Here Comes the Sun

No groundhog on the menu this week. He's been given a reprieve. The sun came out. We were supposed to have a dissection class, but one of the participant's family had a bout with some bug and wouldn't be able to make it. With all of the golden glow lighting up the landscape, the remaining participants made sympathetic noises, told the stricken how sorry we were for their illness, and, of course, we would not even imagine proceeding with the next portion of our studies until everyone was fit for duty. It was a huge sacrifice. But that's what you do for friends, right?

The snow is gone and our propane delivery person managed to slog his way through the soggy tundra to fill our tanks. It does the heart good to see such dedicated personnel, doesn't it? And who says that good help is hard to find these days? It was amazing to see how quickly the extensive footage of snow disappeared, leaving the layer of detritus that its weight brought down. The sides of the road are invisible under the fractured boughs along the berm. It's been so warm, in fact, that the friend of mine, whose sons make maple syrup, has been praying for colder nights. It seems the recipe for good sap flow is warm, sunny days and nippy nights. The weather does seem unseasonably mild, particularly after the ferocious snow storm.

While it is unusual for it to be this warm at this time of year, I couldn't resist the call to go out and play in the mud. St. Paddy's Day has become my traditional Starts Day, so I schlepped down to the cellar and pulled out my trays and markers, beginning my gardening journal for the year. I soaked my seeds, wadded up in saturated paper towel bundles, softening them up for the planting. Some wise gardening soul shared that her favorite trick to optimize her efforts is to do this and actually sprout the seeds. This way she only plants what seeds have demonstrated viability, so as not to waste time or space on a seed that won't be doing anything. Sounds like a plan.

This took an amazingly short period of time make pots, fill trays, and whip through all of my starts. The Hobbits dipped their fingers into the project and helped, so we were done in short order. And still there was more sun. And 70*... No way was I staying inside.

This is the year that I'm going to begin my herb garden, which shall be an entirely separate entity from my vegetable garden. I realized last year that if I start "tucking in" this herb and that herb, I would pretty soon have no room left for vegetables. Herb gardening, it seems, is much like any other gardening. You start out thinking that you are doing the garden, but after a short span of time, the garden is doing you. Herbs are no exception. So I figured that I needed to make space for the horseradish, the comfrey, the sage, the rugosa, the echinachea, the gumweed, the lomatium, the goldenseal, the, the, the...okay, all the other stuff that I feel that I just have to have in order to find fulfillment in the universe. Bottom line: no room with the tomatoes. Yeah, and I only have 36 of those started. For a 20 x 10 greenhouse. I know, I know...good luck with that plan.

After I paced it off, laid down marker rocks, and spread the bag of lime over the fallow ground, the sun was still shining. No way was I going to go indoors. Facebook and all of my lists would just have to wait. Besides, I need my Vitamin D. The compost pile called to me. It has been sitting there for at least two years, since I've been in a snit over my garden failure of year before last. Not to be confused with last year's garden failure. What can I say? I'm a glutton for punishment. Third time pays for all.

So I rounded up one trashcan, two big buckets, and three Hobbits to haul wagon loads of this mature, black compost up a hill and begin layering it over the newly lain lime. I grabbed my shovel and stabbed into the loamy pile. And felt the reverberations up my arms and into my spine. And muttered imprecations at the rock that had found its way into my compost pile. This is not a totally unanticipated occurrence. I have to dig rocks out of the yard every spring that sprout up as liberally as the plantain. I moved over a foot or two and stabbed again. Another imprecation. Another rock. By the third stab, I was beginning to sense a pattern here and scraped off a thin layer of compost to discover that the pile was frozen. I did some mental math and realized that I'd never assayed the outside portion of gardening this early in the year. Mature compost piles freeze. Who knew? Hey, I'm from Louisiana, remember?

Undaunted, I turned to Dog and sent him after the pick axe. Yeah. You heard that right. Pick axe. Hey, the sun was still shining and time's a-wastin'. He came back in short order and we all resumed work. I taught them the lyrics to "You Load Sixteen Tons" while I hewed away at the compost pile, filled the buckets which they used to fill the trashcan, and we all muscled up the hill for the dump. It only took us two days to move a compost pile the size of a VW. No doubt we provided ample entertainment to our neighbors as we carried slabs of frozen compost--the freeze was only a layer on the top--to the garden site and played at discus tosses. The Olympics may be over, but the spirit lives on.

As winter is winding down, I find that I'm still in love with the warming herbs. Hey, these 70* days aren't going to last. There's got to be at least one or two more snowfalls and several hard frosts before the shouting. Since I laid in a generous supply of what I needed to make chai tea, the smells reminded me of an old favorite Chinese food recipe: five spice stir-fry. I had an antique bottle of the five spice powder haunting the back of my cupboard. When I say antique, I'm not referring to the bottle, but to the spices. God only knows how old this bottle was, but I think we moved here with it. Nine years ago. Don't look at me like that. It's all I can do to keep the clothes closets rotated for each appropriate season. But with a fresh supply of The Real Thing spices ready to hand, I decided to take the idea of Five Spice Powder and make something like a Five Spice Infusion. So here's what I did.

Five Spice Beef Stir-fry

Five spice infusion:

2 star anise pods
2 cinnamon sticks
12 whole cloves
1 tsp. whole fennel
1 tsp. whole peppercorns
1 quart of water

Early in the day or the day before, pour water into heavy sauce pan and bring to a boil. Add all of the spices and lower heat to a slow simmer. Cover, allowing to simmer for about 20 minutes before removing from heat. Leave covered and allow to infuse for 2-4 hours. Strain out spices and reserve infusion to make sauce just before serving.

Stir Fry:

1 pound beef steak, thin sliced - I usually freeze the steak and then partially thaw, running the meat through the slicing blade on my mandolin. This is usually marinated overnight in a solution of wheat-free tamari sauce and water.
1 bunch green onions, sliced
1-2 cloves garlic, minced
4 whole carrots, bias sliced
1 cup broccoli, separated into small pieces
3 celery stalks, bias sliced
1 cup mushrooms, sliced
Lard or coconut oil for stir-frying
1-2 T Sesame oil for flavoring
3-4 T Wheat-free tamari for sauce
2-3 T tapioca starch

In a wok over high heat, melt lard or coconut oil (approximately 1-2 tablespoons) and add onions, garlic, and carrots. Stir fry carrots for 3-5 minutes before adding chopped broccoli. Stir fry another 3-5 minutes before adding celery slices. After about three minutes or when vegetables are cooked to taste, remove the entire contents of the wok to another container. (While these ingredients are cooking, drain marinating meat in a colander.) In the wok, melt another tablespoon or so of oil and add mushrooms with a dollop of wheat-free tamari sauce. Stir fry mushrooms until cooked and add the wok contents to the already cooked vegetables. Pour a couple of tablespoons of sesame oil into the cooked ingredients and stir. Add more oil to the wok and stir fry the drained beef strips until cooked to preference. Drain the cooked meat, discarding the liquid, and return all of the cooked ingredients to the wok.

In a heavy sauce pan, pour five spice infusion, less one cup, and wheat-free tamari sauce and bring to a boil. In the reserved one cup of five spice infusion (which should not be warm--cold is good, actually), stir in tapioca starch until dissolved. Add the infusion and dissolved tapioca starch to the boiling pot and stir continually until the sauce has thickened and the milky appearance has become more translucent. Pour sauce over stir-fry and stir until all of the pieces are completely coated.

Serve hot over steamed rice.

Our sunny days have disappeared in a deluge of flood warnings. I remain unperturbed, however. I got my peas in the ground in the greenhouse. Which is an improvement on last year, when I missed the pea planting opportunity altogether. While I was at it, I decided to put down some broccoli and cucumbers, too. Hey, let's garden dangerously. If they don't make it, I still have time to start some more, right? Meanwhile, I've started a new compost pile, since the old one has now surrendered its space and is gone. I'm feeling all kinds of virtuous about getting it done so early.

Marilyn Monroe was wrong. Pickaxes are a girl's best friend.

Summer of My Sloth

Pneumonia can be dangerous. This I knew. But I never knew how dangerous. Oh, not necessarily to lung and life. I've pretty much recovered with only an occasional annoyance in the pulmonary department. And the on-hand elecampagne tincture has kept that nicely under control. No. It is in other ways that pneumonia has proved dangerous. You see, after that memorable bout at Christmas, pneumonia revealed to me that life can go on quite oblivious to the fact that there are dust mice under the bed. Stacks of games teetering ominously and with sometimes disastrous outcomes in the closet. Piles of books unattended. Light feebly poking through grimy, neglected windows. Cobwebs left to be co-opted by successive generations of spiders. Lawns left unmowed for extended periods of time, much to the chagrin of the neighbors, but somehow unmoving me. Prior to being ill, I'd pushed myself through my self-assigned work with uncharacteristic discipline, as if I could make everything in life right as long as I kept to my tasks and did "what needed to be done." It was almost compulsive and I could be rather rigid about it. I remember wondering what I'd done with my days before all of this had come to be. I'm starting to remember what I did.

I read mountains of novels.

I played computer games. Compulsively. Just like I do everything else.

I slept late.

I watched videos.

I stared off into space.

Oh, yeah. That's what it felt like...

It's become rather hard to snap myself out of it. To resume the traces and re-discipline myself to those hard habits. Even in gardening I've become quite slack. When it became clear that my garden wasn't going to be performing up to previous years, I decided to live and let live with whatever decided to poke up. Ironically or perhaps to the point, what volunteered actually performed better than what I'd so carefully planned, started, and cultivated. There's probably a lesson to be learned here. I'm meditating on that possibility.

I don't know where this volunteer came from. A friend of mine gave me a couple of yellow zucchini squash from her abundance last year--I'd never heard of yellow zucchini before--but I thought we'd eaten it all. I have no recollection of having any seed of which I'd disposed. And somehow...the largest profile that dominates my garden is the volunteer yellow zucchini squash, producing in characteristic zucchini fashion.

Squash is, along with beans, one of those foods that never seemed to come up on the "crave" list among the Hobbits. No winsome appeals for "just some more squash, Mom!" Philistines. But they do like crispy, crunchy stuff. Salty stuff. Potato chips. That sort of thing. Having recently joined a foodie list on preserving foods, I sit and observe the conversations and technical discussions on the vicissitudes of dehydrating zucchini. Now I'm rolling up my sleeves to try my hand. A lot, it seems depends on the width of the slice, the length and temperature of the dehydrating process and the storage of the end product. Zucchini has humectant qualities, which will attract moisture from the environment to rehydrate itself. to this end, I've found it helpful to insert a dessicate pack, usually scavanged from an empty bottle of supplements, into the jar before vacuum sealing it.

Dehydrating these is one of those endless variables, kinds of things. I generally dehydrate between 100-150* depending on what I'm drying and how quickly I want it done. This time around, in a bit of a hurry, I dried on 150* for 3-4 hours after sprinkling salt over the very thin chips. Having opted for a thinner chip, the end product was a bit difficult to peel off of the drying trays. I learned to pull them up while they were still a bit leathery. Tedious, perhaps, but less tedious than trying to pull fully dried chips off that stuck and cracked like parchment. Individual taste and projected use can dictate how thick or how crispy one wants the final product to be.

I called the Hobbits around for a test drive. Dog and Tool Guy thought they were great, while the other two--unable to surmount the "but it's squash" obstacle--didn't care for them. Tool Guy remarked that this left more for him and left fewer people to fight with over them. Heh. Some you win, some you lose.

Summer draws to a close. My to-do list calls to me reproachfully and I gird my loins to do what must needs be done. Time to slough the sloth.

The Accidental Composter

One of the benefits of the Hobbits getting older is that I have the opportunity to do more independent stuff. Tool Guy has positively taken up residence in his workshop these days, having a laundry list of things to build this summer, and is locked in the throes of planing and routering. There's a built-in wardrobe at the end of his tunnel and he still has my chicken tractor yet to build. But since the Hobbits are needing less and less direct supervision, it's possible to leave them to their devices while Tool Guy is making enough noise in his shop to annoy the deer and I can go do "me" things.

One such Saturday involved a composting class with my gardening buddy. A local co-operative extension was offering the class, dangling an "Earth Machine" composter as the carrot. Tres chic, and my friend and I decided to bite, thinking that we'd get a free composter and maybe learn a few tips in the bargain. Our version of a Mother's Day Out. Hey, it beats spending money on a day spa, right?

We brought our folding chairs--Princess graciously loaned me her pink one that says, what else, "Princess"--to lounge in the warehouse of a local feed store, redolent of chicken feed and malathion, and prepared ourselves to be informed. The presenters were a couple who were interesting to listen to and well-informed on their topic...even had a PowerPoint presentation to go with it. One of the things that amused me during the lecture was when one of the presenters referred to herself as a "casual composter," by which she meant that she didn't vigorously attend her compost nor apply with scientific rigor the ratios and principles of feeding a compost bin, referencing her parents' habit of tossing all garden scraps and weeding onto a pile just outside the paling of the garden. But listening to her subsequent description how she manages her compost and its wormy inhabitants made me comment later to my friend, "If she's a casual composter, then I'm an accidental one!" Because I guess I'm a rule breaker...or at least a bender. I throw all manner of food scraps into my compost pile. The one that sits at least a half an acre away from the house, so smells and critters are of no moment. Everything including the bones from my soup broth goes into the mountain that sits on the edge of the woods. I'll admit that I pay little attention to ratios of greens and browns, though all of my leaves and yard clippings go there, too. It must all be good, because somehow it all reduces to dirt by the following spring and my worms are auditioning for "Tremors 2." Watch out, Kevin Bacon.

However, bending the rules or ignoring possibilities can come back to bite. This year's garden is a prime example of that. One of the most pertinent points in the lecture was "how to tell when your compost is ready." One of the ways to test compost is to sprout a seed in the stuff. If it doesn't sprout, not ready. Ding, ding, ding, ding. My currently-sluggish garden sprang to mind.

Last summer was the first summer of my huge greenhouse canopy. When I put the garden to bed last fall, I did as I'd always done and pile massive amounts of leaves and yard clippings along with the year's accumulated compost. This procedure has always worked wonderfully well, but I failed to take into consideration the sheltering effect of the greenhouse in diminishing the amount of moisture contributing to the composting process. In the spring, the layer of detritus still remained, bone dry and intact instead of crumbling into the soil over the winter. Despite enthusiastic...nay, desperate...tilling, it's taken quite a while to finish the decomp job. Lesson learned. I guess this is what they call "gardening dangerously."

I'm still managing to harvest a few things out of the garden. I have a half gallon of pickles with the promise of a bit more to come. We've gotten a few squash that volunteered themselves. When I realized that my garden wasn't going to be what I usually get, I decided that whatever showed enough spunk to stick its head up could grow whatever it wanted. I've gotten a yellow zucchini...and I'm trying to figure out where that came from...and a couple of crookneck squash. And a few tomatoes have ripened.

One of the culinary delights that was served to me during that celebratory luncheon with my gardening friend was gazpacho. In my mind, gazpacho has always been one of those exotic dishes that are classics on the gourmet litany of dishes, but I've never had before and never occurred to me to attempt. I was delighted when the first dish of the meal that appeared before me was gazpacho. And it was delicious. My friend confessed that her native informant had critiqued the gazpacho recipe as being "too chunky." Apparently, in this student's home, the gazpacho, after being blended, is sieved through a strainer to make it much smoother and finer. I agreed with my friend, however, that the texture of this gazpacho was much more interesting and satisfying. And refreshing on a warm July afternoon. Here's her version of this Spanish classic.

Gazpacho

4 tomatoes
1/4 sweet onion
1 cucumber
1 sweet red bell pepper
1 tsp. minced garlic
1/2 tsp. salt
olive oil, opt.


Blanch tomatoes, peel, and place in food processor with sweet onion quarter, minced garlic and deseeded bell pepper. Peel cucumber, reserving a portion to dice for garnish, and place in food processor. Add salt and puree to desired consistency. Garnish with diced cucumber and dash of olive oil, if desired. Serve cold.

There's an additional piquancy to this particular bowl of gazpacho. It contains some of the precious few tomatoes and cucumbers that my garden was able to squeeze out this year. It's a pity some lessons get learned the hard way. Ah, well. This fall, the yard clippings will reside in van-sized mountain at the edge of our woods and I'll wait until spring to haul it up and incorporate into the garden. Who knows maybe next year will be better than it would have been otherwise for this accidental vacation due to my accidental composting...

Empty Handed

Sometimes when we try new things we are pleasantly surprised. Sometimes we aren't. Trying new things requires risk and risk means the possibility of failure. As I watch my garden not grow, I realize that I'm facing that possibility of failure. The risk I took when trying something new.

Honestly? It's depressing. I used to amble out to my garden in the mornings with a cup of coffee (now herbal tea), energized and excited to see what new things were happening. Now I make myself go out there around noon, dreading seeing the frozen plants, still the same size as when I put them in over a month ago. Sigh.

This isn't a year that I wanted this to happen. This is a "gardening when it counts" year. This year when tomatoes are tainted with salmonella, no doubt from sloppy farming practices. This year when food prices are skyrocketing. Usually at this point, I'm looking at the empty shelves and jars in my basement with something like satisfaction, knowing that they fed us all winter and will be full to feed us for the next. Knowing I've wrung every ounce of production out of my garden that it was able to deliver to me. This year feels very empty. Even if my garden starts producing, I'll know that it wasn't all it could be.

Right now, a few jars of pizza sauce loiter on the shelves, waiting to get used up. Not sure how much company they'll get by the fall. So we're savoring the last of last year's garden, holding up empty and hopeful hands...hoping the garden snaps back and gives enough to fill the empty shelves.

Since we are trialling beans--and beans haven't been one of the foods that the Hobbits have been clamoring to eat--I'm on the lookout for ways to stealth them into the food supply. More guerrilla nutrition at work. This is made with garbanzo beans, sprouted, cooked, then blended down and fermented for a couple of days with a bit of sourdough starter.

Grainless Pizza Crust

1 cup sprouted bean paste
1/2 cup dried potato flakes
1/4 cup tapioca starch flour
1 egg
2 T olive oil
1/2 cup coconut milk
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking soda
1 tsp cream of tartar
1/2 tsp guar gum

Mix all ingredients into a bowl until incorporated. Spread out on a pizza stone with a bowl scraper to the desired thickness (we tend to like crispier crusts). Bake in a 350* oven for 15-20 minutes. Remove and top with pizza sauce and other desired toppings. Return to a 450* oven and bake for another 10 minutes or until toppings are browned as desired.

...And at last I comprehended
With my stupid mind and dull,
That GOD could not pour HIS riches
Into hands already full.

_{Martha Snell Nicholson}

What I Did on My Nervous Breakdown...

That nervous breakdown I was scheduling? Yeah. This is what I did. I wish every nervous breakdown of mine would have as much to show for it!

The Hobbits...with a little "encouragement"...pitched in to help haul my garden rocks over to the wall and helped me plot the placement. Dad manned the tiller over by the compost pile and dug up generous piles of pitch black soil. Everyone grabbed a shovel of some sort, pushed, pulled, and otherwise wrestled the dirt uphill and helped fill the rock well. We all stood and cheered as we baptized the raspberry canes.

This is container gardening, New England style....where there is never a shortage of rocks. This is, after all, the geography where Robert Frost wrote "Mending Wall." You know. "Good fences make good neighbors." And we have lots of "good neighbors" around here. I liked the outcome of this so well, I think I'll do it again for my asparagus that I want to start this year.

It looks like, as a family, we've moved into "project mode." Everyone has projects that they want to accomplish. Tool Guy is newly restocked with a load of wood that he is in raptures over. He and Bug--rather, mostly Bug--just completed a side table that goes beside the bed in the master bedroom. Bug walks around with an enormous sense of accomplishment as a budding carpenter apprentice. He and Tool Guy have big plans for built-ins for the house this summer.

Lots of plans for kitchen projects. Dog is still perfecting the chili recipe. With the assistance of feedback from Tool Guy, the recipe now includes significantly increased amounts of pepper. Let it be noted that this is the chili that follows Tool Guy to work each day. Ouch! Bug is polishing his reputation as The Muffin Man and is honing his technique at mastering pear butter muffins. And now Princess is clamoring for her share of the glory. Well, it is actually her share of the spoon-licking that she is clamoring for, since to the chef goes the spoils. In our house, it is the custom that the person doing the baking is the one who gets to lick the spoon, bowl, and everything else that might be batter-spattered.

My kitchen is frequently characterized by organized chaos. It all pivots around one drawer in which I shove my favorite small implements, like my everything knife, scissors, measuring spoons, and the pages that I scribble my recipes on. I've gotten a little more organized and now have a notebook filled with clear page protectors that I slip my recipes into as I perfect them. Still sometimes scraps of paper sink to the bottom of the drawer to be forgotten. Until a spring cleaning spree unearths them from the lower strata and brings them to light again. And so it was that I discovered Princess' forgotten favorite: carob muffins, scribbled onto the back of a crumpled and spotted old co-op invoice.



Carob Muffins

Muffin Mix:

2 1/4 cup grain flour
1/2 cup potato starch
1/2 cup tapioca starch
1/3 cup carob powder
1 t baking soda
2 T cream of tartar
1 t salt
1 t guar gum

1 cup mix makes 6 muffins

Per cup of mix, add:

2 eggs
2 t oil
1/3 c water or juice
1 t vanilla
20-30 drops stevia

Mix thoroughly, pour into muffin forms and bake at 350* for 12 minutes or until done.

Princess is enjoying her debut into baking. Her favorite part is collecting all of the bespattered implements and licking them clean. She's still young enough to end up wearing more than she eats, but it's her specialty and she's the queen. Or rather...Princess.

The Substance of Things Hoped For...

Farmers are gamblers. They're the folks who literally bet the farm every year. Gardeners take that leap of faith in a smaller way. Some years are better than others, but every year starts out full of hope and eager expectation. I like to keep a journal of my gardening journey to compare the different things I try, the different outcomes, what works and what doesn't. I have friends who smile behind their hands at the detail of the things I put in my journal. Yes, Breatharian, I even weigh the produce I harvest and journal that according to vegetable and variety. This is when you know that you've moved beyond gardening as a hobby. When the pole bean sprout that you planted begins to resemble Audrey II in Little Shop of Horrors and sing, "Feeeeed meeeee..." That's when you know that you have an addiction going on.

Every year, I try to branch out into a new aspect of sustainability. I'm still waiting to see if the kombucha'd molasses tea will yield great things from my garden. But twiddle my thumbs I will not; I'm also meditating on other things to improve the soil quality and yield in the meantime. These days, seaweed is coming up on my radar with more frequency. I use a lot of it in our foods. I put powdered kelp in the salt shaker. I sneak spoonsful into chili. I sprinkle dulse on my sprouted salads (if you look closely at the pictures, the red flakes are the dulse). And there's the perennial favorite, kimbop. Princess is the only one who will eat seaweed voluntarily, but I have no compunctions about resorting to guerrilla nutrition. I stealth sheets of it into the bone broth. Now I'm looking at the ultimate stealth: the garden.

The ground in my corner of the Shire isn't fertile. Breatharian, there's a reason that the settlers began to push on to the Midwest from here: this here ain't really farm country. Trapping, hunting, and dairy farming, yeah. Planting, not so much. The only thing that one can grow with ease and rapidity here are rocks. I discovered very quickly after assaying into the gardening world exactly why New England is laced with rock walls. Add to that the highly acidic pH and my first garden didn't yield very much. That year's journal tally totaled 68 pounds. It's come a long way, but we're not there yet. There's still more to hope for.

After reading an excerpt from Seaweed in Agriculture and Horticulture by W.A. Stephenson and following the enthusiastic flow of information about the myriad of ways that seaweed benefits the soil fertility and tilth, I was convinced. My soil needs all the nutrients, minerals, and structure that I can pour into it. So this year, along with the compost, clippings, leaves, manure, lime, and molasses kombucha tea, I'm turning under a large supply of seaweed.

One of the things that impressed me mightily with seaweed is that it tackles the fungal challenges that can plague gardens. Yeah. That would be my garden. I'm not sure if it is impaired soil quality, over watering, watering at the wrong time, or overcrowding, but every year I run a race with a kind of fungus that rushes to consume my garden. Neem oil has helped keep it in check, but I'm looking for better answers. Got a lot to hope for this year.

Last year's garden...a definite improvement on the very first...left me with a generous supply of tomato sauce and the remnant jars of that still cling to the shelves that line the basement. Mostly we're satisfied with our style of eating these days, but once in a while, Tool Guy will wistfully emote about a particular food that he misses. I gaped at him, slack jawed, when he recently sighed over missing spaghetti. He was a little taken aback when I informed him that everything necessary for spaghetti was already in the house. I whirled through my stashes of stuff and threw together a pot of spaghetti that had all of the Hobbits humming. And they never knew it had seaweed in it. See? Guerrilla nutrition.

Spaghetti Sauce

4 lbs. ground beef
1 quart tomato sauce
1 quart bone broth
2 tsp. kelp powder
Tinkyada rice pasta

Brown ground beef in cast iron dutch oven and drain. Return meat to dutch oven, add sauce, kelp, and broth, then heat until incorporated and simmering. Meanwhile, in a pot, bring water to a boil and add rice pasta. Cover and turn off heat. Leave pasta in hot water for twenty minutes without removing the lid. After 20 minutes, drain pasta. Perfect pasta every time. Serve spaghetti sauce and meat over pasta.

The iodine in seaweed has a lot to offer our bodies. It works with our endocrine system. It is becoming recognized as a viable way of dealing with pathogens and avoiding antibiotics. It certainly helps deal with fungal overgrowth in our bodies as well as our gardens. In my zeal to include as much seaweed in our diet as guerrilla nutrition will allow, I've discovered that a light hand is required. Better to use less in more foods than more in less. Yes, they'll be getting a lower percentage, bite for bite, but a little seaweed in a Hobbit tummy is a higher percentage than all of the seaweed still in the plate. Softly, softly...

In addition to sustainable gardening, I'm also interested in other sustainable forms of harvesting. In discussing a source of seaweed, The Maine Seaweed Company came up. This company is a delight to do business with. Larch Hanson has a warm, personal touch and is always up for an email exchange about gardening, how to use the seaweed, and is eager to share what's going on in his garden. I'm quite impressed with how his cold frames are producing.

The Hobbits continue to grow and thrive. We continue to stalk new foods. My seedlings are sturdily pushing upwards and putting out their true leaves. In another week or so, my garden will be redolent of seashore. We've come a long way. The substance of things hoped for...the evidence of things not seen.

Good Enough Is Perfect

I'm delving into farming books. I'm planning on turning our little corner of the Shire into a mini-farm. Visions of chicken tractors dance through my head. A must-read book on the subject is You Can Farm by Joel Salatin and the way he writes it makes you think that it's really true...you can farm. One of the more notable quotes in the book comes from his father. He tells how his father gradually passed the reins of the family farm over to him, allowing Joel to make decisions and do things without micromanaging the changeover. "Good enough is perfect," he said. When I first read that, it rubbed my perfectionistic, control-freak nature the wrong way. I cringed. But the thought stayed with me and bubbled in the back of my mind like my pickles. I pondered the hazards of "analysis paralysis," of being caught up in trying to do things so perfectly that nothing gets done at all. Sometimes it is best just to move forward, even if it isn't the best plan around, just to get moving and see what happens.

Which got me thinking about all of the work that I do and the very little that I task the Hobbits to do and the disservice that exacts...for all of us, all for the purpose of satisfying my way of doing things. I've been working on letting go. One excruciating inch at a time. The breaking point for me was the leaves in the yard. Last year, the leaf fall was significantly diminished by the emergence of a cyclical defoliating pestilence. They were amazing. I could stand out on the back deck of our house and hear them eating the leaves. I'm not the only one who noticed this....several other people commented on it, so I know I'm not nuts. (Well, I probably am, but at least this isn't the evidence of it. Smirk.) Yard clean up last fall was an easy-breezy affair. And it only took that one easy-breezy year to forget just how many leaves the trees in our yard produce. After slogging away for an entire week and not being half way done--ignoring the new deposits on the areas where I'd cleaned--I decided that I needed to fall back ten and punt. This was the time for Operation Good Enough Is Perfect.

It came to me one night as I was falling asleep. I'd equip Princess with a small rake and have her edging around buildings and trees; Bug would man the hose and garden, soaking the leaves to speed composting; Dog would run relay on the mulch bags for the mower. Of course, when I announced my plan, it was met with crows of delight from work-famished younglings who were eager to assume this Herculean task. Um. Not. Nonetheless, everyone went to their assigned stations. What had taken me a week to half way complete was accomplished in two days with the four of us working. Dog estimated that he'd satisfied all of his PhysEd requirements for quite some time. He pondered weighing a full mulch bag and calculating the poundage he'd schlepped into the garden, just to throw in some practical math skills applications on top of it all. Bug was a trooper and soaked the leaves relentlessly, just pausing long enough to call for more EMs to refill the spraying cup. "This is the best job I've ever had!" he chirped. I gotta get these guys out more.

On chilly, hard-working days like these, it's divine to come into a house warmed by the oven and infused with the smell of dinner baking. I'm telling you, I keep flashing on all of my childhood favorites these days. Comfort food. My mom used to make a cream of mushroom casserole that we all loved. When everything went off the menu, we lost this one, since it was a "box of this, can of that" kind of recipe. After a while, it dawned on me that someone had probably used the packaged food as a short-cut from a Real Food recipe. I twiddled with it and reverse engineered it into a recipe that everyone with furry feet can enjoy, namely the Hobbits.

Cream of Mushroom Chicken Casserole

6-9 chicken parts
8-12 mushrooms, sliced
2 cups rice
2 cups chicken broth
2 cups coconut milk
2 T dry Italian Dressing Mix

I said before that my grandmother started every recipe by browning the meat in carmelized sugar and oil. See? Here it is. So dump oil or lard in cast iron dutch oven and heat sugar until brown and bubbling, just to the point of smoking. Add meat pieces and allow to brown on each side, turning for even browning. Add sliced mushrooms and saute. Add bone broth, coconut milk, rice, and stir. When the liquids begin boiling, add dressing mix and stir until until incorporated. Bake at 350* for 1-2 hours or until cooked.

Italian Dressing Mix

1 T garlic powder
1 T onion powder
2 T oregano
1 t pepper
1/4 thyme
1 t basil
1 T parsley

For dressing, mix:

1/4 cup cider vinegar
2/3 cup oil
2 T water
2 T dry mix

In the quest for gardening perfection, I stumbled across Efficient Microbes as an enhancer. I used it one Fall and in the following spring, all of the dead fall leaves in the garden were dirt...almost no leafy matter left. And worms? There were so many that when I walked through the garden, they would spring from the ground and wiggle across the tops of my feet with each step. Really. It was like something out of Tremors. The following year I skipped the EM and the results weren't as stellar. It's a great product. But that's the problem. It's a product that I'm buying from someone else and I've taken Sandor Katz's admonition to heart...the one about becoming a producer and not a consumer.

Then the idea struck me. EM is fermented molasses water with some additives thrown in. Fermented molasses water. How about kombucha tea made with molasses instead of white sugar? In the interest of this science project, I sacrificed all but two of my scobies to make this muddy brew. It fermented up and even made more muddy scobies in the process. I had Bug spraying this stuff all over the layers and layers and layers of leaves blanketing what was my garden. I won't know until the spring whether or not my science experiment did its job. I'll know if it the leaves have been reduced to rubble and have returned to the dust sufficiently.

And good enough? Yeah. That would be perfect.

That Was Then, This is Now

Yes, Breatharian, brace yourself for more gardening drivel. I know. I'm intolerable on the subject. Just a little this time, I promise! It's the time of the year when all of the preparation and planning and waiting comes to fruition. I'm swimming in tomatoes. After scoring a stock pot from a yard sale....it was a "make me a deal" deal and the seller accepted my dollar....I'm reaching back through my recipe files for my favorite tomato sauce recipe. This has become a seasonal event in our house. The smells of baking bread and bubbling sauce tantalize the neighborhood....or at least the Hobbits. Everyone walks around with their noses in the air, sniffing. I don't think there's anything that evokes more of the feelings of "home" and "nurturing" than such good food wafting through the windows.

I've been spending such spare time as I have browsing through the archives of lists that chronicle our first furtive scrambles to figure out what was causing our problems and how to fix them. The medical community is singularly unhelpful in this area and almost all of what informed us came from those people who were fumbling and groping as we were. The Complementary Alternative Medicine community takes a lot of flack for giving little relief for the money that they collect, but I don't find the mainstream medical community to have a better track record. Somehow my searches for solutions always comes back to food.

Particularly the posts during our grain-free years stand out to me. Having a few years distance from that stage of our struggle, I'm reading my old posts with fresh eyes. What stands out to me most is how light-hearted they sound compared to how I felt. It certainly didn't feel light-hearted to me then. Some days, I felt like I was drowning. It was during that time that I developed such a strong feeling for The Lord of the Rings trilogy. After reading the books, I was never able to watch Peter Jackson's interpretation without having a stack of kleenex next to me, especially during Sam Gamgee's monologue about his favorite stories...the stories that really mattered.^* I could strongly identify with the sense of profound weariness driven forward by desperation. It sounds melodramatic, perhaps, but watching the progression of my posts where more foods disappeared and the list of intolerances grew longer, I remember that this was how it felt at that time. Some days, I wished I had a Sam to carry me up the mountain.

The sense of unknown was an overwhelming burden. The not knowing why things were going wrong. Not knowing how to fix them. I saw a lot of guessing and groping in my posts. I'm not sure that I shared with other posters just how fearful I was. Afraid of not finding the answers. Afraid of things getting worse and not learning how to make it stop. And things did get frighteningly worse before they got better. One memorable post expressed the trap I found myself in, struggling to nourish children who couldn't tolerate the nourishment they need to be able to tolerate the food they need to nourish them.

I'm finding that dealing with personal disequilibrium is very much easier than dealing with it in your children, especially small children who have only a fuzzy grasp of why they eat differently from everyone else. It's easier to accept that I can't have that slice of pizza sitting on the table than it is for a four year old. And these Hobbits were absolute troopers. I can't sing their praises enough. I've never had a moment's concern about them sneaking food or not cooperating. Which is one of the reasons that I feel so highly motivated to find ways to get them the tastes that they so desire in a safe form. In the middle of our grain-free years, Bug sighed wistfully that he missed pizza. I asked him what was it he missed about pizza: the sauce or the crust? The sauce. Since fruit leather has always been one of his favorite snacks, I decided to use this platform to jump from the sweet to the savory.

The base of pizza leather is the tomato sauce. Since the flavor concentrates when dehydrated, it is necessary to add something that will dilute the taste without altering it. My first solution was to use zucchini or squash. This was a wonderful way of disposing of the excess from the garden that I thought I wanted to can, until I discovered what canned squash tastes like. Um. Won't do that again. Another solution--Bug's preference--is to dilute with apple puree, since he prefers a sweeter taste. Hey, I don't eat it, I just make it. Besides, this is a thrifty way of disposing with all of those odds and ends of apple slices that never seem to get eaten up. I have a bag in the freezer that I toss them into and bring out when it is time to make leather of one kind or another.

Foods that are low in pectin will crumble and separate when dehydrated. This is one of the reasons that apples are in all commercial fruit leathers. Another way to enhance the texture is to use pectin. Pomona makes a terrific product that is derived from citrus and is corn-free. Adding pectin, either through apples or canning pectin gives the pizza leather cohesive smoothness and chew.

Leathers are elastic in quite a few ways, both texturally and ingredient-wise. I confess that I don't have a hard and fast recipe for this, since I tend to just dump in what's on hand, using up the leftovers, bits and pieces of flotsam and jetsam in the fridge and freezer. It's all good.

Pizza Leather

2 quarts pizza sauce
1 quart squash or fruit puree
2-4 T fruit pectin

Run the sauce and fruit through the food processor until incorporated, adding the pectin slowly through the cap. When thoroughly blended, spread at approximately 1/4 inch thick evenly onto sheets of parchment or silicone baking sheets over dehydrating racks. Set temperature to 100-120 degrees and let dehydrate for about 6-12 hours. Some people swear by portable dehydrators, but I've never found one that I liked better than my own stove. It may happen that the edges will dehydrate faster than the center. In that case, I trim the dried parts away from what is still tacky. When it is completely dry and while the sheet is still warm from the stove, cut into strips with scissors.

Store in a dry container. I'd like to tell you how long it will stay edible in the cupboard, but I've yet to discover the end of the shelf life of leather...it doesn't stay around long enough to find out.

The last couple of years has seen the happy return of a few of our off-menu foods--grains not the least--but some of the things we relied on back then are still staples in the house. With the smell of tomato sauce curling through the house, appetites for pizza have been sharpened. Given the demands of canning this time of year, pizza isn't something I'm finding time to readily throw together. It's nice to be able to point to the pantry and say, "If you're really hungry for a taste of pizza, nibble on some pizza leather" and promise the real thing later.


While I still long for that future day when I can gleefully snoopy dance with the rest of the joyful "just" glutenfree-ers, it helps to remember that I'm still in the middle of the story and have yet to read the final chapter.


_{* "It's all wrong...by rights we shouldn't even be here. But we are. It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were and sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it's only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines, it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you...that meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But, I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now."}

The Side Tracked Breatharian

I had so many plans for the week, but it was consumed in stocking up a friend with gf bread for the month and a couple of other friends for the week. And getting caught up with a grungy house. And grungy laundry. And the ten million kid things. And grocery shopping. And co-op orders.

I had a lot of plans for Saturday. I was going to bake bread for us. Get caught up on laundry. Again. Then hit the yard and mow the not inconsiderable amount of grass, both in square yardage and height. I had already flippantly told Tool Guy that it needed to go to seed before we cut it. But Saturday would be the day, promise-promise! Then I'd work on the next week's blog, which included tweaking that recipe some more. Which meant more baking.

Un, huh.

I dunno what it is with me and that stove. I truly love it. It's a great stove. It's me; I'm the biggest klutz there is. In the short life span of this stove, I've created an oven fire with spilled coconut oil (the clean up from that was on par with the clean up from the gumbo fountain since dry powder fire extinguishers generate an amazing amount of powder) and then the aforementioned gumbo fountain. And today, of all days, I create an over-boil. Amazing what kind of havoc a little water in the wrong place on an electrical appliance can cause. I now know the intimate workings of my stove and it has been mopped and cleaned in places I never heretofore even imagined existed.

Actually, as I explained to Tool Guy, who was shaking his head in disbelief, this was the sequel to the gumbo drama. If we'd not had to replace the GFCI outlet, we wouldn't have known that there was water creating a short in the igniter in one of the burners, since it dutifully tripped off as designed, informing us of the problem. Who knows how this could have ended....an unexplained kitchen fire, perhaps? Okay, maybe I'm reaching, but I'm trying to find some meaning out of these kinds of annoying and time-wasting road blocks. So humor me.

Oh, and when I went out to mow the lawn? Yeah, well, the mower and both of the gas cans were all empty. And I couldn't leave to get gas because I had a batch of bread rising in the toaster oven, the stove being out of order until Monday, because there is no way on God's still-green earth that I'm going to call a repair specialist out on a Saturday. And by the time all was said and done, there wouldn't be enough day left to mow such acreage. It would need to wait. In fact, everything I'd planned would need to wait.

So what did I do with my day? I went out to the garden and finished transplanting my tomato starts. Then packaged up the starts that I'm giving away to other gardeners. I dug out all of the materials to transplant several herb plants to larger containers. Bug has decided that along with being a chef, chemist, and artist, he wants to become a horticulturist. For his recent birthday, Tool Guy took Bug to a botanical garden, where Bug picked out a gardening tool kit as a birthday gift. Since I had all of this suddenly unencumbered time, he and I transplanted the herbs and he, to his delight, got to use his tool kit. While he trimmed the dead leaves off, he waxed enthusiastic about how much he was enjoying this gardening time.

I was stuck on worrying about the repair bill on that igniter problem. With an effort, I managed to shove all of that aside and force myself out of my "Martha moment."

Just enjoyed the gardening with my little guy.

Roaming the yard with Princess, looking for bees.

More digging in the dirt and listening to Bug bubbling over with pleasure about how much fun we were having together.

Sometimes it takes a crowbar...or a kitchen disaster...to lever me out of my ruts and go with the flow. Dinner wasn't anything like I'd planned. I love our outdoor grill and in emergencies like this one, I really appreciate having a fall back plan. It was one of those simple nights: just grilled chicken sprinkled with some seasoned salt. Early in our everything free days, when I was winnowing out the corn sources, Lowry's Seasoned Salt went off the menu. Maltodextrin. Scrounging around and looking on the internet at all of the top secret substitutes, I tweaked ours to look like this:

Almost Everything Free Seasoned Salt

2 T Real Salt
2 T paprika
2 T chili powder
1 T turmeric
2 t kelp powder
1 t onion powder
1 t garlic powder
1 t red pepper
1 t cumin
1/4 t nutmeg
1/4 t coriander
1/4 t allspice

Blend well and store in covered container


I'm still tweaking the turmeric and kelp powder to get the maximum amount without unfavorably distorting the flavor. Turmeric has been found to be anti-carcinogenic, which is beneficial when one is introducing carcinogens via bbq grills, as well as protective against Alzheimer's. And kelp is a good source of iodine, especially in everything free diets where iodized salt--yeah, more corn--is off the menu.

My faithful and much abused stove is still with us. No, never did call a repair specialist. While I was out puttering with the Hobbits, the wiring dried out and she's back to her chipper old self, so there was that additional virtue in getting sidetracked. Sometimes a tincture of time fixes everything.

I've promised to save all of my major boiling projects for the outdoor burner. And Bug and I have a date to separate some of his herbs* that have outgrown their pots already.

^{*Parsley and Basil in photo compliments of Bug.}

Corn. It's What's for Dinner...And Breakfast...And Lunch...And Snacks...And...And...

Corn has become the hot topic on a lot of my email lists. As you may suspect, most of them are food lists and even the ones that aren't directly related to food attract people who feel strongly about their food. On my gardening and homesteading lists, people are talking about GMO and what, to quote one poster, "Monsatan" is doing to corn, among other foods that have previously been safe for most peoplekind to eat. On my allergen/intolerance lists, we're talking about corn's ubiquity...and iniquity. Most of us agree that corn is even more evil than gluten because of the limitless ways that industrial agriculture has found to manipulate this bumper crop into countless food additives. The non-food applications may even be worse, since one proceeds through life not expecting to be whammied by the paper towel that she reels off the roll in someone's kitchen. Or licking that stamp. Or expect your sweet little baby to get snaked by those nifty fingerpaints. Yeah. Gotcha.

Corn is also more particularly evil since it isn't included on the top allergen list, being considered a "rare" allergy in the IgE sense. Some in the corn-sensitive community may take exception to being classified as a rare breed, but that's the medical and marketing communities parsing words with a paring knife for you. At any rate, corn in all of its gloriously mutated permutations currently escapes declaration on labels. Imagine how simple it would be to pick up a labeled item and read, "Item contains corn" just as folk sensitive to the other eight now finally enjoy the right to simple and clear information about their particular enemy. But, no. The corn-sensitive must doggedly persist through the phone merry-go-round until reaching the receiver in the cracking unit where the R&D geeks reside to hear them confess that, yes, ma'am, the original food source is corn. The caller is then to be dazzled by the sparkling promise that because of the convoluted nature of what they, the chem gods, have done, the corn has now forgotten its corn-ness. Only the most sensitive will react to this final product. Huh. Well, that's us. The corn canaries.

In fairness, I'm much appreciative of some very sympathetic, generous, and informative specialists who have helped me to understand what the particular ingredient does for the product, the fractionation processes, and what each stage of processing does to corn. Then there was the one woman who even cried on the phone along with me when I learned that my children's favorite hot dog was now out of reach because the company had begun adding a lactic acid starter culture from corn. The individual people are so compassionate. The Machine is not.

One of my foodie friends lamented that she didn't even want to try to wrap her brain around going corn-free because it seemed so impossible. "How does one eliminate it all?" And given the above, it's an understandable lament. I didn't have an eloquent and sophisticated strategy to outline for her. It's pretty simple. Not easy, but simple. No commercially processed foods. And those four words open the door to a totally revolutionized way of living. Because now necessity demands that everything, or as near as makes it everything, be made from scratch. And with the advent of corn as the basis for packaging even vegetables, then the ramifications are even more far-reaching.

The very first face of the corn enemy....okay, the second after high fructose corn syrup....that stared back at me when I started weeding out was citric acid. It can be made from other substances. Sago palm, for example. But, no, corn is cheap and so corn it is, most of the time. So here's my middler who has been dubbed Hugga-bug by his doting grandmother and who adores pizza. When we were grain-free, I even came up with the idea of "pizza leather," just so he could get the taste of a pizza without the problem of flour. The pizza leather was the easy part. The hard part was finding pizza sauce without citric acid from corn. Despite searching through all my available organics, naturals, and "grandma's own recipe" kinds of brands, I was never able to find a safe pizza sauce, though there may have been a maverick brand emerge since then. That was when I gave up looking and decided that it was time to garden.

My favorite mom n' pop nursery mentioned that they always start their tomato seedlings on St. Patrick's Day. So the arrival of St. Patrick's Day this year has found me armed with Mel Bartholomew's Square Foot Gardening chapter on seed starting and the graciously shared wisdom and experience of farming veteran, J. from The L. P. Farm. This year I'm starting my tomatoes from seed. Organic. Heirloom. Based on a consensus of knowledgeable pioneers, I ordered my seeds from the Baker Creek Seed Company. After scrolling through pages of amazing choices, I finally settled on Amish Paste and Beefsteak for my maiden voyage. Now these seeds sit, softening in the sprouting mix soil, under a bright afternoon sunshine that gets stronger daily now. We may have gotten a blizzard two days ago, but I'm taking Spring on faith. My tomatoes have begun.

The last of last year's tomatoes, canned into tomato sauce, sit down in my basement, waiting for their turn to be called into action. I've made pizza proper, or spread it on that delicious Almost Everything Free Sourdough for pizza bread, and made pizza leather. It also makes a great spaghetti sauce when diluted with some homemade chicken broth and served over spaghetti squash or Tinkyada Pasta.

The backbone of this recipe came from, for me, an unexpected source, given that we can only shop the outer aisles of the grocery store and we're Breatharians and all. In one of my more masochistic moments I was watching Food Network of all things and, lo, Alton "God Bless Him!" Brown actually aired a recipe that I could use! I still had to tweak it for our purposes, but it's become a staple in our pantry.

Bug hovers over my soon-to-be seedlings in anticipation. He can't wait for spring either.

Easy Tomato Sauce

20 Roma Tomatoes

1/4 cup olive oil

1/2 teaspoon Real Salt

1 teaspoon red pepper flakes

1 cup minced Vidalia Onions

2 teaspoons minced garlic

1 tablespoon each of chopped oregano and thyme leaves

Or simply dump all of the ingredients except tomatoes into your food processor and whir until well processed.

Preheat oven 350*

Halve tomatoes and remove all of the seeds. This yields a thicker tomato sauce. If you want a thinner sauce, then simply half the tomatoes and place them face up into two 13x9 pans. Spoon seasoning mix over the face of the tomatoes. Bake for two hours. Check tomatoes after an hour and turn down if they are browning too quickly. When baked, remove, allow to cool and run through the food processor to thoroughly incorporate.

If the sauce is too thin for your preference, it can be thickened with a Contadina tomato paste or similar paste made with tomatoes as the sole ingredient.