in the outflow department. I generally just use the overnight pads all the time. Serious business. The good thing about making them yourself is that you can make them in the thickness, length, and with the materials best for you and the needs you have throughout the duration of your period.

As for the Materials:

The outer layers are made with flannel, they can be also made with T-shirt material, although I hear that the stretchy knit makes it trickier to sew depending on your experience level. These materials are soft and absorbent.

The inner layers can be flannel, terry cloth, all cotton batting, hemp, cotton fleece or even microfiber cloth, or a combination of these. I did think it would be pure genius (and possibly necessary) to use a ShamWow. Right?! But then I realized that I didn't know what the heck that stuff was made with. Then I thought of using chamois, but I thought my eco-friendly pads should probably be vegan too. You can reduce the cost of these pads even more by using old flannel sheets, shirts or baby blankets, and old towels. I completely sold out and bought new flannel and terry cloth from the clearance bin at JoAnn Fabrics.
A water proof layer can also be made with PUL (polyester laminate), ripstop nylon, felted wool, or high quality fleece. But I didn't bother with this.

How to make your awesome pads!

There are a lot of patterns available on the Internet for free, but in the end I just made my own. I got some helpful hints for doing this and assembled them according to this lovely lady's instructions. I took one of the disposables that were working for me and traced it. Then I traced it again making the pattern for the outer layers adding 1/2 inch. One 1/4 for the seem allowance and another1/4 inch for the filling. Then in the middle third of the pad I added wings. This was the trickiest part. I made them the size I thought they should be, but when I tried them on there was way too much fabric so I pinned the wings when it was on (very carefully) so I could see where they should snap.

First I traced the inner layer pattern onto two layers of flannel and two layers of terry cloth and cut them out.

Then I traced the outer layer pattern (the one with the wings) onto two pieces of flannel and cut them out.

Then I stacked up my inner layers flannel, terry, terry, flannel, and sewed them to the wrong side of the outer layer. Then sew it right down the middle to keep it in place. Then sew a zigzag around the outer edge about 1/4 inch in.

Now take the other outer layer and pin it to the one you've sewed already right side to right side. Sew around the leaving a 1/4" seem allowance and a 2" opening to turn it right side out. Do this on the straightest place you can find to make it easy to close up.

Turn it right side out. Top Stitch close to the edges all the way around. This should also close up your opening.

You're almost done!

Now find the side of the pad that shows the quilting. Add a couple more channels using a zigzag stitch on either side of the middle channel. This will attach the top and the bottom and give you more channels in the pad.

Just attach the snaps or Velcro and your done! Attach the snaps according to the instructions that come with whatever device you have. You can also use the sew-on kind. I can offer a tip if you get a machine similar to mine. I had to press the pins through the fabric before the "stapled" it down, this just prevented the pins from going all wonky.

You're done! You're a craft-Goddess-eco-warrior-feminist! You're reclaiming the earth and the sanctity of your moon cycle. And you've saved some money. Congratulations!

I have only had one test run with them, but I do have answers to expected questions and some unanticipated advantages.

They didn't leak! I was able to check them when I went to the bathroom by lifting up the front and looking underneath. I once saw a tiny spot of red showing through and knew it was time to switch to another.

They didn't slide around! I was concerned that they wouldn't stay put seeing that they were only snapped around my undies, but I didn't have any issues with that at all.

They were soooo comfy. Really they were so nice and soft. It was a great improvement over the plastic. And, not to be too graphic, but you know how uncomfortable pads can get in the heat of the summer.

It wasn't tricky to clean them at all! I just put them in a pot of cold water when I was done using them. I changed the water a couple of times and them just put them all in the wash when I was done. I don't use a dryer so I dried them on the line (I did feel a mix of embarrassment and pride at this). A side note: They worked so well that I thought maybe I wasn't bleeding as much as I usually do. When I dropped them in the water, that immediately dispelled that idea. The water was deep red within seconds. Those things hold a lot of flow!

I didn't feel that gushing feeling at all! Ladies, you know what I'm talking about here. That feeling like some internal body worker just turned up the faucet and you have to stay still for a minute or so while you wait for your pad to absorb this new flood. I was really worried about this. I was sure it would all just slide off. Not only did they not leak, but the blood was absorbed much faster than it is with regular pads. I even thought that maybe that type of flow wasn't happening. But since I only made 6 pads to start with to make sure they worked, I was still supplementing with the rest of my supply of disposable pads. When I used the disposables I had the dreaded experience a bunch of times.

Odor. There wasn't any. This I looked up. I'm not the only one to notice. Apparently, since the materials are more breathable, odors don't have a chance to build up like they do with disposables.

What would you do if you had to use a tampon? Well, this came up. I had to go swimming with my girls during my week. At first I sewed a tube of flannel and closed it on one end and stuffed it with wool. I sewed it up and left the rest of the string (I used embroidery floss). It was like a teeny tiny pillow! It worked, but when I opened it up (wouldn't you be curious?) I realized that wool doesn't really absorb anything, and the flannel did all the work. Also, this design would still be basically disposable because the I would feel a little iffy about being sure that the inside were really clean. The next day I just took a small square of flannel and folded two edges toward the middle, then the other edges toward the middle and then folded it in half and put in in there O.B, style. This worked great and would allow me to wash it and use it again. This is what I would do again if I had to, but on the whole I generally prefer pads.

Are you insane? Yes. But only as insane as women have been for hundreds and hundreds of years.

If you would like to try this out but don't want to make them yourself, you can purchase them. Here are some links!

http://www.gladrags.com/
http://lunapads.com/
http://www.comfyclothpads.com/
http://www.newmoonpads.com/home.html

And don't forget your crafters!

http://www.etsy.com/search_results.php?search_query=pads+cloth+menstrual+pad&search_type=handmade&ref=auto

Future Me And All Her Wiley Ways

2010-09-02T16:16:00.000-07:00

I have had a life-long love affair with oatmeal. Over the years I have found myself imagining the perfect bowl: the creamy color, the maple syrup pooling around the edges, the fresh fruit piled up on top, perhaps a sprinkling of toasted walnuts, and the steam rising and curling in wisps from the beautiful breakfast. This vision is enough to send me to the store right then. I gather the ingredients, prepare this artful masterpiece, and sit down to enjoy. Trembling with anticipation I take the first mouthful and remember, once again, that I hate oatmeal. I’m not a fan of its pasty texture, and its need to be saturated in more sugary stuff than I would normally consume in a week.

Nonetheless, this scenario has occurred a lot of times. The reason for this is because somewhere along the way I got it in my head that eating oatmeal is in line with the habits of the “Future Me”

Allow me introduce you:

Future Me gets up early, does yoga, makes a cup of herbal tea and gets ready to tuck in to a big bowl of healthy oatmeal. She reads the paper while she eats and waits in joyful anticipation for her children to arise. Future Me is patient and orderly. She wears long earnings and those sweaters with the big loose neck. (The sweater is probably knitted by her cool friends who spin yarn from their alpacas). She is lithe with the kind of body for whom jeans will rest hoop-like around her waist. She has wild black curly hair that is cut just at her chin and makes a neat wedge shape. Future Me is so calm and collected that you never quite know what she’s thinking, but it must be nice because she’s always got a subtle contented smile on her face. She lives in my head. She has a funky loft up there. She’s always having people over for cake, or hosting garden dinner parties. She has been with me for as long as I can remember and has made something of a pastime out of stealing my life right form under my nose.

Future Me holds all my “if/then's,” she holds all my “should be's.” If I could keep up my own yoga practice, then I would be more patient with the girls....I should be less boisterous, less emotional....If I were thinner then I could accept my body as it is...I should be taking more time to collect myself in the morning....If I had friends who had alpacas then they would make me cool sweaters with big floppy turtle necks...

We all have some form of a future me, or a future life, or a future place. Somewhere that’s better than where we are now. A life that has a little bit more money, a house that is a little bit cleaner, newer, bigger. A body that’s thinner, more attractive, more muscular, healthier. A life out there where we can accept ourselves, enjoy ourselves, and appreciate our experiences. These are all powerful imaginations that, while at times can be motivating for needed change, result more often in us simply missing the life we actually have. How much money do we need to finally be “safe” and satisfied? How much thinner or stronger must we get before we can love ourselves? How clean do our homes have to be before we sit and read to ourselves or to our children? How long are we willing to live in a future when the life we have slips away?

The idea of living in the moment is certainly nothing new. Masters and profits have been banging on this drum for many thousands of years now. This idea isn't even new to me, in my short life I've come across the suggestion a whole bunch of times. I kind of get it...but not really. I mean, I understand that this moment, this one now, is the only one that is actually happening and the past and future live in my head in their respective lofts. I understand with my head that I should be fully immersed in this moment, but I don't understand exactly how to do it.

Guess she wanted to be alone.

Actually, the truth is, I thought I was doing a pretty good job of it most of the time. Then I had kids. Having children throws so much of our strengths and shortcomings into sharp relief, doesn't it? Well, I realized that while I was envisioning the family life and childhood I wanted them to have, they were occupying themselves while I cleaned the house to get ready for it. Unfortunately, my kids won't be able to enjoy the childhood I have imagined for them. It really is too bad, because it’s quite idyllic. They, instead, will have the memories of the childhood they actually had. For instance, even though I want them to cook dinner with me, and imagine that this would be a great experience for all of us, they will remember watching Dora the Explorer while I barricade myself in the kitchen and beg them to give me a minute. Realizing that I can't take them with me into my mind where I'm living with Future Me most of the time, is helping me to see that I'm not really living that future life either, just imaging it while my body goes through the motions on auto pilot. Basically, while I'm living this other life, the one where I wear long earnings and have a clean house, the life I do have gets done without me.

I want to tell you it's not usually like this...

But, it seems that no matter how much I know this, no matter how many works of philosophy and guidance I read, no matter how many positive reminders I have taped above the light switches of my home, I retreat into my mind where better things are happening. Even when I realize a particular trap, a new one springs up and it takes me a while to realize it's the same trap. Really there's no difference between an if/then and a when/then. But these futures are powerful. We have it together there and we look great, it’s hard not to get sucked into this fairytale. My future self is so powerful that she has enticed me to repeatedly subject myself to oatmeal. I imagine if I can imitate certain aspects of this future life I can somehow attain the wholeness of the vision. Like I can alter my personality, body type and hair at all let alone with a bowl of oatmeal and a 5 am yoga session. Even it if were possible, how much oatmeal would I have to eat to make me a quiet, contentedly smiling waif with curly hair?!

I think it would take a lot of oatmeal.

The point isn’t weather or not we can transform our lives to fit the visions we may have for the future, the point is weather or not we can love and live the life we’re really in. The one where we go to a job maybe we don’t like, or have a home we can’t keep tidy, or occasionally loose our patience with those we love. A life where our body doesn’t fit our ideal or it’s raining or too hot outside. We may not like it all the time, but it has something over Future Me’s life and that is the fact that it’s real. You can smell it, taste it and touch it in all its imperfect glory. The present is all we have, denying it is a form of self torture. I think the cruelest thing I’ve done to myself in my quest to become Future Me has been to totally disregard who I actually am and the life I have. I mean, future me wouldn’t want me to treat myself that way. She’s probably a Buddhist who meditates for at least an hour everyday (perfectly) and can extend infinite compassion all around herself. I, on the other hand, have subjected myself to all kinds of self torment and it hasn’t all been as benign as a bowl of oatmeal.

About a year or so ago I was grappling with some unhealthy patterns I had been holding onto for a good chunk of my life. These were scary things to leave behind because leaving them meant something new, and I wasn’t sure what that newness would bring. It has often been said that people will choose the prison they know over the freedom they don’t know. Not only was I scared to leave these things behind, but I felt I was mentally and emotionally incapable of doing so. Needless to say, Future Me didn’t have these problems. So in typical fashion, I tried to tough love myself over it. I should be free of these patterns. If I didn’t behave this way or that my life would be better, etc. I constantly worried and berated myself, and this went on for a long time, I’m talking years here, and despite my best efforts, I didn’t seem to be able to empower myself this way. A close friend suggested to me that I just accept that I couldn’t do it now, but know that someday I would. She said, “Just say to yourself: These patterns are not healthy for me and I would like to be rid of them but right now I don’t have the strength, resources or power to do it.” I have to admit, that seemed totally lame to me. Admitting that I couldn’t do it was the same as deciding not to do anything about it, right?

I had failed to see that what my friend was suggesting wasn’t permission, it was simply fact. The fact was I needed to leave some junk behind and I couldn’t. That was clear because I hadn’t yet left my junk behind. So I gave it a shot. What the heck. I had been trying this other…let’s call it a technique…for years, why not the wacky idea of accepting reality. I began to assure myself that when I was ready, I would change. Let me tell you how much less energy this takes than worrying and berating--a lot less. And then….magically, within months I suddenly had the strength, resources and power to make the changes I needed.

I had a moment at the beginning of this new approach where I saw my past self: crippled, scared, and stunted. And I saw this other lady: me. She was the real actually possible future me. No curly hair or quite smile. Just the me I would be without these other pieces holding me back. In this moment I was neither of these ladies completely. I was a person holding aspects of my past and the possibility of a different future. As I stood in my kitchen and watched these two women: one sitting on the stool, hunched over and fearful; the other standing, and watching the other with love and understanding, I could see the value, in a very tangible way, of simply making a small choice in the moment to choose my better self. It was so real and so powerful that I simply stepped between these two visions and chose: this one.

That's all a Future Me is, right? A better self we imagine and wish to be. But then, cleverly, give them a totally different body than we ourselves possess, we outfit them, furnish a home in our heads and put them in the future, where they can remain out of reach while we muddle through our lives wishing we were elsewhere

In my imaginary out of body experience, my better self was right there. She wasn't out of reach; she wasn't dressed in funky clothes that don't exist in my own closet. She didn't have friends with alpacas. She was just me with a different choice in her heart.

'Cause really, nothing but a baby sits jauntily on these hips.

This is where living in the moment becomes a little more accessible for me. A life where I'm living in the moment is too hard to imagine, and it goes straight into Future Me's domain bogged down with contingencies like a clean house, more time and a different body. However, a moment where I choose my better self is a little easier to imagine. But I try not imagining it, because that means I'm looking into a future moment and not making the choice for this one here.

There is a passage in the Tao Te Ching that reads:

I have just three things to teach:
simplicity, patience, compassion.
These three are your greatest treasures.
Simple in actions and in thoughts,
you return to the source of being.
Patient with both friends and enemies,
you accord with the way things are.
Compassionate toward yourself,
you reconcile all beings in the world.

Accepting things as they are is an incredible act of compassion. I would go so far as to say that it’s a radical act of love. When we are free from the illusion that we can change the present by wishing it were the future, we can make even the most disagreeable present bearable. Our simple, patient, compassion toward the reality of “what is” makes it so. When we have accepted that what is happening is happening and we’re here with it, there’s no room for wishing it were different, or berating ourselves. We have chosen our life over our mind’s idea of our life. Our breathing life, The life those we love actually participate in. That life where we feel the sun and rain, the life where we taste the garden’s goods, only happens in the present. Forsaking the present for an imagined future leaves us almost literally life-less.

I don’t know how to balance this present living with the need to have a retirement fund for the future. I don’t know how to effect change in my life long term without loosing the moment. (Any pointers on this would be welcome). But I do know about a choice in a moment to choose my better self. With this choice on the tip of my heart, I can see the difference between a moment that is being given to the future and one that is being lived. The moment that’s being lived has sound, I can feel it with my hands, and its color is brilliant. Zen masters and Yogis seem to be constantly bringing us back to the breath. Breathing happens in the moment, so it’s a handy reminder. But so do the tiny sounds, smells and sights of life. Can you hear birds and car horns, the sound of the wind, the argument your kids are having? Can you see the individual leaves of a tree, your spouse’s smile, or your check engine light? Can you feel the mail in your hand when you bring it in from the mail box? Then more than likely you’re not imagining it. And when you are actually there it is magnificent, isn’t it?

Looking Ahead

2010-09-01T12:54:00.000-07:00

As a person who is chronically jumping from one unfinished job to the next exciting new prospect, the act of looking ahead is always tinged with a bit of guilt and doubt.

"Is it really time to focus on that upcoming task?"
"What have I left undone?"
"Am I afraid of whatever I'm leaving behind?"
"Will anyone really notice that I have one black and one dark brown crock on, really?"

But the end of summer is all looking ahead for me. The summer is so exhausting (in a wonderful way, of course) that by the time it comes to its close I am ready and willing. The fall brings such new cozy and inward-looking adventures, and the change is so clear in its coming, that I can't help but look forward. It's not like the other seasonal changes that seem to sneak up on you, where you find yourself wondering, "When did it get cold enough to snow? " Or you find yourself walking through a forest that just days before was bleak and desolate, the only sign of green the frosty lichen on the trees, and now it is suddenly bursting with little green shoots of life. Fall comes charging in, red banners unfurled, blazing in the last heat waves of summer.
"I am coming!" says Fall, "And I'm bringing a mess-load of pumpkins!"

I live in New England. That's how Fall talks over here.

This fall is bringing a lot of changes to our household. But the thing I think I am looking forward to the most is the blessed, beautiful, benevolent Schedule. Oh my lovely, how I've missed you! I never thought I'd say those words, but I tell you I have been a little lost without it. I type it out, put it on the fridge, and follow it's directives like a love-sick slave. Tell me what to do, tell me what to do, tell me what to do....

No unplanned early vegetables to process and hide away. No more impromptu sojourns to the beach. Just wonderful stability.

Now, it is entirely possible that I am romanticizing this just a little. The same way, in February, I romanticized the bounty of the harvest. But for now, before I actually have to obey my Schedule Master, it does seem worth looking forward to. Predictability, and that mess-load of pumpkins.

Tomatoes

2010-08-26T05:19:00.000-07:00

If August were a woman she would be draped in red, with long red hair, and a fiery temper. I'm pretty sure she just stormed into my house dumped a bunch of tomatoes and zucchini on my kitchen floor, looked at me lovingly, and, just as I was getting used to having her around, said she was about ready to leave. Sigh. That is the way of passionate love affairs, I guess. When it goes that way, you can usually console your self with a zip-up hoodie your fiery-tempered lover has left behind in their haste. In this way August's leaving me is similar. She is leaving her bounty for me to savor while she slips out the door and the slow, cool comfort of Autumn takes her place.

Last year, with the blight, there was scarcely a tomato around. I bought a box of sauce tomatoes from a local farm and made a batch of ketchup that wasn't very good. Well, it was good, but it wasn't ketchup. If you thought of it as tomato spread, or something like that it was alright. But if you sat there with your french fry and thought, "I can't wait to have some ketchup," you would find yourself disappointed. The spices were too strong and all wrong. It did, however, make a mean BBQ Sauce.

This year there are tomatoes! It is very exciting. So far, I have preserved them by:

1. Roasting and Freezing: Set your oven to 200 degrees, cut Tomatoes in half and line a baking sheet with parchment paper, and place tomatoes on the sheet cut side down. Roast for 2 hours. When they come out of the oven, let them cool so you can touch them. The skins with just slip right off. Pack a mason jar 2/3 full only! (the jar will crack in the freezer if it's more than that), and pop it in the freezer. These can be used later for sauce or soup. The roasting makes the flavor absolutely incredible.

2. "Sun Dry" (dehydrate): I sliced the big tomatoes into thirds and dehydrated them in my electric dehydrator for about a day. The plum tomatoes I sliced in half and dehydrated them for longer. The manual says it shouldn't take this long, but that's how long it took. I am still having trouble finding the right consistency. I know they should be leathery, but when they are they still seem wet, and I don't want them to mold. So the truth is some of them are a little crisper than usual. I'll have to soften them in water before I use them. I have also dehydrated the cherry tomatoes. We had an abundance, and I couldn't figure out what to do with them. We sliced them in half and dehydrated them (they are doing this right now) and I will pack them in olive oil in jelly jars.

3. Tomato Jam: What's tomato jam? I don't really know. It seems like it's similar to ketchup bu not as thick. My two-and-a-half-year-old says, "I yike dis tomato jam, Mama." I took the recipe from The Big Book Preserving the Harvest.

4. Tomato Sauce: This recipe I took from Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving. It is a water bath recipe, which means that it doesn't have to be pressure canned. It has lemon juice added to boost the acidity so we don't get botulism. I also boiled the ever-living life out of that stuff. So hopefully we won't all die from a home cooked spaghetti dinner.

I am hoping to make some salsa, some real ketchup, and some more tomato sauce. I don't really have enough right now to make it through winter. I think more than likely I will be spending the weekend gathering sauce tomatoes and canning. Which is fine, really. Now that the summer is coming to an end, my panicky feelings that it won't be enough are (mostly) turning into contended feelings of having done the best I could. And after last year, I'm grateful for any tomatoes.

The Monarch

2010-08-18T08:11:00.000-07:00

I love seeing images in field guides of cool, lesser noticed bugs, the really big ones, or the ones that have more colors than most, or even the ones that live for a brief moment in time and then go on their journey into death and beyond. It makes it all seem something like a treasure hunt. In all my (relatively) brief years, I have never seen an actual monarch caterpillar. They are so big and so yellow, that it seems amazing that I've never come across one, but there you have it.

"MOM! Come quick!"
I hear this a lot. It is usually followed by "See what Hunter did!"
(Her mischievous younger sister)

But this time it was followed by, "See what I found!"

'Lo and behold my daughter had found a bona-fide monarch caterpillar that was huge, and most likely in its last instar before going into it's pupal stage. She found it chomping away on our milkweed plants right next to the front porch (which is, of course, exactly why we planted them).

Inspired by this momma here, I thought we would make an environment for her and watch this miracle happen. I had a large glass biscotti jar I got at a yard sale, got some sticks and milkweed leaves, a piece of screen and a rubber band and got to work. I found a lot of helpful information here at the Butterfly School. Did you know that caterpillars don't need water in their "house" because they get all the water they need from the plants they eat? Did you know that caterpillar poop is called frass? Did you know how loud the term "pupa" will make a four-year-old laugh? Well, neither did I. Look how much smarter we are already.

At first the little one ate.

And ate.

And ate some more.

It was the very hungry caterpillar all over again.

Then it stopped. I got freaked out and called the Audubon society. They informed me (without even laughing a little bit) they they don't eat continuously without stopping ever, and that it probably just needed a rest. She was right. It ate and ate a bit after that.

Toward the evening it started to climb up the side of the jar. This was really amazing to watch. As she climbed she was swaying her head back and forth, kind of like she was questing for something. As I sat (the girls were heading off to bed at this point) with my arms folded on the table and my head resting upon them, I saw that she was actually weaving a silky ladder for herself. It seemed the jar was too slippery for her to hang on without some help. So she made this ladder, and slept there on the side of the jar. When my husband came downstairs after putting the kids to sleep, he asked if I was going to watch it all night and that it seemed like it was probably sleeping.

The next morning we gave it fresh leaves and it seemed to just sort of putz around. By the next day it was hanging from the screen in the tell-tale "J" shape! We were headed out that day, and I was so afraid that we would miss the magical chrysalis transformation into the pupal stage (hahahaha).

When we came home there was a bright green thing coming from the head area, and some liquid dripping. I immediately thought it was dead. But after my previous folly into freakedoutedness, before calling the authorities I decided to wait. And then we waited one more day. It was dead.

When I had spoken to the Audubon lady she talked a bit about how sometimes they die. She said, "People get so fussy about them and monitor their every move. But sometimes they die. It's just the way it is."

I was heartbroken. And I was so sad to have to tall my kids. Athena asked if we could wait another day, and so we did. By this time it was beginning to shrivel and dry up. When I told her it was really dead her response was, "Can I hold it now?" I hadn't let her handle it again since I learned that we have bacteria on our hands that can kill it, and I was afraid her little sister would crush it by accident.

Her response blows my mind. She's a really different kind of kid than I was (am). If I had gone through something like this at her age I would have been inconsolable for days. Possibly years. Really, there is still some lame stuff that still gives me pangs. Like that time I threw my Chatty Cathy Doll off the second story balcony to see what would happen. It breaks. (pang). But Athena just moves on to the next truth. It's dead now, so we can't hurt it, I can hold it. Just like that. Don't think she's cold either, she loves all living things, and they love her. I seriously just watched a lobster fall asleep in her arms the other day. A lobster. But she has a very matter-of-fact was of looking at things. She inherits this handy skill from her father, and not from me. I am still honing my matter-of-fact skills.

Later that week we were by the tomatoes and I heard, "MOM! Come Quick!"
I hurried over, checking to make sure the little one was in view.
"Look! Frass!"
She had found a pile of frass identical to the one the monarch left behind. We rooted around to see if we could get another, but it was long gone.

So our butterfly adventure didn't turn out the way we (or the Monarch) hoped, but we learned a little. My kid has a sharper, keener eye for the nature around her, and her momma learned to enjoy the beauty of what is, whether it falls in with my expectations or not. Thanks, Kid.

Toothpaste

2010-08-10T20:02:00.000-07:00

I am on a mission to reduce my consumption. I have tightened the screws, and as supplies run out, I am looking for less wasteful or reusable ways to replace them. I have been patiently waiting for the toothpaste to run out completely to motivate me to try out some recipes.

When I began my inquires to the Internet about how to make toothpaste, I came across a few interesting things. One was the information that toothpaste usually has aspartame in it. This is apparently what make toothpaste so sweet. I am a little embarrassed to say that I had never even thought about toothpaste being sweet, let alone what makes it that way. Needless to say, I'm glad we won't be having any more of that before breakfast. Another ingredient in commercial toothpaste is glycerin. This is also makes it sweet and it gives toothpaste its pasty consistency. Many natural recipes also use vegetable glycerin. I had to look up glycerin to find out what it actually is. I do have some I got at the pharmacy because it is needed in the task of making snow globes (it helps suspend the glitter flakes in the water, making their decent delightfully slower). I found that "Glycerin is a thick liquid that is colorless and sweet tasting. It has a high boiling point and freezes to a paste. Glycerin's most common use is in soap and other beauty products like lotions, though it is also used, in the form of nitroglycerin, to create dynamite." Oh. Wait, what?!

So, I read more. Basically, glycerin is a chemical that is derived from the soap making process. It comes from fats which can be vegetable or animal. It's sweet, syrupy, and pulls moisture to itself, which is why it is used in a lot of lotions. Now, without making my degree in fine arts and not in science painfully clear, I will try to explain why it is controversial. I read some information that suggests the reason why it hydrates the skin so well is because it is actually pulling the moisture from your own skin's deeper layers, drying your body from the inside out. It also is a dubious toothpaste ingredient because it appears to leave a film on the teeth for days, preventing remineralization of the teeth.

When in doubt--Leave it out. So I did.

Don't even get me started on fluoride. Seriously, I don't want you to think I really belong on a compound in Montana with a sniper rifle strapped to my back. But, "The fluoride added to 90% of drinking water is hydrofluoric acid which is a compound of fluorine that is a chemical byproduct of aluminum, steel, cement, phosphate, and nuclear weapons manufacturing. Such fluoride is man made. In this form, fluoride has no nutrient value whatsoever. It is one of the most caustic of industrial chemicals. Fluoride is the active toxin in rat poisons and cockroach powder. Hydrofluoric acid is used to refine high octane gasoline, to make fluorocarbons and chlorofluorocarbons for freezers and air conditioners, and to manufacture computer screens, fluorescent light bulbs, semiconductors, plastics, herbicides, -- and toothpaste." I don't want fluoride in my toothpaste either.

So what did I do instead? I made m'self some toothpaste out of coconut oil, baking soda, peppermint essential oil, and stevia.

See? This stuff comes from the kitchen.

Why these things? Well, apparently we don't need much more than flossing, gentle brushing and a mild plaque-sanding abrasive to keep our teeth healthy (not to mention plenty of dark, leafy greens filled with calcium). The baking soda is the abrasive, the stevia is to make it a little sweeter (it's a plant extract you can use as a calorie-free sugar substitute), the peppermint is to freshen your breath and hide the unpleasant taste of baking soda, and the coconut oil is to make it pasty. I saw a lot of recipes that included things like hydrogen peroxide and tea tree oil. These ingredients would be added to kill bacteria, but that's a little too much chemical for me. Tea tree essential oil is natural and everything, but it's pretty serious. I was thinking of adding a little bit of sage tincture to the toothpaste, but I ended up just adding it to my mouthwash instead. Sage in an anti-viral and had been used to treat gingivitis, so I figured I was in good shape to use this.

But back to the toothpaste. First I used equal parts coconut oil and baking soda (2 Tablespoons each):

Then I added 1 more tablespoon of baking soda:

Then a little more....

Then one more.

In the end I used 2 tablespoons coconut oil to 4 tablespoons baking soda.

Then I added 35 drops of stevia to the mix. Stevia has a sweetness equivalent that is something like 2 drops stevia to 1 tsp sugar. it's pretty sweet, but it has nothing in it to rot your teeth, add pounds or cause cancer in lab rats in the state of California. After that I added about 10 drops peppermint oil. Both of these ingredients are about personal taste.

It came out pretty good. My oldest daughter loves it, my youngest, not so much. But they both use it. We have been using it for maybe a month now, no problems. Except the dispensing. I tried to get a small squeeze bottle but it didn't work. Someone somewhere on the Internet had the idea of taking an empty toothpaste tube, cutting off the end, filling it that way and using one of those toothpaste pushers to seal the end. This seems fairly brilliant and I plan to try it out just as soon as I get my hands on one of those things and an empty toothpaste tube. For now we just kind of scoop a little bit out of an amber glass jar. Not ideal, but it works.

This is my final recipe:

2 Tbsp Coconut oil
4 Tbsp Baking Soda
35 Drops Stevia Extract
10 Drops Peppermint Essential Oil

Mix. Brush. Feel Free.

It's Busy Here!

2010-08-09T05:27:00.000-07:00

Summer is in full swing and things have been moving at a quick pace. I haven't had a moment to sit down and write about the projects, recipes and adventures we're having, but they are happening none-the-less. Here is a sneak preview in pictures of some of the things I've been up to. Details to follow....

Caterpillars and Worms

Toothpaste and Tinctures

Herbs

Art Spaces

and dubious parenting (that's right, she's asleep standing up)

Fall Crops, Time To Learn

2010-07-29T06:46:00.000-07:00

We basically missed the boat for many plantings for the summer. We started some tomatoes indoors, as well as basil, zinnias, and a bunch of herbs. We direct sowed peas, mustard greens, chard, carrots, radishes, endive, kale, leeks, broccoli and cabbage. Some of these things we sowed into a cold frame that were then to be transplanted. Much of these things grew, don't get me wrong. Many of them failed to get transplanted by me, when I was too busy mothering. We did eat a bunch of lettuce, have pesto from the basil, froze and ate some kale and mustard greens, snacked on carrots, and will actually get a few tomatoes off of the plants that are growing great despite being all crammed together.

The tomatoes here are resting on the center piece of the cold frame above. Those were our neat little rows of seedlings, all happy-like and filled with promise. Some grew and were eaten, but as you can see we just let the tomatoes stay in the other side and get messy. When I finally thought to transplant some of them it was too late and they were a little too big to get moved around in the hot sun and they died, so I left the rest as they were.

I'm not feeling too down on my little family, we did our best, and we're learning. But, I am determined to get better at this, and that means practice. I consulted the Oracle of Homesteading and Sustainable Living (that would be Mother Earth News) and found their "what to plant now" page, so I could find out what to pant now. It turns out I was just about to miss planting a bunch of stuff...again! I prepared the garden beds, and so far have planted turnips, chard, kale, carrots, dry beans, and lettuce. I did this about a week a go and couldn't write about it because my husband was away in Oregon learning how to build earthen bread ovens, and it was something of a surprise for his homecoming. They have already started coming up and they look wonderful! I am really excited, maybe more than I should be, but I feel like I finally did something right with this gardening on time thing.

Calipso Dry Beans (they look like yin yangs!)

We also built two cold frames so we could do some winter gardening. According to Elliot Coleman, we can be planting some crops as late as October and get food all the way through December or later! The idea of having fresh spinach and lettuce all the way until December is so exciting that I can't even think about it lest my little heart burst with hope and longing.

I'm starting to watch the clock a little as August approaches. I know a lot of crops ripen in the next two months, but I am looking at my pantry and my freezer, and I find myself feeling like it's not going to work. What will I do!? (I should probably start with breathing). The tomatoes still haven't come in, the peppers are just starting, the potatoes aren't up and the winter squash is still months away...I will be fine, people. Don't worry about me. I won't starve.

Turnips! I think I'm most excited about these.

But the farm share we have been members of since our oldest daughter started eating (her first foods were from this farm) has stopped, for now, giving out the extras to the shareholders. This is a reaction to some people being pushy at "extra pick-up times." Our farm share is only a farm share and so their extras don't get sold at a farmer's market. They give some to the employees, people take them to food pantries and they do sell a little at the nature camp they run, but there is always more. Up until this year they have offered extras a couple of days a week. This results in a bunch of Prius driving vultures standing around the distribution table, reusable bags clenched in their hands waiting for the "go" signal and then snatching up what they can. It really wasn't all that cut throat, but I guess that last year some people were being rude and greedy. My husband experienced this and really didn't want to bother picking up the extras. After that we kind of just hung back and took everything that was left. Seriously, we took it all. All those tiny, topless carrots mixed in the the greens at the bottom of the bin, we washed, peeled, shredded and dehydrated them. Bins and Bins of huge eggplants? You know I canned them. Contractor grade bags of tat soi? We washed and froze the hell out of it and ate it for two years! Without the ability to get huge quantities of produce for (basically) free, my little homesteading dream kind of falls apart.

Carrots! I know I could have sowed more into this area and thinned them out, but I find it really tricky to think carrots, and I thought if I had small rows it would be easier for me to thin them...we'll see.

We are taking steps to make our yard more hospitable to gardening on a larger scale. But there could be all the space in the world, and if I still don't know what I'm doing it won't matter. Is my panic palpable? Can you feel it oozing thorough your keyboard to grab you by the wrists? I think the thing I have the hardest time with in all this earth living, is the time frame. I am a procrastinator, I am a little scatter-brained at times and I am a job jumper (I bounce from one project to the next without actually finishing what I started). All of these traits have been with me for a long time and we are all very cozy. I am in the process of freeing myself from these balls and chains, but it's a long, slow, break-up. In the mean time, when I don't get something done because "I'll do it tomorrow," tomorrow comes full of seedlings that have died because they did actually want to be watered yesterday. I think it's very good for me and my personal development and all that, but it's like nails on a chalkboard to slowly reform the well-grooved ridges of my brain.

That said, I'd better get into the kitchen to process the 30 pounds of zucchini into things that I will eat in the winter before tomorrow comes correct with rotten produce.

Simple Summer Squash Sauce

2010-07-28T11:56:00.000-07:00

My family has quit eating dairy for a number of reasons. It gives my oldest daughter and myself a stuffy nose, makes us cranky, and is one of the very few foods we had to actually go to the grocery store for at this point. We figured by cutting it out we might enjoy better health and have one less thing to rely on The Man for. We are in the midst of a 30-day clean out, and I have seen real changes in my oldest daughter's behavior. It's really amazing. I had realized I was sensitive to dairy after Christmas when the cheese was free flowing and I finally couldn't breath at all. I thought I'd give quitting dairy a shot and cleaned out my body for 30 days and felt a world of difference. When I asked my husband if he noticed any difference in me, he avoided eye contact and said "Yes..."
"What is it?" I prodded, assuming he was just having trouble putting into words the amazing change in my now glowing complexion.
"You're, well..you're nicer."
"What do you mean by that!" I asked (very nicely).

So that's how I learned that dairy gives me a stuffy nose, and possibly makes me cranky.

This has changed our menu quite a bit. We don't eat a lot of meat and relied pretty heavily on the creamy, protein-filled goodness of cheese, whole milk and butter. It's proving to be a bit of a learning curve in the kitchen. One thing I have noticed recently is that my older girl especially is always hungry. I think she's suffering from a lack of fat in her diet. I'm trying to step up the fat content of our dinners. This dish is not an example of that, but I did manage to make a fairly "creamy" sauce for our homemade whole wheat egg noodles.

Summer Squash sauce

3 Summer Squash (I used the deep golden summer squash, not zucchini or crookneck. Either of these could be substituted, but they just won't give the same color.)
1 medium onion
olive oil
2 Tablespoons cornstarch
1/4 cup cool water
1/4 tsp nutmeg
salt and pepper to taste.

Slice up the squash and steam until tender. While that's steaming, dice the onion and saute in the oil until tender. Puree the squash and add to the skillet with the onions. (You could puree the onions with the squash if you have picky eaters who will let their dinner get ice cold while they carefully pick out all the onion pieces). Dissolve the cornstarch in cool water and add to the pan. Cook over med/low heat while stirring until it thickens up. Add salt, pepper and nutmeg. Mix in some pasta and enjoy!

Blueberries: The Continuing Saga

2010-07-24T19:50:00.000-07:00

While I waited patiently for the wild blueberries to get a move on and ripen up, the cultivated bushes are gong nuts all over the place around here. Peak season can often mean discounts for bulk. We don't want to miss out on things like that, so thanks to my lovely aunt and cousins who watched my children all day while I drove to Tougas Family Farm and picked blueberries for three hours. I just made the 25 pound discount. Only just! It takes s a long time to pick tiny fruit off a bush.

After about 45 minutes or so, the field I was in started to clear out until I was the only person left in that area. I stood in front of the same 4-6 bushes for the entire time (they were laden with ripe fruit), with no sound but the wind in the pines and the birds over head. Silence. Those of you with children may have a hard time understanding me here. What I mean to say is: there was no sound. For two full hours. I'm not sure I've had that experience in a couple of years at best. It was magnificent. So much so, that a couple of times I got kind of choked up. I didn't full on cry, but I came close.

When I got home it quickly became clear to me that my children could easily eat 25 pounds of blueberries in one sitting. so I took them away. I filled a couple of pints and put them in the fridge for snaking. I have frozen 12 pounds. To freeze them I just laid them on a baking sheet lined with parchment paper in one pound batches (about three cups) and froze them. After that I put them into mason jars. I would have probably vacuum sealed them but I was out and it seems a little easier to get at this way, I can take as little or as much as I need. They do, however take up more space in the freezer this way, so I may have to vacuum seal them later anyway.

I also took 3 pounds and made 4 pints of blueberry juice concentrate (instructions here). With this I will be able to make refreshing blueberry juice and berry sumacade during the winter. I am planning to make 12 jars of jam tonight (if I don't choose to go to bed instead) and will dehydrate about four pounds into fruit leathers, which I hope come out better than my strawberry fruit leathers.

These 25 pounds will most likely take care of my yearly blueberry needs. I went back with the kids the next day and we picked for pleasure an even got some peaches.

We took home about three pounds, which are being turned into pancakes, snack, and dinner.

Athena Made this lunch herself!

While I was out in the blazing heat picking the cultivated berries, the precious wild berries were ripening. I made plans with my friend Kerry, fellow mother and earth lady, to meet in the woods behind Target. She would bring her two boys and I would bring my big girl. We got up early, grabbed our buckets and our cups on strings (these are to hang around your neck to free up both hands for picking) and tromped into the woods. The bushes were covered! It was a much better show than the week before. Athena got right to picking, just as I thought she might. We hadn't been in the woods 10 minutes before Kerry's little one, James, let out an ear piercing scream. He had been stung by a bee. His momma managed to calm him down and he was game to keep picking (and eating) the tiny wild berries. We got back into our groove and there was another ear piercing scream. This time from Athena. It kind of started as a whine and so at first I didn't think she was hurt. She's four-and-a-half and whining happens a lot around here. But within seconds, I realized she too had been stung by a bee. I could see the little guy on her pants. I pulled the pants away from her leg, but there was still screaming. I picked her up to carry her to the path and over her shoulder I could see Kerry's horrified look, "She's covered in bees," she said. Sure enough Athena had a bunch of bees on her pants. We stripped them off and her poor little legs were covered in at least ten stings. Luckily I had made toothpaste the night before and had brought some for Kerry to try out. She ran to the car to get it and I put the baking soda mixture on all the bites. I guess it neutralizes the sting. It seemed to make a difference. But the bees wouldn't leave her pants alone. I think she probably got more peach juice on her pants than I had realized before leaving the house. To make matters worse, they were inside out, so there were bees all up in her pants. Kerry got a stick and tried to get the bees out, because, you know, she had no pants on, but while the attempt was being made, James got stung again. Off came his pants.

"Just leave the pants here, I'll get them another time!" And out we ran, about a third of a cup of blueberries between us and two kids with no pants on.

Back at the van, while we waited to see if our kids were going to go into anaphylactic shock, I ran into Target to get Athena something to wear. When I got back and gave her a dress, she was very pleased, and not suffocating. So all was good. We relaxed a bit. The kids ate some pretzels. I spent my time feeling horrible. I had led my new friend, her children and my own first born into a bee hive. Traumatizing children is not part of my wild edibles MO. My revelry of self-loathing was interrupted by yet another ear-piercing scream. Apparently the bee that had been hanging out on James for the past 20 minutes had decided to sting him. Poor kid! So we made everyone take their clothes off and reinspected them for bees.

We all calmed down again. The kids listened to music and the mothers discussed the resilience of children. We eventually decided to run our errands at Target so we could at least say we got something done. We walked along the edge of the parking lot, the ripe, plentiful blueberries teasing us all along the way.

"Ain't nothin' in this world is free, baby," they said, "take the bad with the good and come on over."

We (the moms) decided we would find something in Target to occupy our children, and after our errands were run, we would come back out and pick some more. And so we did, Kerry pulled up her van, parked it sideways and opened the door. We sandwiched the kids in between the van and the edge of the parking lot. Armed with a new box of sidewalk chalk we told them to "stay in between these white lines" and went into the woods to pick blueberries. Really, we were right there, just up a two foot slope.

Athena and James sitting on the curb, the blueberry forest in the background. Athena is admiring her "sorry-you-got-stung-by-ten-bees-and-we-had-to-leave-your-pants-in-the-woods" dress

Eventually, they heard the saucy call of the blueberries and came up to join us, picking and eating to their heart's content. They were not even scarred for life a little bit. In under an hour we both picked about two cups. This is really not so bad for wild bushes. We didn't travel far and could have gotten a lot more with a little more time and a little less kids. We are working out a way to go back without the little angels.

I feel like I have passed some sort of initiation. This is my first utterly ridiculous time collecting wild edibles.

Blueberry Juice Concentrate

2010-07-24T19:49:00.000-07:00

I found this great idea here at mother Earth News. I did it last year with my blackberries, and will be making a lot more this year. I started with blueberries this year. The juice concentrate can be turned into a drink any strength you like, from a really sweet juice to something more like fruit water.

It's super easy too!

1. Thoroughly rinse berries, and place them in a heavy pot with just enough water to make them bob. (I used 3 pounds of blueberries and 4 cups of water) Bring to a slow boil, mash with a potato masher or spoon, bring back to a boil, and remove from the heat. Cool slightly.

2. Pour the mashed berries into a jelly bag or a colander lined with several thicknesses of cheesecloth. Collect the juice in a bowl.
3. Return juice to the pot and sweeten to taste with sugar, honey, or other fruit juices (such as pineapple). I warmed the juice back up a bit to help the sugar melt. Under-sweeten, because you can always add more sugar later, but you can't restore lost tartness. (I used about 1/2 cup of raw sugar) At this point you have a concentrate, which can be diluted with 3 to 4 parts water.
4. Pour it into clean hot jars, leaving half an inch headspace and seal. Or freeze your concentrate in ice cube trays or small freezer containers.

5. Process in a water bath canner for 10 minutes. Most berries are naturally acidic, but when canning concentrates from softer fruits like plums, add a teaspoon of lemon or lime juice per cup, just to be safe.

Zucchini Bread, Two Recipes

2010-07-23T08:00:00.000-07:00

The Zucchini has landed. There is a lot of it, and it is taking over my kitchen. I have made some zucchini pickles (which are really good, by the way), purchased a really neat vegetable peeler that peels veggies into noodles, and made fried zucchini (Joy of Cooking's recipe). All of that is well and good, but I've also made some zucchini bread!

I found a recipe here, and changed it a bit halving the sugar and using all white whole wheat flour instead of some white and some whole wheat. I made both recipes side by side to see the difference and mine was better. Well, it was less sweet and rose higher.

Isn't the difference in quality startling!? (Mine is on the left) That was a joke, I know it's not easy to tell. If you squint and tilt your head you can see that the one on the left is a little lighter in color, it also had a nicer formed top.

Then I changed the recipe even more! I replaced the sugar with honey, used some whole oats, and added nuts and fruit. This bread is suitable for breakfast. I am always trying to make treats that can be eaten any time, like my breakfast cookies.

First the traditional:

Ingredients:

1 cup canola oil
3 eggs
1 t. vanilla
1 cup sugar
3 1/2 cups white whole wheat flour (If you can't find this flour, use 2 1/5 cups white and 1 cup whole wheat)
1/2 t. salt
2 t. baking soda
1 t. cinnamon
1/2 t. nutmeg
2 cups grated zucchini
*1-2 cups raisins, nuts, or dairy-free chocolate chips, optional

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Grease and flour 2 loaf pans.

Whisk together all the dry ingredients in a medium bowl. In a large bowl beat together oil, eggs, sugar, and vanilla until light in color. Add dry ingredients to the egg mixture one cup at a time. The batter will seem like it's not wet enough, this is because the zucchini is giving the bread most of its moisture. Stir in zucchini and optional ingredients. Spread into two loaf pans. Bake one hour or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean.

I've made 8 loaves of this (so far) to freeze. Yum.

The top is the breakfast bread, the bottom, lighter bread is the recipe above. You can see how much darker the honey makes the bread. This loaf was also a little over cooked. After I made this I tried the recipe in a 9x13 glass pan, and that was way better.

Breakfast Bread

Ingredients:

1 cup canola oil
3 eggs
1 t. vanilla
1 cup honey
3 cups white whole wheat flour (If you can't find this flour, use 2 1/5 cups white and 1 cup whole wheat)
1/2 cup whole oats
1/4 cup flax meal (you could leave this out if you don't have any)
1/2 t. salt
2 1/2 t. baking soda
1 t. cinnamon
1/2 t. nutmeg
2 cups grated zucchini
1/2 cup raisins
1/2 cup dried fruit (I used blueberries)
1/2 cup sunflower seeds
1/2 cup chopped walnuts
whole oats and shredded coconut to sprinkle on top (optional)

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Grease and flour a 9x13 baking pan.

Whisk together all the dry ingredients in a medium bowl. Combine nuts and fruit in a small bowl, set aside. In a large bowl beat together oil, eggs, honey, and vanilla until light in color. Add dry ingredients to the egg mixture one cup at a time. The batter will seem like it's not wet enough, this is because the zucchini is giving the bread most of its moisture. Stir in zucchini and fruit and nut mixture. Spread into pan. Sprinkle with whole oats and some coconut, if desired. Bake 45 min- one hour or until a toothpick inserted comes out clean. Honey browns faster than sugar, so the loaf will be a bit darker, but keep and eye on it at the 45 minute mark. If a toothpick comes out mostly clean at 45 minutes, I'd take it out. The edges may get over cooked and dry if you leave it in. If you're married to the loaf shape versus the cake shape, try baking it for only 35-40 minutes in the loaf pan instead.

Onions

2010-07-21T08:00:00.000-07:00

I pulled our onions the other day. They're not super huge, they're the size I would use if a recipe called for a medium onion. A few are pretty small, but on the whole I think they're a good size. We got about 45 or so; I figure if I can keep my onion use to say...3.75 per week I'll have enough for the year. That doesn't really seem like enough. However, I have a large bundle of smaller onions from our farm shares, so if that lasts me through the summer, then 45 onions for the year seems a little bit more possible. But only a little bit. I'm pretty sure I use more than one onion a week, it's probably closer to one a day. There's a big gap between 45 onions and 365. If I do use one onion a day, then I'm 320 onions short. That's a lot!

These onions were started from sets. They (the Gardening Gurus of Lore) say that onions started from sets do not store as well, so I'll have to see if these onions are even capable of getting me through the year. We have tried to grow onions from seed twice and have failed both times. We actually have bad luck with seeds started indoors. But I'll go into that in more detail in a post entitled something like, "I Hate Starting Seeds Indoors; Why Can't We Just Buy Our Plants From A Nursery And Plant Them On Memorial Day Like Everyone Else," or something.

All in all, I'm happy with these onions. They look like real onions, which is exciting. More than likely they taste like real onions because they smell like real onions. They might be a little to few and a little small, but they're my onions and I love them.

Wax Beans

2010-07-19T05:22:00.000-07:00

I had an over load of beans recently. I eat them, and one of my girls will eat them happily (the other eats them unhappily). But there were too many for us, so, I decided to freeze them for later. I blanched them according to their proper timing (3 minutes) and vacuum sealed them. Two pounds all set! Last year I noticed a complete lack of whole veggies. I didn't have anything that could just be eaten on the side of the plate. It all had to be put into a soup or casserole, so I'm trying to be a little more mindful of preserving things that are in their entirety and hold up well to the freeze.

Viola! All ready for the freezer!

(Almost) Blueberries

2010-07-18T09:42:00.000-07:00

I have been stalking the woods behind Target for about a month now. By stalking I don't mean walking through them and discovering the land; I mean watching, spying, creeping up on, etc. I noticed last fall that the pine forest behind our local Target has an understory of blueberry bushes. Like, the whole forest floor is blueberry bushes. So I have been mostly patiently waiting to see if they would fruit, (they did!) and now I am waiting for them to ripen. I have missed quite a few seasons of wild edibles since I started learning. Many plants have a really short season, so it doesn't take much to just miss it completely. During the winter, when you're curled up with a field guide, cross referencing that with your recipe books on wild edibles (anyone?), you start to get exited about this new thing you will try in about nine months. You see your plant emerge in the spring, maybe flower, or start to get berries, and then someone gets sick, or you go away for a long weekend, and--poof--just like that it's over and you have to wait an entire year to try out cattail pickles.

I will not be making this mistake with the blueberries, believe you me. So, I have been stalking them like a jealous lover. No, wait. Let me think of something less creepy...I have been watching them like a careful mother. That's better. I have been tenderly keeping an eye on them, watching their buds turn to flowers, the flowers turn to round, green fruit, watching the green fade away to a deep blue, and the blue turn dusty and delicious. When I was there yesterday I climbed up the embankment and, huzzah!, they were ready. I emailed my blueberry picking posse (that's right, I have a blueberry picking posse) and told them to meet me at the Target at 7am if they're ready. It's just as well no one was, because when the little one and I got there with two buckets, some water, peanut butter sandwiches and a wagon, it turns out that only about twenty or so berries were actually ready. And we ate them.

It is a little early for blueberries.

Because I hadn't actually gone into the the woods yet, I could only see the berries on the edge that get a little more sun. They obviously ripen faster, and the bushes under the cover of the trees are behind about a week or so. That's cool, I don't mind waking up at 6am on a Sunday morning.

It wasn't a total loss, though. We got to explore the woods, finally. The land used to be a farm, so there is an old cart path down the middle of the area. It ends abruptly at a fenced in water run-off for the Target. Probably, when they built the building they had to provide for all the water that would no longer be able to seep into the ground because their parking lot was on top of it now. There seems to be a way to go around it and presumably the path starts up again.

I couldn't explore that this time with the little one in tow. The area we were in was about 400 feet by 200 feet, but the other side of the run-off pool is much bigger. It's really cool to be in woods that aren't a state forest, conservation land or a park. It is someone's property and will most likely be a Panera Bread some day, but for now it's just "the woods" and that feels pretty old-timey.

Can you see the Target Red?

I wish I could tell you that my little one was in glory for being in the woods, surrounded by blueberry bushes, the warm morning sun filtering through the trees. I mean, I guess I could tell you that anyway, but it would be a lie. The whole time she was saying things like, "I tired of walking, Mama." Or, "We go home now?" And even, "I tired of standing and sitting and walking, Mama." To which I replied that those are the only things she'll ever do excepting lying down, so she'd better get over it now.

Can you see her? She's that tiny orange speck with the mane of curly hair in the sea of blueberry bushes. Doesn't she look like such a little nature child? Well what you can't hear her saying is, "CAN WE GO HOME NOW, MAMA?!"

She did stop occasionally to eat a blueberry or watch an ant, but on the whole she was pretty cranky. I think next time I will just bring the big girl and see how that goes. We eventually made our way back to the wagon and headed out into the parking lot again.

Looking at the parking lot and shopping center through the woods while I try to get food to eat kind of makes me feel like a little animal who's environment has been encroached upon. I think about the fact that this property (which is for sale) will someday realize the financial dreams of its owner and become something worth while. The blueberries, wintergreen, sassafras, and whatever animals live there, will be churned under or driven out. After that, when it becomes something "useful" people will notice it, and forget what was there before. Maybe it will take long enough to sell that chunk of land in this economy for my kids to have memories of trespassing on private land to gather the blueberries for their summer and, hopefully, winter enjoyment. Maybe my kids can have the more and more forgotten experience of saying, "I remember before that was a Lowes, my mother used to take us blueberry picking there."

Zucchinni Pickles and a Lesson in Reading the Directions.

2010-07-15T05:53:00.000-07:00

I just erased a nice chipper paragraph I wrote before I typed in the directions. The paragraph wondered what the pickles would taste like, and told you how sweet they were. It may have even said something about how pretty they look in the jar, or pointed out the cool vintage labels my aunt found for me. I erased it because after typing in the directions, I realized I didn't follow them properly and will more than likely have to make them over again. Bummer. What I didn't do was get the air bubbles out, which, now that they have risen out, means that there isn't enough liquid to cover the pickles. I also didn't leave the jars in the hot water for 5 minutes after I took the lid off the canner. I threw some of the jars in the fridge, If we're lucky we'll be able to eat a few of them before they go bad. I'm not really even sure what would happen. I don't think you can get botulism form pickled things, please correct me if I'm wrong about this. Either way, I'll be too wigged-out come December to actually eat them. They'll get opened and poked at, set on the door of the fridge like we're going to eat them, when people come over we'll say, "Oh yes, those are our zucchini pickles." And eventually, they'll find their way into the compost. So, I figure they are fine now if they are refrigerated, and we'll just find it in our hearts to eat 10 pints of zucchini pickles before they "go bad" (whatever that means). So take my lesson and really read through the directions thoroughly before you start. In fact take another lesson and don't start a a 4-hour canning adventure at 8:30 at night. Go to sleep if you're too tired to read the directions.

I got this recipe from Ball Complete Book of Home Preserving.

Zany Zucchini Pickles
14 cups diagonally sliced zucchini
1/2 cup pickling or canning salt
cool water
6 cups white vinegar
4 cups granulated sugar
4 tsp mustard seeds
2 tsp celery seeds
2 tsp ground turmeric

1. In a glass or stainless steel bowl layer zucchini slices with pickling salt. Cover with cool water and let stand for 2 hours. Transfer to a colander in a sink and let drain. Rinse with cool running water and drain thoroughly.

2. In a large stainless steel saucepan, combine vinegar, sugar, and spices. Bring to a boil over medium-high heat, stirring to dissolve sugar. Reduce heat and boil gently for 5 minutes, until spices have infused the liquid. Stir in zucchini. Remove from heat, cover and let stand for 1 hour.

3. Meanwhile get your jars and canner ready.

4. Return saucepan to medium-high heat and bring zucchini mixture to a boil, stirring occasionally. Reduce heat and boil gently for 5 minutes, until zucchini is heated through.

5. Pack zucchini into hot jars to within a generous 1/2 inch of top of jar. Ladle hot liquid into jar to cover vegetables, leaving 1/2 inch headspace. Remove air bubbles and adjust headspace, if necessary by adding hot pickling liquid. Wipe rim. Center lid on jar. Screw band down until resistance is met, then increase to fingertip tight.

6. Place jars in canner, ensuring they are completely covered with water. Bring to a boil and process for 10 minutes. Remove canner lid. Wait 5 minutes, then remove jars, cool and store.

*Also I have added another tag: "Mistakes." We harvest as many of those around here as anything else. Better me than you!

Granola Cereal

2010-07-13T21:21:00.000-07:00

We don't have any cereal in our house. I don't buy anything like cereal, mostly because I'm too cheap--I mean thrifty. A little because I find it hard to buy food that has a long list of ingredients. Less for my own health, and more because I unwillingly imagine a little Mac truck next to each ingredient. The little truck totes the ingredient to a factory where it is fixed up with a bunch of other ingredients that got brought in by their own little truck and then is shipped out again in a new truck, all of them belching smog into the atmosphere. I know, real downer, right?

The kids eat oatmeal instead. They love oatmeal. They never even thought about cereal. Then they were introduced to fruity pebbles. We were at a church breakfast and there was a huge bowl of fruity pebbles, all colorful and sweet. They were really magical looking, and it didn't take long for my husband and two children to set themselves in front their little bowls of rainbows.

Shortly afterward I started hearing a lot of, "Why don't we have cereal?"
"Do you want the kid answer or the grownup answer?" I ask her.
Short pause to ponder, "Both."
"Well, the grown-up answer is that there are too many ingredients in that kind of cereal. All those ingredients have to get moved around the world to factories and that uses a lot of oil, and there isn't a lot of that left. The kid answer is that a lot of those ingredients aren't so good for you and are more of a treat food to eat every once an a while, and not for breakfast."
Silence. "But I like it."
"I know. But, hey! We can make our own cereal!"
Brightening, "Will it be colorful like the cereal at church!"

Oh man, no it won't little girl.

I have so many feelings when I am in the process of explaining things like this to my bright 4 year old. There is a large part of me that feels like I'm being really snobby, and I am self-conscious about that. I grew up on the foods I now tell my kids are "poisonous." We didn't have a lot of money and cheap food is just that. We ate mac n' cheese, ramen noodles, hot dos (in mac n' cheese), canned veggies, sugary cereal, processed American Cheese food, the whole deal. We didn't eat these things because my mother didn't love us, we ate them because they were a financial necessity. An alternative approach to diet was either unknown or unfeasible. I don't want my kids to be with other kids, see them eating something that I have made off-limits and have them tell the kids or a parent, "That food is poisonous and is killing the earth." At the same time, my kid demands answers that are real, and those are the real reasons we don't eat that sort of thing on the regular. I want them to have a sense of their responsibility to the earth and their bodies, and that means no fun cereal. Sorry.

We did make granola, though. She got to put all the ingredients in herself. She was mighty proud, and the the pride she took in seeing "her cereal" on the shelf seemed to make up for it's less flamboyant show in the bowl. When the supply gets low she looks to me and says with duty, "Almost time for me to make some more cereal," and this is the recipe she uses:

Athena's Granola

5 cups Regular rolled oats (not quick oats)
1/4 cup honey
1/4 cup melted butter or oil
1 t vanilla
1/2 cup slivered almonds
1/2 cup sunflower seeds
2 T ground flax seeds
2 t cinnamon (or to taste, she likes a lot of cinnamon)
1 cup shredded unsweetened coconut
1/2 cup raisins
1/ cup dried blueberries
1/2 cup dried cranberries

Place oats, almonds, sunflower seeds, and flax in a large crockpot. Add the vanilla to the oil or butter. Pour oil or butter and honey over the oat mixture and stir until is it mixed through.

Cook on medium for 3 hours with the lid vented with BBQ skewers or set of kilter. Stir every 1/2 hour or when you can smell it cooking.

When the three hours are up, turn off the crockpot and add the rest of the ingredients.

I have found that the coconut over toasts and the fruit dries up too much if it is cooked along with the oats and nuts. You may want to experiment with the coconut, though. It is nice to have it toasted. It could probably be added after 2 hours and be fine.

Let the cereal cool and store in an airtight container.

Enjoy!

Raspberries! -or- A Demo of all the Juicers I Own.

2010-07-11T05:09:00.000-07:00

Strawberry season is gone. The next fruit around here is raspberries. Onward we have moved! I have to go elsewhere for our raspberry-lovin' needs, we don't grow raspberries (yet). There is a local farm around here called Gerry's, and the people there are so helpful. They have given me countless tips on gardening and preserving. They never seem too busy to stop and say hello and catch up a little bit. AND they are the kind of farm that has canning and sauce produce available when you ask. This is great because you can often yourself with a lot of berries for less money and with a little bit more work of picking though them, a lot of jam! I ended up getting 10 jars of beautiful raspberry jelly.

I decided to go with jelly this year and not just mush of the berries because the seeds drive me a bit bonkers. We use a lot of our jelly to flavor oatmeal in the winter and the seeds are really noticeable. I like jam with big chunks of fruit, I love how extra homemade it seems, but the seeds! I also happen to have an amazing, wonderful, incredible Squeezo!

This monster of homesteading bliss was given to me by my grandmother who found it at a yard sale. I didn't even know what it was! There are so many projects I wouldn't even consider doing without it (we'll talk about that during tomato and apple season). They come with (or you can purchase) different screens depending on your job. So I clamped it to the counter and we got to work!

You simply place your raspberries in the hopper and crank out juice! It's that simple!

Berries in top (don't you love this heath-code nightmare? don't' worry, the jelly is hair-free)

Juice comes out this way,

Seeds go out that way! Notice how clean the seeds are of juice.

Well, it's usually that simple. I found that after a while the scroll, which is like a drill that is inside the screen,was getting full of seeds and it was then mushing the seeds up and pushing them out into the juice. Ew. So I took it apart, cleaned it out and put it back together. It worked for a while, but the same things started to happen again. I began to suspect that we had the wrong sized screen. This is what it say here: The parts for today's Squeezo will fit most older Squeezo models; however, if your Squeezo is over 20 years old, we recommend you call us to check proper sizing.

So, I thought I'd take out the juicer I used last year. I'm not even sure what it's called.

You put your berries in the cone and use a cone-shaped pestle to push the juice out the sides. It doesn't get the seeds quite as clean as the Squeezo does, but it works well enough.

Well, maybe not so well enough. I knew how much juice I was loosing after using the Squeezo. I happen to have another knock-off Squeezo that I got last year from the same grandmother who found me the real deal. I thought I'd get that out and see if it would get the last bit of juice off the seeds.

As you can see, many of the parts are plastic, and the screen is covered, so you can't watch he magic happen! But we gave it a shot.

FAIL! As you can also see, the fake Squeezo (let's call it a "Feezo") didn't get the seeds nearly as clean as the Squeezo. I ended up getting about another 1/2 cup of juice from the Feezo.

Look at all that potential jelly! It all went to the chickens.

Later that night, when it wasn't 4 million degrees and only a balmy 2 million I boiled up the juice and made jelly. I also brought a gigantic canning pot to a boil and processed the jars this time.

All in all, a successful day.

Beach Peas!

2010-07-07T03:43:00.000-07:00

I found beach peas! This is exciting because it's a wild food that tastes just about exactly like a cultivated food. I think this is fun because it feels more like finding food in the wild and less like turning something wild into something you would consider food.

I'm not sure if this takes away some of my hardcore naturalist points (if I have any), but I'll accept the hit. (Sort of like when I tried and tried to read Pride and Prejudice and just couldn't get into it even though I tried with all my heart. I knew I was giving up forever being able to call myself "well read" but I just don't like Jane Austin and I don't care about her cutting-edge feminist rich people. There I said it. But I do like the movies that have been made from her books because of the costumes!)

There wasn't enough for me to harvest anything really serious, just enough to mix with some rice and have with dinner. Sometimes I like it when there isn't enough of something to keep. All of this packing away takes me out of the moment of life. I live in future-land too often as it is. When we find something like four ripe raspberries, or three wild strawberries, or a cup of beach peas it's nice to have a complete moment, without the chore of keeping.

So I pointed these little beauties out to my big girl. She of course new what they were and started picking and shelling them with me. The peas are smaller than regular peas, but very sweet and really, just perfect. I am exceedingly proud to say that when she would come across one that had a dweller within she would say, "caterpillar," and toss the whole thing over her shoulder.

She has no fear of insects, which is more than I can say for myself at her age (or up until the age of about 25).

So we collected about a half a cup, snacked a bit on the beach and tossed the rest into some rice. It was a great find and a fun activity.

Greens! Greens! Greens!

2010-07-05T19:01:00.000-07:00

Last February, when we could no longer put together a full meal with what we had preserved from the summer, I practically ran to the grocery store and brought tons of lettuce. I wanted greens so badly that I think I would have been capable of absorbing the nutrients through my skin had I laid the leaves all over my body like a freaky stay-at-home-mom wood nymph. I had a couple of salads here and there, don't get me wrong. I host a weekly potluck and people would bring a salad, and I would eat the whole thing, or I would go to some one's house and they would have a salad and I would eat the whole thing there.

"You know they sell this stuff at the grocery store," they would say.
"Yeah, I know, but I'm trying to do this thing here. Is this cucumber?!"

This has inspired us to check out Elliot Coleman's book, Four-Season Harvest, and build ourselves some cold frames. We also chose a variety of seeds, that when planted in the late summer, should bear leaves for our munching mouths well into the winter.

But that was over the winter. Now that the lettuce is free flowing (at least for another week or so), now that there is kale, endive, tai soi, spinach, arugula, and mustard greens, well, I just can't seem to eat it all. Funny right? So I've taken the least desirable stuff, or at leas the stuff I can't eat all day long (like mustard greens) and put them in the freezer.

A couple of years ago we acquired two contractor-grade trash bags full of tai soi. It was the end of the Harvest at our CSA and they just couldn't spread it around enough. We figured if we didn't eat it all we could at least give it to our chickens. But eat it we did! We chopped, washed and vacuum sealed the whole nine-thousand pounds of this slightly bitter green. We only just finished eating it this past winter, in fact. When it was thawed out it was pretty mushy and chewy. I only learned after the fact that most veggies need to be blanched before they are frozen. This is because blanching destroys the enzymes that allow the veggies to ripen and to rot. It also sets the color and preserves the nutritional content and flavor. In short, it prevents thawed greens from tasting like chewy mush fit only for pureeing and hiding in spinach bread and other such things. There is great information about blanching and freezing veggies here, at the National Center for Home Preservation including a chart with blanching times. (Here they have a chart from the Joy of Cooking, it includes some other veggies). Timing is important because under blanching just speeds up the ripening/rotting process and over blanching is actually called cooking, which you can do, but isn't the goal here.

So, now we blanch. I had pretty good luck with it last year. I dehydrated a lot of stuff, but the greens I did freeze came out better. I decided not to dehydrate as much of my greens this year because they just crumble. So, while they can be added to soups and casseroles as a seasoning, there's never any greens in them. I also froze pepper strips, blanched, but they tasted, um, like frozen peppers...so we still have some. I found they were usable only in sausage and peppers, covered in sauce. And eggplant. I froze a bunch of peeled, sliced, blanched eggplant. Yeah, we still have most of that left also.

How to blanch?

1. Wash and Chop your greens. I like to make them into the basic size I would use them in cooking. For me, part of the benefit of doing all this work in the summer is to make the winters really, really easy.

2. Bring a pot of water to a boil. Prepare a large bowl of ice water in the sink. This is to put the veggies in after they are blanched to stop them from cooking.

3. Put the greens in the water in batches not too big for the pot. (Isn't that helpful?) I basically blanch them one bunch at a time (this seems to be about a pound). You want to make sure the pot isn't so full that the leaves get stuck together, and so don't get blanched.

4. Blanch them for only 2 1/2 minutes.

5. Take them out and plunge them int the ice water.

This job is a lot easier If you have a metal basket like this. It is tricky to fish the greens out of the water when the time is up without over cooking them.

6. After they are cooled completely put them in a colander while you finish of the next batch.

7. Label what it is with the date and freeze them in a freezer bag with as much of the air squeezed out as possible. If you're iffy about plastic you can use mason jars, just don't fill them too much. I vacuum seal them, but I do find that this is tricky because as the water gets sucked up it prevents the bag from getting a really good seal. I have found two ways of dealing with this, one press the "seal" button on the vacuum sealer before it's done really vacuuming (and so hasn't had enough time to suck the water up). I'm not sure all machines have this capability. The other thing I found works pretty well is to place some paper towels or coffee filters above the food inside the bag. This way the water gets absorbed into this and doesn't interfere with the seal.

That's it! Then just wait to unity you would maim someone for a leafy veggie and thaw out the mustard greens!

More Sea Lettuce!

2010-06-30T13:46:00.000-07:00

The girls and I went to the beach the other day and manged to find amazing amounts of sea lettuce. I brought it all home, rinsed it and hung it to dry on our laundry rack. This may or may not have been a good idea (little pieces ended up sticking to it). After it was dry my littlest one and I shoved them into mason jars. I now have four pretty packed mason jars full of seaweed. It might even me more than enough for the whole year!

Fruit Leathers

2010-06-28T05:14:00.000-07:00

So, during the season for strawberries I made jam, froze a couple of pounds, and let my kids have strawberries as a vegetable side dish for dinner for about two weeks. I quickly came to realize that the 8'x4' patch we have is not suitable for all our strawberry loving needs. I looked around to find a place in the area that offered pick your own organic strawberries. I was directed to Land's Sake, an amazing nonprofit public farm working for education and conservation. So we trotted down there, bright and early with our picnic basket in hand to pick a boat-load of strawberries and have a generally fun day.

I managed to pick two quarts, which, while not so bad, was not the idea I had in mind. I had the idea that we would be out there for at least three hours, all of us (including my two-and-a-half-year-old) working like professionals to acquire the 12-15 pounds we would need for all our smoothies, yogurt pops, and oatmeal for the entire year. But I usually make the mistake of imaging what I could do without kids running around, needing to go to the bathroom, wanting to see chickens, etc.

"Girls we have chickens at home...don't you want to come over here and pick more strawberries...girls?"

"Ok, you're sure? Just checking because we can totally go back to getting my to do list done if you want."

When we got home, I just couldn't bare the thought of boiling the strawberries. I also kind of didn't want to freeze them. After resigning to the fact that I wasn't going to get a year's worth of strawberries out of the season I figured I may buy organic frozen strawberries and didn't want my precious picked beauties to get lost in the shuffle. After hemming and hawing and talking to my friend, I decided to make fruit leathers out of them! It's practically like eating them raw! (Nutritionally speaking, of course).

I pureed them in the blender, oiled my dehydrator tray with a little olive oil and poured it in about 1/4 inch thick.

Then I let it dehydrate overnight. It was too long! They were more like strawberry chips than leathers. How disappointing! Then the kids came running in and were all like, "What's that? Can I have it? Can I have two?" So it is acceptable for its target market anyway.

This is the first batch. I think I didn't put in enough puree.

The next batch came out more leathery. I used my canning head-space measurer thingy to check the thickness of the puree. I found that I did have to flip it to dehydrate a couple of patches on the underside that just didn't want to dry. All in all a success.

Wild Grape Leaves

2010-06-27T06:09:00.000-07:00

I love stuffed grape leaves. My love affair with this Grecian treat started of all places at the Willowbrook mall in New Jersey. I am sort-of from New Jersey a little. Anyway, in the food court there was an eatery called Athenos or something like that. They had an amazing stuffed grape leaf salad. I'm not sure what would have compelled me to order a salad topped with little green logs filled with who-knows-what at 12 years of age, but I did and I've been hooked ever since.

I happen to have a massive amount of grape vines growing in my back yard. I have something of a teeny tiny wilderness back there and they thrive. The vines thrive not the berries, there's not enough sun for those. So, in trying to use everything I have at my disposal I decided to go and harvest some and try my hand at making these little tastes.

This is a little bit of my wilderness, what isn't grape vines is goutweed a nasty invasive.

I checked out out this site, consulted Steve "Wildman" Brill's book, and looked up a recipe in the Joy of Cooking, melded my new knowledge and came up with these!

The first thing I had to do was collect them. Grape leaves are best tasting in the spring and early summer. I'm not sure what happens after that, but my guess is that they become tough. Once they start wearing leather jackets and carrying switch blades it's best to stay way from them. Medium-sized ones are preferable, not too small to roll up but not too big and tough. You do need some big ones though, so that you can line the pan and cover the stuffed ones (more on this later). I just took a bucket and picked all the good ones I could get at easily. I ended up picking about 100 leaves in no time at all. (I think I also got about 100 bug bites).

Be careful to inspect your leaves, this one had some sort of hatching beetle on the back of them, and the one below shows the trail of leaf borers. They're just bugs, but if you want your meal bug-free take a close look at your leaves.

I sorted them into leaves to roll, and leaves too big, too ripped or too small for the pan. Then I prepared a filling. I used white rice, amaranth, chopped walnuts, chopped dried cranberries, and onions and a couple dried figs. (I'll have the full recipe at the bottom along with how to freeze them for later use). Then I prepared the leaves. Steve Brill says he just rolled them up with a filling and pressure cooked them. I didn't try, but I suspect that without cooking the leaves a little bit it would be difficult to roll them up without tearing. The joy of cooking says to soak them for an hour in hot water because they are assuming you're using jarred leaves. So I just steamed them for about a minute or so. Even this I think may have been more steaming than I needed and next time I plan to cover them with very hot water for a minute or two.

Then you simply take a spoonful of the filling, place it on the base of the leaf (where the stem would be), vein side up and roll it up like a burrito! For those of you who have never made a burrito or are inept at rolling them (it happens, don't feel bad) that would mean: roll it up so the filling is just covered and then fold the sides over and continue to roll so the sides are all tucked in and it's like a neat little package.

Place them seam side down in a pan you have prepared by lining the sides and bottom with grape leaves. This took about 5 large leaves for my #8 cast iron skillet.

Place all your little grape leaf rolls side by side all snug and then pour stock or water over them, drizzle them with olive oil, cover them with more grape leaves, weight them down with a plate and cover the pan.

The Joy of Cooking says to cook them for about 30 minutes, but they were using raw lamb and I wasn't so I cooked them for about 15. After that, take them out, put them on a plate and let them cool down completely. I sprinkled them with a little vinegar so they would have the taste that I'm used to. They came out really great!

There's the recipe: Makes about 10 Stuffed Grape Leaves

Ingredients:
20-25 Fresh Grape Leaves. 10 medium sized ones to roll and 10-15 to line the pan.
1.5 cup cooked white rice
1 cup cooked amaranth (I thought I was using quinoa, while I was cooking it, realized it was amaranth, so I think you could use either!)
1/4 cup finely chopped onions
1/4 cup walnuts chopped
1/4 cup dried cranberries chopped
5 dried figs chopped (you could leave these out if you don't have them, I thought it was a nice touch. You can also use any dried fruit you want)
salt and pepper to taste
1 cup water or stock
4 tablespoons olive oil

To prepare the filling:
Mix the amaranth and rice together with a fork. Amaranth* is a bit sticky and porridge-y, it's not really tricky or anything, but the goal is to separate the amaranth into the rice so there are no clumps. Saute the onions in 1 tablespoon of the olive oil until tender, add the dried fruit and walnuts and saute until fragrant. Mix the onion mixture with the rice mixture. Season with salt and pepper to taste. Set aside.

Prepare your pan:

Prepare the leaves:
Stack up ten leaves (11 is you think you might mess up!) and lightly steam them. Really only steam them for a minute. Their color will change to a dull green. You can try to place them in a bowl and over them with hot but not boiling water until they change color and then strain them. I haven't tried this yet, but I think it will work. Take one leaf at a time and place vein side up, stem side toward you on a clean surface. Put a spoonful of filling on the end and roll up, folding the sides over as you go. Place them seam side down in the prepared pan. Once the pan is full with your 10 rolls pour 1 cup of stock or water over them and drizzle with the remaining 3 tablespoons of olive oil. Cover with the rest of the leaves, weight them down with a plate and cover with a lid. Cook over medium heat for 15 minutes. Remove them from the pan and let cool. Sprinkle with vinegar if you desire and enjoy!

To Freeze:
Take 25 leave and stack them. Roll them up and tie with a string. Dip them one at a time into boiling water for a minute to blanch. Let cool and put them in a plastic bag. Press out as much air as possible (I actually vacuum sealed them) and pop them into the freezer.
This was so super easy that I really really hope that it's works!

*Amaranth is also a super food, filled with good for you stuff like lots of protein.

Lavender

2010-06-14T11:18:00.000-07:00

I have three beautiful bushes of lavender that I have had since I was fist a Momma. They were in containers in our first apartment as a family, and now that they have been allowed to rest in the ground for about three seasons, they are gorgeous!

These will be hung to dry and used in baths salts, poultices and given away as gifts in the form of eye pillows, most likely!

Little Friends

2010-06-13T11:55:00.000-07:00

When I was a kid I had a collection of short stories that I really liked. I Wish to God that I could remember what it was called or even the name of one of the stories in it. I could go into relatively great detail (relatively for a memory that is 20 or so years old) about the stories themselves and can still remember many many of the illustrations, but alas, I'm not sure it would be enough to find the book. There was a story about a couch that was really a fat man, a story about a girl who held up a blue scrap of fabric to a rainy sky to make a patch of blue, which I think may have been the name of that story. There was a story about a wizard, one about a kite... One of the stories was about "people" who were household objects...wooden spoons, clothespins, stuff like that. I can still see the clothespin family in my mind and had always wanted to have them. So, recently for a project to do during a Ladies Craft Night, I made some! (For Athena, of course.)

Strawberries Are The Jam!

2010-06-13T11:46:00.000-07:00

Last year we prepared an 8'x4' just for strawberries. They are June bearing sweet beautiful tasty berries. They started ripening about two weeks ago, and the kids have been snacking. Athena is especially fond of using a knife (very exciting) to cut them into minute pieces and eat them out of a bowl. Unfortunately we don't really have enough at this point to let them snack at will. My oldest will happily eat a green strawberry, so she can clear a crop faster than a murder of crows. We do have a couple of patches of wild strawberries where they have free range. We hope to plant more June bearers and ever bearers in the future. But for now, this is what we have and a couple of days ago I had enough to make twelve jars of jam! I am also freezing the berries whole to use in smoothies. I think that we will probably end up going to a pick your own and getting a bunch for freezing and jamming this week.

We had about 8 cups mashed which was enough for a double batch.. I use Pomona's which is activated by calcium and so you don't need a lot (or any) sugar to make the jam jam. (Sorry, I can't seem to help myself). I use the inversion method to seal the jars. It's my understanding that this means I can't enter my jam j-ahem-in any fairs or contests? I guess this has something to do with bacterial. But I have seen old pros use this method and I can't bear the thought if boiling them again! However, after double checking my facts just now, I am adequately paranoid* and will probably process them in a water bath, given that we give a lot of jams away as gifts.

*When the inversion process does work, the vacuum seals of filled jars still tend to be weaker than those produced by a short boiling water canning process. A weak seal is more likely to fail during storage. In addition, the headspace of the jar may retain enough oxygen to allow some mold growth if airborne molds contaminated the surface of the product as the jar was filled and closed. More complete removal of oxygen from the headspace also offers some longer protection from undesirable color and flavor changes with some types of fruit products.

The Trade Off

2010-06-11T19:56:00.000-07:00

Ugh. Well, we're in a little over our heads. Again. This is something that seems to happen to us a lot. We get excited. We see an extremely pleasurable end product. Then we try to run and leap over all the learning that has to come before in order to actually achieve that extremely desirable end product. Usually it happens with animals. More than once (I hate to admit) we acquired animals and then scrambled to build, find, expand the home for said animals. It is very easy to see, with alive things, that you have missed a couple of steps, chickens get cramped, bunnies have babies, and lettuce bolts. For this very reason we decided not to get any additional animals this year and just focus on preserving our foods and getting our yard ready for more planting ability. We did plant quite a bit. We ordered our seeds and made a little calender during the cold and easy-paced winter months (the calender has been completely ignored). We built cold frames and started our seeds in them and under lights in the kitchen. We even rented a community garden plot again at a local land trust in hopes of having better luck with our tomatoes this year (last year's attempts got gotten by the blight).

Well, many of the things we started from seed indoors looked wimpy, and a bunch of the things we started in the cold frames needed/needs to be transplanted and just hasn't yet. I'm not really even sure why. I guess I don't really have a lot of time to do that sort of thing. But I'm not really sure at this point what I am doing instead. I guess taking care of my kids? They're practically feral, so I can't imagine that it's taking up that much of my time. For a while I was getting up at 5:30, an hour before the family, so I could do some outdoor things in peace. It was really, really nice, actually. I felt like I was getting some time to myself and getting some nagging projects done. But then I started wanting to not get up at 5:30 am and instead sleep in (until 6:30). What a looser. So I guess I will have to get back on the "getting up like a crazy person or a runner (same thing) at the crack of dawn" thing and transplant some basil and zinnias.

We have deiced to forgo the garden plot. Although it's in a place that I frequent with the children and it's only a mile away, so not far for us to walk, it seems unlikely that I will be able to walk there everyday at a regular time to water, weed and harvest. It's a little too much strain on my primary job which is parenting. I know there are some super women out there who do it and any tips would be great. But I am not She just yet and if I have to do the garden march of tears everyday my children will get yelled at, ignored, and have a generally cranky mom. It's just not the holistic nature-y childhood I'm trying to cultivate for them. We have also decided not to stress too much about the things we have started and could be harvesting by now. Instead we've deiced to just get the yard ready to plant in the fall for our winter greens and carrots and things like that. We put the unused seeds in the refrigerator and will just wait until next time to try again. We are a part of two farm shares this summer and should have plenty of produce to eat and preserve without trying to learn so quickly under summer pressure. I mean, we seriously still don't know all that much about cultivating soil. Again, with the house for your alive things!

Last year we purchased the Rail Road ties to the right for a ridiculously cheap price. This year we are planning to make four beds about 3.5'x9' in this spot to give us more gardening space. My husband is holding up the root of a forsythia that was in our way. I have so many of them, and am not such a big fan to begin with so I deiced we would just dig it up without trying to transplant.

There is just so much to learn, and I am so impatient to know it all now! But I don't. And we've only been learning in earnest for two or three years. In that time we have learned a lot. I can remember being around seven months pregnant with Athena and kind of panicking about teaching her about wild edibles and herbs. I felt really hormonal about her not loosing this ancestral knowledge about the earth and its cycles. Something I was determined to teach her, and that I would have to learn in like TWO MONTHS! I'm not sure if you know this, but a few minutes after they are born they start wondering about when nettles grow and the various ways to prepare them, as well as their health benefits. It's a fact and you'd better get ready. Anyway, I managed to take it one step at a time, and I can now safely pull together a wild meal as well as cure bug bites, open wounds, skin rashes and lighten the flow of a heavy period. As a family we're getting there. To my delight my kid could tell the difference on sight between peppermint and spearmint at the age of three. They are definitely picking up a sense of the earth's timing and offerings. There is just so much more to learn. Perhaps the lesson in this, as in all things, is to be contented or even joyful with the process of learning. Because surely, if it's done right, that never stops.

I guess I'm not willing to miss watching Athena help her little sister "birth" her baby cat, even if it means a slower learning curve and less homemade ketchup.

Sea Lettuce, anyone?

2010-05-31T21:06:00.000-07:00

Why yes, thank you. When we went to the beach recently I collected some sea lettuce. Today I cooked some up and am currently drying the rest to use as a spice for soups later. Apparently sea weed is some sort of super food containing more vitamins and minerals than land veggies and also carrying a heavy dose of protein and soluble fiber. Sounds good, but how does it taste? I sauteed up garlic in olive oil and added some chopped bok choy so the dish would have some crunch. I added the rinsed and chopped sea lettuce and then powdered ginger and sesame seeds. I am pleased to say that it was really great! I will definitely eat it again. Next I'll try soup.

Recipe for Sauteed Sea Lettuce:

1 Tablespoon of olive oil
2-5 Cloves garlic, chopped
1 Small head of bok choy, chopped
2 Cups rinsed and chopped sea lettuce
1/2 teaspoon of ginger powder (or if you have fresh, chop and saute with the garlic)
1 Teaspoon sesame seeds

In a medium skillet heat the olive oil and saute garlic 'til tender. Add bok choy and cook until just wilted, about 2 minutes. Add Sea lettuce and cook for about 1 minute or so. Add ginger and sesame seeds, stir it up and cook for about another minute and serve!

Helping Hands

2010-05-31T20:41:00.000-07:00

My kids thumped though the door of the kitchen carrying between them a large basket of dry laundry.
"Did you guys take the laundry off the line?" I laughed.
They had, and then my oldest put some more on. It was really cute, and really helpful. Really. I'm totally against child labor in the real world, but here, at the house, I am all for it. I believe in an entire family working together doing jobs that make them feel a part of things and gives each a sense of accomplishment. I definitely get some push back. My 4 year old will say things like "Why do I have to do everything around here." Luckily this is too funny to rile me up. One of her unofficial jobs is to let the cat in when he meows at a door. This is pretty annoying, as he can come in and out many many times during the day, but I think that because Noodles is alive she can see that doing this job actually takes care of something that needs her.

Anyway, they did the laundry and helped clean up outside without being asked and it was extremely adorable.

That black plastic is my pile of Japanese Knowtweed that is actually still growing under there!

Sea Lettuce, a Mermaid, and Rockets

2010-05-30T18:41:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we were invited to a friend's beach house right on the chilly Atlantic. The girls were beyond excited to get in the water and run free. I was excited to see them enjoy themselves and maybe get into the sand myself. My grandmother lived about a five minute walk from the beach, and during my childhood I spent every summer walking to the rocky New England beach, collecting rocks,visiting tide pools, and searching for the perfect sea shell.

Now a days I tend to look for oceanic wild edibles. One of my favorites is sea rocket. It has the incredible taste of wasabi, and although I usually don't like spicy foods, this I can manage. I have been meaning to invent a good chicken salad recipe especially for this wild food. So, yesterday when I crossed over the dunes and found that the whole beach was lined with the stuff I was pretty excited. I also found a lot of sea lettuce. I collected a couple of zip lock bags full, it's in the fridge now waiting to become soup (I'll let you know how it turns out).

I've never noticed this before, so maybe I've never collected sea lettuce during this part of the summer but many of the plants I pulled form the shore line had clusters of eggs of some kind on them. I threw them back and think I manged only to pull egg-less lettuce form the sea....I am curious to know what animal will emerge form these tiny wonders.

This was the mermaid I made. I wish I could say that I made it with the kids, or even for them. They did become interested once she really took shape. My big girl collected all the seaweed and sea straw from the beach in huge armfuls for her hair.

...and then the ocean took her back.

First Wild Strawberry of the Season!

2010-05-28T05:08:00.000-07:00

There it is....

There it went....

Long Car Rides

2010-05-28T04:00:00.000-07:00

Our town has a small children's museum within walking distance from our house. They run a lot of wonderful programs and we visit about once every couple of weeks. They offer a reciprocating membership to a bunch of other museums that we can get into free. My husband is very goal oriented, so if we are within 40 miles of a museum we have a membership to, we nearly always go. Because of this, we are something of children's museum connoisseurs. So far we have been to The Children's Museum in Easton in Massachusetts, Kidcity in Connecticut, Children's Museum of Southeastern Connecticut, The Providence Children's Museum, Boston Children's Museum, Hands-on House In Pennsylvania, Children's Museum Pittsburgh, The Children's Museum at Saratoga in New York, and The Liberty Science Center in Jersey City. Don't get me wrong, we still have a long way to go, but we're steadily making our way down the list. Many of these museums we have been to multiple times. The main reason for this is we do a long drive once a year out to western Pennsylvania. And we do this trip DVD-Free.

This is a drive of many many hours that my brother and I were subjected to as children. My mother seems relatively sane, so I don't think it caused too much permanent damage. As for my brother and me, I think we cherish the memories of the drive almost as much as arriving and playing in the freedom of my grandmother's rural Pennsylvania acreage. My most memorable car event occurred when we were probably something like 3 and 8 years old (I am older). I don't know how long we had been fighting, the drive is something like 8 -10 hours, so probably for about 6. My mother abruptly pulled over, got out of the car and started throwing the luggage from the trunk onto the roadside. We, of course, assumed we had gone too far and now lived on the side of the road. When she was through, she looked at us, eyes glowing with frustration, and said, "OUT!" Trembling we slid out of the back seat and hung our heads, preparing to shield our eyes from the dust the car would kick up as she sped to the safety of her mother's house, childless and free. To our surprise she began repacking the luggage into the back seat. Obviously, she was so mad she was going to leave us abandoned without so much as a change of clothes. She stacked the suitcases up in the backseat and when she was finished she fumed, "Get. In." She had built for us a kind of backseat Berlin Wall, I sitting on one side of the seat to ceiling stack and he on the other. We couldn't see each other, couldn't communicate, and we certainly weren't going to try to chat with my other at this point. I can remember being immediately allied with my brother and we attempted to "drill" holes in the luggage so we could see each other once again. Now that I'm a mother myself, I am inspired by this creativity in problem solving and I cringe to think of how annoyed she must have been to go though this spectacle. But regardless, it is probably one of the funniest traveling memories I have.

I watch my oldest sit in the backseat and chatter away to us actively looking out the window. She is absorbing the sights, the climate difference, the change in the architecture, and landscape. These will become for her actual memories and not just another environment in which to watch a movie. I don't want to seem high and mighty here, and believe me there are plenty of frustrating moments. The words, "You'll know when we're there because we will be out of the car." or, "Ok! it's a quiet ride now!" are said, but it's worth it. We're not crazy though, so we do have a strategy that will hopefully prevent road-side child abandonment. We break up the trip with children's museums and Grandmas house. My mother lives in New Jersey so on the way to her house we stop at Kidcity in Middletown Connecticut. I think this one is my favorite. The artists they have working there are extremely talented and everything, and I mean every detail is thought out. The colors and imagination of the place are so vibrant. If you are anywhere near this museum I highly recommend it.

Here is an example of the thoroughness of the designing. These three pigs have air coming up though them so, as you can see, the yellow balls float in mid air above the piggies' backs. However, if you were to hold them in (and really what kid wouldn't) they shoot up when you let go hitting...ready?...little drums set in the ceiling!!

Look, even the lights look like apples in the tree! And the mama pig on the right is also a seat, and don't think that you can't climb in the box and barrel and go though them like a tunnel, 'casue you can!

This is in the fishery, there is a big ship and a harbor and all kinds of conveyor belts and pulleys and wheels to mess around with to get the fish allover the place.

Notice they both have the same concentrated look on their faces...also notice the water painted on the floor.

See how she has the fish sorted by color and also into the basket that most resembles that color? That's no accident, she is a sorting sort of kid, all business.

Pink Mashed Potatoes

2010-05-24T17:26:00.000-07:00

One of my secret food loves is mashed potatoes from a box. Really. When I'm sick I want potato buds with a dollop of butter. I often fantasize about going into school cafeterias and ordering the stuff because really, the cardboardy-butter flavor and grammar school paste-like texture all wrapped up in the magical "this was served with an ice cream scoop and a frown" shape is like heaven to me. But, of course, we never really have them in the house because I tend not to buy boxed foods. But for my birthday my hubby served me up a big plate for lunch. We didn't finish the whole box so I had decided to make some for the girls for lunch. I am also trying to finish off the last of the preserved harvest from last year. This includes little vacuum sealed packages of dried beets. What I thought I'd do with them I don't know, but if they are soaked in some water the water turns a wonderful pink. I've been using it (the water that is--the beets get thrown in the compost) to cook with. So far I have had the best results using beet water in my tortillas, they make a real true pink tortilla. My other experiments--pasta, crackers--haven't been so pretty, not bad, just not really pink. But put them in some mashed potato buds and you get a really stunning result! They are HOT PINK.

Dandelion Wine

2010-05-20T04:58:00.000-07:00

A few weeks ago, my daughters and I dipped off the main road that runs through our town into a field to pick dandelion flowers. Risking social scrutiny and limes disease we waded through the tall grass and filled a canvas bag so Mommy could make "a grown up drink." I had got it in my head while walking home from my four-year-old's first field trip to make dandelion wine. I have been informed by my husband that it isn't really dandelion wine because the dandelions are not actually being fermented, but dandelion flavored wine. I have also been informed by Rico Check's book Making Plant Medicine, that some of the medicinal qualities of dandelion are preserved in the wine, so it's all a wash and good old-timey fun.

I wasn't sure how much we were supposed to collect so we just collected until the kids started complaining. When we got home I set to de-bugging and making sure all the stems were off. If you use just the petals it results in a less bitter wine. It's really time consuming to remove just the petals, so I thought I could find an easy medium. I just used my fingernails to pinch off most of the green part of the flower. This also was really time consuming and it resulted in a completely blackened thumb and forefinger nail, which looked really gross for a couple of days no matter how many times I scrubbed with boraxo.

When all was said and done and the inch worms had crawled away I had about 3 quarts of mostly petals. These were then supposed to be steeped in boiling water in a non-reactive container and covered with a cloth (I used a crock from a crock pot with the lid). So I boiled up a gallon and a half of water and poured it over the flowers and let it steep. When I informed my husband that I was "now making dandelion wine," he--being an experienced beer and mead maker--informed me that we are without much of the equipment needed to progress to the next stage after the flowers had steeped for two days. So once again a project was begun on a whim and then the exciting scramble to get what is actually needed to finish said project had begun. It wasn't really as dramatic as all that, but we did have to drive into Cambridge to the Modern Brewer to get a 2 gallon bucket and an air lock. Let it be said that this can be done with a wine bottle and a balloon, but apparently the quality "is for suckers."

After the flowers have steeped they are put back into a pot with some other fun things like orange peels with no pith, a couple of lemon peels with no pith (pith makes the wine bitter), the juice from these fruits, a couple of cloves and brought to a boil for ten minutes. We then strained the mixture into a large stainless steel bowl, added four-and-a-half pounds of sugar and let it cool a bit. When it gets to a temperature yeast likes (which is usually about 110 degrees) I added the juice, champagne yeast and yeast nutrient. We poured the whole thing into the 2 gallon fermentation bucket and then let it sit. I basically used the second recipe on this site, but changed it up a bit, as you can see.

In the morning, we looked at it and didn't believe it was doing anything, even though the air lock buoy had risen and we could hear the sound of bubbles popping. So we opened up the top to see and it was of course doing something. We then called the Modern Brewer and they said it was doing something and opening up the container was the worst thing to do but that it would be fine and we would in fact have wine of some kind at the end of this adventure. They also said that we could do something called "back sweeten" the wine which means adding sugar after the wine has stopped fermenting. The sugar that is added at this point is not eaten by the yeast, as the four-and-a-half pounds we already added will be. The new sugar can then behave in a more traditional way for sugar and sweeten the drink, making what my husband called "dandelion wine coolers." Do you think he was making fun of me?