What is something that can always make you feel better?
Submitted by meehshell
Well, I suppose there are several things, but the one thing that's really working right now is the Stoddard Creek Campground. Some days, I just can't stand any more time in the kitchen, and I have to get out. But we're broke. Right now, in fact, we're really broke. So, going out to eat isn't really an option. Instead, I parboil some potatoes (from our garden, multicolored). Then we pack up the cooler with the potatoes and whatever other veggies we get from the garden that have been tossed in olive oil and salt, some kind of protein, and some beverages, and we head for the hills. Sometimes we go fishing before dinner at nearby Beaver Creek; sometimes we just go there and start our fire and run around trying to catch chipmunks while the coals are heating up. Sometimes we take along beer and potato chips, if we've got 'em, and a big jar of pickles and a tomato ripe from the vine that we liberally douse with salt, and we snack our way through the ritualistic building of fire. It all works. Then we eat, and we know the smoke is supposed to be carcinogenic, but fuck it. Last time we went, when we got there, there were 6 or 7 deer grazing on the hill right behind the campground, 3 of which were still-spotted fawns. The time before that, we sat around talking and watching the fire for so long that it got dark, and we watched with real gratitude and awe as a giant, full, pumpkin moon rose over the mountains.
Yep, some days, you just have to get out of the damned kitchen.
Oh, which reminds me. Have you all seen that fucking paper-plate commercial where the woman says, "I want a paper plate that's as strong as I am." I am so sick of that bitch. Way to totally trivialize yourself, by comparing your strength to that of a paper plate. You know, there is no paper plate on earth that's as strong as I am, nor will there ever be. Possibly that is why we do not purchase or use paper plates. Then she goes on to say, "and I'm proud to use whatever brand of paper product if it means fewer dishes and spending more time with my family." She makes me want to punch the TV.
What do we use when we go to the campground to eat, if not paper? Obviously, we have purchased a set of plastic plates and bowls for the purpose. They're real plates and bowls, just plastic. We take however many we need; when we get home, we scrape the leftovers into the garbage and put the plates into the dishwasher. We just take along our normal cutlery, because it is not breakable and we figure we are alert enough to make sure it all comes home. This isn't hard.
I've been thinking lately about how things that are not hard seem hard until you start doing them and get the habit. This occurred to me the other day as I was making salad dressing. I didn't always make my own salad dressings. I am not sure quite how or why I started doing it, even, although it was probably some combination of urging from Alton Brown and Mark Bittman and running out of store-bought at an inopportune moment. And I just started doing it, and now I do it every time we have salad. I make a new salad dressing pretty much every time we have salad, just making enough for that night's salad, even though I could make a batch and keep it for a while. The other night I made a salad of smoked (smoked by us, no less!) salmon, poached egg, arugula, and tomato, and I topped this with a creamy lemon dressing, and it was brilliant. I can remember back to a time when I felt sure that the additional time it would take to make the dressing would just be a hassle and impossible to fit in, but it's not, once you get the habit. It takes time to really get the habit, but once you do, it's just there, part of the routine.
I can remember, too, when I first started canning. I started with jam--marmalade, to be precise, and it started because of a particularly wonderful cookbook, The French Farmhouse Cookbook. The whole Farmhouse series (there are 3: Farmhouse, French Farmhouse, and Italian Farmhouse, and I have them all) is fantastic, and my copies are all splattered and dog-eared, and much loved. Anyway, they all have some recipes in them for jams and other preserved foods, since that is a typical part of the farmhouse cook's routine. The French Farmhouse Cookbook, indeed, has a recipe for orange marmalade that intrigued me. I love orange marmalade, but a lot of commercial marmalades disappoint. She made it sound pretty easy in the cookbook, so I thought I'd give it a whirl. I made that, and then the orange-lemon marmalade. Then I made the Basque-style plum-vanilla jam. And the rhubarb-raspberry. All from the same cookbook. And then, once you start, the store jams just don't taste very good anymore. You can taste their deficiencies, that you could never taste before, just by comparison to the real, amazing deal. So, you won't settle for them anymore, so the next summer (well, now I do orange and orange-lemon during winter, since citrus is in season and cheaper then--we most certainly do not grow our own citrus here in Idaho) you just do it again, because of that hankering for the goodness. You do it often enough, it gets to be a habit.
I don't remember exactly when I started in on the pickles. I do remember that once I had the canning bug, my mom gave me her old canning cookbook. It's the Farm Journal cookbook from the early 1960s. It's kind of hilarious, in the way that books aimed at housewives in the 1950s and '60s are. But it's also full of pickle recipes (it's also full of fucking bizarre recipes, in the way that cookbooks from that time period are: "salads" that consist primarily of mayonnaise and canned mandarin oranges, for example. Lots of molded Jell-O things, too, of course. It's also funny in that it implies that zucchini is still mainly a vegetable grown and enjoyed by Californians and Italians. Oh, those wacky Californians!), and I think my first attempt was beets. I never liked beets until I learned how to pickle them myself. I always thought those tinny, unspiced things you get in the store were "pickled beets," but it always seemed to me that the beet had potential to be great. And it certainly does. I've played around with my beet pickles and found a couple of pickling methods that I like. One adds the traditional cinnamon and clove to the vinegar solution. The other, and I made this one up, is pickled and flavored with fennel instead. I sliced fennel bulbs and Chioggia beets up last year to make a really pretty little salad pickle or pickle salad, and it was tasty. This year I'll probably do it with golden beets instead of Chioggia, since the Chioggia beets lost some of their stripes in processing. I'll save the Chioggias for applications where their colors are shown off to better effect.
The next habit I'm going to try to acquire is making more of my own soaps and shampoos and stuff like that. After that, I'll be moving on to cheese-making. I've already started making my own laundry soap and most of my own household cleaning supplies; why not shampoo? And I believe Barbara Kingsolver completely when she says that cheesemaking can fit into your normal routine. I feel sure of this, because I have already acquired other habits that I felt sure I would never have time for. It is true that now any time I am watching TV, I am also doing something else: chopping onions for relish, pitting cherries, pulling dill seeds off their heads. But that's alright. If you're going to sit on your ass and drool over Bear Grylls anyway, you may as well be doing something constructive with your hands.
Anyway, you get the habit, or I do, and then you want to do more. I make chokecherry jelly or syrup more years than not, since chokecherries are so plentiful around here. This year, I had some wild raspberries (or, probably, thimbleberries) sitting in the fridge from our last picking excursion, and I threw them in for a chokecherry-thimbleberry jam. Something new, something delicious. Today, admittedly, I did something odd even for me: I dehydrated cucumbers. I was surprised to find that in their dehydrated stated, they still taste cucumbery. I will attempt rehydrating them tomorrow to see how well they fare in various applications: in a gazpacho, in a curry, and possibly even in a raita. If this works, I shall be very happy, because I get to missing cucumbers in the winter. I am also dehydrating tomatoes tonight. These ones will get ground up eventually to a tomato powder, which then serves as an excellent thickener of sauces and stews, much like tomato paste, only without the boiling down and canning processes.
You get these habits and routines and make them part of your life, and then you want to learn more. My forays into pickledom have now taken me to a place where I find myself reading up on molarity and buffering as they apply to pH levels in pickled vegetables. My diddling around with wild plants led to research on traditional medicinal applications for those plants, and now I'm making homemade cough remedies and fever-reducing teas (and, yes, I am quite aware of the potential dangers and am doing thorough research and taking all necessary precautions, etc.). It's really remarkable how you get to be 34 years old with a Master's! Degree! and thinking you know a little something and then you find out that, really, you don't. You have no idea what the fuck "molarity" is and why it should matter to your precious cucumbers, but it does, so you have to find out. Despite the fact that I can discourse at length about Heidegger and Chomsky and the grammatical complexities of Navajo, I don't know shit. Except that I know that I don't, so I think that's a good place to start.
I guess I went way off topic in this post, which is not unusual for me, but in a way it brought us full circle, didn't it? The forest is a great place to go to remind yourself how little you know, especially if you take along a 3-year-old. Frankly, I think our society would be a lot better off if more people realized how little they really know.
]]>Ah, yes, and we've reached the time in the summer when my husband and I look at each other pitifully and wonder why the fuck we keep doing this. It happens. Over the next month and a half or so, until the growing season really goes kaput, we'll groan and mutter and whine and rub each other's aching shoulders (at least I don't have two cords of wood to split...my heart and shoulders ache for my poor husband and his wood-splitting chores) and slog through it all.
In addition to the previously referenced subscription to Gourmet, I also get a magazine called Mother Earth News. It's full of great information about gardening and composting and building your own solar contraptions and all sorts of other stuff for people who are just sick to death of the overconsumption, wastefulness, and helplessness of modern life. In this issue, one of the letters suggests that this way of life--the canning, the homemade solar contraptions, etc.--is not, in fact, a "simple" life. She suggests that going to the store and buying canned spaghetti sauce is "simpler" than canning your own. She has a point, on the one hand; it's a lot of bloody work. (Hot work, too: The temperature around my pickle station today, as I was putting up jars of oregano-scented giardiniera, was 103 F, which I believe is the official boiling point of my brain).
On the other hand, I think she's missing the point. The idea that this is the "simple" life (although I also find that to be a sort of silly thing to call it) is that it's simpler in terms of the technology and systems required to run it. The canned spaghetti sauce in the store has a lot of technological support, from the types of tomatoes that have been bred for commercial processing to the mechanical harvesting to the trucks that deliver it to your store and the various systems that the store itself requires. Certainly, that sauce is simple for you, the consumer, but nothing else about it is simple at all. On the other hand, the technology required to grow and harvest paste tomatoes and then cook and can them in your own kitchen is practically medieval, transparent, and available to all (or pretty close). Similarly, hanging my clothes out on the clothesline to dry in the sun is not simpler for me; indeed, it's a pain in the ass. However, in terms of technology and energy use, it's vastly simpler than using a dryer (besides just the obvious, we also require no dryer sheets as no static builds up in our clothes). So, I guess I'm saying that "simple" for you on a micro level takes a lot of (often invisible) complexity; pain in the ass for you means simple on a macro level.
Anyway, I've begun a new offensive on winter: I am dehydrating kale. Kale is one thing we have tons and tons of. It's really a shame that more people here don't eat kale (they don't--I tried selling some of our excess at the farmer's market, and people had no idea what to do with such an item. "Wash it, cut it up, cook it with some bacon," said I, but still no takers. Sigh.) since it is one of the few things that will grow here way past frost and be happy about it. We actually have three varieties of kale this year which, admittedly, seems excessive (we have that Tuscan black kale, a Scotch blue curled kale, and a Red Russian--they don't taste a whole lot different, but there are textural differences). Anyway, it is producing so well that we have started wondering what the heck to do with it all, so now we're drying it. Greens dry fairly well and then you can add them all winter long to soups and rice while it cooks or whatever, quite easily.
I've also discovered a little trick that I think is quite clever. I already mentioned, I think, that I am trying to stockpile herbal teas, because my son and I drink a lot of tea during winter. Well, we've been out picking wild raspberries (I think these are actually thimbleberries, a relative of raspberries, but what the hell?), and I had noted previously that most "raspberry" herbal teas actually contain raspberry leaves rather than raspberries. Same with strawberry. Anyway, so now whenever we go pick the berries, I get some of the leaves, too, and now I have a significant stockpile of those, along with my chamomile and goldenrod and such. It's kind of amazing to think how much money I would have spent on that this winter had I not finally thought to just start bringing some of the leaves home. I'm going to go ahead and dry the leaves of our strawberry plants at the end of the season, too. I mean, why not?
So, tomorrow, I have to: harvest beets; dehydrate most of the beet greens along with some more kale; pickle the beets; harvest coriander, dill seed, and poppy seeds and get them in the solar contraption to dry; harvest chamomile and calendula and get them to drying; feed the worms (we have a vermicomposter, aka "the worm farm," in the basement, and if I don't feed them, then they don't poop for me) and get their poop and spread it where we just harvested the All-Blue potatoes tonight; plant daikon and other radishes in that spot, amongst the worm castings; experiment with the cucumbers (I'm going to try freezing cucumbers that have been purged, i.e., salted and allowed to drain thoroughly; I'm wondering if purging the cucumbers will let them freeze successfully. Purging eggplant before freezing it works a charm in keeping it a reasonable texture, so I'm hoping it might work for cukes. And, besides, for a lot of applications I purge the cukes first, anyway. So...maybe. It's worth a shot, anyway); make chokecherry something or other, probably jelly and syrup since we have a lot of bleedin chokecherries this year (I want to make chokecherry wine, but I just don't have that in me right now).
All of that is just to say that I'm sorry I'm not responding to anyone right now or reading anyone else's blogs or emailing or anything at all right now. If I get all distracted by actually corresponding with friends and family, the beets and kale will rot in the ground and we'll starve to death this winter. Alright, that's an exaggeration, I know. But, still. After another 6 weeks, I'll be back to my usual prolix bitching. Well, I might be around more in a couple of weeks because that's when my semester starts again, so I'll be online anyway.
Oh, man, now it's getting late and I did not get the onion relish done...so I guess I have to do that tomorrow, too. These computers are the biggest damned distraction ever.
One last thing...has anyone reading this read any Murakami Haruki? I just read After Dark, and that was the first Murakami book I ever read, and...I don't get it. All the reviews I read said it was brilliant, but if it's brilliant, then I am clearly not. I mean, I understood it, but I don't understand what's supposed to be so brilliant about it, I guess, which means I'm missing something? Or...? The dialogue really grated on my nerves badly, but since I was reading it in translation I can't necessarily blame Murakami for that. Feck. Maybe it just irritated me that two of the main characters make a show of asserting that they're totally not the type of people who go to love hotels, like it's some kind of terrible thing to go to a love hotel. THERE'S NO SHAME IN GOING TO LOVE HOTELS. Anyway, it isn't just me. I also recently read (finally!) No Country for Old Men, and I not only got it but sooooo much loved it. It could have been me. I spend way too much time in the summers analyzing canning and pickling cookbooks. Sometimes I can't remember what it's like to think of things that do not involve vinegar.
]]>We've been fishing a lot. Or, rather, my menfolk fish while I gather berries and flowers. It's very...1850s. But, by Christ, we eat so well. So very well.
My husband found some spot full of brook trout who are eager to jump right up onto our dinner plates. Tonight we smoked 6 of them, and ...oh. Oooooh. Smoked trout. We smoked with applewood, so the trout now taste remarkably like good bacon. While the boys were fishing, I picked gooseberries and made muffins with some of them and froze some more. There are few things that make winter palatable like warm berry muffins in the morning.
I also pick wildflowers and such to make herbal teas with. I have already laid in enough goldenrod to suffice for the winter, I think. I probably already have enough chamomile (after I had already planted mine I found that some grows wild around here, too), but can you ever really have enough chamomile tea? I have yarrow for fevers, and next time we go out I'll get mullein, said to be good for lung congestion. Not to mention the leaves of wild raspberries which, when dried, make a remarkably tasty tea that is apparently good for feminine complaints, if you get my drift.
And, of course, we've been making jam and pickles and whatnot, too. My best thing so far this year--and it is in serious contention for the best jam I've ever made--is a blackberry-mint jam. I got the idea to make it from a Gourmet (yes, I subscribe) recipe by Dan Barber. He has these minted blackberries on top of cheesecake. I am not interested in the cheesecake (it is possible that his is a good cheesecake, but by and large I find most cheesecakes to be terribly overrated. Which I realize puts me in a distinct minority. When I do want/make cheesecake, I usually make them with some kind of combination of ricotta and goat cheeses rather than cream cheese. I know, I know). Anyway, the minted blackberry topping intrigued me, and as it happens I have quite a lot of apple mint. So I tried his recipe, sans cheesecake, and was delighted to find that the amount of mint he uses is a sprightly underscore to the flavor of the blackberries. Blackberries and marionberries are in season here now, so I picked up a flat (or two) and decided to forego (well, not entirely) my erstwhile favorite blackberry jam (a blackberry-lemon jam that I've made every year since my first year of jam-making). And I made blackberry-marionberry-mint jam that also has lemon zest.
This shit packs a punch. The lemon and mint work in concert; neither overwhelms the flavor of the berries or each other. It's like when Emmylou Harris sings backup vocals--you always know she's there, and you always know it's her, but she's still only in the background, harmonizing and blending seamlessly in with the lead singer. This jam made me do little jigs of joy around my kitchen. My sweltering kitchen.
Tomorrow, since I have half a case of peaches and half a case of apricots melting in said kitchen, I have to make a peach-apricot jam and an apricot butter (like apple butter...only apricots). I think I will still have enough apricots left to make an apricot chutney, too, but I think I might blow that off and make apricot upside-down cake instead. Wooooo--summertime!
The big news around here lately is that we have started ourselves a farmer's market. I sell my excess Costata Romanesca zucchini now and get weird looks from the old men who don't understand why I don't just grow the normal kinds of zucchini. These same old men (and a lot of other people besides) are big fans of my jams and pickles, though. This one guy comes now and just scoops up whatever pickles I have on the table and buys them all, and word has already got around town (and back to me) that my dilly beans are some kind of awesome. It's pretty cool. Right now we still don't have a lot of vendors, but more of them are promising to start showing up. There is widespread enthusiasm and support for this, although I really don't think any person shopping there would ever use a word like "locavore." It feels sort of strange to think that, instead of just sitting in front of my computer being grumpy, I'm actually doing something to make a lasting positive change in the community. Kind of gives ya the heebie-jeebies.
Oh, and I'm entering my chili in the county fair chili cook-off this Friday. The public gets to the be the judges, though, and people here hate spicy food, so I don't know how good my chances are.
Gah, between the community activities and the berry-picking and gardening and canning and freezing and smoking, I'm bushed. I really need to go to bed. Big day with stone fruits tomorrow...mmmmm...stone fruits....zzzzzzzz.
]]>Apologies in advance, but we have to ask... How do you REALLY feel about the New Kids on the Block reunion?
I'm so excited about it that I didn't even know it was happening. I didn't even know they are all still alive, let alone having a reunion. Aren't they too old to do those dance moves and still respect themselves in the morning?
They sang that "Hangin' Tough" song? Despite the fact that they looked like sissies? I'm pretty sure Hank, Jr., would shoot those boys if he caught them trespassing, then we'd see how tough they hang. While I'm not advocating shooting them, I'm also not advocating giving a fuck about them.
]]>What question do you wish you'd never asked.
Submitted by cha0tic.
Christ, that's an easy one. Maybe I shouldn't talk about it.
Oh, what the hey.
I deeply regret having ever asked about my grandmother's love life. Seriously. The chippie. The harlot. The tramp.
I don't entirely remember how the conversation got started, but it was during the summer when my mom and I were taking care of my aunt who was dying of lung cancer, and there was some time when my mom's best friend (they've been best friends since third grade, which seems like it should be some kind of record) came over, I think, and maybe one of my other aunts was there, and we got to talking about their life growing up. Perhaps a little background, a very brief family history, although this is going to make us seem trashy, but what the hey:
My great-grandma left her three children and her husband and moved off to Hollywood to be a big star. She was in some movies and dated guys like Errol Flynn, but meanwhile her kids were just sort of shuffled around from farm to farm living with different family members. Great-grandma, who until her dying day did not wear underpants (apparently, she was Britney before Britney was cool), did not get back in her kids' lives until they were older. I'm unclear on when.
Alright, so the three kids were getting shuffled around, and their lives were pretty miserable. Farm life is never easy, and it's even rougher when you've been abandoned and all that. At 15, my grandma met Mr. Charming and married him and promptly starting makin' babies. I think she had her first kid when she was only 16. She went on to have 4 more (and a couple of miscarriages or stillbirths or something--unclear again), and her life was pretty much the standard 40s and 50s housewife story, working her ass off taking care of kids. Then--and again there are unclear parts here, especially because a lot of this story is shit no one wants to relive by talking about--her husband started abusing some of the kids. So, grandma kicked his ass to the curb. That meant she had 5 hungry mouths to feed, and this was the late 50s, so life was hard for single moms. But she got a job, and she sewed all the kids' clothes, and they ate crappy food and lived in overcrowded apartments, and somehow or other got by. Her kids were not all entirely well behaved children, either, let me assure you.
And then, for various reasons, my grams would take in other kids. Like, some friend of her kids would get kicked out of their house and come to live with them. Or my uncle Pat's girlfriend came to live with them while Pat was in Vietnam. Whatever. But there were always even more kids around than her own kids, and I guess people would just be sleeping all higgledy-piggledy over the floor and whatnot.
During this time, however, my grams somehow managed to get married to one other guy and also have one long-term relationship with a married man I prefer to call "The Traveling Salesman." They say he wasn't a salesman, but he did live in a different city, and she met him through work because he traveled there a lot or whatever, and he had the wife back home, and it's all too sordid. I believe he was Catholic (theoretically, so is my Grams) so he couldn't get a divorce, or that was the story. Never stopped my Grams!
I don't know exactly what precipitated divorce #2--it wasn't the Traveling Salesman, because as far as anyone can tell, Salesman happened after divorce #2.
Anyway, so sometime after the Salesman, my grams took up ballroom dancing as a hobby. My mom vividly remembers her sewing herself chiffon dancing dresses. It was at ballroom dancing class that Grams met husband #3. Husband #3 was unfortunately a grumpy, antisocial hypochondriac, and from what I hear he was even worse when they first got married. Apparently he was so bad that my mom's youngest brother, the only kid who was still living at home at that time I think, felt compelled to move out; he was 15 at that time. But all of his brothers and sisters were already married and gone (or, in Susie's case, possibly unmarried and gone--I don't know when Susie first got married) so I don't know where he lived. But anyway.
Oh, right, and somewhere in the midst of all of this, she went to clown school and became a registered professional clown. I really wish I didn't know about that, too.
How did my Grams find time to make herself chiffon ballroom gowns and take clown classes and meet man after man? Who the fuck knows, man. When I raised this concern, my mom and her friend were all, "But she was still a fairly young woman, and she deserved to have some fun!" And I was all, "Well, I'm pretty sure that if something happened to T and I was a single mom, and I spent 3 nights away from home ballroom dancing instead of spending it with my kid, you'd be pretty upset about it." And they agreed. If I spent money on chiffon to make dancing dresses while my kids were making themselves white bread with canned tomato soup for supper night after night because there wasn't money for other food, I can tell you right now that my mother would have something to say about my behavior. But that's different.
Anyway, the rest of my grandma's love life I've actually witnessed. She was still married to the hypochondriac when I was a kid (though she's not now--divorce #3 was precipitated by death of best friend and rapid moving in with best friend's grieving widower, aka husband #4, a man I hated very much but who is now deceased so according to the rules of life I can no longer speak ill of, I guess). She's single now, but we have a family betting pool going on when she will meet Lucky #5 and who it will be. The best money is on Andy, this guy who lives in her, um, senior village or whatever the fuck it's called. He's sort of Tony Bourdain-ish, and all the ladies in the village like him. My grams is still an attractive woman, although it's hard to see it sometimes through the damn kitten sweatshirts.
Seriously--about the kitten sweatshirts. My grams never used to dress like that. I mean, her style was never to my taste--a little on the Bea Arthur side for me--but she dressed like a woman anyway. Do you hit some specific age and the AARP sends you a notice that now you must refrain from wearing stylish clothes and start with the kitten sweatshirts?
Anyway, I love my Grams. I do. Obviously, she's an interesting woman and tough as nails and generous and a friggin CLOWN, and I adore her. I just wish I didn't know about the chiffon and the Traveling Salesman, mostly. Of course I also wish that I had never heard my great-grandma complain about Clark Gable's halitosis or how underpants are too constricting. Some things are just kind of personal, ya know.
]]>Show us an awesome mustache.
Submitted by Soup.
Alright, Soup, I will.
Granted, this is not a mere mustache, and the overall look is quite dependent on the beret, I think. Still, you have to admire this. I think this takes a certain amount of huevos, a definite inner confidence.
Although, perhaps not as much as this facial hair/headgear combination. It's not a mustache, so it doesn't qualify, but you still have to admire the balls.
The other day we were watching an interview with the singer Jewel about her life growing up in Alaska, and she said that basically up there you spend all summer getting ready for winter.
We don't live in Alaska anymore, but Idaho is close enough (actually, according to the USDA Zone Map, many places in Alaska, including where Jewel lived and where we used to live, do not get as cold as it gets here, and considering they actually have humidity up there, the weather in general up there is less harsh than it is here), and we know exactly what she means.
Today my husband and stepdad went out to cut wood and spent all day (well, 7 hours) doing it. We now have a giant pile (about a cord and a half) of wood scattered about our backyard; my son has already built a fort out of some of it. That wood needs to be split and stacked, and we still need to get about 4 more cords. It's work--muscle-straining, backache-inducing work.
And today I spent about 4 hours working on cherries. I had bought about 10 or 12 pounds yesterday at the farmer's market. These are locally grown (more or less) Bing cherries, picked absolutely ripe and indescribably delicious, the kind of cherry that turns you off supermarket fruit. I washed them all and pitted them. The slightly overripe ones will go into jam (make that tomorrow) as cherry jam is one of my all-time favorite yogurt toppings, and we need a lot of it. The perfectly ripe ones are being individually frozen. I put them on cookie sheets to freeze, so that once they are bagged I can just pull out however many cherries I want at a time instead of having to defrost the whole bag.
All the peas are harvested and stored now. We have about 10 quarts of snow and snap peas in the freezer, along with 2 gallons of shelled peas. We also dried enough peas to total about a pound of dry peas for soup. We dried all the peas on a homemade screen rack outside in the sun. We will plant peas again soon, for a second harvest in the fall.
Chamomile and other herbs for medicine and tea have to be harvested almost daily in this weather, because they're growing so fast. We dry them on the same screen rack outside, using nothing but solar energy. We're going to have a bounteous supply of chamomile tea, although I'm also mixing it with pineapple weed flowers. Pineapple weed is, yes, a weed, but it's closely related to chamomile (the Matricaria chamomile, anyway), and it tastes really good as tea and offers some of the same benefits (being soothing, etc.). We also have calendula flowers to dry and yarrow. Indeed, I am utterly in love with yarrow. I have never tested its supposed fever-curing properties, but if it's good enough for Achilles, it's damn sure good enough for us. We also picked about a pound of wild mint leaves, and we are drying them and intend to mix them with our garden-grown mint (we have three varieties, currently) to make a mint tea for winter. I'm letting the cilantro do as it wants to do and make coriander for me. The poppies are also doing what they want and making seeds, later to make lemon poppyseed muffins with. Lillies, sunflowers, nasturtiums, and cornflowers (aka bachelor's buttons) are all blooming to great effect and pleasing me mightily.
Oh, right, y'all wanted pictures. After work finishes up, OK?
Also at the farmer's market yesterday, I bought 20 pounds of local apricots. Yum. I hope to get another box next week. Of course, we are eating them, letting the bright-orange juice get all over our faces and forearms, but we will also make jam (we eat a fair quantity of jam, mostly because we only buy plain yogurt, and we put jam on top of the plain yogurt--we also use it on biscuits and pancakes and so forth, of course, but the yogurt habit is what really affects our jam consumption), and then--THEN!--I ordered a new food dehydrator, a 9-rack commercial type unit, and we will make dried apricots. Oh, super yum. I bought the big dehydrator because we intend to do a lot of drying this year, especially once my husband gets a deer (jerky!--fingers crossed, as getting a deer is by no means a foregone conclusion), and things like apricots and cherries take a long time to sun-dry here. I think we're going to do the tomatoes out in the sun, though. Oh, right, I also intend to make zucchini chips this year. I read about it this winter, and I'm always looking for new ways to sock zucchini away for the winter since it produces so abundantly, and apparently dehydrated zucchini slices make a delicious chip, that you can just eat straight out of the bag like a potato chip. You could also rehydrate them, of course, and use them in soup or whatever. Whatever. It's chips I want. I figure once the zucchini gets going it shouldn't be too hard to fill that 9-rack dehydrator. Fortunately, I have a mandoline for easy uniform slicing.
Oh, we also found a big patch of wild raspberries the other day while we were fishing/harvesting mint. They're in flower now. Can't wait...can't wait.
I only have one week of work left for the summer, and it's good, because August is too full of getting ready for winter to hold down an actual job. Once the tomatoes and zucchini start in earnest (all our tomatoes are still green right now--we should start having cherry tomatoes soon), dealing with them is a full-time job.
People ask me all the time if I don't get tired of it. The truth is that we get very tired of it about the end of August or middle of September, but the rest of the year makes up for it. Well, not only that, but to be honest, I think for us there is great satisfaction in doing this kind of work. There is satisfaction in using your hands and your back to do real hard work, in getting sweaty and dirty from mixing about with earth. All three of us (because my son helps, sort of--as best as a 3-year-old can) sit back in October and look at our carefully split-and-stacked wood, our pantry full of dried and canned foods, our freezer stocked with both vegetables by themselves and some ready-to-eat convenience foods that I make (stuffed zucchini, soup concentrates, zucchini fritters, etc.), and we take pride and comfort from it. It will mean lower grocery bills for us, of course, and it will mean fewer trips to the grocery store, more selection when decent produce is hard to get in winter, and higher quality food. It also means that a significant portion of the work we do in our lives is not work where we trade our time for money, but where we work directly for whatever it is that we need, cutting out the money part of the deal. It means that that work that we did was work we did as a family; it was time spent together, working towards a common goal, laughing, bickering, cooperating, trying not to cut each other's fingers off with the axe.
I don't mean to get too sentimental about it--it is hard work, and as I said, we do get tired of it. And I don't want to sound preachy, but sometimes I wonder if more people tried it out, if they wouldn't also find it more rewarding than they imagined. I wonder, too, if people would appreciate the energy (in the form of electricity, oil, or food) they consume more when they knew what that consumption meant in real physical terms. Maybe we wouldn't be so wasteful as a society, and maybe we wouldn't abuse food the way we do. Maybe being outdoors and working and finding yourself reaching for apricots and peas for snacks would give us better health. Maybe the time spent working with their families would be good for kids and adults alike. Oh, I don't know...but maybe.
I know, I know--I'm a dreamer and an idealist, but when you spend 4 hours pitting cherries, you have a lot of time to daydream. Trust me.
]]>What's the closest thing you have to a time machine?
Submitted by Verisimilitude.
I'm not sure if I understand the question correctly, but I guess my son, since he has reintroduced me to the wonders the world holds when your mind has youthful curiosity. I mean, to take an example, I learned why the sky is blue way back in elementary school, right? And at the time, I found it wonderful, that little molecules could conspire so to produce something that we can see and call beautiful--not just the blue, but also the rainbows and the sunsets and clouds and all of it. Somewhere along the way, though, I started taking it for granted. I guess I can only marvel at molecules for so long.
Now, I get to teach him about it, and I am once again finding myself smitten with awe and wonder at the careless, incessant beauty of the world. I say "careless" because it's not as if the molecules of the world have really set out to make beauty, though perhaps we are made in some way to see the things they make as beautiful.
Seeing things with him again and watching him thrill at the deliciousness of the world especially as he comes to understand reminds me of a time when I had just explained--oh, I don't know, let's say I had just explained why the sky is blue to a friend. And she asked if it didn't seem less beautiful and romantic or something once you understood. I told her I thought it was more gorgeous because it wasn't intentional. If we assume a god to be omnipotent and intentional, then it's not a miracle that beauty exists; it would be simple enough to just make a rainbow if you were God. If, on the other hand, it's just a fortuitous alignment of raindrops and sunlight that are acting with no intent to create something at all, that's a fucking miracle. That's something worth celebrating.
And, thanks to my son, I'm remembering how much I loved it all the first time around. I can't wait to build a mock volcano with, like, dry ice and shit. Woo!
]]>Sometimes, you love something, and you really don't know why. You can't explain it to anyone. People ridicule you, and still you love it.
I'm like this with The Monkees. Yeah, I love them. I can regale you with all sorts of obscure facts about them, such is my fandom, if you want me to (e.g., The Monkees spotted a virtual unknown playing at the Monterey Pop Festival and invited him to open for them on their upcoming tour, and that virtual unknown was Jimi Hendrix. And, no, your typical Monkees fan who was at the concert did not enjoy the sonic stylings of the Hendrix. I believe there was much booing and chanting, which makes one want to find those girls, and you know they were girls, who booed Jimi Hendrix in favor of the Monkees and shake the daylights out of them. Anyway.)
And now, there are a couple of commercials that I just totally love and can't stop myself from loving, despite the ridicule I must suffer from friends and family. Behold:
What is that gesture that the mustache man near the end is doing to "cheddarwurst?" And while we're on the subject, and because over on the Book of the Face I've been involved recently in a very long discussion about "Americanisms" that are sniper-attacking the lovely and completely correct forms of English spoken in other nations--is "cheddarwurst" a real word?
Also, these commercials bewitch and entrance me:
I don't know why I love this goofy band of guys who really need to get a handle on their credit histories, but I do. If they're a real band, I'd totally buy their album. Album? Nobody buys albums anymore. Whatever.
And in the next one, there are specifically two things I love (beyond the fact that he would "be a happy bachelor with a dog and a yard"): 1. If you look close at the beginning, you can totally see the pirate hat!!! I wish they had the junky car from the other commercial, too. 2. I love it when the drummer has to open the door after cranky Dream Girl shuts it on him. Oh, I'm not blaming Dream Girl for being cranky. I mean--she has a husband who works as a pirate at a restaurant and always has his friends over hanging out and drinking all the beer while she stomps around picking up laundry that is apparently scattered everywhere. Then he's ready to ditch her just because she has bad credit. Seems kinda harsh. Anyway:
Heh. Well, the Intarwebz have demonstrated to me that the cutie lead singer is one Eric Violette who apparently only speaks English during Free Credit Report.com commercials. I guess he's Quebecois, which is good to know because I thought my French was just getting really, really bad--it's not me, it's him! Or, rather, it's that the French that I learned isn't the French he speaks. Whatever. I officially love him now. I wonder if he will bring me some poutine. Or...something.
I don't think the other commercials I love are quite so embarrassing:
And, finally, our favorite commercial of all time. While it is cute and huggable when my toddler shouts, "Go Meat!" at the dinner table, this is the commercial that has stolen the hearts of everyone in our family (it has also taught my son the two crucial words 'arachnid' and 'magma' thus launching a recurring debate about what is really at the center of the earth and how it might have got there--he does not believe this 'magma' business for one minute). I could listen to either Bear Grylls or my son declaim his love of arachnids all day long.
(Admittedly, my son has also developed a habit of attempting to trap and eat animals that are not normally considered food here in the US, and when we question his behavior, he shouts, "It's survival! That's what Bear Grylls does!" I think it's maybe a good thing we're going to homeschool him.)
]]>What is the big news story in your area today and how does this news impact your life?
Not a lot of news happens around here. There is the weather, an eternal source of wonderment and consternation. The big story is that it's dry--DAMN dry--and warm-to-hot. This leads to the related story that the Forest Service is about two steps away from closing the forests. You know why they have to close the forests when it's this dry? Because idiots go to dry forests and start fires, fires that can rage on for days or even weeks, consuming thousands and thousands of acres. Sure, fire is a natural and rejuvenating phenomenon for the forest. And when the fire mows down people's homes, the Forest Service could just sit back and let the "natural" fire started by some dickweed with a can of Sterno burn, baby, burn. Except that then they would get sued. Because this is America. In consequence, everyone is now racing to get in their winter's supply of firewood. This flurry of wood-cutting could actually be helpful if a fire should start, because you take the dead wood that's lying around as firewood, not the living trees. Dead wood is just fuel for those fires, although in this kind of dryness, the living trees won't fare much better.
Anyway, getting extremely local, the big news is that this community is finally starting its own farmer's market and community store (separate entities, but related). Woo! The Economic Development Committee has shown some progress at last!
And, um. That's about all the news around here. It's either boring or great, depending on how you look at it.
Oh, but a while back we did have a big story. A letter went out to everyone in town claiming that one of the county commissioners had done things the cemetery that would shock us! Naturally, my curiosity was piqued. I thought for sure we had caught a necrophiliac, or at the very least a graverobber, in our midst. No. It was all very anticlimactic: He was putting gravel in the graves instead of soil or some damn fool thing. So, like grass and flowers wouldn't grow on the graves. Still, while we were all less than shocked, at least it gave us something to make chit-chat about.
Must...keep...making...chit-chat.
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