A Sukkot Campout...At School!

This week, my children's third grade Waldorf class celebrated the Jewish harvest festival of Sukkot. To honor of the 40-year period the people of Israel spent wandering through the desert and living in temporary shelters, it is customary to build and dwell in a temporary shelter called a Sukkah. We gathered bamboo at a local farm and then fashioned a Sukkah frame. Then the children and members of the school community brought in gleanings from their gardens and farms. I cut down all of our corn stalks that we had harvested from,  big bunches of sunflowers and dill, and colorful little gourds. The class had great fun fastening corn stalks and flowers all around, and hanging gourds and apples by the stem with twine to dangle down from the roof. It was beautiful and tapped into the impulse in all of us, both young and old, to build forts.

In the spirit of dwelling in the Sukkah, the teacher invited us to have a dinner potluck and camp out at school in tents around our wonderful structure. We gathered together and shared a delicious meal, sang songs and did traditional Jewish folk dances, and sat around the campfire for some of the teacher's wonderful storytelling. She told a tale of two brothers, one wealthy and one poor, who built their Sukkah structures for Sukkot. The wealthy brother built a beautiful and elaborate Sukkah, with the finest fruits and served the finest meal, but didn't truly welcome strangers in as he should in the spirit of the festival. The poor brother built the best Sukkah he could with the bruised and overripe fruits he was able to acquire from the market, and in this Sukkah, everyone was welcome. One Sukkat, three heavenly beings came to visit each of the brothers, and  magically transformed their Sukkahs to reflect on the outside what was on the inside. The wealthy brother's structure became rotten and full of bugs, while the poor brother's structure turned into fruits of silver and gold. From then on, he prospered, and his wealthy brother learned to welcome and include everyone, sharing what he had. It was told much more eloquently by the teacher, of course, but I wanted to relay the basic message. After that, my son volunteered to tell a story from ancient India he learned of a Brahmin and a Tiger. He told it so willingly to the whole group of us, and so well, with such detail, that I was in awe. It was one of those moments where your child brings forth a new, shining skill you had no idea they possessed. I was a very proud mamma.

We all settled into our tents and slept out in the lower field of our school, under the stars on the hot September night. Our children's teacher, in keeping with the Sukkat tradition, slept under the Sukkah we had built. Then they all rolled out of their tents in the morning, put on school clothes, had hot rice cereal for breakfast, and went about their school day. What a fun memory they will always have of the night they camped out at their school! I am constantly grateful to have such a wonderful school and teacher in our lives.

If you want to know more about Sukkot, I found this information page on a Judaism 101 website, compiled by Tracey Rich from her years of research: http://www.jewfaq.org/holiday5.htm#Sukkah.

Today's Gleanings

I'm hearing from all around what a busy fall it is, and I can tell you, I know all about it. I have stepped into a whole new level of bustling activity in the past weeks. The garden patches need watering, picking and preserving. The wild foods beckon to be plucked off bush, vine and tree. There is much work to help with in my children's amazing third grade class at our Waldorf school. I'm doing a lot more and sleeping a lot less. Even in this whirlwind, I am thoroughly loving Autumn. No other time of year offers the rich bounty, the fiery colors, the warm hazy days and crisp nights, the abundance and the sense of shedding to make way for something new. I'm drinking it all in.

Even though I have plenty of foraged fruit piled in baskets all over my counter, my back porch and my pantry all waiting to be processed and stored, I still go on urban gleaning excursions while I wait for my kids to get out of school on our two short days a week. Yesterday, I took a friend along to show her all the bounty that can still be had even in these hard economic times. We skimmed over some fruit trees I had picked from the previous week at a student rental near the university. I gathered just a few more apples and pears to dry, and she collected some good saucing apples.

Then we swung over to another alley by campus student housing, to check on the concord grapes. They were ripe! Granted, with the late frosts this spring, there were nowhere near as many grapes as last year, but still enough to fill a couple of baskets. I'm going to try making some canned grape juice suggested by my neighbor, where you pack a quart jar full of grapes, pour a boiling honey water mixture over it, and process in a boiling water bath. Then you simply take the grapes out before drinking. I love easy canning recipes.

It's reassuring somehow that even when the economy is in the pits, and a late, cold spring results in a scant fruit growing year, there is still plenty if you really look for it.

Fall Color in the Mountains

Up in the mountains, Autumn is beginning to cover the land in a patchwork blanket of bright, fiery colors as we go about our lives in the towns and cities below. While camping at one of my favorite lakes this weekend in the Cascades, all the beautiful leaves turning color on the huckleberry, vine maple, and bracken fern kept catching my eye. I couldn't bring them all home with me (although I did prune off a few branches to put around my house), but I tried my best to capture what I could in a few photographs.

Vine Maple

(Acer circinatum)

Bracken Fern

(Pteridiam aquilinum)

Cascade Mountain Ash

(Sorbus scopulina)

Huckleberry

(Vaccinium sp.)

Fireweed

(Epilobium angustifolium)

A friend on our camping trip told us that when she was in Alaska, she heard it told that when the fireweed goes to seed, winter has arrived. I don't know if I'm quite ready for winter yet, but I'm happily savoring every minute of the fall!

Fall Foraging Adventures

Everywhere you look right now, there is an abundance of food. Along country roadsides, in overgrown neighborhood alleys, in forgotten corners of back yards, fruit is hanging ripe for the picking. The last few weeks have been busy ones for me, with all the usual foraging that I do this time of year, the harvest that needs gathering on my own land, and all the preserving that ensues. With the counters covered in heaping baskets, and bowls I'm teetering on the brink of food preserving burnout, but am determined to keep going strong until the winter weather sets in. There hasn't been much time left over for blogging, but I feel that I would be doing you all a disservice by not sharing the knowledge that there is good, free food to be had all around, and giving you some ideas on how to go about finding it.

Since we live a ways out of town, and the kids still need to go in for school, I usually plan on spending a couple of mornings a week in town to save on driving. I load up the back of my car with baskets, bags and apple pickers, and meet up with my foraging friends. We have a lot of good times going around town together harvesting food. I imagine this is how women connected and socialized back in the day, before there were coffee houses and there was a lot of hard, honest work to be done. They foraged together.

A note: If you do not own an apple picker, you need to go out and get one. Here it is in the photo below. The best 15 dollars you ever spent at the hardware store. Seriously.

I'll start off with urban foraging. Alleys are excellent places to find fruit this time of year. Blackberries, plums, apples, grapes, you name it. The wilder and more overgrown the alley, the better. Forgotten fruit trees grow outside the fence lines of yards, overgrown grapevines trail out of back fences and blackberries grow unnoticed. Vacant houses for sale are another place to find un-harvested fruit trees. With the poor economy, some houses sit empty for a long time. There is a wonderful pear tree in a front yard that I have visited two years in a row now. I'm going to be a little sad when it does become occupied. Don't overlook vacant lots, parks and arboretums. Oftentimes, original homestead orchards were incorporated into city sprawl. We have one large local park with hazelnuts, beech nuts, and few black walnuts. There are places like Dorris Ranch Living History Farm where they still manage and harvest the hazelnut orchards, but allow gleaning once the harvest ends.

 

If you are fortunate to live in a college town, university neighborhoods are another excellent urban foraging scene. These neighborhoods are often old neighborhoods where the owners planted fruit trees at some point. Now they are student rentals, often inhabited by folks who are buried alive in homework and couldn't care less if there were an entire orchard in their back yard. They do not have the time to deal with it. They are worried about passing their exam next week and will tell you to please, please make all the fruit stop accumulating on their lawn, so their landlord will leave them alone. This past week a group of guys were happy to let us pick from their apple and pear trees. One of them said he thought he might make an apple cobbler sometime. That was the extent of his fruit gathering ambitions. Universities also tend to own a lot of vacant land with future campus planning and expansion in mind, and sometimes you will find old fruit trees left over from times when it was all still farm land.

Country roads are another good bet for foraging. I found this apple tree along a road not far from my house, and every year it has these delicious little yellow apples, just the right size for packing in my kids lunch baskets. They make great drying apples too. Another thing I should mention here, is that kids love foraging. I have gone with two friends now who brought their young children along, and they love to help and snack on the unlimited fruit.

For wilder foods, like elderberries for example, Forest Service and BLM roads are good places to look. I took some friends out elderberry picking off of the highway West of town this week, and we were all appreciating the bounty of wild food in the midst of the un-favorable crop growing season we've had this year. My friend noted that the bushes looked like we hadn't even picked off of them when we were done, there were that many clusters of berries still left!

It feels wonderful to bring home full baskets. I always find that I need to remember to plan in adequate time to process and store all the food I bring home. Between canning, freezing, pantry storage and drying, I always manage to put it all away for the winter, but not without some late nights and frazzled days. Still, it's absolutely worth it feeding my family food that I gathered and preserved myself.

This will not be the last you will hear of my foraging adventures, but for now, I will close with these words of wisdom to live by:

Apple Pickin' Ladies

Today, I dropped the kids off at school, and went out to Farmer John's to pick apples with my friends Taryn and Jeana. The morning was warm, the apples were ripe, and we filled our baskets for applesauce-making and storing in the pantry. I cannot describe to you how wonderful an apple picked fresh off the tree tastes. It makes me never, ever want to eat a store-bought apple in the middle of winter again. I know the apples in our pantry will start to lose some of their deliciousness by then as well, but right now I'm just enjoying the fresh crunchiness of it all. I'm a fresh, crunchy sort of mamma.

I'm used to doing a lot of gleaning off of old, unruly trees that you have to climb or use a fruit picking implement on a long stick to harvest. Going to a real farm where the trees were pruned and grew fruit down where we could reach it was a real treat. It all felt so easy!

Apple picking is always a morning well spent. Chatting, picking, and eating apples on an organic farm are all good ways to start out the day. 

Here's the haul. We also picked some elderberries off of a giant old elderberry tree (yes, it was really a tree). Farmer John was generous with his u-pick pricing, which we all appreciated tremendously, since Taryn picked a lot of saucing apples!

One thing I love about this time of year is all the abundant, ripe fruit growing all around us, and how it fills the baskets around the house. When anyone gets hungry, they can always reach for something good.

Homemade Lard, It's not Your Mama's Crisco Shortening

When you are a mother of of two kids with dairy sensitivities, and you love to bake, the options start looking slim. I tried Earth Balance margarine for a long time, but I didn't feel good about all those processed vegetable oils. I tried organic shortening, same story. I finally threw up my hands and started using butter again, because I wanted them to have some real, un-processed fats. They do fine with the butter, but good, organic butter is expensive, and sometimes you need something more shortening-like. I was reading Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder one day, and a light bulb went off in my head when I got to the hog butchering passage. We had ordered a half hog from Sweetbriar Farm that would be done at the butcher in a few weeks. Lard was the answer. Now, I am well aware of all the stigma around lard and animal fats. There was a time I would not have touched lard with a ten foot pole, but the more I educated myself about it, the more I felt like lard, was indeed, the answer. Not the only answer, mind you, there are still plenty of uses for butter and olive oil on a regular basis in my kitchen, but lard also has its own important place in the scheme of things.

In her cookbook, Nourishing Traditions, based on the nutritional research of Dr. Weston Price, Sally Fallon writes on fats in the diet, "Fats from animal and vegetable sources provide a concentrated source of energy in the diet; they also provide the building blocks for cell membranes and a variety of hormones and hormone-like substances. Fats as part of a meal slow down nutrient absorption so that we can go longer without feeling hungry. In addition, they act as carriers for important fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E and K. Dietary fats are needed for the conversion of carotene to vitamin A, for mineral absorption and for a host of other processes." "Our choice of fats and oils is of extreme importance. Most people, especially infants and growing children, benefit from more fat in the diet rather than less. But the fats we eat must be chosen with care. Avoid all processed foods containing new-fangled hydrogenated fats and polyunsaturated oils. Instead, use traditional vegetable oils like extra virgin olive oil and small amounts of unrefined flax seed oil. Acquaint yourself with the merits of coconut oil for baking and with animal fats for occasional frying. Eat egg yolks and other animal fats with the proteins to which they were attached. And, finally, use as much good quality butter as you like, with the happy assurance that it is wholesome-indeed, an essential-food for you and your whole family."

On lard, specifically, she writes: "Lard or pork fat is 40 percent saturated, 48 percent monounsaturated (including moderate amounts of antimicrobial palmitoleic acid), and 12 percent polyunsaturated. Like the fat of birds, the amount of Omega-6 and Omega-3 fatty acids in lard will vary according to the diet of the pigs. ..Like duck and goose fat, lard is stable and preferred fat for frying. It was widely used in America at the turn of the century. It is an excellent source of vitamin D, especially in third-world countries where other animal foods are likely to be expensive.

What about the risk of heart disease, you  might also ask? Fallon writes on this topic, "Before 1920 coronary heart disease was rare in America; so rare that when a young internist named Paul Dudley White introduces the German electrocardiograph to his colleagues at Harvard University, they advised him to concentrate on a more profitable branch of medicine. The new machine revealed the presence of arterial blockages, thus permitting early diagnosis of coronary heart disease. But in those days clogged arteries were a medical rarity, and White had to search for patients who could benefit from his new technology. During the next forty years, however, the incidence of coronary heart disease rose dramatically, so much so that by the mid-1950's heart disease was the leading cause of death among Americans. Today heart disease causes at least 40 percent of all US deaths. If, as we have been told, heart disease is caused by consumption of saturated fats, one would expect to find a corresponding increase in animal fat in the American diet. Actually, the reverse is true. During the sixty-year period from 1910-1970, the proportion of traditional animal fat in the American diet declined from 83 percent to 62 percent, and butter consumption plummeted from 18 pounds per person per year to four. During the past eighty years, dietary cholesterol intake has increased only 1 percent. During the same period the percentage of dietary vegetable oils in the form of margarine, shortening, and refined oils increased about 400 percent while the consumption of sugar and processed foods increased about 60 percent."

So, when would you use lard? My answer is occasionally and for frying and some baking. We all know about lard pie crusts, I'm sure. They really are amazing. I find that for frying up potatoes, lard keeps things from sticking to the cast-iron skillet unlike anything else. Of course, greens are delicious sauteed in a little bit of lard or bacon grease. This may all sound like a really gross idea to some of you still, but when you think about going for the Omega-3 fatty acids, and the vitamins, especially vitamin D in the winter when you need it the most here in Oregon, it seems like a better and better idea. When you're living on a tight budget, and you can't get as much good-quality, organic meat in your diet as you would like for your kids, a little lard here and there can be a good thing. All else aside, it's SO much better for you than margarine or shortening.

Here is the lard hot and fresh, after the solids, aka. cracklings, have been strained out. It's usually an amber color until it cools, and then it turns creamy white.

I strain the cracklings through a cheese cloth and let it drip tied onto a wooden spoon.

What, you might wonder, does one do with cracklings? You make crackling cornbread. Just freeze the cracklings you won't use right away, and throw a little handful in your cornbread batter for seasoning.

If lard is sounding like something you want to try making, it's very easy. Just find a local farmer who raises pigs naturally and organically on pasture, and ask to buy a few pounds of fat. I hear kidney fat is the ideal choice. Then cube it, put it in a pot, and cook it on low heat all day long. It will melt slowly until it is mostly liquid with some crispy cracklings floating on top. At this point, you strain the cracklings through cheese cloth and pour it into jars to cool. Then you can  freeze whatever you don't plan on using within the next few weeks. Just keep the jar you're using in the fridge. And just throw that Crisco away!

This Land is Your Land, This Song is Your Song

“I am out to sing songs that will prove to you that this is your world and that if it has hit you pretty hard and knocked you for a dozen loops, no matter what color, what size you are, how you are built, I am out to sing the songs that make you take pride in yourself and in your work. And the songs that I sing are made up for the most part by all sorts of folks just about like you.”   ~Woody Guthrie

I think it all started with Bob Dylan, or maybe it was my dad playing folk songs on his guitar for fun when I was growing up. I remember this family friend named Laura Campbell who used to come over for campfires sometimes with her guitar, and we would all sing "Puff the Magic Dragon." I thought she was amazing. I don't think I ever had a strong enough urge to play music myself. I played the piano when I was young, then the trumpet, and then the tuba. I didn't like any of them enough to stay with it. I sang opera in high school, but that didn't turn out to be a long-term thing either. I have always thought I would take up the banjo and harmonica so that one day when I'm old, I can play them on my front porch steps. But life is very full with other things right now, and learning an instrument isn't really part of my immediate plans. What I really want to do is listen to other people play music. Nearly every day, I take time to practice the art of appreciating the tones coming out of guitars, banjos, fiddles, harmonicas and mouths. Every musician needs an audience to hear their songs, and that is where I fit into the whole picture. I have been fortunate in life to have a few friends who are musically inclined. Ever so often some travelling friend will come through town with a guitar or a banjo, and we have wonderful campfire singalongs. Those are some of the best times in life.

I have never been very interested in what's playing on the radio. It's never had much of anything to do with my life as far as I can tell. Sometimes I'll hear something on an NPR station that I really enjoy, but it's usually the independent folk musicians that I hear about through friends who create music that sets the background for this life I'm living. I have enjoyed a wide variety of music, just not much of it contemporary. The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Simon and Garfunkle, Crosby Stills Nash and Young, The Who, and Led Zeppellin are all bands I have enjoyed greatly over the years, and none of them were current with my generation or what was being played on the radio. I guess I'm just old-fashioned by nature. Listening to Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan's traditional folk ballads and Jerry Garcia and David Grisman's bluegrass tunes during college I felt like I was moving towards something more real for me and more reflective of life as I knew it. Many of the Grateful Dead's songs, I also started to notice, were based in old folk tunes, or made a lot of reference to them. Then, a friend introduced me to British Folk. Pentangle, and their guitarist Bert Jansch, played all these amazing arrangements of old folk tunes, and I came to realize that I really love traditional folk music. It's timeless. Many of the songs cross cultures, barriers, various musical traditions, and can be found at the root of much of the music being played today. In many ways, it's also a music very rooted in place. If you want to get to know a landscape, listen to some of the local folk music. I've visited Great Britain, the Appalachians, California's gold rush country, Michigan, and various towns of the old west without ever going there. Here I will share a few of my favorites.

Being that I live in the American west, I came to really love Mary McCaslin's heartfelt western folk. I had never been one for country music, but there's a fine line between folk, bluegrass and country. My mother listened to McCaslin a little when I was growing up, so it came to mind when I started listening to more folk music. This music really gives a sense of the vast, open prairies and the old wild west. Outlaws, gamblers, and frontier ladies come to life in the stories of her songs. She did some great Beatles covers too, like an old-western version of "Blackbird." Here's a great version of "Ghost Riders in the Sky" that she does on the banjo. I'll also share a link here to a great slideshow on YouTube that someone put together to her song "Prairie in the Sky", and here is one of my very favorites by her put to a slideshow as well, "Way out West."

A few years later, I made the pleasant discovery of the late Kate Wolf's folk tunes. This is the folk music of the California hills, the gold country and Sonoma. Her voice is so beautiful, and her open, honest, earthy songs are hard to forget. Old farmhouses, kitchens, mountains and rivers are some of the subject matter of her songs that make her music among my favorites. One of the things I find particularly amazing about her is that she didn't start her musical career until she was 27, and after she had a family with two children. She played folk festivals all around the United States and Canada, and organized the Santa Rosa Folk Festival in California. Here she is singing one of my favorites about the golden rolling hills of California, "The Redtail Hawk."

Laura Kemp is my favorite local folk singer, hands down. I don't even know how many times I've gone to her shows over the past few years at farm festivals, bars, the Saturday Market, and the Oregon Country Fair. She always puts on a good show with talented musicians in accompaniment and tales of her garden between songs. Her music is very in-tune with the seasons, which I enjoy. She does a great Kate Wolf cover of "The Lilac and the Apple." Here she is at Sam Bond's Garage playing a banjo favorite of mine, "Swordferns and Salmonberries" and an autumn tune, "Hannah Branch." I was at that show!

I found out about this Michigan duo, Seth Bernard and May Erlewine through another crafter's giveaway on a blog I read. I had always wanted a beaded peyote stitch necklace, and I won a lovely blue and green one from Su Smith of Star Sunflower Studio, who sent me a two-disc live recording of these folks at Short's Brewery. I loved their music the minute I heard it. My kids did too. To my eight-year-old daughter, Daisy May has become a folk singing hero. They combine some excellent guitar and string playing with some poignant messages about the importance of sustainability and care taking the earth.  "I travel for to know the land, to learn to speak for everyone, and I will work this broken world until my days are done." These lines by Bernard remind me of something I'd hear from Woody Guthrie or Bob Dylan, and carries on the tradition of folk music representing the land and the regular folks who live on it. Both have done their share of travelling around the country, and May even hitchhiked and hopped trains in her late teens. Through their music, I'm getting the impression that Michigan is a pretty happening place that I'm going to need to visit one day. You see, folk music can take you all sorts of places. Here is a recording of the duo singing one I have been really enjoying, called "Seeds," and another favorite of mine, "Tend Your Mind." Here's "Sassafrass" at a house concert in Colorado, and another recording from the same concert of May telling the story behind her fishing song from a fresh perspective, "Big Mama Brown." And here's one more, from the roots of rock and roll, a modern folk cover of Pink Floyd's "Fearless."

Being the Grateful Dead fan that I am, it was good news to find out that members of the band, Tongue and Groove, from my hometown up in Washington State, had started an old-time band called Deadwood Revival, doing traditional songs and Grateful Dead covers among other wonderful things. Even better news is that they have family in Eugene, and come through frequently on tours, so we get the opportunity to catch a live show every now and again. Some of the band members are friends of friends, so I get lots of good updates on when shows will be coming up. Jason Mogi does some seriously skilled banjo playing, and their fiddle player, Julie Campbell is smoking hot! Kim Trennery, the lead female vocalist has become another guitar playing hero in my daughter's world. We've taken the kids to a couple of shows that weren't at bars, and they dance their little tails off. We will never forget the show we went to at the Drain Civic Center last year when an intoxicated woman in a red dress got up on stage and started dirty dancing by the bass player. I'm sure the band will never forget it either! Here they are in Corvallis playing an awesome rendition of  "Cold Rain and Snow." You should hear them do "Brown Eyed Women" at the Axe and Fiddle in Cottage Grove. I think I even like their version better than the Grateful Dead's! Here they are doing one of their newer songs, "When I'm Gone," and another favorite, performed at the Axe and Fiddle, "Come See Me Sometime." I love it.

Nothing makes you feel like this land is your land more than listening to the music that comes right from it, from the people that are travelling and getting to know it, and appreciating it. I think the messages that come out of this music are important ones that are worth paying attention to. It's good to be reminded that the human experience is something universal, timeless and well travelled. Aside from that, you've gotta love a little toe tapping, foot stomping fun every now and then. Through all of these old traditional songs, I've "dug some songs out of the mud" as Jason Mogi of Deadwood Revival puts it, and thoroughly enjoyed them. When I went to the public library this week, I checked out Roscoe Holcomb's "The High Lonesome Sound," some John Hartford fiddle tunes, "Traditional Fiddle Music of the Ozarks," "Kentucky Old-time Banjo," and "Songs From the Mountain" which turned out to be a collection of old-time music from the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina referred to in the Novel, Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier (made into one of my favorite movies ever). I even found one called "Songs and Stories of Early Oregon." None of it is disappointing. So, my advice is to step out of the mainstream sometimes and see where it takes you. You might end up closer to home than you had imagined.

Canning Local Food With Relish!

If you're going to can, you may as well do it with relish! I kicked off my weekend with a trip on Friday out to Riverbend Farm to get peaches and corn. Every year I go and get their distressed, or "seconds" peaches for half price. Then I can feel better about getting a couple of big boxes full. The corn was for making corn relish, a favorite canned treat in my house, and since we didn't grow wild amounts of corn with the cold June we had, I wanted to save what we had for eating on the cob. Then, while I was picking up my kids at school, I happened to mention to my neighbor that I needed peppers for the relish, and she told me to come on over to her little farm and get a bag full. So, I came home with peaches, corn, and a whole paper bag of beautiful peppers. I was set for canning adventures!

Here are some of those "distressed" peaches. The thing I love about Riverbend Farm is that these aren't all that distressed in my opinion. They're just peachy!

The variety I ended up with came right off the pit with ease, and the peels came right off with my fingertips. None of that business of blanching peaches for me. I try to simplify my canning experiences as much as possible. I did a cold pack method this year where you fill the jar and the pour on the hot syrup of water and raw honey. I had some jars break when I was getting started, but I got in a good jar heating groove before too long, and canned 16 quarts of peaches.

With the peach set-up already going, I decided to can the windfall pears our neighbor gave us the other evening as well. I quickly sliced and cored them and did a cold pack with peels on (all about the ease) and a cinnamon stick and star anise in each before pouring on the hot honey syrup. I ended up with a bonus six jars of canned pears I hadn't been planning on. None of them broke either!

 

Corn relish needs onions and cabbage as well, and it was a good thing we had planted all those onions and cabbages out in the garden. It was time to harvest a lot of the onions anyway, so we laid out a screen on top of some plastic gallon pots and put the onions on top to dry out in the sun. The plan is to use these as storage onions, so hopefully they cure enough for that to work out. I pulled aside the few I needed for relish, and picked a couple of good, small cabbages.

While I was working out in the garden, our neighbor showed up on his tractor to plow our crimson clover cover crop under in the field. The kids had a good time watching heavy farm machinery at work, and now we have a nice blank slate for all our agricultural pursuits. We're going to do a fall cover crop on it, and then the fun will begin in the spring.  There will definitely be lavender and pumpkins involved.  

Now it was time to do something with all that corn. My husband took a break from screening in our back porch and cleaning the chimney to shuck and boil 20 ears of corn. We had to boil it all in our big canning pot, it was so much corn! While the corn was boiling, I made a quick trip to a farm down the road to get some raw honey. I had used up all we had on the peaches and pairs, and needed more for the relish and jelly. Why am I using honey instead of sugar for all my canning, you may wonder? It is not due to any bad feelings about sugar, but more due to good feelings about raw, local honey. Since I'm using fresh, seasonal, organic produce (IPM in the case of the peaches) for canning, it felt like the sweetener should go along the same lines. When I was out at Morning Glory Farm buying the honey, I met the farmers and shared my relish recipe with them. They were really nice folks. So, with my two quarts of beautiful, dark wildflower honey from the coastal mountains, I headed back to the kitchen to make this wonderful corn relish from the Ball Blue Book of Preserving:

Corn Relish

2 quarts cooked corn cut off the cob (18-20 ears)

1 quart chopped cabbage

1 cup chopped onion

2 cups chopped sweet red peppers

2 cups chopped sweet green peppers

2 cups honey

2 Tbsp. dry mustard powder

1 Tbsp. celery seed

1 Tbsp. mustard seed

1 Tbsp. salt

1 Tbsp. turmeric

1 quart apple cider vinegar

1  cup water

Combine all ingredients in a large saucepot. Bring to a boil, then simmer 20 minutes. Pack hot relish in hot jars leaving 1/4 " head space. Adjust 2 piece caps. Process in boiling water bath 15 minutes.

Makes 6-12 pints.

The corn relish canned beautifully, and I ended up with 12 pints! Then I began dicing peppers, onions and crabapples to make a pepper jelly. By this time, I was tired of being in the kitchen, so I just made a recipe up by the seat of my pants. I couldn't even tell you what I did if I tried. But, at this point it is half-way done cooling, and mostly jelled up, so I hope it was a success. I ended up with 12 half-pints of beautifully colored pepper jelly.

As if this wasn't all enough fun, we got a call from a neighbor down the road with raw milk who I had been playing phone tag with for a few days. After dinner, our whole family went over to the Ellsworth's place. Mr. Ellsworth, or Dr. Ellsworth, I should say, is an old-timer Psychologist who works from home and keeps a beloved pet Jersey dairy cow, Daisy and her calf, Dolly. Daisy and Dolly live on three acres of green pasture and get all kinds of pampering from their owners. We were very fortunate to come at milking time, and the kids got to help milk Daisy. Her stall was immaculately clean, she munched happily on sweet smelling alfalfa while she was milked, and then went back out to the pasture with her calf. Then we got to watch the milk being poured and strained in the most sanitary garage set-up I could ever imagine. It was very impressive. We went home with our gallon of fresh, raw milk, a quart of homemade feta cheese, and an old stew hen for Monday night supper. I could have never hoped to get milk from a better place than this, and it's just a few minutes away from home.

All in all, it was a very full weekend. I canned a lot of food, and had a lot of good local-food experiences. I had great conversations with several farmers over the course of the last three days, and I came away from each interaction with food for my family grown right here, close to home. Some of it came from right down the road, and some of  it came from our own garden. All of it ended up in canning jars lining the shelves of my pantry, promising good things to eat this winter.

Oh, the Possibilities of a Freshly Plowed Field...

Lavender, a pumpking patch, more room for corn.....

Back to School We Go!

This week is a big week for a lot of kids in Oregon (and I hear last week was a big week for kids in Washington.) It's back to school time. It's not as though it was my children's first day of school ever, but it was a pretty important day for us with both kids going to the Waldorf school that we have wanted them to go to for such a long time. With their willow lunch baskets packed, a bouquet of sunflowers from our garden, and a watermelon for the teacher (we didn't have any apples yet), they headed off today for a new year of adventures.

The other night, their teacher came over for a home visit and dinner. I dont' know about you, but none of my teachers ever did that. This is one of the Waldorf traditions that I especially love. The kids were so excited and so proud to show her our home. We cleaned the house as spic-and-span as we could, and I made a good, farmhouse dinner in her honor. It wasn't quite the spread that Mother Wilder made for Almanzo's teacher, Mr. Course, in Laura Ingalls Wilder's Farmer Boy, but I think she would have been proud. I roasted a chicken from the farm down the road, and served it with a tomato cucumber salad from the garden, fresh corn on the cob from our field, green beans from our CSA, and mashed potatoes from our potato patch with chicken gravy. I even made gluten-free drop biscuits with Pamela's GF baking mix, topped with homemade cultured butter and gooseberry jam. We had blackberries and cream for dessert (the kids had coconut milk on theirs since they can't do dairy.) The kids found a big, beautiful orb spider in our garden that day which they were tickled to show her. I think she liked meeting Orbarella Orbsy Orbie, and our menagerie of chickens. It's a really good feeling to have such an amazing teacher who will take the time to really KNOW, love and carry them through eighth grade. It is in this way, and many others, that this Waldorf school feels like an extension of home.

The third-grade curriculum in Waldorf schools is centered around living on the earth, and there is a lot of focus on meeting earthly needs such as shelter building, textile-making, and growing food. At this age, it really contributes to a solid sense of security and place on the earth. The children will garden, cook, and bake. They will learn about the animals and plants that give us fibers for clothing. They will study different shelters from all over the world. They will visit a building site and work on some building projects around the school campus. In years past, the third graders have built play structures, gazebos, garden sheds, and play houses. Soon we will be going on farm field trips galore, with one to Farmer John's to pick apples, one to Wintergreen Farm to pick pumpkins the children planted in the spring, one to a farm powered by a pair of draft horses, and possibly one to our house to harvest corn and amaranth for making grain and baking bread. And if that wasn't exciting enough, they will be reading Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder aloud together. Of course, there will also be math, writing, folk tales, folk dancing, flute playing, art, form drawing and painting. I am wishing I could go back and do third grade over again!

The Autumn is a time of year so full of wonderful things, and for us this year, going back to school is a big one. I am deeply grateful for this school, this teacher, and their place in our family's lives.

Fields Where Scarlet Poppies Run

"The silver rain, the golden sun.

The fields where scarlet poppies run.

And all the ripples of the wheat

are in the food that we do eat.

So when we sit for every meal

we say grace we always feel

that we are eating rain and sun

and fields where scarlet poppies run."

~Traditional Meal Blessing