Chez Musser

Christmas Meals Plans

2008-12-24T07:19:00.000-08:00

This is the first Christmas since my daughter was born five years ago that we are not visiting or hosting my family or Mike's family for the holiday. I'm a bit sad in some ways, but glad of it in others. The holiday lead-up has been a slower one, with less external pressure to conform to expectations about when to have decorations up or go visit Santa (missed that one entirely this year thanks to the snow) or getting things done before traveling somewhere. Before December, I was feeling good about not over-scheduling us with holiday activities, though the first two weekends of the month still wound up jam-packed with back-to-back and even overlapping events. A few snuck up on me, like Annabel's dance performance at ScanFair and the German Saturday School's holiday party.

One aspect of our nuclear-family Christmas that I'm especially glad about is having complete freedom to decide on our holiday meals, without interference from or consideration of my parents or in-laws. Because it's just the four of us, I don't feel the need to go overboard with an abundant variety of side dishes and desserts or use conveniences in the name of expediency. Rather, I'm keeping things simple, wholesome, and mostly local, and incorporating my little family's favorites. Here's the plan:

Christmas Eve Dinner
Celery Root Soup
Fennel, Arugula, and Orange salad
Dungeness Crabs
Cookies of Near Infinite Variety

Since the kids will probably not like the salad (well, maybe Luc will, but Annabel won't), I'm going to serve them orange and apple slices in a bed of purple cabbage leaves. I think I'll make the grown-up salad with oranges instead of apples as suggested in the recipe. As tempted as I am to make a dessert, we have so many cookies from neighbors and that we have baked ourselves that dessert seems a little overboard.

It's just now light enough to see outside and it is snowing! again!

Christmas Morning Brunch
Biscuits and Gravy with Apple Sausage
Scrambled Eggs

I have been sneaking off with the kids lately to visit the Clinton Corner Cafe (formerly The Habit, Portland's first internet cafe, where I washed dishes and made grocery runs in exchange for free internet access when I first moved here) and order their biscuits and gravy. They make it with a pork-apple sausage that I'm going to attempt to replicate as a gift to myself for Christmas morning. Hopefully we'll get eggs from our chickens for our scramble, though we may have to thaw them first.

Christmas Mid-Day Snack
Gingerbread House Candy

We made our gingerbread house with this recipe from Diane, a fellow member of the whole grain baking email list, and it was fantastic--construction grade gingerbread suitable for snacking. I like making the house on Christmas day and then having it to munch on in the week or so afterward, instead of half-eaten by Christmas morning. I'm glad I pre-ordered candy from the Natural Candy Store...we would have nothing for the gingerbread house otherwise, with the weather keeping me from shopping this last week and a half.

The snow is really! coming down! I cannot believe it's been snowing almost everyday since December 15th. Crazy. I will have to get some more pictures today and put them up in my spare time. (We haven't wrapped a single gift--and we have to wrap presents that have arrived from the grandparents as well as those from us!)

Christmas Dinner
Roasted beet, Sunflower Seed & Gorgonzola Salad
Baked Potatoes with Butter, Bacon, and Yogurt
Roast Brussels Sprouts
Roast Leeks
Roast Beef
Gingerbread House
More Cookies of Near Infinite Variety
Chocolate Chocolate Chip Ice Cream (that New Seasons gave us for having to make substitutions to our online order) topped with Crushed Candy Canes

No recipes as these are all simple family favorites I do by rote. Again, I'll serve the kids purple cabbage with apples and oranges and raw Brussels sprouts. I cannot get my kids to eat cooked cruciferous vegetables, but they'll eat any of them raw.

Humungous flakes are falling rapidly and in quick succession from the sky! This would be picture-perfect Christmas Eve were in not the tenth day of snow here.

Seriously, I don't really mind it much, and would mind it even less if our mailman would only please please please deliver our Netflix movies. I'm beginning to forget the plot of Battlestar Galactica and while White Christmas (1954), Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer (1964) and The Year Without a Santa Claus (1974...notice a pattern here?) were all shipped days ago, we haven't gotten any mail since Saturday! Whatever happened to

We are mothers and fathers. And sons and daughters. Who every day go about our lives with duty, honor and pride. And neither snow, nor rain, nor heat, nor gloom of night, nor the winds of change, nor a nation challenged, will stay us from the swift completion of our appointed rounds. Ever. [Unless you happen to live in East Portland in the early 21st century. Your Christmas packages and sanity-saving DVDs will wait. Forever.]

Don't worry, Mr. Mailman, you'll still get your Candy Cane Cocoa mix. But ya gotta get here before we drink it all!

Cooking Up a Storm

2008-12-23T02:14:00.000-08:00

We have been having a relatively severe winter storm here in Portland. In the 12 years I've lived here, I don't ever recall temperatures this low for so long or seeing it snow everyday for a week. Except for a quick trip on Wednesday to Growers Outlet, our local produce market, I have been home since going out to knit with friends on Monday evening. Stuck inside, watching the snow blow from the east and then the west, I've been keeping warm in the kitchen, cooking up a storm.

For dinner one evening, I brined a pork loin and then roasted it along with some cauliflower, seasoned simply with just olive oil, salt and pepper. A couple days later we put the leftover meat in the slow cooker with some canned tomatoes, green tomato chutney from my friend Harriet, molasses, wine, and oregano, and had lovely pulled pork for sandwiches. There was still some of that leftover and Mike had the idea to use it in a tamale pie. So, we managed three utterly different meals with one piece of meat.

Friday night's fish was pan-fried pistachio crusted halibut with not-so spicy yogurt. This turned out perfectly, crisp on the outside and juicy on the inside. I vastly simplified the yogurt, just swirling in a little fresh dill and lemon juice into homemade yogurt. I made fish cakes with the leftovers last night, adding a bit of It's Alive Sea Vegetable Sauerkraut to the mix along with finely chopped celery, homemade mayonnaise, dulse flakes, panko and a couple eggs. I dredged the cakes in panko as well, which gave them a nice crunchy finish with they were cooked.

For lunch one day last week, I satisfied a hankering I have had for pasta e fagioli for several weeks. In the process, I made a triple batch of navy beans and now have two quarts in the freezer for more soups or maybe dip. This morning, I came across this recipe for White Bean & Squash Soup, which I think I'll make next week. While I was cooking dinner last night, I baked two delicata squash and three apples for this curried soup I'll make to go along with grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner tonight. In another pan, I baked a celery root, several small cloves of garlic, and some Yukon gold potatoes for yet another soup that we'll have on Christmas Eve, I think. I figured that baking these vegetable would be easier and perhaps yield a better flavor than simply cooking them in broth. We'll see.

Over in the fermentation department, I finally got a quart of burdock root started. I have no idea if this is going to work, as I couldn't find any recipes. I just peeled the roots, cut them all to the same length, submersed them in a quart jar of salty brine with a little whey and some grated ginger, and kept the jar on the counter for several days. It's now in the fridge and I'll let it sit there for a few weeks before taking a taste. I love pickled burdock root, but the stuff they sell at the Japanese markets is full of chemicals and dyed fluorescent orange (burdock root is white). I also pickled another 5 pounds of beets, using my food processor to grate them instead of grating by hand. Thumbs up on the modern convenience. I was concerned that food processor would grate the beets too fine, but it actually grated a little thicker--more like a julienne, so I'm pleased. The packed jar did get a little mold growth on top while it sat on the counter, which hasn't happened before. I scraped off the top quarter-inch and it hasn't come back. When I bought veggies last week, I picked up a cabbage and some turnips to pickle, plus a few rutabaga to add to borscht next week.

I've done a bit of food gift prep as well. I made candied nuts, candied grapefruit peel, and cranberry-pumpkin-walnut breads. We ran low on sugar, so I didn't get the orange peels candied yet. A neighbor picked up a 5-pound bag of sugar for me at Winco yesterday, but I'm not sure now if I'll get to that before Christmas or not. We may just have them for our New Years Day open house instead.

I tried what the New York Times touted as the best chocolate chip cookie recipe ever, but we have been only mildly impressed. I cooked one batch immediately and a second 24 hours later and didn't notice any improvement. I do like sprinkling the cookies with salt before baking--salt and chocolate is a favorite combination of mine--but I'm not sure that these cookies are Santa-worthy. Today, I'm going to make more chocolate-pepper-espresso cookies and gingersnaps, which I know will please Sankt Nikolaus, as Annabel insist we call Mr. Bowl Full of Jelly this year.

Annabel and I have invited ourselves over to our neighbor Jill's house this afternoon to help her decorate sugar cookies. I haven't decorated cookies since I was a girl myself and know nothing about making icing or doing fancy piping, but Jill turns out beautifully decorated cookies every year, so we're going to learn from a master. Christmas morning, I'll bake the pieces for our gingerbread house while we open gifts and then we'll put it together after brunch. I ordered candy from Natural Candy Store this year, way ahead of time, so we didn't have to run around at the last minute looking for candy, which is especially fortunate as there's no running around for us with the snow we've got here. A neighbor with an SUV is giving me a lift to New Seasons this afternoon so I can pick up Dungeness crabs for our Christmas Eve feast and a few other provisions. Honestly, though, we have managed quite well with food during this storm. We ran out of milk, but I'm kinda used to working without fresh milk and have found that sour raw milk works as well or even better in cooking and the kids are happy to have yogurt in their oatmeal.

We got our tree and decorations up yesterday. I got into the habit of waiting until the last minute to put up the tree when Annabel was little and I didn't want to hassle with her over pulling decorations off for weeks before Christmas. Now, I just like waiting until the official start of winter before taking down the fall decorations and getting out wintry Christmas decor. I like fall and it seems like it gets a little short-changed with Christmas celebrations starting ever earlier. I'm bummed that we don't have any garland. I had planned on picking some up over the weekend, but the storm put an ix-nay on that idea. Maybe New Seasons will have some today.

Merry Christmas!

Two Soups from My Imagination & Pantry

2008-12-11T14:37:00.000-08:00

I just made a couple soups for lunch without recipes or much planning. The one preliminary was that I had soaked about a cup of wheat berries in water for about 24 hours, then cooked gently in water until softened...30 minutes? I don't know exactly, I was watching Battlestar Galactica (this fall's television obsession) while they cooked. I drained them and then sprinkled olive oil, balsamic vinegar, salt and pepper until they tasted good, then put them in the fridge for some future use...perhaps a soup or salad? I wasn't sure at the time. All together, it took about 10 minutes of my attention over the course of a day to get the wheat berries ready.

Wheat Berry, Chard, Sauerkraut, & Beef Soup
1/2 medium onion, chopped
1 stalk celery, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
4 stalks chard, stems chopped, leaves torn
1 pint beef broth
1/2 pint of leftover jar of tomato sauce
half of leftover pot roast, shreddd
1 cup soaked and cooked wheat berries
1/2 cup sauerkraut
salt, pepper to taste

Saute the onions and celery for this recipe and one below until soft. Remove half onions and celery. Add chard stems and saute for a few minutes, then add garlic and saute briefly. Add beef broth, tomato sauce, pot roast, wheat berries and chard leaves. Season, then simmer for 10 minutes, until chard leaves are soft. Add sauerkraut and cook briefly, just until warmed through.

Wheat Berry, Tomato, Sauerkraut & Bean Soup
1/2 medium onion, chopped
1 stalk celery, chopped
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 pint frozen chicken broth
1/2 pint tomato sauce
1 15-oz can cannelini beans, drained and rinsed
1 cup soaked and cooked wheat berries
1/2 cup sauerkraut
salt, pepper, celery seed, parsley

While sauteing onions and celery in one pan, begin thawing frozen chicken stock in a second pan. When there is 1/2-inch of liquid broth in the pan, add garlic. Add onions and celery from first pan. Once broth is completely thawed, add beans, wheat berries, then season to taste. Cook over a medium flame for a few minutes. Add sauerkraut and cook briefly, just long enough to warm through, but not long enough to softened. Serve!

The sauerkraut was an after thought, but I'm so glad I thought of using it, as it added both taste and texture to these soups. Like other sour foods, it brightened the flavor of the other ingredients, plus it added its own complex flavor. Because I didn't cook it for long, it remained noticeably crunchy. If I hadn't added the sauerkraut, I might have tried a little more balsamic. The kids slurped up the milder bean soup, while Mike and I enjoyed the more sour and complex beef soup. Mmmmmm...good!

Food Storage Inventory Online

2008-12-11T10:41:00.001-08:00

As part of the Nourished Kitchen Pantry Challenge, I completed a fairly thorough inventory of most of the food we have in our house. It's hard for me to say how long all this will last. I expect the meat to last about a year from when it was purchased and I think we won't go through all the rice and beans we have stored any time soon. It seems we go through five pounds of cheddar cheese in a little under two months. I know that the 20 pounds of whole wheat flour will be used up within a month.

I have a lot of thoughts about our food storage that I'd like to share, but I must do some Lost Arts Kitchen business while I have these few kid-free precious moments this morning. More later.

Whole Foods Not So Wholesome Attack on New Seasons

2008-12-04T09:04:00.000-08:00

Do you shop at Whole Foods? There are many good reasons not to shop there, but here's yet another one. Whole Foods has subpoenaed New Seasons financial records, marketing plans, documents related to plans to open new stores or improve existing stores, and other sensitive information about its business. The Oregonian weighed in on the matter yesterday.

Of course, this outrageously unfair, anticompetitive demand should come as no surprise to those of us who've paid attention to Whole Foods' business practices over the years. What concerns me is that a lot of people out there think that by shopping at Whole Foods, they're doing the "right" thing, buying organic food for their family. Perhaps in some areas of the country, Whole Foods is the one and only choice for those seeking organic food, but I doubt it. Given the way Whole Foods does business, I'd bet that every single one of its stores is within a stone's throw of another, smaller, locally owned health food store or food co-op. You may not know about it yet. It may not be right on your way home from work, but it's almost certainly there. Please, if you shop at Whole Foods, find your local alternative and shop there.

I no longer shop very often at New Seasons. I prefer to pick up produce at farmers' markets or People's Co-op, buy meat farm-direct, and get my groceries delivered to my door by Azure Standard. Still, I'm glad that when I still shopped at grocery stores regularly, I could go to a locally owned natural food store committed to selling local, organic products. After my run-in at Fred Meyers, New Seasons became the only place I grocery shopped for some time. I urge those of you who do shop at Whole Foods to stop supporting the Goliath and give David some well deserved support.

What About Those 10 Meals?

2008-12-01T07:22:00.001-08:00

First, I want to remind people that if you haven't already done so, please subscribe to the Lost Arts Kitchen newsletter for discounts on upcoming classes, sustainable food news, seasonal recipes, and more. Now, on with the post.

I mentioned in my last post that my family has about 10 or so meals that we eat fairly regularly and Matriarchy asked me to share what they are. Here's a list plus my usual long-winded explanation about the whys and wherefores of what I do.

Roast chicken, usually with roast potatoes or steamed rice and some other roasted vegetables. In the interest of saving time and energy, when I use the oven I try to fill it with multiple items. Often I will cook some things I plan to serve the next day, like sweet potatoes that I'll mash and reheat or beets that I chop up for salad.
Roast beef with roasted veggies. The leftover meat is great for sandwiches, salad, or soup.
Pan-fried or roasted pork chops, with steamed or roasted vegetables. I have different quick pan sauces or marinades I use with pork, citrus-ginger, balsamic-honey-mustard, blackberry-bbq, etc.
Roast or grilled salmon or halibut with roasted or steamed vegetables. We eat a lot of these two particular fish because I can buy frozen fillets in 10-pound boxes from Azure. I am looking for sources of alternatives such as tilapia, cod, and mahi mahi that don't require a trip to the grocery store.
Quiche/Bread Pudding/Strata. Eggs and milk and/or cream combined with cheese, veggies, and sometimes a bit of prosciutto or bacon. When I have baby fingerlings from our garden, I just put those in the buttered quiche pan and pour the egg mixture over them. If I decide to make quiche with a crust, I make and freeze extra dough. When I have enough bread ends in the freezer, I make bread pudding or strata. I suppose these could qualify as different types of meals, but they're all pretty much the same with varying types of starch. They all make fantastic leftovers. For a lighter meal with no leftovers, I make frittata.
Soup made from leftover roast chicken or roast beef. I make broth with the chicken carcass or using beef bones I keep in the freezer and mirepoix vegetables (that is, celery, onion, and carrots, the classic French combination of aromatics used to flavor stocks, sauces, etc.) I always have on-hand. My family's favorite soup is Chicken-Corn Soup, which practically makes itself it's so quick and easy. The kids love this with noodles and when I have time, we'll make egg noodles from scratch.
Twice baked potatoes. I love these and practically lived on them in college. So easy and filling. I wash four russets, sprinkle them with kosher salt while they're still wet, then bake them for an hour or so. When they're just barely cool enough to handle, I scoop out the flesh with a soup spoon, mash it, then add grated cheddar, yogurt, steamed broccoli, asparagus, or some other leftover green vegetable. I put the skins in a glass baking dish, fill them, and bake for another 30 minutes. Another great leftover.
Lentil soup, with rice or alphabets pasta. Again, I make a big batch and freeze what's left.
Fish cakes made with leftover roast salmon or halibut, with steamed veggies.
Fried rice made with leftover meat and veggies (or frozen green beans and corn), a couple eggs, and miso.
Pasta with bolognese sauce. I make a big batch of sauce, then freeze it in quart-sized containers so I always have some on hand. If we make noodles for soup, I make enough for pasta night.

You may notice a pattern...almost everything I cook is good (or even better) the next day, uses leftovers, or can be added to something else. All four of us are home for lunch most days and I rarely make lunch--I just pull leftovers out of the refrigerator and reheat them. I say this as someone who used to have a serious aversion to leftovers and still turns her nose up at a lot of things (yuck on any leftovers with green beans). Now that I've figured out how to cook things that can be used in another meal or that actually improve overnight in the fridge, I love leftovers.

I don't rotate through these 10 meals every 10 days. Ideally, dinner each week follows a pattern of roast on Monday, eggs on Tuesday, soup on Wednesday, vegetarian(ish) on Thursday, fish on Friday, Italian on Saturday, and easy or fun on Sunday. Leftovers from dinner provide us with lunch the next day. A hypothetical week of meals would go something like this:

Monday: Oats for breakfast, egg salad or fried eggs for lunch if there are no leftovers from the weekend, roast chicken with potatoes and Brussels sprouts for dinner. Bake bread and make bagel dough in the morning. Roast chard for tomorrow's quiche while roasting dinner. After dinner, pick meat off the bones and start stock with carcass.
Tuesday: Boil and bake bagels first thing in the morning. Bagels & cream cheese for breakfast, chicken salad for lunch, and quiche with cheddar, chard, and prosciutto for dinner.
Wednesday: Oats for breakfast, leftover quiche for lunch, chicken-corn soup for dinner. Every other week, pick up raw milk and make Neufchatel cheese and yogurt.
Thursday: French toast and bacon (cook extra for dinner), leftover soup, twice-baked potatoes with broccoli and bacon.
Friday: Oats, leftover potatoes, roast salmon with cauliflower and wild rice.
Saturday: Pancakes with blueberries, fish cakes, pasta with bolognese.
Sunday: Big late brunch, no lunch. I'll cook a casserole or start something in the slow cooker early in the day if we're going to be out. If not I'll make something new or special, like sushi!

So, within that framework and those 10 basic meals, there's a lot of possibilities for variety, but I don't have to fish out recipes or buy special ingredients. Anything on that list I could make today assuming I have defrosted or already cooked the meat involved. This is the beauty of having a thoughtfully stocked pantry, fridge, and freezer. I never go to the grocery store anymore at five o'clock in search of some ingredient essential for that evening's dinner. I also don't have to make elaborate meal plans every week before I go shopping because 1) I don't go shopping every week and 2) when I do shop for fresh produce, I just buy what's in season that we like and work it into my basic plan.

During the summer, we grill instead of roast. Like the oven, I tend to fill the grill to capacity and have a plan in mind for using whatever we don't eat that evening for another meal. Instead of soup, I made salad with leftovers. We also eat a lot more raw fresh vegetables during the summer and a lot less meat.

For the pantry challenge, I'm going to experiment more with using vegetables that I've fermented. Think borscht and choucroute garni. I also want to cook with beans more often than I do now. My kids love beans and I do make batches of black beans for them to have for quick lunches (or for Annabel to eat instead of potatoes as she inexplicably doesn't like potatoes), but I haven't gotten into making bean-based meals for the whole family. Anyone have a favorite bean dish to share?

Pantry Challenge Preparations

2008-11-29T11:26:00.001-08:00

I've been preparing for the December Pantry Challenge I wrote about in a post a few days ago. Next month, we will only spend $30 a week on food. The rest of what we eat will come from our pantry, freezers, and refrigerators. I've done a thorough inventory and stocked up on staples. Earlier this week I purchased 20 pounds of Bob's Red Mill organic white whole wheat flour, 5 pounds of BRM organic whole wheat pastry flour, and 10 pounds of BRM organic unbleached white bread flour, all on sale for $3.99 per 5 pound bag at New Seasons this week. (This is a pretty good deal on BRM flour--less expensive than 5-pound bags direct from Bob's.)

For fresh fruits and vegetables, we have about 30 pounds of apples on the front stoop along with a stalk of Brussels sprouts, 2 pounds of parsnips, 2 acorn squash, 2 delicata squash and 2 butternut squash. I have 20 pounds of Asian pears on order from Azure--they're a bit more expensive than apples or pears, but the kids love them and they keep well. Other than the occasional pomegranate (another kid fave), that's all the fresh fruit we eat this time of year, though I'm looking forward to the end of the month when oranges, especially blood oranges, come into season. I also have 5 pounds of beets (which I plan to ferment immediately), 5 pounds of carrots, and 5 pounds of Yukon gold potatoes on order.

For dairy, we will continue to buy 2 gallons of raw milk every other week, at $10/gallon (crazy, I know, but it's good stuff). I use most of that to make Neufchatel and yogurt. I have 5 pounds of raw milk cheddar and 1/2 pound of Parmesan coming from Azure. We used to keep a greater variety of cheeses on hand, but Azure doesn't carry stinky cheeses like Gorgonzola and brie. I could go get some if I really want it, but I don't find myself craving the more exotic flavors that my palate used to enjoy and I definitely don't relish the idea of going to New Seasons "just" for cheese (as I know much more would wind up in my cart). Rather, I find myself enjoying the simpler dairy products that I make at home: multitasking yogurt, tangy Neufchatel, and irresistible mozzarella.

With that and everything else we have in the house, I will hardly need to buy anything except some fresh green veggies. Just think how much time I will save not shopping during this busiest shopping month of the year. I loved that I hardly had any shopping to do for Thanksgiving and with the money we will save this month on groceries (and I may continue with this challenge in January), we'll be able to afford Dungeness crab for our Christmas Eve feast, something I look forward to immensely.

As I have become less and less dependent on the grocery store, I find that any extra time I spend in the kitchen is well worth not having to drag myself around fluorescent-lit markets full of stuff my family does not need. If I was the kind of person to keep track of such things, I believe I would find that I'm actually spending less total time on food procurement and preparation that I was a year or two ago. Some of that is because I have simplified meals. We don't eat the same 10 things all the time, but we eat about 10 basic meals most of the time, along with some seasonal and meat variations, special occasion menus, and craving-fulfillments...like the couple times a year that I made sushi.

What I am most looking forward to next month is planning meals solely around what we have at home. I believe this challenge will push me to greater heights of culinary creativity and to learn more of the ways of my grandmothers, who knew how to prepare meals from leftover this and that and throw together their pantry treasures into satisfying, healthy meals.

T-Day Report

2008-11-28T07:48:00.000-08:00

True to form, our plans changed midstream yesterday. Instead of simply roasting our turkey, Mike suggested smoking it. Great idea! The only downside was no roasting pan drippings, so the gravy was kinda weak. I bolstered it with sage, parsley, and lots of butter. The turkey was quite good, though. Nicely done, Mike!

The sweet potatoes were fantastic. I love plain roasted sweet potatoes and don't feel they need a lot of dressing up, but the ginger, touch of maple syrup, and coconut milk were nice additions. I might try molasses next time. I liked the stuffing recipe overall, but it didn't call for any moistening or binding ingredients, like broth or egg, that I am accustomed to using. I had some leftover chicken gravy, so I added that and a couple eggs. Who likes dry, crumbly stuffing?

The biggest disappointment was the green beans. I was totally winging it as the recipe I was trying to replicate is at my mom's house in Maryland and my mom is at her Winter Estate in Florida (this would be a double-wide in a trailer park full of snowbirds, lest you get the mistaken impression that their winter home is a Palm Beach McMansion), so no access to said recipe and I could not find one like it on ye ol' Internet. Plus, the kids were anxious to get out of the house just as I was getting the beans ready, so I totally slopped it together. Literally, I put frozen green beans, half a chopped onion, and homemade sour cream in a 9" x 9" baking dish, tossed it all together, topped with grated cheddar cheese, and put it in the oven with the stuffing and sweet potatoes. Mike, smart guy that he is, said that he liked them. And they were not bad, just too raw on the onions and I should've added some bread crumbs on top for texture. Oh well.

We did go on a nice walk, stopping at our neighbors to wish them Happy Thanksgiving. The kids and I had done leaf rubbings earlier in the day and wrote messages of thanks on them to people on our street. We taped them to the doors of people who were not home and visited briefly with everyone who was home. We returned to a nearly-finished dinner and set the table with the silverware my mother-in-law gave us a couple years ago that we almost never use, plus these tiny "escarglow" candles made with beeswax in snail shells that I picked up at Gossamer, and poured a sparkling riesling from our favorite German winery.

The best part of our meal, which I forgot until I was halfway through my plate, was the cranberry sauce. I didn't get the apple cider for the recipe I had planned to make, so I peeled and chopped two Fuji apples instead. I also added the flesh of the orange as well as the zest. And I spiced it slightly differently, using a dash of cardamom, cinnamom, cloves, and ginger. I accidentally managed to replicate my Granny's cranberry sauce! There's nothing like the taste of food that takes you back in time, is there? That sauce transported me across 3000 miles and 30 years, directly to the steamy warmth of my Pennsylvania Dutch grandmother's kitchen. Truly, it was just magical. There's a whole 'nother pint of it in the fridge and I plan to slather it all over my turkey and cream cheese sandwich today.

Lastly, the marbled pumpkin cheesecake didn't marble as well as I would have liked, mostly due to the lack of contrast between the pumpkin flavored cream cheese and the not flavored, but OMG it was really tasty! I added crystallized ginger to the pumpkin-flavored portion, but I don't think it improved the cake overall. The gingersnaps were quite good too...in fact, we had real problem keeping our fingers out of the dough while it cooled to a slice-able temperature before I baked them. I'm not usually a cookie dough fan, but that gingersnap dough was yum! Definitely a keeper recipe and Mike tells me his mom loves 'snaps...so I have a new food gift idea in mind, too.

After dinner and dessert, I played Uno with the kids while Mike washed dishes. Luc had terrific beginners luck, winning more round than Annabel or me. It was really nice to be home for T-Day this year...there were some stressful moments, like when I was about to start making the cheesecake and realized the beater for my mixer was missing (and still is), but overall, it was a low-stress, enjoyable day of wondrous aromas, terrific tastes, and family fun. Annabel and I went to bed early, like 8:15, and as she tucked in with me, she said to me, "This was a great day, Mommy." Who cares about not-quite-perfect green beans and missing beaters!

My First Thanksgiving

2008-11-25T00:01:00.001-08:00

This is the first year I'll host Thanksgiving at my home. I'm excited to start some new food and non-food-related traditions with my family. The menu will be fairly traditional, but the green bean casserole will not have canned cream of mushroom soup and instead of pumpkin pie, I am making pumpkin cheese cake with a homemade gingersnap crust, because I have two pints of cream cheese leftover from the cheese making class I taught last Friday. As I review the recipes, I'm feeling quite pleased that most everything we'll need is already in the house (or on order, in the case of the turkey). Here's my menu plan:

Roast Turkey, brined according to my brining bible (turkey comes from the Deck Family Farm)
Roast Brussels sprouts
Green Bean Casserole with local green beans that I froze this summer, raw milk cheddar, and homemade sour cream
Cranberry and Hazelnut Stuff ing, made with heels of homemade bread I've been stashing in the freezer for months
Sweet Potatoes with Coconut & Hazelnuts
Honey and Spice Cranberry Sauce
Marbled Pumpkin Cheesecake with Gingersnap Crust

With our pantry, fridges and freezers stocked, I don't have much shopping to do. I pick up the turkey from the Decks Tuesday afternoon at the Moreland Farmers Market, as well as some cranberries. Wednesday morning. I'll make the cranberry sauce, bake the sweet potatoes, steam wild rice for the dressing, and make the gingersnaps. That evening, I'll take the turkey out of the brine, then air dry it in the refrigerator over night. This makes for a very crispy skin.

On Thursday morning, I'll start with the cheesecake, so that can bake before the turkey and then cool while the turkey roasts. That will leave me with the sweet potatoes, green bean casserole, Brussels sprouts, and dressing to assemble while the turkey roasts. They'll go into the oven while the turkey rests, then it'll be time for our first Thanksgiving feast in our own home and for me to collapse in a heap!

Since this is supposed to be a holiday for expression our gratitude, I would like to start some new traditions. Something simple, like going around the table and naming something that we for which we are grateful. While dinner is cooking, I want the kids to work on cards for our neighbors, thanking them for all they've done for us and our neighborhood this year, as well as family and friends. As difficult as things are right now with Mike unemployed, we have felt so fortunate to be surrounded by such supportive, encouraging people.

Pantry Challenge

2008-11-23T10:47:00.000-08:00

One of my favorite food blogs, The Nourished Kitchen, is hosting a Pantry Challenge for the month of December and I'm going to participate. Our pantry, freezer, and refrigerator are all well-stocked now and copy of the out-of-print Fancy Pantry arrived in the mail yesterday. I am set!

To prepare for the challenge, I need do a more complete inventory than the one I did for a recent post, then I'll need to store up on few things before the end of November. Off the top of head, I know I need to stock up on

fresh cranberries, apples, pears, pomegranates, chestnuts, russet and fingerling potatoes
Rapadura and organic cane sugar, organic milk powder, chocolate chips, Celtic sea salt
white whole wheat flour, whole wheat pastry flour, white bread flour, maybe white pastry flour

Also off the top of my head, my clean out goals for the month include

make applesauce with half bushel of apples on the front stoop
making desserts, sauce, chutneys, or jams with fruit that is in the freezer
use up frozen soups and stocks
render frozen leaf lard
make beef stock with frozen bones
make hot cocoa mix with cocoa in freezer

The difficulties I foresee are keeping our food budget to $30 per week given that we spend $40 per month just on raw milk. With our chickens on a laying holiday, I'm also spending about $28 per month on eggs--maybe less. That leaves about $13 per week for fresh vegetables, but do think we can manage on that as most of what we buy this time of year, kale, chard, cabbage, cauliflower, and broccoli, are relatively inexpensive.

So, we're on for the challenge. How about you?

This Lawn Is Your Lawn

2008-11-14T03:29:00.000-08:00

Richard Doiron, founder of Kitchen Gardeners International, has planted an organic garden in front of his white house and has started a movement to persuade our next president grow a kitchen garden on the White House lawn. You can join the movement and learn more about it at Eat the View.

Preparing for Winter

2008-11-05T20:24:00.001-08:00

First off, Lost Arts Kitchen is officially open for business! While visiting my family in October, I was came up with a name for my new business, wrote a business plan, and built my web site, which is now up and ready for constructive criticism. I will begin offering classes in January, though I may offer a holiday food-gift-making session before then if there is interest.

On to the topic at hand. The New York Times did a piece on root cellaring in its Home & Garden section today. My friend Harriet Fasenfest, a local restaurateur turned urban homesteader and owner of Preserve, is pictured and quoted in the article, which offers some good tips on storing vegetables over winter. We didn't grow or put up nearly as much food as I would have liked this year, but considering my health issues, I'm pleased I was able to do as much as I did. I've been building up our stores with food from local farms, markets, and Azure, and I am glad, with Mike out of work and prospects being slim, that we have a house full of food.

In the pantry we have or will have after today's Azure Standard delivery:

10 quarts home canned tomato sauce
10 quarts home canned peaches
20 pints home canned apple sauce
10 half-pints home canned raspberry jam
10 half-pints home canned strawberry jam
5 pounds black beans
2 pounds lentils
1 pound dry garbanzo beans
50 pounds rye berries
25 pounds wheat berries
12 15-ounce cans pumpkin
12 15-ounce cans garbanzo beans
12 15-ounce cans black olives
5 28-0unce cans crushed tomatoes
18 6-ounces can tuna
5 pounds brown basmati rice
5 pounds brown jasmine rice
10 pounds whole wheat spaghetti
1 pound dried cranberries
20 pounds unbleached white flour
10 pounds unbleached pastry flour
1 gallon olive oil
2 pounds tapioca pearls
1 pound milk powder (I use this to thicken yogurt)
1 pound cacao nibs

Most everything in the pantry is organic, local and/or fair trade, except the black olives and tuna. In our "root cellar" (that is, the basement bathroom) we have or will have soon:

3 pounds sweet potatoes
5 pounds beets
5 pounds fingerling potatoes
5 pounds russet potatoes

We store alliums in the stairwell to our basement. It's quite dry there.

12 pounds yellow onions
1 pound garlic

Since I'm getting pretty good prices on these bulk produce items from Azure, I haven't felt compelled to buy say 50 pounds of potatoes. I might next month though, just to see how well they last in our cellar. I would like to get fresh apples and pears soon to store as well.

In our freezer, we have or will have within the next couple weeks:

90 pounds grassfed beef
90 pounds pastured pork
50 pounds venison
10 pounds grassfed lamb
5 whole pastured chickens
9 pounds halibut filets
9 pounds salmon filets
10 pounds butter
10 pounds beef bones
2 pounds chicken feet
2 pounds leaf lard
5 pounds cocoa powder (hot cocoa season is almost here!)
5 pounds sunflower seeds
2 pounds pecans
2 pounds walnuts
1 pound almonds
3 gallons blueberries
2 gallons green beans
4 quarts asparagus
3 10-ounce bags cranberries (I plan to can cranberry sauce with these soon)
20 pounds white whole wheat flour
several pounds miscellaneous flours and meals
several gallons berries that have been in the freezer for over a year that I plan to turn into syrup or jam soon

All of our meat is local. The beef and pork comes from the Deck Family Farm. The chickens come from Deo Volente Farm. The lamb comes from a friend in Happy Valley. The venison comes from my husband's first Oregon deer, that he finally got last weekend after seven years of hunting here. Yay, Mike! He butchered it yesterday afternoon. Yesterday morning, he helped slaughter and quarter our lamb from Mary. He and I will butcher that today. We have so little room in our freezers now that we will be selling some lamb to folks in our buying club. We also have a pastured turkey on order from the Decks, which we will have to cook whenever they deliver it because we won't have space to freeze it whole.

And in our pickle fridge, we have:

2 half-gallons sour cucumbers
3 half-gallons sauerkraut
1 quart pickled beets (plus more that I will pickle soon)
1 quart sauerreuben (pickled turnips)
5 pounds raw cheddar

With all this food in storage, plus what we have in the kitchen cupboards, refrigerator and freezer, all I have to do is buy fresh fruits and vegetables every week or so and milk every two weeks. Buying groceries in bulk from Azure and buying meat in bulk direct from local farmers is saving us both money and time, and gives me piece of mind. Come what may, my family will at least have plenty to eat.

Relief, Elation, Hope, Gratitude

2008-11-05T16:28:00.000-08:00

I'm relieved that an indisputably fair election has come to pass in the US.
I'm elated to see an African American elected president in my lifetime.
I'm hopeful that a genuinely good man will lead our nation with intelligence, compassion, and integrity.
I'm grateful to everyone who voted, who volunteered on the Obama campaign, and who worked to register new voters.

My faith in our electoral process has been renewed. What a great day.

No Time for Love, Dr. Jones...

2008-10-12T20:21:00.000-07:00

Okay, is there anyone reading this blog who gets the reference above? Thankfully, we are living in the glorious age of YouTube, so I can share with you this clip from my favorite movie of 1994, Clerks. Now that you get the reference, I'm sure you feel your day is complete. Go waste some time watching more clips from the movie...better yet, rent it. Clerks was particularly relevant to me in 1994, as I was working as a bookseller. There is no retail worker more convinced of her intellectual superiority over her customers than the lowly bookseller. Randal got it right, though, "If we're so fuckin' advanced, then what are we doing working here?"

Anyway...I don't have time for much of a post. Looking at how long it's been since I last wrote here, obviously I haven't had time for a while. I have been somewhat overwhelmed with "issues" and busy continuing with many of the changes I've written about here. Our freezer is stocked with beef and pork from the Decks, chicken from Deo Volente Farm, and Alaskan salmon and halibut I bought through Azure Standard. I've also managed to stash three gallons of blueberries and three gallons of green beans in the freezer, bearly--the freezer is now as full as it should be as we head into winter. I continue to bake bread and bagels regularly, make raw milk Neufchatel cheese and yogurt every other week, have of gallons sauerkraut and fermented pickles in our second fridge, and have incorporated homemade mayonnaise and mustard into my repertoire. After several years of not putting up more than a dozen or so jars of jam, this summer and fall I have not only canned jam, but peaches and tomato sauce as well. I didn't can a lot--12 quarts of peaches and 11 quarts of tomato sauce--but considering my health issues, which make it painful for me to stand for long, I'm pleased I got that much done. In November, I plan to turn our basement bathroom into a cold storage area, for keeping bulk potatoes, squash, and the like over winter. I would like to figure out a second cold storage area for apples and pears. Onions, I discovered this summer, keep well at the top of our basement stairs, which stays somewhat warm, but very dry. I kept a 10 pound bag of Walla Wallas there for a couple months and only the very last one showed signs of deterioration.

We now have not three, but six chickens! In August, I designed and Mike built a nifty A-frame chicken tractor...that is, a chicken coop with wheels.
Much to Mike's consternation, before he was done building the coop, I bought three pullets, Pike (a Light Brahma), T-Rex (Golden Sex Linked), and Jane Austin Sunberry (Buff Orpington), from a farm in St. Helens. As you can see, we still need to finish painting a few parts of it.
Our other three chickens, Henny Penny, Brownie, and Ladybug, came from my friend Chrissy's mother-in-law, Sue, who was overwhelmed with seven chickens. They're all Rhode Island Reds. Here's Henny Penny.The Brownies, as Sue called them, and as we call them here, too, are laying occasionally, but not always in their nest box. We have found eggs in a brush pile and in a stand of lemon balm. Who knows if they're laying somewhere else in the yard as well. Chicken-watching is a favorite family activity these days and we all enjoy their antics.

Okay, I guess I found the time for a lengthy update afterall! There's more to come--over the next few weeks, I will be getting set to launch an exciting new business venture. No, I'm not going to tell you about it yet! Stay tuned!

On Making Changes, and Not

2008-07-14T06:50:00.000-07:00

I have been thinking a lot about change lately...personal change, cultural change, political change. I'm not the only one. Barack Obama is not only promising change, but in banning donations from lobbyists, running a radically different campaign and now, as the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, pushing the Democratic National Convention to change fund raising strategies as well. All around, I am learning of people who are changing their habits in an effort to reduce their carbon footprint, from riding public transportation to learning how to find and prepare organic whole foods on the cheap. At home, we are making changes, too, many of which I've chronicled here.

During the spring, I attended the Center for Earth Leadership's Agent of Change workshop along with 15 other Portlanders who feel called "to help create a sustainable future." We learned about theories and strategies for citizen-led cultural change, drawing especially from the ideas outlined in The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. I thoroughly enjoyed participating in this workshop, having the opportunity to meet this inspirational group and especially Jeanne and Dick Roy, longtime Earth activists and founders of the Northwest Earth Institute and the Center for Earth Leadership. I'm am now an official Agent of Change, so mind your step or I may be forced to us my new secret powers on you!

Change is hard, even when we feel profoundly moved to make a change, even when our collective conscience cries out, "Change NOW!" taking up a new habits challenges most of us. So, how do we do it? When we come to the realization that for the sake of our home on Earth, for the sake of our children's children, or simply for the sake of ourselves, we must make changes, what do we do?

Recently, I learned of the Japanese philosophy of kaizen, which emphasizes making continuous, small improvement throughout all aspects of one's life. Since World War II, this philosophy has particularly informed Japanese business practices and can be credited with the success of manufacturers such as Toyota, but its principals can be applied to our personal lives as well. Reading a recent New York Times article on the subject, I was struck by one passage in particular:

Rather than dismissing ourselves as unchangeable creatures of habit, we can instead direct our own change by consciously developing new habits. In fact, the more new things we try — the more we step outside our comfort zone — the more inherently creative we become, both in the workplace and in our personal lives.
But don’t bother trying to kill off old habits; once those ruts of procedure are worn into the hippocampus, they’re there to stay. Instead, the new habits we deliberately ingrain into ourselves create parallel pathways that can bypass those old roads.
“The first thing needed for innovation is a fascination with wonder,” says Dawna Markova, author of “The Open Mind” and an executive change consultant for Professional Thinking Partners. “But we are taught instead to ‘decide,’ just as our president calls himself ‘the Decider.’ ” She adds, however, that “to decide is to kill off all possibilities but one. A good innovational thinker is always exploring the many other possibilities.”

As I have been consciously making changes in my family's consumption habits, I have noticed myself thinking more and more out-of-the-box. As I eschew the new, I must come up with creative ways to re-purpose what we already own or can find used. Instead of seeing individual problems that need solving, I find myself examining and continually re-jiggering entire systems.

For example, my husband has been working incredibly long hours for the last six months, which has thrown our whole food system into disarray--the old system, from meal planning to grocery buying to meal prep--was disrupted. For a while, I just reacted to each of these aspects individually, with little success. I slowly began to recognize that the whole system needed adjusting and the changes I've been making for the last several months--planning for meals months in advance rather than a week or two, buying meat in bulk, ordering groceries from Azure standard, switching to even more whole, seasonal, and organic food--have been conscious attempts to make our food system align with our values and our lifestyle. I have had to step outside the conventional system and learn (or in some cases, remember from my childhood) "new" ways of doing things.

Another recent find on making continual improvement focuses on the change a typical American family make do over the next decade to reduce its carbon imprint to zero. (This is a great issue of Yes! magazine, by the way. Note all the other climate solution articles listed on the left side of the page.) According to this carbon footprint calculator, my family's current carbon footprint is about half that of the typical American household, largely due to the fact that neither my husband nor I commute to work. Easy access to excellent local food and our temperate climate help us keep our footprint small, too. I am embarrassed to admit our electricity consumption is 112% of the American average according to the Riot 4 Austerity calculator. Anticipate some posts this summer about our new electricity diet, along with some kvetching about our home's lack of decent cross ventilation.

Paradoxically, while we often find making changes in attitude and personal habits difficult, even the most environmentally conscious among us struggles with not changing to the latest model mobile phone or with letting go of the conviction that only a major remodel to our home will make us happy. Beth Meredith and Eric Storm, the green home designers who wrote the latter piece, came to our home a few years ago when I was convinced that a major remodel was essential to my future happiness. Truly, I did not believe I could survive life with two children and no dishwasher. (Wonder of wonders, I have. Thankfully, Mike took up the bulk of dish washing when Luc arrived.) We have never been able to afford the remodel and while I still really want an automatic dishwasher and a gas stove in my kitchen, and wish my kids could have separate bedrooms someday, I generally find myself feeling grateful for all we have rather than wishing we had more.

So, how can we, as individuals "Save the Earth?" We can make conscious, incremental changes, that stretch us, but don't stress us. We can develop a list of intentions and remind ourselves of them when we feel that itch to buy something new or make major "improvements" that require lots of energy and resources. We can use a few of the 86,400 seconds we have every day to count our blessings. We can't all run for president, reduce our carbon footprint by 90% in the next year, or grow our own food, but we can all start with something small and with our hearts and minds open, reach for something big.

Azure Standard Order This Week

2008-07-06T07:17:00.000-07:00

Sorry for the short notice, but I am placing my next Azure Standard order this week. The deadline for ordering is Tuesday, with delivery expected Thursday afternoon. If you want to join my order, let me know and I'll send you the information you need.

Fresh Ways with Our Food

2008-06-22T08:23:00.000-07:00

As I wrote a few weeks ago, our family has made some changes regarding how much meat we eat and where it comes from. When I first decided to switch to buying only meat from local farmers raising pastured or naturally fed animals, I assumed our meat costs would rise significantly and so I decided it would be best to just eat less. As it turns out, by buying in bulk, we're actually spending less per pound than we did buying meat from Gartner's, our local butcher that sells grain-fed beef raised in Banks, and significantly less than what New Seasons charges for its grass-fed Country Natural Beef from Eastern Oregon. By the time I figured that out, though, I had already gotten into some new meal planning and cooking habits and so plan to stick with eating smaller quantities of higher quality meat.

My primary method for reducing our meat consumption has been to only cook it once a week. For the last couple months, that has meant roasting a whole chicken, a beef rump roast, or some other 3-5 pounds of meat for dinner on Monday. We eat as much of it as we want that evening, then I add the remains to salads, soups, casseroles, or sandwiches the rest of the week. We also eat a lot more eggs, legumes, and potatoes. Twice-baked potato, with sharp cheddar cheese, yogurt, and broccoli or asparagus, and maybe a bit of prosciutto or bacon, is my all-time favorite cool weather comfort food.

Mark Bittman wrote a piece in the New York Times recently about reducing meat consumption, with several good ideas on how to go about it. We've incorporated a number of his tips, making rules, buying less meat and more vegetables, and we forgot the "protein thing" a long time ago. And while I have learned to really appreciate all manner of fresh vegetables, I'm still learning about cooking with whole grains and incorporating them into my weekly meal plans. As a kid, I liked having fruit for dessert and want to re-adopt that habit.

Along with reducing my meat consumption, I've also been on a book diet, too, so my trip to Looking Glass Bookstore in Sellwood last week was a special treat. I bought two new cookbooks there to help me learn fresh ways with fresh fruits and vegetables: Farmer John's Cookbook: The Real Dirt on Vegetables by John Peterson and Angelic Organic, and Local Flavors by Deborah Madison. What I like best about both these books is that they are organized by season. Both cookbooks feature uncomplicated recipes using familiar ingredients most of us have in our kitchens.

Farmer John's has sections devoted to the early, mid, late, and extended seasons, loosely grouped according to leafy, fruiting, rooting, and storable vegetables (though carrots are grouped with the fruiting varieties and cauliflower and broccoli are with the rooting veggies). Each vegetable has its own section, with recipes, storage and handling tips, culinary uses, and culinary partners. Farmer John's is full of quotes from Rudolf Steiner on nutrition and biodynamic farming, plus excerpts from the Angelic Organic CSA newsletter. All the recipes are vegetarian, though some include dairy. This week I'll try Easy Greens with Peanuts and Creamy Choi Soup.

Local Flavors starts with the early spring produce and basically moves chronologically through the seasons, but fruits and vegetables are grouped in families: greens; crucifers including cabbage, kale, broccoli, turnips; the vining cucurbits family of squashes, melons, and cukes; corn and beans (not closely related, but I suppose the connection is that we grow them to eat their seeds); vegetable fruits like tomatoes, eggplant, peppers; roots and tubers; stone fruits; pomme fruits; citrus and suptropical fruits, as well as foods that keep, such as nuts, dried fruits, rice, and honey. Inspired by her recipe for radish butter, I've been making radish sandwiches for a couple weeks. Last week we had Pasta with Peas, Fresh Sage, and Bread Crumbs. Annabel loved gathering the sage leaves and blossom for this...the peas came from our garden as well. I'm trying Stir-Fried Snow Peas with Pea Greens tonight.

What fresh ways with the season's offerings have you discovered lately?

Hasta la Vista, Banana?

2008-06-20T06:43:00.000-07:00

I've been working on a long, link-filled post for a week or so and haven't posted it, or anything else lately, because I a got stuck. I was inspired to move on and get out of my rut by an interesting piece in the New York Times today about the expected spike in the price of bananas, thanks to floods in Ecuador, rising fuel costs, and a virus that may wipe out the single variety of bananas that is currently grown for the worldwide market. I rarely buy bananas. Personally, I'm indifferent to them taste-wise. Ethically, well, what's to like about bananas? One hundred years of colonialism, oppression, and deforestation for a fruit that must travel hundreds, if not thousands of miles to its final destination under refrigeration? Ugh.

I do sometimes buy bananas on those rare occasions when I take the kids to the produce market and they beg me for a bunch. Despite my ethical misgivings about buying fruit from afar, I try to pick my battles with the kids. I've been trying to explain the whole concept of buying local, seasonal fresh fruits and vegetables to Annabel lately. She's starting to get it, but she still wants me to buy watermelon, now. I've stuck firm on the watermelon and I suppose that one's easier for me because I grew up eating it only during the summer, whereas I've always known bananas as a year-round fruit. (I have often wonder, though, what is the natural season for bananas?) In my youth, watermelon was strictly a late summer, outdoor food, to be enjoyed during backyard cookouts. Strawberries came ready around my birthday in late May and strawberry shortcake was my traditional birthday cake. Well, that and Lady Baltimore cake, but you can't have too many traditional birthday cakes, if you ask me.

My tastes remain rather strictly geared toward what's in season. Recently, while cleaning out our deep freeze in anticipation of having to store 100 or so pounds of beef, I composted gallons of berries, frozen years ago and now freezer-burned and hardened into solid blocks. My husband wondered why we had so many berries we didn't use and I realized that I just don't crave berries out of season and so those bags just sit there in the bottom of the freezer, unused. We froze a bunch of asparagus this spring, when it was coming on so strong we couldn't keep up with it, and I am determined to cook with it soon, because I know come fall, I won't be interested. Next year, we'll try to give more away.

I want my kids to develop this same sense of the seasonality for food; to experience anticipation for asparagus, peas, strawberries, beans, peaches, tomatoes, watermelon, and pumpkins; to grow up with palates that know the difference between the fresh-picked and the well-traveled. It ain't easy, though, to convince them to eat greens or asparagus. Just last night, I made a bread pudding with local chard, kale, eggs, sorta local raw milk (I know I shouldn't count Sequim as local, but I haven't found a local raw milk dairy without a wait list), Canadian nitrate-free bacon (uh, we'll be getting bacon from the Decks in the near future), and the crusty ends of home baked bread. Luc ate what I fed him, though he mostly wanted the bacon. Annabel wouldn't touch it and ate a (nitrate-free, from Old Country Sausage) hotdog instead. Again, picking battles. I won't make her eat greens, yet, but I think from now on, I'll stand firm on bananas.

It's a perennial question for parents of young children, but for those of us trying to eat with the seasons, it's even more of a challenge: How do you get them to eat the good stuff? Also, what do you do when they refuse to eat what you have cooked for the family?

Bee-Boppa-Rhubarb!

2008-06-10T18:38:00.000-07:00

Our rhubarb patch looks spectacular this year and Sunday I finally got around to doing some rhubarb cookin'. I made two recipes from The Complete Book of Year-Round Small-Batch Preserving: Rhubarb-Ginger Chutney and Gingered Rhubarb Jam with Honey. Unfortunately, I was not impressed with either finished product. The chutney may improve with age and will be fine with pork, but my immediate impression was that it lacked the sweet and sour contrast of a good chutney. The jam is far too sweet for my taste--the honey completely overwhelms the rhubarb and ginger. The kids will love it, though, and the nice thing about making small batches is that we're not stuck with eating tons of something we don't like.

Fortunately, I did manage to make one fantastic rhubarb recipe, which I found at The Rhubarb Compendium, which truly has everything you ever wanted to know about growing, cooking, and even cleaning, with the first of spring's fruity ruby beauties. Continuing with the rhubarb-ginger theme, I made Gingered Rhubarb Apple Crisp, replacing two of the apples with some firm Washington pears I picked up at the market Saturday (which had me wondering just how do they keep those apples and pears so fresh for so long). Well, this was just absolutely one of the best desserts I've ever made. The ginger and rhubarb combination is amazing and the crystalline oatmeal topping added just the right contrast to the soft fruit. We had the crisp for dessert Sunday evening and by lunchtime on Monday, there was only one piece left. I'm looking forward to making it again later this week.

So, we still have more rhubarb to harvest. What else might we try to do with it? Freezing is out, as we're getting our quarter of grassfed Oregon beef on Saturday (!!!) and I'm determined not to add anything to the freezer. Anyone have a good rhubarb jam recipe that shows off its tartness rather than masks it with sugar or honey?

With a Little Help From My Friends

2008-06-02T07:45:00.000-07:00

We're huge Beatles fans here at Chez Musser. Sure, my husband and I initially bonded over our mutual love of Led Zeppelin, but when we got married, our processional was Here Comes the Sun (played my brother on acoustic guitar). Now, we have the kids hooked on Yellow Submarine, both the album and movie, and Sgt. Pepper's, which I'm instructed to play, "Loud, Mommy!" in the car. Anyway, thanks, Friends and Family, for helping me get over my funk last week. I received so many kind words and thoughtful advice, from people I didn't even realize read my blog! Thank you thank you thank you!

Amazingly, the day after I wrote about my sadness about the eventual sale of the Musser Farm to developers, I happened upon a copy of the March 2008 issue of Progressive Farmer magazine at my doctor's office, with the headline, "Saving Our Farmland" on the cover. After my appointment, at sat in her waiting room and devoured Losing Two Acres, Every Minute. While I have known that there are organizations out there like Oregon Sustainable Land Trust, preserving farm land on a donation bases, I did not realize that local and state governments are actually buying development rights to farmland, leaving the farming family free to sell the land for agricultural uses. What a win-win deal. Farmer gets to keep his land, while getting some cash (which could be especially helpful for an aging farmer unable to produce as much as he did in earlier years), still leave a legacy for his children, and yet know that the land that sustained him and his family will remain farm land. I'm going to send a copy of the article to my Aunt Helen and Uncle Paul, as they not be aware that a program exists right there in York County. I can't be sure they'll be interested, but it's worth a shot!

Moo

2008-05-31T00:02:00.000-07:00

This is Moo the Cow, as he is now known in our family. Annabel named him Moo after I showed her his picture and explained he would provide us with hamburgers and steak soon. She's a little sad about it. I suggested we think of Moo the Cow and thank him whenever we eat beef at home. I plan to print his picture and hang it on the freezer.

Azure Standard Order Next Week

2008-05-29T19:43:00.000-07:00

I'm going to place my first Azure Standard order next week, for delivery on Thursday afternoon. If you would like to join my order and will be available to come pick up your items by 9pm Thursday evening, please let me know. I'll submit my order sometime Tuesday, so get in touch with me by Monday.

For Years to Come?

2008-05-28T21:20:00.000-07:00

This afternoon, Annabel and I got to talking about her namesake, my paternal grandmother, Anna Bell Doll Musser. I have a distinct memory of when I learned Granny's full name. She had a plate commemorating her and Pop Pop's 50th anniversary on a table in her living room, inscribed with her maiden name and Pop's name and their wedding date. I remember thinking that her name was the most beautiful name of any real person that I'd ever known and that Anna Bell Doll seemed an incongruously delicate and girly name for my sturdy, sensible Granny. Somehow, I loved her even more for having this wonderful name. From the moment I knew I was pregnant with Annabel, I knew she would be a girl and early on, before the ultrasound lab tech confirmed for me what I already knew, I also had decided (after consulting Mike, of course) what what my baby girl's name would be. We never considered any other names for her...had she come out a boy, he would have likely spent his first several weeks of life on the outside without a permanent name. She would be Annabel. Pronounced AH-na-bel, with the sensible German spelling rather than the fanciful French spelling, as Mike put it.

So, I was telling Annabel some of this and she wanted to see some pictures of Granny . I have some prints around, but I knew my dad has many old photos up on his web site. I didn't realize the treasure he had put up there and so was pleasantly surprised to stumble upon this page of pictures of Musser Farm, in Manchester, Pennsylvania, circa 1942-43.

A little background about the pictures. Sometime in the early 1940s, Christian B. Musser (aka Pop Pop), decided to try contour plowing his small (acreage, Dad?) farm. The US Soil Conservation Service helped Pop figure out how to go from traditional straight furrow cultivation to contour farming and the USDA, bless 'em, filmed the process over a year long period, in an effort to create a bit of pro-contour-plowing propaganda to convince other farmers of the ease and benefits of contour farming. Contour plowing prevents soil erosion and after millions of acres of farmland lost top soil during the 1930s, the USDA began actively promoting the method through the SCS.

I've watched this short film, entitled For Years to Come, many times over the years and am always utterly fascinated watching my grandparents, uncles, and aunts, all so young, smiling shyly as the camera trains on them picking peaches, carrying baskets of eggs or big jars full of summer's bounty up from the cellar. To see these people, whom I have only known in person as "old," animated in the spring of life is such a gift. To see the Musser Farm, now in its demise with my Uncle Paul (who bought the farm my grandparents in the 1960s) turning 80 this year and none of his kids taking it over, in its glorious, beautiful heyday, pleases me to no end. I never knew the farm with such a variety of crops and animals--pastured no less! I spent weeks there every summer as a child, chasing ducks, helping my Aunt Helen sort eggs, and just generally wandering around and exploring. Many of my happiest childhood memories come from that place.

Anyway, I stumbled on this trove of stills from the film on my dad's site and as I sat there looking at these pictures with my daughter, marveling at the primitive yet ingenious tools they used and the abundant beautiful crops they grew, I couldn't help but wonder about their farming practices. Were they organic? Did they compost? My dad has often commented on the rich dark soil we have here at our place and wistfully noted that Pop Pop would marvel at my soil. What would Pop Pop think of my pathetic garden? Maybe he'd be impressed with my asparagus and artichokes.

I think of Granny everytime I can, with her spectacular bursting-at-the-seams pantry. I wish I understood its organization. It seems somewhat random, but I can't help but think there must have been some reason to it. Did she can small batches and just add jars wherever she had space? Did she put jars in the order she wanted them taken back out? Was life just so unhurried then that she didn't need some high level of organization to keep things from getting chaotic? Oh, Granny, I have so many questions for you.

Please excuse me for going on and on about this. (Well, I suppose I shouldn't have to beg your indulgence. This is my blog afterall. I can go on and on if I want to, right?) I'm rather attached to those people and that farm. I miss them all terribly, especially my grandparents. For years I have fantasized about taking over the farm myself, transitioning it to organic, bringing animals back on the land. I know I'll never live on the East Coast again and I'm too old and out-of-shape to take up farming. Unfortunately, with no one in the family to pass the farm on to and the property being worth so much now, it seems unlikely that anyone wanting to farm could afford to buy this valuable bit of land and its lovely old buildings, now surrounded by suburban development and industrial parks.

I've been sick and down for a couple days...we just learned that one friend has bone cancer and a neighbor has leukemia, another friend's company is going out of business, someone stole the catalytic converter off our truck, and my husband's job remains in jeopardy, too. I'm completely wallowing and now find myself falling even further into my pit o' despair imagining Musser Farm being no more. Could someone please send me some uplifting news?

Birthday Thoughts on Being the Change

2008-05-26T06:05:00.000-07:00

Today is my 41st birthday! I'm so glad to find myself still growing and learning. You may already know I am hosting Monique Dupre's Introduction to Sustainable Living on a Budget workshop at my home in NE Portland on July 21st at 7pm. The price for workshops goes up to $35 on June 1st, so register soon! Come learn and grow with us!

One of my mantras these days is Progress Not Perfection. I've been making a lot of the incremental changes toward sustainable living for a while...years in fact. I first became aware of and began consuming organic food in college during the late 1980s, but the changes I made then were small. Three years ago, when my oldest was two I began making more intentional and dramatic changes in my family's diet and home life.

It started when I removed all the commercially prepared salad dressings from the refrigerator (though we still have a vast collection of other condiments...at least seven varieties of mustard and several chutneys and curry pastes). I also began to consciously eschew most processed foods--especially those containing any of the many additives my grandmother wouldn't have found in her kitchen--instead relying more seasonal, local, and organic food. I cleansed our pantry of all the processed foods I no longer felt good about feeding to my family.
To maintain our new at-home eating lifestyle after the birth of our son two years ago, I began cooking and freezing batches of stews, soups, and sauces and preparing "freezer marinades" in earnest during the last month or two of my pregnancy.
Soon after Luc was born, friends introduced me to Nourishing Traditions and Feeding the Whole Family, and I started cooking with more whole grains and legumes.
A year ago, I began a "buy nothing new year," which only lasted six months, but I did replace using paper napkins and towels with cloth equivalents. At the same time, I began purging our home of junky toys and anything that I no longer found beautiful or useful. These early de-cluttering efforts impacted my shopping habits and I now think twice before buying anything. I still find myself shopping for entertainment or when I'm anxious, but more than once I have walked away from a shopping cart full of impulses when I realized what I was doing.
In August 2007, I began baking all our family's bread and bagels every week. I was too busy one week before Christmas and another time right before Annabel's birthday in April, but otherwise I've been amazed at how easily I have integrated bread-making into our life. It wasn't easy at first and I baked a lot of loaves that didn't rise properly, but now I consistently make decent bread.
For the last several months I have been learning about long term food storage, making cheese, and raw food fermentation, though I haven't begun to put what I've learned into practice, but for a batch of yogurt cheese and quark.
I continue with my de-cluttering efforts throughout the house and I donate, freecycle, sell, or recycle as much as possible. I am learning more and more ways to keep my "trash" out of the waste stream.
I have also been de-cluttering my calendar, keeping our family's outside commitments to a minimum. This is still hard and I find myself over-committed occasionally, but I am getting better at saying "no" to requests for my time--even when an activity sounds fun or interesting. My husband and I now share a Google calendar which helps us keep our schedules synched. Annabel just has two scheduled activities each week, outdoor school Friday mornings and German school Saturday mornings, instead of the five she had a year ago. She still sees at least one friend a week during my weekly childcare swap and we inevitably arrange one other playdate or outing every week. I worry less, though about getting her "socialized" by other kids and spend more time with her one-on-one.
Last week I made another step on the path and ordered a whole Oregon grass-fed steer to share with a group of friends. As I mentioned in a previous post, we've reduced our meat consumption by half over the last few months.
After a hiccup in the plan to drink raw milk from a Sequim, Washington, dairy, I picked up a gallon late Wednesday evening and hope to have better luck with persuading Annabel to enjoy it this time. She wants to make cheese with me and I think we'll make some raw milk mozzarella on Tuesday.
I'm currently now working on my first Azure Standard order. I've been diligently comparing prices with WinCo, Bob's Red Mill, and New Seasons, and Azure Standard has significantly better prices on everything. It's like Costco for those of us who appreciate whole organic foods, but they deliver.

I have listed all these changes not to brag--not at all--but to demonstrate that these changes take time. I know some people are able to incorporate them more quickly than we have. I still don't have the gardening thing down, despite over six years of trying. It's one of my great frustrations--I come from Pennsylvania Dutch farm stock, afterall! We still eat out more than I would like. Each of these changes has come with some failures and frustrations (bread baking day was NOT as happy time here the first few weeks I tried to experiment with using whole grains, for example).

Success with these changes, I have found, is finding a system that works, attaching the new habits to old ones, assessing what's working and what isn't, tweaking the system, and trying anew. It took me six months of baking bread and making bagels separately every week to figure out that I could bake bread and make bagel dough on the same day (the bagel dough ferments overnight in the fridge). Now, I only have to pull out all my flours and grains and wash my bread mixer once a week. Duh! I can't believe it took me so long to figure that out! I'm sure there will be some issues with this big order of beef and my first few orders from Azure Standard, but I'm also sure I'll figure out ways to make it all work for our family.

I spent my 20s and 30s being an activist but now I find myself more satisfied with making changes at home rather than trying to change the rest of the world. I feel like that's all that I can do these days and maybe that's not enough, but at the same time, I do believe I'm doing exactly what I should be doing. Afterall, I have the next generation watching what I do, very intently!

Calculations and Ruminations of All That Is Grass-Fed

2008-05-12T18:24:00.000-07:00

After weeks of research, mulling, querying, and more mulling, I have figured out where to get our meat for the coming year. I decided to buy a quarter of beef and a side of pork from Deck Family Farm near Junction City, located west of Eugene. I hope to go in with friends on those purchases and now just need to get confirmation and deposits from all the people who said, "Yeah, great idea!" when I suggested getting shares of a steer and hog. I'll also be getting a lamb from local writer and homesteader Mary Rosenblum and I just ordered six chickens from Rebecca, who organized a large order of roasters from Deo Volente Farm near Mulino. Later in the year, I'll order a turkey from the Deck family.

When I last wrote about finding pastured local meat, I was still not sure how much of everything I should order. Figuring out how much of a steer our family is likely to eat within a year led me to deciding to make some fairly radical (for us) changes to our eating habits. Usually, we eat meat at least once a day, at dinner time. Lunch often includes meat too, though breakfast rarely does. I know eating so much meat is not sustainable, both in terms of our food budget and planetary resources. I also found trying to calculate our annual meat consumption overly taxing and decided it would be easier to reduce and simplify--my mantra with just about everything these days. So out of both altruism and laziness, I decided to limit myself to cooking meat for the family to just once a week. For about six weeks now, I've been doing just that, cooking a rump roast, pork loin, or whole chicken at the beginning of the week and then using the meat variously--in sandwiches, soups, salads--throughout the week. This has been working out well for us. We're eating more eggs and legumes and while I haven't been keeping any tallies, it seems like I'm spending less on food lately at the same time everyone else seems to be complaining about spending more.

Here is how I arrived at the various amounts of meat to order for our family for a year. The typical steer yields about 195 pounds of meat per side, roughly 65 pounds of steaks, 65 pounds of roasts, and 65 pounds of ground beef. Half that amount, 97 pounds, will more than suffice for our family for a year. That's about five pounds of roasts or steaks and 3 pounds of ground per month. Currently, average American beef consumption is about 60 pounds per year. I estimate that our kids each eat about one-sixth of whatever meat we cook and that my husband and I eat one-third each. If we limit our beef consumption to what we eat at home, my husband and I will eat half as much beef as the average American over the next year.

The typical whole hog yields about 144 pounds of meat, including three pounds of feet, five pounds of head, and 23 pounds of back fat. So, minus the that stuff we wouldn't eat, a side of pork would have about 60 pounds of meat that we would eat. If we again assume Mike and I would each eat a third of that total, our annual pork consumption would be less than half the current American average.

Whole roasted chicken is such a favorite at our house and again, we can feast on the remains for the whole week. I brine the bird overnight, air-dry it in the fridge all day, put butter mixed with salt and pepper beneath the skin, fill the cavity with garlic and a quartered lemon or orange, then roast at 500 degrees for an hour or so (usually less). Although any chicken cooked with this method will yield crispy skin and succulent flesh, I can really taste the difference between pastured chicken and conventionally raised birds. Even the organic, "free-range" chicken from New Seasons isn't as tasty as the pastured ones we've gotten from Abundant Life Farm.

We get a dozen or two eggs a week from my friend Chrissy and her in-laws and I've decided to go back to getting raw milk from the Portland Real Milk network. I stopped getting it for a month or so because Annabel says she doesn't like it, but when I pick up our order next week, I'm going to put it in a container from the store and see if she notices the difference. I think her reaction wasn't to the taste so much as the unfamiliar container and a wee bit of contrariness for its own sake. Some days, whatever I like, she does not, and such is the nature of five-year-old girls.

That's all on the pastured meat, dairy and egg front! I'm so pleased to be saying goodbye to mystery meat and hello to real, live farmers and their fantastic offerings.

Joys of Decluttering

2008-04-11T20:55:00.000-07:00

Wow! I have been decluttering our bedroom for a week or so and after a big push yesterday to get the closet cleared of everything that I didn't want in there* while my kids were at a friend's for our weekly childcare swap, I am really beginning to enjoy the benefits of a less cluttered space.

This morning, I let Annabel look through my closet--one of the first times I've ever allowed her to because prior to this week, it had been so full I didn't dare let any curious child even peek inside for fear of the mess that would get made, the purposely hidden (yet forgotten) items that would get found, and so forth. All day, I have felt a small wave of relaxation every time I saw the warm glow of the wood surface of my dresser, no longer covered with dust or piled high with my children's out-of-season or outgrown clothing, digital camera, tape gun, ugly hair ties, and broken toys, but displaying a small collection of pretty containers and momentos. I found myself putting things away in the closet, because I knew I wouldn't have to see grocery bags of outgrown children and toys, staged for delivery to the consignment store or shelter and the boxes of unsorted items from the all areas of the house, hidden there during some rushed clean-up before a party.

I realized today that opening that closet always reminded me of this seemingly insurmountable task of organizing my whole house. Recently, I decided to break down the job of organizing my whole house into manageable tasks and have managed to complete the first major one on time and under budget. There are only five rooms upstairs and five rooms in the basement: master bedroom, Annabel's (and someday Luc's as well) room, bathroom, kitchen, living/dining room are up and Mike's office, the laundry, utility room, craft/guest room, and second bathroom are down. I decided to attend to some major task in each room, plus the hallway, front entrance, patio, carport, and sheds, every season for the next year. For example, in both the bedrooms, I'll de-clutter the closets in the spring, underbed storage in the summer, prepare outgrown and unwanted warm season clothes for consignment and donation in the fall, and de-clutter the dressers in the winter. As another example, in the kitchen, I'll de-clutter the base cabinets, the island, and the fridge this spring, the upper cabinets, counters, and freezer in the summer, the wine cabinet and built-in this fall. By winter all areas of the kitchen will have been de-cluttered and I'll just have ongoing maintenance de-cluttering and cleaning to do.

This evening, I was tossing a ball down the hallway for the kids in some game Annabel made up for us and realized that I was not worried about them running into my bedroom and knocking over piles of clutter and laundry in baskets or tripping over stray shoes. I think this is where serenity comes from--knowing that I don't have to worry about things getting broken, lost, and strewn about or try to shove aside that nagging sensation of undone work. For me, this is the goal of de-cluttering. It's serenity.

Funny thing is, after all this work in my bedroom, I still cannot find my favorite pair of pants. I don't remember where or when I last wore them, but they've been missing for over a week now and I've done the laundry twice since. My house is more organized than at any time since I moved here--particularly my bedroom, where most of my other garb spends its time when its not on my body and to a lesser extent our laundry room, where it usually spends the rest of its time off. Where in the world are my brown velour pants?

* There is still excess, unwanted, never-t0-be-worn-again clothes in our closet, including one large plastic shoebox of neckties, at least half-a-dozen ill-fitting dress shirts with ring-around-the-collar, and some ugly sweaters, which should not be hanging in the closet, but laying in someone's (already overfull) dresser or underbed storage. Those neckties, shirts, and sweaters are not mine.

Some Kids Listen

2008-03-31T10:12:00.001-07:00

"Some kids clean up their rooms and listen. Most kids don't."

--Annabel, after getting caught sticking her fingers in the jam jar this morning.

New Sources for Meat & Dairy

2008-03-24T22:09:00.000-07:00

I've longed wished to buy our meat and dairy direct from farmers. When I was a child, my family bought much of our meat from my uncle, who by then owned the family farm my dad grew up on. Annually, we would purchase a side of a beef, a whole pig, and a turkey or two. It was so nice then to go to our deep freeze and get meat out for dinner. Having been there, working alongside my grandparents and parents, while they butchered our pig every year (steers were butchered off the farm), I knew exactly where our meat came from at an early age.

While I still appreciate the convenience and cost benefit of purchasing meat in bulk, more importantly, I want to know that the animals I eat lived well and were harvested humanely, that the milk my children drink is pure and made by healthy, grass-eating cows. I want to pay the real cost of real food and I want to support small family farms. I have been intimidated, however, by the prospect of coping with a side of beef and put off by the inconvenience of driving to the country every week to buy milk. Reading In Defense of Food finally inspired me to get over my objections. Pollan comes across as more hopeful in his latest tome than he did in The Omnivore's Dilemma, reminding us that it is easier than it's been in half a century for regular people to find real food.

I know he's right. I realized recently that I've been striving to eat organic and local for 20 years, since my first visit to an erstwhile farmers market, held on Saturdays in some in Beltsville, Maryland, warehouse. Things are so different today, with places like Wal-Mart and Whole Foods selling organic (though not necessarily local or, despite the latter's moniker, whole) food. More importantly, the Internet has made it possible for those living far from farms to find and connect with farmers and ranchers directly, through sites like Eat Wild and Real Milk. As much as I enjoy the shopping experience at New Seasons, when it comes down to it, I prefer to buy food from places like Rossi's (family farm with a retail "barn" just a mile from my house that sadly went out of business a year or so ago) or Growers Outlet (another family-owned retailer of local produce...when it's in season, anyway). I know when I shop at those places, more of my food dollar is going to the people who grew the food and less of it is going to marketers and middlemen and building fancy stores full of irresistibly merchandised, utterly superfluous stuff. And while I can buy local produce at Growers or at our neighborhood's new farmers market and even grow much of our own, meat, eggs, and dairy are a different story.

Since I am chomping at the bit to make my own cheese, I decided to start with getting a new source for dairy, since I had been buying ultra-pasteurized Organic Valley milk at Winco, which is no good for making cheese. Initially, I just wanted to find a local farmer selling milk from pastured cows that was not ultra-pasteurized. I had heard of Noris Dairy years ago, from Lynn Siprelle, that delivers to homes in Portland. Their prices are competitive with the price of organic milk in the grocery store, and for a few days, I thought I had found the answer. The dumbest thing prevented me from ordering from them and, fortuitously, led me to another path. We don't have a fax machine and that seems to be the only way the dairy takes orders. I called and left a couple messages, hoping to just place my order by phone. After waiting a few days for a call back, I lost my patience and and I decided to try another source. The Campaign for Real Milk listing of raw milk dairies led me to Real Milk PDX, a group that gets milk delivered from Dungeness Valley Creamery, a Sequim, Washington, raw milk dairy. For once, my impatience paid off. I picked up our first gallon of raw milk last Wednesday--at the home of an acquaintance in NE Portland who happens to be one of the people who drives to Vancouver where the dairy delivers its milk--and have been raving about it to anyone who will listen since. It's so delicious--I drank three glasses of milk in 12 hours! I have to admit, I was a little concerned at first about raw milk, but having learned more, I now feel convinced that raw milk from grass-fed cows is safer and healthier than pasteurized milk from grain-fed cows.

That same Wednesday evening, I attended the second meeting of a group of home cheese makers at Foster & Dobbs. While discussing milk sources with some people there, I got into a conversation with another woman who had just picked up her raw milk, from the same home where I picked up ours. She raved about how raw milk cured her allergies after just three weeks. Well, that was all I needed to hear. No more allergies! I've been trying to drink a little bit everyday--not that I mind drinking it, but it's a new habit to establish. So, we'll see if it helps with my allergies. Wouldn't that be incredible? Anyway, I ordered rennet, cultures, molds, etc., from New England Cheesemaking Supply last week and hope to report the results of my first cheesemaking experiences soon.

As far as finding local sources for the rest of our animal related food: We're getting about half of our eggs right now from my friend Chrissy, who has three chickens and is presently overwhelmed with eggs. I feel so lucky to have a ready source of local eggs! Next year, I would like to get our own chickens, fulfilling a dream I've had since I first heard about urban chickens in 2001. (I gave up on this particular fantasy with the birth of my daughter, but now I know so many families with young children and chickens that I can see it's doable.) I am still researching sources for meat. One of the big questions I have had about buying a side of beef is how much of everything is there? It's one thing to say that the hanging weight of a half a beef (that is, the weight of half a steer carcass, before being trimmed of fat and bones) is about 300 pounds, but just how many rib eyes come with that? I learned here that a side of beef includes approximately 25% waste, 25% ground beef and stew meat, 25% steaks, and 25% roasts. I'm pretty sure we won't eat 225 pound of beef in a year, even if it was all rib eyes. I asked Chrissy if she'd be interested in going in with us on a side and I'm excited that she'll be joining me this new venture! Now we just have to figure out just exactly where to get our beef. And our pork, lamb, chicken, and turkey.

In my next post, I will relate my new meal-planning strategy, based on the calculations I started doing as I tried to figure out how much meat we should buy.

Our Weekly Bread

2008-03-13T08:30:00.001-07:00

I make bread once a week now, usually Tuesday or Wednesday. Pictured above is yesterday's production, which turned out pretty good despite this week's "whoops," forgetting to add two cups of water until I'd almost finished adding all the flour. (There's a whoops almost every week, some make me cus more than others. I got through yesterday's whoops cus-free, though it did get kinda messy.) I make enough dough for four sandwich loaves, but I only have two loaf pans. I make two sandwich loaves (each with two pounds of dough--yes, I weigh it!) and then get creative with the rest. My husband like hoagie-style rolls, so I usually make a couple of those for him. I like bread with melted cheddar cheese, celery, sesame, and poppy seeds, so I make a couple "cheesy sticks" for me. Sometimes, I make a braided loaf, to take with us to our friend's weekly potluck or to give to a neighbor. If we're going to have young friends over that day, I'll make pretzels for the kids to enjoy. Lately, I've been experimented with crackers...I roll out the dough as thin as I can, sprinkle it with kosher salt, cut it into squares with a pizza cutter, and bake 'til golden.

Annabel and Luc don't get interested in what I'm doing until it's time to shape the risen dough. I give them both a small amount of dough, a big pinch of flour, they get out their rolling pins and do what kids do with dough. The little ball of bread in the far left of the picture above is Luc's handiwork. I don't know what happened to Annabel's piece of dough. Here's my current recipe for multigrain bread:

5 cups warm water
2 tablespoons yeast
2 tablespoons evaporated cane juice or sugar
2 tablespoons sea salt
1 stick butter, softened
1 cup vital wheat gluten
1 cup 10-grain cereal
2 cups whole wheat flour
8 cups unbleached bread flour

Sprinkle yeast and pinch of sugar in one cup of water. Whisk together and allow to proof while you get the rest of the ingredients measured. Mix wheat gluten, 10 grain cereal, whole wheat flour and 2 cups unbleached flour in a bowl. Put yeast mixture, remaining 4 cups of water, sugar, and butter into mixing bowl with dough hook. Add flour mixture to mixing bowl and mix until incorporated. In the bowl you used to mix the flours together (which should now be empty), mix the remaining 6 cups of flour with the salt. Begin adding this flour and salt mixture to the mixing bowl 1 cup at a time, waiting until flour is incorporated before adding the next cup. Continue to mix until the surface of the dough is smooth--no more than 10 minutes total mixing time or the bread will become over-kneaded. If you feel unsure about things at this stage, take the dough out and finish kneading by hand.

Put kneaded dough in a large bowl. Note the size of the dough ball. Cover with a damp dish cloth, piece of plastic wrap or wax paper. Set bowl in a draft free spot and allow to rise until doubled in size, about one hour, depending on the temperature. Gently punch dough down and divide into whatever size batches you want to bake. As I mentioned, I bake two-pound sandwich loaves. If using a loaf pan, butter pan before you begin shaping the dough. If you will be baking on a sheet pan, cover the pan with parchment paper (I use Beyond Gourmet Unbleached Parchment Paper, which I am able to reuse multiple times for baking bread).

Shape dough and let rise again for 45 minutes, until doubled. Bake in preheated 350 degree oven for 25-35 minutes, until crust is golden brown. If you feel unsure, stick a thermometer in the underside of your loaf. This bread is done when the center is 200 degrees Fahrenheit. Put bread on a rack to cool. I store mine in plastic bags (which I reuse, over and over again, of course). I freeze one loaf and find it is perfectly good a few days later when thawed.

I wish I could address dough shaping now, but I've run out of time. It's an important aspect of making good bread and shouldn't be overlooked. I will try to take pictures as I shape my dough next week.

Spring's the Thing

2008-03-12T07:41:00.001-07:00

OH, thank the gods it is almost spring! Between my emotional state most of the winter (that would be anti-social, depressed, and uh, let's just call it moody...Mike probably has another name for it) and the kids' cabin fever, it was starting to become rather stifling indoors. After two years of not having much of a garden, I'm especially excited to be getting out and working in the garden. We didn't put in much in 2006 because with Luc being a newborn (oh, and me getting all caught up in breastfeeding activism), I wasn't up to planning and planting. (I do all that, Mike does the weeding, grass eradication, bed prep, compost turning, and well, lots else.) Last year, our newly toddling number one son constantly ran out into the street, making it next to impossible to get any work done. This year, he's only heading for the street 43% of the time, and usually there's some impetus, like a neighbor outside or someone walking their dog, that gives me a heads-up that he's about to make a run for it. He and his big sister have actually been somewhat helpful in the garden, though never for long.

So, we've gotten a fair amount of work done outside in the last couple weeks, though I am still feeling a bit behind. What gardener doesn't? We've cleared last fall's leaves out of the bed, spread lime (yes, I know, I shoulda done that in the fall, but it's done now, so give me some slack), thoroughly weeded the asparagus bed and covered it with steer manure. Two weeks ago, I planted peas, carrots, and radishes. I staked the peas with branches that fell from the sycamore in our front yard and am pleased with how my little branches look "planted" in the freshly sown bed. This is the first time I've been satisfied aesthetically with a staking method, though we'll have to wait and see how well it works in practice. Mike has also begun working on the grass that constantly encroaches into the beds. His plan is to cover the alleys between the garden beds with cardboard and cover that with wood chips from our yard. You can see where we've already got one alley covered in the picture above.

The radishes we planted began to peek out a few days ago, though I couldn't get a good picture of them. This week, I want to plant a row of Rose Finn Apple potatoes outside and get tomato seeds started inside. Rose Finn is our family's favorite potato, a fingerling that has excellent flavor and stays firm when boiled--perfect for potato salad. We're going to try growing from potatoes we dug up from the garden last year (which grew as "volunteers" from potatoes left behind when we last planted them in 2006). I also plan to pick up another couple rhubarb plants at the nursery when I get tomato seeds. And there's a daphne I bought last year blooming in its pot that really deserves to be planted forthwith! So much to do and I always feel like we have to make the most of every not-pouring-rain day we have in February and March. The last few weeks have been remarkably dry, though of course, Mike or I had to get sick during some of the best days we've had for gardening. Oh well. We're still ahead of where we were this time last year.

One last thing. Notice the sign in the picture? I just found out last week that Parkrose is getting a farmers market this year! Hoo-ray!

Crafty, or Just Crazy?

2008-03-11T23:16:00.000-07:00

So, in the last six months or so, I have tried out several new crafts and some have become bad habits.

Waldorf doll making--I made five dolls as Christmas gifts for my kids, niece and nephews. Here's the one I made for Annabel. I also made several small (3" and 4" tall) dolls as angel ornaments. I want to make one of these for Abba's birthday.
Wee Folks doll making--Never finished any, didn't like wrapping embroidery floss around pipe cleaners so much. Also, these dolls don't stand on their own and that annoys me. (Yes, for an additional $2.50, one can buy wooden feet that would help them stay upright, but I'd already lost interest.)
Needle felting--OMG I love this! So sculptural! I have made two very respectable hummingbirds (one went to my dad for his birthday, the other with go to my mother-in-law for hers), a lovely robin, with nest and eggs, some Easter eggs, and itty-bitty chicken eggs for a small chicken I sewed with wool felt.
Hand piecing--I am currently working on a doll quilt. I enjoy this--it goes a lot more quickly than I would have thought and is much more portable than machine piecing.
Embroidery--I took a class a couple weeks ago and found a lot of inspiration in some Japanese embroidery books the instructor brought for us to look through. I subsequently went to Uwajimaya with my friend Chrissy for the sole purpose of buying Japanese embroidery books. Found one I especially like...it's called Needle Work and has designs for herbs and flowers and I just love it. Deciphering books written entirely in Japanese has been interesting, to say the least. Now I want to take up silk ribbon embroidery as well.
Finally, last Saturday I took a "make a pioneer era dress in a day" class at Newell House with master dress maker Kim Demlow, owner of Lavender's Green. Soon, I'll be able to volunteer at Champoeg Park's living history events.

I feel conflicted about all these new crafts. I'm enjoying them, but feel I should focus on one, say for more than a week at a time? There's a part of me that feels like I am making up for lost time, learning all these skills now, when I "should" have learned to embroider, hand sew, and make simple dresses as a child or adolescent. In fact, I did learn to embroider when I was younger, but as I recall, I gave up in frustration over French knots.

Well, I am forced to focus on the dress making for now. We are supposed to get as much done as we can before the group meets again on March 22nd for the second and last class. I hope to at least get my fabric cut out and determine if the bodice will fit me correctly (there's a question as to whether the sleeves will fit my, ugh, flabby arms). After that, I will need to get working on Abba's doll, if I'm going to finish it by her birthday. Oh, and she'll want a dress like mine the moment she sees me in it.

Snack Attack!

2008-03-08T19:25:00.001-08:00

Healthy, minimally processed snack ideas came up somewhere recently (I tried to recall where, but alas, I cannot). I no longer buy packaged snack foods, except for occasional bags of locally made tortilla chips and boxes of graham crackers (which I am determined to make at home...I even have the right flour). Right now, there are no packaged snacks in our house. Wow. I had to think about that for a minute--I hadn't realized how completely we have dropped the habit. I buy nuts, seeds, dried fruit in bulk. When the kids come to me wanting a snack on the run, I usually give them a bowl of dried fruit and nuts. Lucasaurus likes pretzels, too, and I buy those in bulk as well.

We make "Sweetie Pies," little granola cookies baked in the bottom of a muffin tin, so they're kinda pie-shaped. These are messy but fun to make with the kids, as they can smoosh the butter, oats, sugar, honey and mix-ins like dried cranberries, sunflower seeds, and coconut, together in a bowl.

Another delicious and healthy snack we enjoy is fruit salad with yogurt and honey. It takes a few minutes make, but we've developed a bit of an afternoon ritual around it. This time of year, we indulge in citrus and other "fruits from afar" so fruit salad is oranges, baby bananas, kiwi, plus local apples, local walnuts (cracking them is part of the ritual), local honey, and Nancy's whole milk yogurt.

Fresh fruit and vegetables are a daily part of the kids' diet. These days, they're eating oranges and apples. They also like peanut butter on celery, which was one of my favorites as a kid and something I find helps me get through those afternoons when I'm feeling peckish. I also stopped buying those "baby" carrots a while back and now just make carrot sticks whenever we need them. I store them in a glass container with a little water to keep them crisp, though that's probably not necessary as they're eaten within a day or so.

Recently, we tried peanut butter on toast with dried apples. As I kid, I use to top peanut butter on toast with marshmallows, and I swear, those dried apples tasted far better than marshmallows! Also, I made crackers during last week's bread-baking session. They turned out okay--a little tougher than I expected, I think I should not have cooked them as long as I did--but they were still delicious when spread with cream cheese. I'm going to continue experimenting with those and also make some graham crackers soon.

Snacks are more of a sit-down affair than they use to be. I still allow a little grazing, but I try to have one "formal" snack time a day. It's nice to sit at the little table with the kids have short and easy dining experience with them.

Locavoracious

2008-03-07T21:02:00.000-08:00

I have a number of wishes when I reach for food in the supermarket (rarely), natural foods market (occasionally), locally owned and operated discount food chain (bimonthly), year-round or seasonal farmers' market (weekly). In no particular order, I wish for quality, locally grown/harvested, minimal processing/packaging, freshness, fair price (that is, fair to my family's budget and fair to producers). Here's how I handle the juggling match currently:

From WinCo

bulk dried apricots, cranberries, apples, and raisins
bulk flours, sugar and cereals for baking (I believe much of these come from Bob's Red Mill)
Organic Valley milk
Tillamook cheddar cheese
Nancy's whole milk yogurt
store brand cream cheese
mozzarella, fontina, asiago, parmesan from who knows where
canned tomatoes, tomato juice
beef bottom round (roast for sandwich meat)

From Grower's Outlet

fresh, seasonal vegetables
fresh, seasonal fruits, plus citrus, kiwi, tropical fruit during winter
local nuts
pasta, dried legumes, sugar, salt (I think this stuff comes from Bob's Red Mill)

From New Seasons

Niman Ranch (northern California) ham
salsa verde with green olives
whole organic chicken
"natural" buffalo, beef
cheese
wine

From Bob's Red Mill

flour, yeast, sugar, salt for baking
oats and other whole grains for baking
local hazelnut syrup, raspberry syrup
lunch!

From Gartner's Meats

pork sausage, pork loin, pork ribs
beef steaks and roasts

From From Old Country Sausage (nearby family-owned German market)

uh, sausage
Fleiskasse
cheese
German potato salad
jarred sauerkraut, pickles
mustard

From Lily Market (nearby family-owned Thai market)

fresh Thai produce...eggplants, cilantro, lemongrass, etc.
canned coconut milk, canned soup
jarred curries
green tea ice cream

Changes we've made over the last few years:

making all our own bread, bagels, rolls, etc. (started last September)
buying vegetables that grow in our region
buying local fruit, except for the intentional exception during winter, when I buy citrus, kiwi, and occasionally other tropical fruit
buying organic milk, local cheese, butter, and yogurt
eliminating heavily processed foods (meaning: anything I can't replicate at home)
buying pasta, dried fruit, flours, pretzels, nuts/seeds in bulk
buying from locally owned businesses (even if everything they sell isn't local)
eating out less

Changes we're making this year:

growing and preserving more vegetables and fruits
using our food dryer for the first time since we got it six years ago!
planting fruit trees in the fall
buying local organic milk and butter (probably from Noris--I love the idea of home delivery)
making our own soft cheeses
empty freezers of all old stuff, fill with local meat, home-frozen produce
cooking with whole grains and legumes more
eating less meat, more eggs
eating out even less
learning to cook even more simply

Changes for the future:

rabbits, chickens, ducks, turkeys, and maybe a goat
putting more of our property into vegetable and fruit production
making hard cheeses

I can't at this moment place an exact figure on how *much* more produce we will grow and preserve this year, though it won't be hard to do more than we've done the last two years. I would like to have, at a minimum, 30 quarts of tomatoes, plus some dried tomatoes. I'd really like to have enough tomato juice to get through the year (about 50 gallons to have enough for breakfast 5 mornings a week). I want to try canning in small batches, multiple times a week, rather than spending a whole weekend making canning several dozen quarts at a time. I think small batches will suit our lifestyle and our current equipment better.

Recently, I realized that one thing that's kept me from purchasing a large amount of meat and freezing it is that our freezer is full of stuff we will never eat! While I've been decluttering throughout our home, the freezers are still quite cluttered. Also, there's a problem with the two basket-drawers that no longer hang properly, but simply collapse onto the floor of the freezer/the bottom basket. This summer, before the first bag of berries goes in there, I am tossing all the old freezer-burned junk! Same with the freezer in the kitchen. What the heck is in there, anyway?

Something else, that Mike has helped me realize, is that I overdo when it comes to dinner prep. I have this notion stuck in my head that dinner should be this elaborate combination of meat, starch, and vegetable, and despite him telling me he doesn't expect a big dinner, for a long time, I still felt like I haven't done my job if dinner didn't meet this outdated standard. I've already done some simplifying, to be sure. Generally, I roast or steam vegetables. The steamed ones we eat only with a bit of salt and butter or Bragg's Aminos. The roasted ones, I toss in olive oil, salt, and pepper before putting in the oven. Meat is usually roasted, comes from the freezer already prepared (think frozen coq au vin, bolognese sauce, etc.), but if I don't have something out of the freezer, or my feet are hurting too much for me to stand and prep dinner, we often resort to take out, because just suggesting to Mike that he make fried eggs for us all seems like I'm asking too much (which is ridiculous and Mike's generally happy to pitch in with cooking). But, I've been looking at other people's meal plans and seeing they are even simpler, with less meat, less dishes and getting inspired to make some changes. So, I'm going to use our crock pot more, concentrate on learning more one-pot meals, and more egg dishes that don't involve making pastry (frittatas are my favorite, but I've been kind of a one-trick pony, making only smoked salmon-cream cheese-asparagus frittatas).

I am glad to have taken the time to do a little inventory of where we're at and where we're going. We'll re-evaluate our goals and make some adjustments, of course. Where are you at with eating locally and seasonally? What changes do you want to make this year or further into the future?

The Tomato Seedlings That Saved My Life

2008-02-28T05:59:00.000-08:00

I was inspired by a post over at GNMParents to write about how I returned to my creative self after the death of a precious person in my life.

Ten years ago, my most beloved friend, John, committed suicide, leaving behind his beautiful wife, their newborn son, loving parents and enough friends and colleagues to overflow the chapel where his memorial was held. My anguish was unbearable and instead of dealing with it, I buried myself in software engineering studies and my new career as a technical writer. I began a relationship with a no-good loser I had previously shunned. I moved to Silicon Valley, a place I had previously swore I would never live. I invited No-Good Loser to live with me there. My life went to shit. I was massively depressed, supporting a man who had me convinced I owed him something. After three years, I reached a breaking point. The day things finally fell apart, I found myself on the floor, alternately screaming and moaning in anguish--over the loss of my friend, the loss of my self. I knew I would go insane or die if I didn't get help.

I did get a lot of help from the traditional source--a good therapist whom I still see occasionally. But what really brought me back from the brink was something quite unexpected--a pack of tomato seeds. I planted those seeds in a flat, set them under lights in a closet, and waited. I wondered, and often doubted, if I could possibly do something as extraordinary, yet ordinary, as bringing seeds to life. I did. And when those seedlings began to make leaves, their scent transported me across decades and thousands of miles, back to the greenhouse where my parents raised tomato starts when I was just five or six, back to a time of full infinite possibilities and nearly empty of responsibilities and sadness. Their scent reminded me of where I had intended to go, back before John died. I had intended to have a welcoming home with a big garden full of healthy food. I had intended to live independent of transnational corporations. I had intended to practice creative self-sufficiency wherever possible--sewing my own clothing, growing and cooking my own food, limiting my consumption, and bartering talents and goods with like-minded friends. By remaining in a codependent relationship, ignoring the origins my food, clothing, and the other "things" in my life, and working for companies that were part of the global corporate machine, I was living in denial of those intentions. My heart knew I was in the wrong place, but I couldn't get out of it until those tomato seedlings showed me the way back.

I don't beat myself up for getting lost. When John died, I had only recently moved to Portland and had no real friends here to lean on during that awful time. My friends back home were mostly in the same circle and were reeling with the loss themselves. I have had trouble with depression most of my adult life, though rarely had the resources (i.e., decent health insurance) to pay for the help I needed, so it's little wonder things got so bad.

Every spring, as I plant peas and think about which varieties of tomatoes to start, I renew my commitment to those intentions. I think that's why I feel so energized this time of year. This year, after a couple years hiatus as we brought our second child into the world, we're putting in a big garden again. Yesterday, my daughter, son, and I planted peas, staked them with branches that broke off the trees in our yard this winter. We sowed radish seeds together and created a nice sandy bed for our carrot seeds (carrots love sandy, loose soil...this is the first time I've gone to such trouble for them). I felt so connected to them, to the earth, and to myself as we spent a unseasonably glorious, sunny February afternoon planting our good intentions.

As usual, I've run out of time (the kids are awake) before finishing my thoughts, but I feel like I must explore the transformation I've undergone since sprouting those seeds and will return soon. Have you been transformed by something as unexpected and seemingly insignificant as a tomato seedling?

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Purchased New, but Locally

2008-02-27T07:52:00.000-08:00

With so many people I know reading Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, (one friend simply calls it "The Book"), my own love of the subject matter, and my propensity to buy almost any book that's even vaguely interesting, you might have assumed that I had purchased it some time ago. Unfortunately, the book came out while I was just starting (and therefore highly committed to) my "buy nothing new year" and I was determined to borrow it from a friend or the library. Well, I was on the wait list, twice at the library. First time I was 238th in line and waited a few months for it, then couldn't get to the library within the requisite week to pick it up when it was finally my turn. I put in on hold again, this time landing 524th in line. That time, my turn came up a week or two before Christmas. Clearly there was no chance I would finish the book in three weeks, so I let that one go as well.

Having given up on the library route, I asked my friend about borrowing her copy. She was willing to lend it to me, but with the caveat that I keep her first edition copy, signed by Kingsolver, her husband, and daughter (!!!) in good condition. I could not bear to take on the responsibility. I am careful with books. My children are generally careful with books, but I still couldn't take the chance of damaging such a treasure.

So, finally, last night I went to Broadway Books and paid FULL retail for The Book. I haven't begun devouring it, but I know once I start I won't be able to put it down. I am hoping it will provide me with lots of inspiration as we get our garden back in full production for the first time in years. I'll be sharing my thoughts on it soon.

When "Not Listening" Has Reached a Fever Pitch

2008-02-25T13:26:00.000-08:00

My almost five-year-old has begun to act quite disrespectfully toward me and her dad and often disregards everything we say. The battles over basics like picking up her own toys and clothes were becoming exasperating. I too have begun to "describe the problem," rather than asking her to do things that I expect her to do as part of a member of our family.

"There are toys underneath the dining table that belong in your room."

"It's your job to put your toys back where they belong."

"Toys that are left out will be put in storage."

I find it so much easier to maintain my equanimity when I am just describing the situation rather than asking. I realized that part of *my* irritation was that I do not like having to ask that these things be done...I would feel like I was asking her to do me a *favor* and of course, since I want to model good manners, I would say, "please" with all my requests and would feel like pleading. By simply describing the problem, I don't put myself in the position of asking her to do things that are her responsibilities. I just tell her what I expect.

Feeling Full

2007-10-03T11:51:00.000-07:00

I realized this morning that simplifying--letting go of possessions, commitments, desires--has allowed me to experience a state of psychic fullness. Not so long ago, I was feeling a lot of anxiety, about where to put all our household stuff, meeting all my commitments, and acquiring all that I wanted. I was experiencing both an overwhelming sensation of fullness as well as scarcity. Actually, I've been letting go of scarcity feelings for some time, but only recognized the effects of that since I started letting go the stuff and the commitments.

Having a Home-Based Routine

2007-09-26T10:02:00.000-07:00

I've gotten bread and bagel making well incorporated into our home routine, largely because our routine is based around activities at home, rather than how it has been in the past, that is, based around lots of activities outside the home. With Annabel having one day for swim, yoga, and dance lessons, plus Fridays for playdates, I'm less harried, the house is becoming more and more orderly, we're cooking everyday, baking multiple times a week, and doing our homeschool lessons regularly. I'm less harried because I'm less hurried, but also because I am accomplishing things that I wasn't able to accomplish when we were going out almost daily and thanks to the house being more organized, I can find things, which also makes me less stressed. I feel good about all the baking and cooking I do for my family. We are spending less money on groceries and eating tastier, healthier food.

I had worried in the past that Annabel would be bored or unhappy being home so much, but she doesn't appear to be at all. I suppose I am pressed into service as her partner in pretend more often, but I still have more time for my "own" pursuits (in quotes because these pursuits--the organizing, planning, cooking, baking, housekeeping, etc., I do for my family, not just for me) than I did when I was paying someone else to entertain her a few hours a week.

Bread Baking as a Form of Exercise

2007-09-14T07:04:00.000-07:00

Mike and I have been talking about losing weight. Somehow. Some way. Weight Watchers has been discussed, though neither of us has gone to the web site and signed up. I'm less enthusiastic about the thought of paying for someone to tell me how much to eat than he. Instead, I would rather force myself to put so much effort into making something eat that I will one, burn calories in the process, and two, limit my consumption because I will want to savor my efforts (that's usually how I think).

So, for the first time in about a billion years, I made a menu plan last weekend and except for last night, when we made a rare family appearance at the Oregon Hunters Association meeting (I decided to attend, which of course meant the children would attend, because a couple falconers were presenting and that sounded interesting enough to me to get out of the house) that Mike had to go to right around dinner time, we stuck to the plan all week. This is what we've been eating (never fear, I'll get to the bread baking bits soon enough):

Saturday dinner: grilled ratatouille (or at least that's what I call red bell peppers, patty pan squash, sweet onions, cherry tomatoes, and eggplant marinated in balsamic, EVOO, and herbes de provence, then grilled and returned to said marinade), corn on the cob, and ??? It seems like there was something else, maybe a salad?

Sunday breakfast (for me, anyway): the last store bought bagel I will allow myself. In theory.

Sunday dinner: citrus-marinated chicken (from the freezer, cooked days ago) in my "Chinese" Chicken Salad. What is Chinese about this, I don't know, but that's what they called the inspiration dish at The Cheesecake Factory, where I used to eat lunch almost everyday as a manager at Borders Books well over a decade ago.

Monday lunch: leftover Chinese chicken salad, this time with the wild & brown rice mix that should have been in it the night before. Ooops.

Monday dinner: ratatouille quiche...this was marvelous...must repeat. Used ol' Julia's pie dough and quiche recipes, natch.

Tuesday lunch: leftover quiche and cheese soup from leftover mashed potatoes, cheddar, and dried onion.
Tuesday dinner: grilled tri-tip (I kept my mouth shut while Mike stuffed no less than 10 cloves of garlic into that poor slab of beef, but he later admitted himself that it had too much garlic), grilled patty pan, carrot & dried cherry salad tossed with balsamic, and the last of the grilled ratatouille, tossed with wheat berries. Problem was, while I had soaked the wheat berries for some time, I forgot to cooked them. This turned out to be a blessing...

Wednesday lunch: per Mike's suggestion, I tossed the wheat berry salad into a pot, added water to cover, and made soup. He threw in the garlic and the tri-tip. Sublime. So, out of one batch of grilled vegetables and a bit of leftover grilled meat, we got three meals--all quite tasty.
Wednesday dinner: grilled tuna, cucumber soup, and sugar snap pea-radish-and-carrot salad, tossed with rice vinegar, sesame oil, and toasted sesame seeds.

Thursday lunch: took the kids to Subway after a trip to the library.
Thursday dinner: worst pizza ever at the Pizza Baron.

Friday: leftover tuna and cucumber soup.
Friday dinner: al pastor, black beans, and corn on the cob.

Saturday breakfast: applesauce-buckwheat pancakes with sliced apples
Saturday lunch: leftovers
Saturday dinner: spaghetti with Bolognese sauce from the freezer

Sunday brunch: garden vegetable (uh, that would be tomatoes and some chard) and mozzarella omelette.
Sunday dinner: roasted chicken, boiled potatoes from the garden, steamed broccoli, roasted carrots, celery, and onions. I'll make chicken salad and chicken soup with leftover vegetables, corn, and black beans.

I started making bread twice a week about three weeks ago. Haven't bought a loaf at the store since (though I did continue to buy bagels). For the first couple weeks, I only had bleached all purpose flour in the house, purchased accidentally while I was bargain hunting and not reading labels carefully at Winco. Started with a French baguette, from Julia's Way to Cook. Next, I made sandwich loaves (from Baking with Julia) that were predictably Wonderbreadish with the bleached flour. I had promised myself to use up all that flour before making a run to Bob's for something better, but after about four loaves of the stuff, I couldn't stand it anymore. I took the kids there for lunch and shopping last Friday and we now have unbleached organic white flour, organic white whole wheat flour, cracked wheat, amaranth flour, and some other Bob's goodness. I've made one loaf of sandwich bread with the unbleached white, but left the dough to proof too long (as I learned later from Harold McGee's On Food and Cooking) and the loaf came out half as tall as it ought to have been.

My greatest flour, water, and yeast triumph, however, has been with bagel making. The first batch, not so pretty. Returning to Baking with Julia, I seasoned the dough with black pepper and I just love the results. Shaping the bagels takes some practice, as it's important to develop a gluten coat by rolling the dough into a ball with a gathering up motion. I hurried while shaping the first batch and also left the boiled bagels sit on a towel to drain too long--they stuck when I tried to move them to a baking sheet. Anyway, that batch wasn't so great. Batch two received a "Looks like the ones you get at the store," from Mike, which I suppose was meant as a compliment. The taste is so superior to store-bought!

I also started a batch of sourdough starter and will bake a cracked wheat loaf from that this weekend. I also need to start another batch of bagels.

This bread baking is exercise, though. I mix the dough in my stand mixer, but knead it by hand for 8-10 minutes. I enjoy look forward to kneading. It's my favorite part of all this homemade bread business (besides slathering my own strawberry jam on a still warm slice).

Time to make the bagels.

I'm Awake

2007-09-05T05:03:00.000-07:00

Literally and figuratively, I'm awake.

I'm literally awake at an unusually early hour because some dude with a pile of rocks in his mouth called at 4:30 this morning, looking for Owen. Our daughter is on a sleep over, so I was wide awake and in perfect enunciation form when I picked up the phone and responded, "You have misdialed."

"Can I speak to Owen." It's 4:30 in the morning, you're making unapologetic phone calls, AND you're not listening?

"You have misdialed." Click. Damn if the rock-mouth didn't call back again 10 seconds later.

"Dude!! It's 4:30 in the morning." (There's something about these gravel-mouthed boys that brings out the surfer girl in me.)

I'm guessing it was my use of a big word like misdialed that threw him off?

I have read conspiracy theorist explanations about the purpose of our public education system. The story, of course, is that it is meant to produce mindlessly consuming docile workers, which sounds plausible, yet is so disturbing to think about that it was always easier to dismiss it as mostly baseless paranoid ranting. Yes, that does seem to be the effect of public education, but I didn't care to believe that the outcome was anyone's conscious intent. I was awoken in a more figurative sense last night while reading John Taylor Gatto's 2003 Harper's Magazine piece Against School. Holy crap, "they" really did mean to create a system that produced unquestioning, conforming worker bees and to push those who refused to go along with the plan to the margins of society, where they hopefully won't get the chance to breed.

The US education system was not based on idealized notions about egalitarianism or democracy, but on the 19th century Prussian education system designed to prepare men for service in the military and bureaucracy. "The schools must fashion the person, and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than what you wish him to will," said 18th century German philosopher and father of the modern Nazism Johann Gottlieb Fichte.

How much does this matter now, that public education was based on such views? One could argue that while some founders of the modern school system did advocate the production of weak-willed lemmings, surely the all the of good people who have strove to improve public education have made some changes that negate the original intention? Looking around, at the mainstream media, the people I have worked with at various jobs, the people I meet in most social situations, I have to say that it seems the founders of US education did a fine job of creating a self-perpetuating system that more than adequately meets the needs of the ruling elite. There seems, in fact, to be cumulative effect and as the schooled school the succeeding generation, the adults they churn out seem more and more childlike, in the worst possible ways. It's almost an insult to children to compare them to petty, jealous, greedy grownups who obsess about celebrities while our unelected administration commits atrocities around the globe, who ponder which new green gadget to buy while our continued consumption, green or black, destroys our home, who go on diet after diet as our corn-fattened bodies betray us and our government does nothing to change the subsidy system that created the abundance of unhealthy food marketed by multinational corporations that have no responsibility to the public they should be serving.

I'm ranting and writing run-ons now, aren't I.

I blame the dude.

Portland Hospitals Give Babies the Best Gift of All for WBW!

2007-08-01T15:45:00.000-07:00

That is, they are no longer giving away formula-filled discharge bags!

As of today, all major hospitals in Portland, Oregon, will no longer serve as formula company marketing hacks, sending new babies and moms home with formula in the traditional "gift" bag. This was managed without government intervention, but by staff lactation consultants and others who persuaded their hospitals administrators to voluntarily stop issuing the bags. (Once a couple hospitals agreed to stop, an LC at one holdout warned, "You don't want to be the last hospital in town still giving away formula, do you?") Altogether, five hospital systems, totaling 16 medical centers (including several outside the Portland area, as far off as Medford, Oregon), have stopped giving out formula in discharge bags. Some still are giving bags, but without formula or coupons.

Today, during its annual Benefit Luncheon, the Nursing Mothers Counsel of Oregon awarded the following hospitals for "Maternity-Care Best Practices" for eliminating infant formula sample packs:

Adventist Medical Center
Kaiser Sunnyside Medical Center
Legacy Emmanuel Hospital and Health Center
Legacy Good Samaritan Hospital and Medical Center
Legacy Meridian Park Hospital
Legacy Mount Hood Medical Center
Legacy Salmon Creek Hospital
Providence Portland Medical Center (where my two came into the world!)
Providence St. Vincent Medical Center
Providence Milwaukie Hospital
Providence Newberg Medical Center
Providence Seaside Hospital
Providence Medford Medical Center
Providence Hood River Memorial Hospital
Oregon Health and Science University
OHSU Doernbecher Neonatal Care Center

Thank you to all those who worked to make this happen. Oregonians once again lead the way in the US, supporting, protecting, and promoting breastfeeding!

IKEA Report

2007-07-27T08:23:00.000-07:00

I had a couple hours to kill between a late breakfast out with the kids and Annabel's Bug Camp, so I decided to venture out to IKEA. The stupendously huge parking lot was so packed I almost decided to forgo the whole thing, but the big box must have had me on tractor beam, as I couldn't turn around. I managed, quite accidently, to find the Family Friendly Parking lot. Right next to the store. In fact, the one empty space in that lot was the one closest to the store. Obviously, I was meant to be there, despite my "buy nothing new for a year" commitment that I made merely two months ago. I figured I could just browse, maybe buy something for the kids. I was so excited about the awesome parking space I called Chrissy to tell her about it.

We walked smack dab into Smalland, the awesome play area for kids staffed by about a bazillion young women in yellow shirts. I offered Annabel the choice of shopping with me or going to Smalland. Duh, Smalland, Mom.

Leaving my first-born in the care of total strangers, I took off with Luc to explore. I love IKEA. I have loved it from afar for I can't remember how long...since before I moved to Portland 11 years ago. There was one in Townsend, Maryland, too far from where I lived to bother with actually going there, but this was back when they sent out their paper catalog and I used to spend hours pouring over it. I love the Euro-ness of it. The eco-ness of it. The Swed-glish names for everything.

Mom's Time Out

2007-07-20T11:58:00.000-07:00

When I think about all the "down time" I had Before Kids, I just can't believe the luxury of it all. Now, I try to get a "Mom's Time Out" at least one evening a week. Usually I get together with some mom friends and knit at a cafe or yarn shop. Having just taken my first overnight (32 hours!) away from the family since my son was born almost 18 months ago to attend the Outdoor Quilt Show in Sisters, Oregon, I'm inspired to get one more block of time to get down in my sewing room and quilt at least once a week.

Like a lot of parents, I have lost many of my BK friends and now mostly socialize with other mothers of young children. The women I happened to go out of town with are moms of much older kids (like, out of college) or not moms. While they had some interest in talking kids, it was from a different perspective than that of my mom friends who are still in the toddler trenches and it helped me mentally relax to not trade wee-one war stories, but to hear the calm, knowing voices of moms who'd been there, survived, and knew I would too.

It was also a relief to leave the kids at home with their dad and know that they were Okay Without Me. REALLY. Not that I doubt my husband's abilities--he had some concerns, but I knew he'd be okay. I worried that our still-nursing toddler would cry all night, though, and be traumatized by the separation. My fears were not born out and now that we've managed our first successful mom-free overnight, I have a feeling I'll be getting away more often.

While I do enjoy my time out of the house with my friends, I think that for really getting back in touch with that creative, multi-faceted, reflective person I was BK, time alone is essential and I'm thinking of scheduling myself a short retreat, say here: www.breitenbush.com.

The Writing on the Wall

2007-03-24T07:10:00.000-07:00

I've been following the news stories about the "care-gap/mom's movement" issue pretty closely and to date, Judith Stadtman Tucker's analysis of what's happening around the country and why now is the best I've read. It's short, on-point, and inspiring. Plus, she includes a fantastic round-up of the latest media pieces on these issues that are so profoundly impacting families today. I can't recommend it highly enough.

Local + Seasonal = Good For Us + Planet

2007-03-23T08:22:00.000-07:00

Shopping local is near and dear to me. I read many years ago, in a wonderful publication Small is Beautiful, Big is Subsidized (published by the International Society for Ecology and Culture), that now well-worn statistic about the average American meal travelling 1500 miles from farm to plate. I've been actively practicing "localism" ever since. It does take practice, figuring out recipes that work with what's in season. I can hardly bring myself to eat out-of-season produce anymore as the poor quality and knowing how far it has travelled make me lose my appetite. In winter, we eat a lot of kale, cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower, plus root vegetables such as beets, parsnips, carrots and potatoes. I do freeze locally grown corn, beans, asparagus, artichokes (we grow the latter two in our home garden) to give us variety. I use those in soups and stews as they aren't quite as crisp and tasty as they are fresh, though my daughter does love green beans straight from the freezer!

My one conscious exception to local food is tropical fresh fruit in winter--this is when we enjoy mango, kiwi, and citrus. Citrus is in season then, even though it isn't grown locally. I figure loading on the vitamin C at that time of year is good for us as well. My favorite is blood oranges; when I was pregnant with my son, I gave into my cravings and ate two or three a day. We don't eat bananas, which is one of those fruits that many families say they can't give up, but no one in my family likes them much, so they are easy for us to forego. I don't know when they're in season, but you might consider only eating them when they're naturally at their best and eat other fresh fruits during the rest of the year.

I have different sources for food during the year. Out here in the Far East of NE Portland, there's Rossi Farm on 122nd & Shaver, open from June through December. They're growing food literally less than a mile from our house, so I take advantage of that as much as possible when they're open. It's not organic, but that's one of those trade-offs we all find ourselves making as we reconcile our green balance sheet. We also have Grower's Outlet at 162nd & Glisan, which is open year-round. I shop at New Seasons quite a bit and appreciate how they label their produce. Less frequently, I go to the Hollywood Farmers' Market, but it's so crowded and kind of far to drive. I am looking forward to the opening of the Montavilla Farmers' Market this spring.

Finally, of course, there's our home garden. It's a shadow of its former self these days, as I haven't gotten back into the swing of things since my son was born last year,
but we do have asparagus, artichokes, rhubarb, strawberries, raspberries, blackberries, boisenberries, and blueberries growing perennially and at the very least will grow tomatoes, eggplants, potatoes, and several varieties of winter and summer squash this summer. I would like to also put in green beans, sugar snap peas, and leeks as well, but will have to see how the spring shapes up for us. Long term, we would like to grow vegetables all year, but it'll be a couple more years 'til we're ready to make that commitment.

We are so fortunate here in the Pacific Northwest to be able to enjoy as much fresh food year 'round, whether grown in our own gardens or grown for us by local farmers. Find out what's in season in your area and start cooking!

Get Outta Town!

2007-03-22T08:00:00.000-07:00

Find family fun farther afield this weekend.

Spring Whale Watch Week starts on Saturday. Volunteers assist watchers at 28 sites along the Oregon coast. The closest site to Portland is at Cape Meares, west of Tillamook. Volunteers are on duty from 10am to 1pm to help visitors see the marine animals and offer information about their migration.
Visit Evergreen Aviation Museum on Sunday for foam glider making, rocket & radio-controlled plane demonstrations, and exploring the Spruce Goose.
Prepare otter treats and meet a mammalogist to learn about animal care & feeding as you watch sea otters up close at Oregon Coast Aquarium in Newport on Sunday at 10am. Registration required. 541.867.3474 ext. 5319.

Food in Hibernation

2007-03-21T20:20:00.000-07:00

I cook for the freezer pretty regularly. I started when I was pregnant with my second (now 14 months) and love knowing that I have delicious meals hibernating downstairs in the deep freeze. I have two distinct processes that work well for me.

One, I cook stews and hearty soups. Burgundy Beef, Flemish Beef, Hungarian Beef, White Chili (chicken, tomatillos, hominy), Chicken-Corn Soup, Coq au Vin, Chicken Paprika, Lamb Korma, you get the picture. I make large batches (usually enough for four meals for my family of two adult and two young children) and then freeze them in meal-size portions. These are fully cooked; all I have to do is defrost/reheat, steam a vegetable, boil some potatoes or cous-cous or reheat some leftover rice to soak up yummy gravy.

Two, I make what I call “freezer marinades.” I put meal-size amounts of raw meat (bone-in chicken breasts, pork chops, cubed leg of lamb are my standbys) in a freezer bag, add a marinade (orange marmalade-ginger-garlic, balsamic-honey-garlic, curry-yogurt), squeeze out as much air as possible from the bag, seal it, and lay it flat on a tray in the freezer (this makes the packages easier to store once they’re frozen). Ideally, I get a package out and defrost it in the fridge for 24 hours, though I often forget to do this the evening before and wind up getting a package out in the morning and leaving it on the kitchen counter to defrost. Since food defrosts more quickly if the package is in contact with metal (which conducts the chill away), I put frozen packages in an aluminum cake pan. Depending on the meat, it will need to cook at 350-400F for 10-30 minutes. Again…I just steam a veggie or maybe do a stir fry while the meat cooks.

For dinner tonight, I tossed leeks from our garden with olive oil, salt, and pepper, and started them in the oven at 425F. I left a little room in the baking dish for two slabs of polenta (leftover from a big batch I made earlier this week and spread on a jelly roll pan) . After about 25 minutes, I put the polenta in the pan with the leeks and Pork Medallions With Balsamic-Honey Marinade in another pan (a wonderful Le Creuset roaster that I won in a raffle years ago). I turned the oven down to 350F and left everything to finish cooking for another 10 minutes or so. I had all of five minutes of prep (cleaning the leeks, cutting them in half lengthwise, and seasoning them) and paid virtually no attention while everything cooked. And Mike only had two baking dishes plus dinner dishes to wash afterward (we plated everything in the kitchen to avoid using serving dishes).

I’ve never eaten or made roasted leeks before. Amazing! Crispy and salty on the outside, creamy allium deliciousness on the inside. This could be the new roasted garlic. And the marinade made a rich savory sauce for the polenta and pork. It was such a satisfying meal; I must admit part of the satisfaction came from feeling rather clever for putting it all together with so little effort.

Here is the basic recipe for tonight's pork. You will want to multiply the quantities depending on how much meat you want to prepare at once. I usually double this recipe when preparing it for the freezer. I also find I prefer more marinade than called for.

Pork Medallions With Balsamic-Honey Marinade
Serves 4-6
1 ¾ to 2 pounds pork tenderloin
2 tablespoons high heat oil such as coconut or sunflower for searing
½ cup balsamic vinegar
3 tablespoons honey
2 tablespoons olive oil
1 tablespoon Dijon mustard
4 cloves garlic finely chopped
1 tablespoon chopped fresh rosemary
salt and pepper to taste

Put vinegar, honey, olive oil, mustard, garlic, and rosemary in a small bowl. Stir to combine. salt and pepper, stir to combine.

Slice tenderloin into 1-inch rounds and season with salt and pepper. Set pan on medium high heat and cover the bottom with oil. When pan is hot, add pork slices in a single layer and sear for 1 minute. Turn and sear 1 minute more. Remove from pan and allow to cool some. Label freezer bags with content and date. Transfer meal-size amounts of pork to bags and evenly divide the marinade between the bags. Squeeze the air of the bags, seal, and then lay them flat on a baking sheet to freeze. Once frozen, I store the bags upright in a plastic shoebox size storage box, making it easy to flip through the bags when I'm looking for something to defrost.

To cook, defrost in the refrigerator for 24 hours. Preheat oven to 350F. Roast for 8 to 10 minutes or until done.

Knitted Fairy

2007-03-20T21:19:00.000-07:00

My daughter's fourth birthday is at the end of April and I already have a wonderful little knitted cotton dress on needles. It's from Lucinda Guy's Handknits for Kids and has been something of a challenge for me. Mostly, because of the colorwork involved, I have to pay closer attention than I'm accustomed to doing while I knit. Chatting away while knitting with my mom-friends when we get together on Monday nights has led to more than one session of unknitting. Another issue comes from knitting with a silky mercerized cotton on super slick Addi Turbo needles; my hands get tired and cramped from being clenched as I try to keep it all from slipping away from me. So, I've been looking for a bit of a break from this project...and seeing as I'm feeling ahead of schedule still, I decided to start something new. Oh, and I had a $25 credit to use at the Yarn Garden which was burning a hole in my pocket for a couple weeks. I gave in on Monday, bought yarn, and began working on the knitted fairy from Claire Garland's Dream Toys.

I'm on total knitted toy jag right now. A few weeks ago, I nearly bought every knitted toy book I could find at Amazon, but thankfully came to my senses and went to the library instead. Besides Dream Toys, I have World of Knitted Toys and Knitted Toys checked out right now (and if you're the person with Knit Toys on hold, don't worry, I'm returning it today). All three are full of wonderul, darling designs, but I have been itching to make every single item in Dream Toys. I'm changing the fairy doll design somewhat...or at least, how to achieve the design. Garland instructs to knit flat stockinette pieces and sew them together, but I loathe sewing and I don't like to purl much either. Instead, I'm knitting in the round, which I'm fast at (my first knitting project, which I did over and over again, was a knit-in-the-round hat, ever since I've just preferred to knit in the round to anything else...I think that's what I like best about making socks) and can knit thusly nice and tight, good for a knitted doll project.

I started the doll this afternoon and it's going well so far. I've knit the torso and about half her head. I need to figure out how to get her face on. She gets felt eyes and lips and a little sewn nose. I'm trying to figure out if I do that before or after I stuff her. Also, stuffing will be a tiny bit tricky thanks to my choice to knit in the round, but I'll work that out. Anyway, I am using lovely soft (in texture and color) pink yarns for the body and hair. Rowan Cashcotton 4-ply for the body (cash as in cashmere...delicious to work with) and Rowan Kidsilk Haze for the hair (ideal fairy hair...super soft and fine with a little silver shimmer). I'm thinking of making her dress a mini version of the dress I'm knitting for my daughter. See, sometimes I'm not such a bad mommy.

Not Your Average Joe

2007-03-19T11:21:00.000-07:00

I have to tell you all about Joe Mishkin, this incredible balloon artist/children's entertainer I have seen in action the last two weekends. Okay, first, I'll admit, I have a crush on him. He makes me laugh out loud and he's kinda cute, in a hyperactive, fuzzy rodent way. But seriously, the guy is a fantastic entertainer and I highly recommend you check out the calendar on his web site...he has gigs in public venues a couple times a month, so if you want to "see the goods" yourself before hiring him for a birthday party or whatever, you can. He does NOT make balloon animals...silly hats, space hats, fairy/butterfly wings, and magic wands are his thing. Chrissy & I took our girls to see him at McMenamins on St. Paddy's Day and he had them (and us) cracking up...and they loved their balloon art, of course.

Cinderella and the Three Little Pigs, Live!

2007-03-08T08:58:00.000-08:00

The True Story of Three Little Pigs by A. Wolf.
MARCH 9, 10, 11, 17, 18
Tears of Joy Theatre and Paul Mesner Puppets give us the real skinny on this time-honored tale. This adaptation of Jon Scieszeka's popular book reveals that Alexander T. Wolf just wanted to borrow a cup of sugar. Ages 4 and older. 7:30 pm March 9, 11 am March 10 and 17 and 2 and 4 pm March 11 and 18. $16 adults, $12 kids. Brunish Hall, 1111 SW Broadway. 503-248-0557.

Academy Theater Anniversary Weekend
MARCH 10 & 11
Saturday: Joe Mishkin! Not your average Joe! Balloons, juggling, music and having fun! Sing along to the Wizard of Oz, 2:15 and 4:30 on Saturday and Sunday.
Sunday at noon: "Professor Banjo's Old-Time Play Party" starring Paul Silveria. A show for all ages featuring simple dances, sing alongs and audience participation. Sing along to the Wizard of Oz, 2:15 and 4:30 on Saturday and Sunday. Academy Theater, 7818 SE Stark. 503-252-0500

Cinderella, the Musical
March 10, 11
St. Mary's Academy is putting on its spring musical, Cinderella! Performances are Friday and Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2:00 p.m. Tickets are $12 for adults, $8 for students and senior citizens, and $5 for children under six. The Sunday matinee is great for kids because they sit up front, and at end of production, they can go on stage and meet Cinderella and have photos taken with her or other cast members. The cast is make up of great student actors/singers, and the music is live orchestra of students and community members. Be sure and call to reserve tickets since Sunday is final showing. St Mary's is located at 1615 SW Fifth and Market, downtown. There is paid parking across the street, and downtown street parking is free on Sundays. To reserve seats or for more information call 503-721-7712.

Every Family Reads Presents Avi!
Multnomah County Library staff created the Every Family Reads program to motivate families to read and experience books together. Newbery Medal winner author Avi, author of several acclaimed novels for middle-grade and teen readers, inaugurates this new and exciting program. Your family can participate by reading the works of Avi during March and April and taking advantage of the art exhibits, puppet performances, craft workshops and author visits. See the library web page for more information, but here's taste of what's happening this weekend:

Adventures of a Snail and an Ant
Join Amy Gray of Zing Productions as she brings puppets Avon and Edward to life in this adaptation of Avi's story The End of the Beginning. Saturday, March 10, 1pm and 2:3pm at the Capitol Hill Branch. More performances throughout the month at other branches.
Puppet Creations
Bring Avon the Snail and Edward the Ant to life as shadow puppets or create your own moveable puppet with artist Kathy Karbo. Recommended for children 5 and up. Saturday, March 10, 1pm, at the Sellwood-Moreland Branch.

A Blog With a Plan

2007-03-06T20:55:00.000-08:00

I've decided to resurrect this blog and use it to share my cooking and crafting exploits, ideas for things to do with young children here in Portland, thoughts about clean environments, breastfeeding advocacy, world affairs, whatever catches my interest during the precious free moments I have to write. Posting schedule will be as follows:

Monday: Roundup of weekday kid activities
Tuesday: Craft update
Wednesday: Recipe of the Week
Thursday: Roundup of weekend kid activities
Friday: Green notes...gardening and environmental activism
Weekends: Miscellaneous ramblings about whatever's going on in my head, parenting, breastfeeding advocacy, world affairs, etc.

Okay?

A Different Kind of Wish List

2005-03-30T14:15:00.000-08:00

I'm having trouble coming up with non-food pleasures that I can use as rewards for giving up unhealthy eating habits. Here's what I've come up with so far:

pedicure
massage
facial
childfree visit to a nursery, bookstore, library, fabric or yarn store
reading a book outside in the sun
lunch with a friend (and sometimes, without Annabel)
quilting retreat
talking to my brother on the phone
browsing through nursery catalogs
work on plans for house and yard
work on quilt

Moral Values

2005-03-22T06:00:00.000-08:00

According to Spong, Jesus taught us to respect life, love wastefully, and be true to ourselves. I was reading about keeping promises yesterday. I realized that not keeping promises to myself to lose weight goes against my moral values, insofar as it is dishonest. This morning I was thinking about where my moral values come from: I don't believe in being honest because God said to be honest and I must obey that commandment, but because I simply agree that overall, striving to be honest is better than not. Of course, I may believe that because I was taught to by priests and parents, not simply because I came up with the idea on my own and really absorbed those believes. In fact, I've been consciously ignoring that my behavior hasn't been in keeping with my values for some time. Basically, I'm a hypocrit. Not because I don't act in accordance with my believes, but I don't even pay attention to it, which is also disrespectful, self-destructive, and dishonest, the acting exactly opposites of Jesus' message to "live, love, be." Does this mean I don't believe?

Eastside Playgroup Formed!

2005-03-07T06:16:00.000-08:00

So, I started a playgroup. Me. I did it.

It's closer to what I had in mind at first than what I sort of prematurely tried to grow into something larger, which is fine, actually. Whatever this is, it'll probably be healthier without too much meddling from me. So far, I have met Aline, Christy, Sharon, and Laurie in person for a planning meeting. Liked them all immediately--we seemed to all like one another. Last Friday, Sharon and her son Hank came to our house for a very nice visit. I was hoping more people would show up, but it was very pleasant getting to know Sharon a bit more one-on-one. Annabel and Hank got along really well. We have another playgroup meeting this morning at ten, which we're going to attend, probably late.

Quilting and Sewing Projects

2005-03-07T05:57:00.000-08:00

So, from my October list of projects, I have completed the ladybug quilt for Annabel's bed, curtains for Annabel's bedroom, chenille scarf for Carol (well, I finished two, one I gave to Annabel, one still needs to be channel cut), guitar quilt for Greg (needs sleeve, label), and the top of the baby quilt for Ashley. I also made Mom and Dad a quilt flamingo wallhanging for their new house. Except I didn't get a sleeve or label on that before Christmas, so it's in a closet in their new house, not on the wall.

I have added to the list:

Blue-violet bedroom quilt
Kitchen curtains
Bedroom curtains
Flower wallhanging
Vegetable wallhanging
My computer bag
Tree wallhanging
Christmas décor: placemats and tablerunner, tree skirt, amarylis wallhanging
Two items for Mike that will probably be gifts so I won't say what they are here

Plus, I'm working on a flannel-backed lap quilt for me. I decided I had to have one when I was handquilting Annabel's flannel-backed ladybug quilt. It's a yellow brick road pattern, using several prints from Maywood's Gladiolas line. I fell in love with the large print cream, salmon, and garnet gladiolas on the chocolate background print. I have two-thirds of the blocks sewn and together, the fabrics don't look as good to me as they did on the bolt. I will wait until I've got it all together before making judgements.

Misty Morning

2005-03-06T07:05:00.000-08:00

Misty Morning

This is such an anticipatary time of year for me.

How to Make Tab Top Curtains

2004-11-01T07:52:00.000-08:00

Decide on length. Factor length of tabs into consideration, where you want curtain to hang in relation to top and bottom of window glass and frame.

Decide on hem. The longer the curtain, the deeper the hem. I have used 2-1/2" to 3" hems on 76" long curtains and would probably use 1-1/2" hem on a 36" long curtain.

Cut fabric, including 1/4" seam allowance.

Turn under bottom edge full depth of finished hem and press. Turn under again, half depth of finished hem and press.

Blind hem bottom.

Turn in each side full depth of finished hem and press. Turn under again, half depth of finished hem and press.

Cut and sew enough tabs.

Escaped Chili Recipe

2004-10-12T11:01:00.000-07:00

2 or 3 cans of hominy, drained (I think 15 oz.)
2 cans of cannelini beans, drained and rinsed (I think 13 oz.)
3 or 4 chicken thighs
16 to 32 oz. chicken broth
olive oil
1 onion, chopped
2+ cloves garlic, chopped
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp ground coriander
1 tbsp chili powder

On the side:
1 lime, cut into wedges
1 onion, chopped
2 tomatillos, chopped
leaves from 20 sprigs of coriander, chopped

Brown chicken thighs on medium high in olive oil. Remove chicken from pan and drain off most the fat. Chop chicken into bite-size pieces. Saute onion, garlic, and spices in olive oil. Deglaze pan with chicken broth. Add chicken and beans and bring to boil, then simmer for 30 minutes. Add hominy and cook another 10 minutes. Serve with lime slices and chopped onions, tomatillos, and cilantro.

Quilting and Sewing Plans

2004-10-06T19:44:00.000-07:00

Last count, I was in the midst of or planning to complete eight quilting and sewing projects. Let's see if I can enumerate them all:

Ladybug quilt for Annabel's bed (pieced)
Curtains for Annabel's bedroom (fabric purchased)
Pillowcases for Annabel's floor pillows (fabric purchased)
Curtains for master bedroom (2 of 4 finished)
Blind for living room window (3 of 4 finished)
Chenille scarf for Carol (fabric purchased)
Guitar quilt for Greg (fabric purchased, some cut)
Baby quilt for Ashley (not started, EDD April 2005)
Quilt or duvet cover for master bedroom (not started)

Yep. That's all of 'em. Plus, I've just decided that rather than paint murals in Annabel's room, I'm going to quilt them. A big tree quilt, a big garden quilt...ladybugs everywhere. And I want to get it all done by Christmas.

Spong on the Christian Roots of His Political Depression

2004-10-06T06:25:00.000-07:00

My friend Martha emailed this essay from retired Episcopalian Bishop John Shelby Spong. I don't consider myself a Christian, though the peaceful and compassionate message of Jesus Christ, like the messages of other great teachers, does inform my personal beliefs. I found this essay, in which Spong describes how the Bush Dynasty uses and distorts the message of Christ to gain political power which they wield in most un-Christian manner, incredibly moving. He sums up my own feelings about the current adminstration more eloquently and with far less cussin' than I ever seem to manage.

UNDERSTANDING THE CHRISTIAN ROOTS OF MY POLITICAL DEPRESSION
By Bishop John Shelby Spong, Retired Episcopal Bishop of Newark

The Republican Convention in New York City forced me to face the fact that my feelings about the Bush Administration have reached a visceral negativity, the intensity of which surprises even me. So I decided to search introspectively to identify its source. Is it simply runaway partisanship? That is certainly how it sounds to many who make that charge publicly, but that has not been my history. I did not react this way to other Republican presidents like Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford or Reagan. My feelings are quite specifically Bush related.

I first became aware of them in 1988 when George H. W. Bush's campaign employed the Willie Horton ad against Michael Dukakis. This dirty trick was successful and the insinuation entered the body politic that to be the governor of a multi-racial state where all were treated fairly meant that you favored freeing black criminals to commit murder. Lee Atwater, mentor of Karl Rove, devised that campaign. The Willie Horton episode said to me that these people believed that no dishonest tactic was to be avoided if it helped your candidate to victory.

The next manifestation of this mentality came in the South Carolina primary in George W. Bush's campaign in 2000, when the patriotism of John McCain was viciously attacked. It appeared those five years, as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam was not sufficient to prove one's loyalty to America. The third episode came when the operatives of this administration destroyed Georgia's Senator Max Cleland in 2002, by accusing him of being soft on national security, despite the fact that this veteran had lost three of his limbs in the service of his country. Each of these attacks brought defeat to its victims but they also brought defeat to truth and integrity.

In 2004 we have seen the pattern repeated. John Kerry, a veteran who served with honor and distinction in Vietnam was told in countless surrogate ads that his service was not worthy and that his three purple hearts and his Silver Star for heroism were cheaply won. For a candidate who ducked military service by securing a preferential appointment to the Texas National Guard, part of which was served in Alabama, this takes gall indeed.

Then Senator Zell Miller, his face contorted with anger, recited a litany of weapons systems that he said Senator Kerry had opposed. What he failed to say was that most of these military cuts were recommended by a Secretary of Defense named Richard Cheney in the first Bush Administration! The last time I looked, the Ten Commandments still included an injunction against bearing false witness.

Yes, other campaigns bend the truth but these tactics go beyond just bending, they assassinate character and suggest traitorous behavior. When that is combined with the fact that this party does this while proclaiming itself the party of religion, cultural values and faith-based initiatives is the final straw for me. I experience the religious right as a deeply racist enterprise that seeks to hide its intolerance under the rhetoric of super patriotism and "family values." For those who think that this is too strong a charge or too out of bounds politically, I invite you to look at the record.

It was George H. W. Bush who gave us Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court, calling him "the most qualified person in America." Thomas replaced Thurgood Marshall, who had been the legal hero to black Americans during the struggle over segregation. Clarence Thomas, the opponent of every governmental program that made his own life possible, is today an embarrassment to blacks in America. To appoint a black man to do the racist work against black people is demonic.

Consistent with that pattern, this administration entered an amicus brief against the University of Michigan's Law School because in the quest for a representative student body that Law School used race as one factor in determining admissions. The strange 'Orwellian' rhetoric again was deceiving. "We want America to be a nation where race is not counted for anything and all are to be judged on merit alone." Those are fair sounding words until one factors in centuries of slavery and segregation, or the quality of public education in urban America which just happens to be predominantly black. Next one cannot help noticing the concerted Republican effort to limit black suffrage in many states like Florida where it has been most overt, and to deny the power of the ballot to all the citizens of Washington, D.C.

Does anyone doubt that the people of Washington have no vote for any other reason than that they are overwhelmingly black?

Only when I touched these wells of resentment, did I discover how deeply personal my feelings are about the Bushes. I grew up in the southern, religious world they seek to exploit. I went to a church that combined piety with segregation, quoted the Bible to keep women in secondary positions, and encouraged me to hate both my enemies and other religions, especially Jews. It taught me that homosexual people choose their lifestyle because they are either mentally sick or morally depraved. I hear these same definitions echoed in the pious phrases of those who want to "defend marriage against the gay onslaught." Are the leaders of this party the only educated people who seem not to know that their attitudes about homosexuality are uninformed? People no more choose their sexual orientation than they choose to be left-handed! To play on both ignorance and fear for political gain is a page lifted right out of the racial struggle that shaped my region. Racism simply hides today under new pseudonyms.

I lived in Lynchburg, Virginia, before Jerry Falwell rose to national prominence. He was a race baiting segregationist to his core. Liberty Baptist College began as a segregation academy. Super patriot Falwell condemned Nelson Mandela as a 'communist' and praised the apartheid regime in South Africa as a 'bulwark for Christian civilization.' I have heard Pat Robertson attack the movement to give equality to women by referring to feminists as Lesbians who want to destroy the family, while quoting the Bible to defeat the Equal Rights Amendment. The homophobic rhetoric that spews so frequently out of the mouths of these "Jesus preaching" right-wingers has been mentioned time and again as factors that encourage hate crimes.

I am aware that the former Chief Justice Roy Moore of Alabama, famous for his attempt to place a three-ton monument of the Ten Commandments in his Montgomery courthouse to the delight of southern preachers, is on record as saying that "homosexuality is inherently evil."

I lived through the brutality that greeted the civil rights movement in the South during its early days. Congressman John Lewis of Atlanta can tell you what it means to be beaten into unconsciousness on a "freedom ride." I remember the names of Southerners who covered their hate-filled racism with the blanket of religion to enable them to win the governors' mansions in the deep South: John Patterson and George Wallace in Alabama, Ross Barnett in Mississippi, Orville Faubus in Arkansas, Mills Godwin in Virginia and Strom Thurmond in South Carolina. I know the religious dimensions of North Carolina that kept Jesse Helms in the Senate for five terms. Now we have learned that Strom Thurmond, who protected segregation in the Senate when he could not impose it by winning the presidency in 1948, also fathered a daughter by an underage black girl. I know that Congressman Robert Barr of Georgia, who introduced the Defense of Marriage Act in 1988, has been married three times. ! I know that Pat Robertson's Congressman in Norfolk, Ed Schrock, courted religious votes while condemning homosexual people until he was outed as a gay man and was forced to resign his seat.

I know that the bulk of the voters from the Religious Right today are the George Wallace voters of yesterday, who simply transformed their racial prejudices and called them "family values." That mentality is now present in this administration. It starts with the President, embraces the Attorney General John Ashcroft and spreads out in every direction.

I have known Southern mobs that have acted in violence against black people while couching that violence in the sweetness of Evangelical Christianity. I abhor that kind of religion. I resent more than I can express the fact that my Christ has been employed in the service of this mentality. My Christ, who refused to condemn the woman taken in the act of adultery; my Christ who embraced the lepers, the most feared social outcasts of his day; my Christ who implored us to see the face of God in the faces of "the least of these our brothers and sisters;" my Christ who opposed the prejudice being expressed against the racially impure Samaritans, is today being used politically to dehumanize others by those who play on base instincts.

David Halberstam, in his book on the Civil Rights movement entitled The Children, quotes Lyndon Johnson talking with Bill Moyers right after the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had passed by large margins in the Congress of the United States. This positive vote followed the arousing of the public's consciousness by the Abu Ghraib-like use of dogs and fire hoses on black citizens in Alabama. Klan groups, under the direct protection of Southern State Troopers and local police, had also attacked blacks with baseball bats and lead pipes in public places, which had been seen on national television. Moyers expected to find President Johnson jubilant over this legislative victory. Instead he found the President strangely silent. When Moyers enquired as to the reason, Johnson said rather prophetically, "Bill, I've just handed the South to the Republicans for fifty years, certainly for the rest of our life times." That is surely correct. Bush's polls popped after his convention. It is now his election to lose. The combination of super patriotism with piety, used in the service of fear to elicit votes while suppressing equality works, but it is lethal for America and lethal for Christianity. It may be a winning formula but it has no integrity and it feels dreadful to this particular Christian.

-- John Shelby Spong

Ban Straight Marriage (on TV)!

2004-10-05T21:58:00.000-07:00

Would someone please point me to the study that shows how in the world the marriage of a loving gay couple hurts other marriages and families? A more sensible movement would be to ban TV shows like "Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire" that essentially pay people to wed strangers. Have any of these unions lasted even six months? Does anyone really believe these people married for love or intend to start families together? What sort of message about marriage do these shows send to kids? For that matter, what message do they send to adults?

Home School Manifesto

2004-10-05T19:25:00.000-07:00

To the Concerned Citizen Who Made It Her Business to Question My Decision to Home School My Daughter:

First of all, I cannot imagine that if the situation were reversed, and you had happened to mention that you were going to be sending your child to public school, that I would dare to approach you and not only question you about why, but then try to persuade you that your thinking about the matter was wrong. Secondly, thank you for prompting me to ponder once again the myriad reasons why I will educate my children at home. When I returned home after our conversation, I began to write my personal Home School Manifesto. I’ll carry copies of it with me from now on and pass it out to folks like you who believe they know better than me what’s best for my kid.

Why Home School?
My primary reason is academic success. I believe that my husband and I can give our daughter a better education, in less time, than any public school and at far less cost than any private school. We will teach her in the classical manner: providing her with a strong foundation in reading, writing, and math; systematic, integrated instruction in science, history, art, and music; as well as lessons in Latin and German. I believe we will do a far better job helping her to become a moral and thinking citizen of the world than any institutional education system.

Studies of standardized test scores have repeatedly demonstrated that home schooled students are far better prepared for college than their institutionally schooled peers. Here’s a quote from a paper that appeared in “Education Policy Analysis Archives.”

Even with a conservative analysis of the data, the achievement levels of the home school students in the study were exceptional. Within each grade level and each skill area, the median scores for home school students fell between the 70th and 80th percentile of students nationwide and between the 60th and 70th percentile of Catholic/Private school students. For younger students, this is a one year lead. By the time home school students are in 8th grade, they are four years ahead of their public/private school counterparts.

Four years ahead! How can I deny my daughter such an opportunity?

Since I enjoy spending time with my daughter, watching her learn and grow, I don’t want to send her off to school so that some strangers can enjoy (or more likely, NOT enjoy) spending time with this wonderful little person. She's truly one of my favorite people on the planet. If I believed it was in her best interest to go to school, I'd let her go, but if not, why send her away?

More concerned folks raise the “socialization” issue with me than any other. School does a horrendous job socializing children and seems designed to grind down the unique and elevate the average. Children should spend time with other children. School, however, is total immersion in the peer group, six to eight hours of the day at least, throughout a highly impressionable time of life. I think an couple hours a day with a group of peers is as much as a kid needs before age 10 or so, except on supervised group outings like camping, museum visits, sports meets, etc. Children are best socialized by loving parents and other trusted adults who can model kind, responsible behavior and by playing with friends one-on-one or in small groups. Some have argued that experiencing the trial-by-fire that is school builds character and while I can't disagree that trauma does shape one's character, I don't believe it improves it. Where in adult life do we consider teasing, bullying, or sexual harrassment just something we have to experience in order to get along better in life?

How have people come to so wholeheartedly accept the shifting of children from the home to institutions of a thousand or more that home schoolers are continually asked to justify themselves? For most of human history, parents have educated their children at home and human culture evolved to a remarkable level of sophistication. Schools do provide an opportunity for literacy to many who might have otherwise remained illiterate, but it is not in the least bit necessary to prepare for the “real” world or college and comes with so many costs.

So, thanks, kindly intrusive lady who tried to convince me to send my kid to public school, but no thanks.

2004-10-05T18:41:00.000-07:00

C'est moi, Le Musser.

Feast Your Eyes "Exhibit"

2004-10-05T16:17:00.000-07:00

I went to Feast Your Eyes: The Unexpected Beauty of the Vegetable Garden at the Museum of the Oregon Territory in Oregon City this morning with virtually no expectations, yet still found myself a bit disappointed. To call this Smithsonian Institution (!) display an "exhibit" is an exaggeration. It was, sadly, a collection of boards with text and reproductions of a fraction of the images included in the 142-page Feast Your Eyes book I bought at the gift shop. Not a single original image or artifact was on display. Nonetheless, the 10 or so mostly locally crafted vegetable quilts on display with the exhibit were well worth trekking 20 minutes south and paying $5 to see. My favorite, Tossed Salad, consists of log cabin blocks set on point in mostly chartruese batiks with dashes of purple and yellow. I also appreciated the quilting on an asparagus wall quilt. A third quilt, made up of puzzle blocks in vegetable prints looked fun and not to difficult to piece. Very inspiring...and I can now add vegetable and fruit fabric to my already lengthy list of thread-related obsessions. Anyone ever seen asparagus fabric? The exhibit closes this weekend.