Back to Plants, Thank God!

We are back to plant matter, thank God!  Butcher day was hard on all of us. 

We've had several hard frosts and it's time for the winter squash to come in.  The first step is to let them dry well.  We filled two tables.  Now they'll sit in the sun for several days.

This year our winter squash harvest was probably half of last year's.  I might have planted less, but I also think the plants are really feeling the lack of fertilizer.  Skipping a year of adding manure was a *bad* idea.

Those tomatoes we picked over two weeks ago are ripening up nicely.  Tonight we get to enjoy a whole bowl of "fresh" tomatoes.  If we had put them in the root cellar, they'd ripen even slower and then we could have had "fresh" tomatoes at Christmas.  Maybe next year.

I'm watching this class on food and one of the topics was what makes a diet nutritious.  Many studies disagree, but all seems to concur that vegetables are good.  In an effort to increase our vegetable intact, we started eating dinner in courses.  First we eat veggies, fresh and cooked, and then we eat everything else.  So far it's working.

It's November and we are still working hard on the garden.  There are more things to harvest and seeds to collect and beds to protect, but it's cold and I just as soon sit in a comfy chair under a blanket.  Once I get out there, I enjoy myself, but I sure do procrastinate getting out there. 

Saving Squash Rewards

I came across a listing of how long different squash last in storage.  It said acorn squash only make it three months.  It's been almost three months!  My husband got down in the root cellar and pulled all of them out.  Many have turned yellow, which means that rot is next.  We'll cook these up and put it in the freezer.

It also said that you should turn the squash in the cellar every week.  Well, it's been a lot longer than a week, so since he was down there, he did some turning.  Every squash got a new position and most were fine, although a few had gone bad. 

The temperature is 42º down there, while it's been below freezing outside.  That's good. 

We need to get the root cellar into our regular habits.  I guess we need a day of the week for root cellar day, like trash day.  Hmm... I guess we'll start thinking.

It's not really ice cream weather, but it is pie weather, and pie with ice cream is pretty good.  There are a few things that we make from Christina milk that are absolutely unique and spectacular.  Ice cream is one of them.  We use the same old recipe, but it tastes like the best specialty ice cream we've ever had.  I can even forget the vanilla and it's still sensational.

After running through the ice cream maker, it comes out pretty soft.  We scoop it into a tuperware and freeze it hard.  Now it's time to make pie.

When we started this life we knew it was the right thing to do, for moral reasons.  I can't look into the face of the workers (some of them children) suffering from injustice so I can have my processed low-cost food.  I can't face my own children, years from now after decades of fossil fuel burning to transport my food an average of 1500 miles, suffering from a diseased planet.  But we didn't expect the eating to be so good.  Like many things in life, when you do the right thing, God rewards you.  This ice cream sure is a reward.

60

This is my 60th post.  I remember that warm day when it first began.  The words, how hard can it be, were popping in my ears.  We had been at this life for over a year, but finally into the full swing of it.  After giving a workshop at our diocesan Fall Conference about being an imperfect follower of a perfect God, a friend said to me, "you really should start a blog."  Others had said it before, but there was something about it coming out of her mouth at that moment that was like a zooming lens and an echoing voice.  So I went home and started this blog the next day.

Before we began this life about a year and a half ago, I had been in full time ministry for over a decade.  During that time I wrote a book, lots of articles for local newspapers, and a few articles for national newspapers and magazines.  I wrote a lot.  It had become just as much a part of my ministry as the work I did in an official capacity.  But then I stopped writing.  I just stopped.  I was busy, but there was a heaviness on my heart that held the words down.

After only week at this blog, I had written more than I had written the previous two years.  My year with the land had worked away the heaviness and there were words again.  A cork had been pulled.  Now the words were spilling out of me, from that mysterious source that I have come to think of as a best friend.

Thank you for being part of this journey with me. Thank you for reading. Thank you for telling your friends about it.  Thank you for leaving comments. Thank you.

We finally moved all those squash from the basement into the root cellar.  The kids ran them upstairs and out to the garage while my husband arranged them in the cellar.  Remembering that they shouldn't touch, we filled up shelves, filled up slotted boxes, and just as we were out of ideas, the last of the squash appeared and we were done.

We have snow on the ground, freezing temperatures, and it finally occurs to me that we should eat the food in the freezer.  When we freeze it in the summer I think to myself, don't eat these right away, we need to save them for winter.  I just keep thinking that way.  I suddenly realized that I'll be starting the early plants for next summer's garden in only a month, and that it IS winter. So now I tell myself, it's winter, eat it up.

After the big snow snow, we finally got the snow blade on the baby tractor.  We don't have the chains and weights that you're supposed to use with it and last year it worked out.  After half an hour of pushing and bracing with boards, we finally gave up.  It's not working out this year.  One more thing we need to buy. 

Milking still has a new feeling to us.  Christina is peeing and pooping at least once a day during milking.  I think it started as an accident, but now it seems like a habit.  This never happened last summer before she dried off.  When she does it, we whip the milk pail away in time, but it's gross and we want her to stop.  We are catching her business in a bucket and yell at her, like we've read, but it continues.  Yesterday she started to pee, my husband grabbed the bucket and yelled, "Christina, stop that" with a whack on the back.  She stopped immediately.  But this morning, she was at it again.  Any ideas would be welcome.

First Caramel

When people ask me if I'm working, I say, "no, but I keep really busy." I talk about raising our own food, the homeschooling, the cow, the cheese-making, but as it comes out of my mouth, it sounds like fluff.  It sounds so optional, just keep-me-out-of-trouble work.  I realize that I still harbor some lack of respect for this life-style.  But we are working hard and it is real work!  Long days with lots of time on my feet, lots of planning and figuring things out. And a tiny little grocery list.

Our three squash a week diet is already falling behind.  It's very possible we skipped last week; I honestly don't remember.  Today I grabbed the three sorriest looking fruits to cook up before they get any worse. 

Last year we made lots of caramels to give away and eat.  Caramels are easy to make and they just taste like Christmas to us.  Our regular recipe starts with butter, cream, and milk.  We decided to try with just cream and milk and see how it goes.  It saves us the step of making butter.  Figuring that a pint of cream makes a half-cup of butter, we mixed it up and got it cooking.  It cooked down in about the same amount of time as regular caramels. 

The texture isn't perfectly smooth, but the flavor is good.  The girls descended upon the pan and licked it clean.  As soon as we get the recipe worked out, I'll post it.  My family loves it when I'm working out recipes like this because it means I have to make a lot of them.

Today I'll try my first Monterrey Jack cheese.  It doesn't need much pressure so I can use my mold with just weights on top, rather than that nasty spring thing.  These cheeses use whole milk, and it's hard to let all that cream go.  In the three gallons I'll use for the cheese, there is at least half a gallon of cream that could go for caramels!  But hopefully it will become really good cheese (please God).

We got out the advent wreath and candles.  Counting down advent has become so much more fun since we got this wreath.  Every night this week at dinner we'll light one candle.  Next week we'll light that one and another one.  The week after that we'll light those two and the pink one.  The last week of Advent we'll burn all four.  On Christmas we light the white candle and all five will burn through the Christmas season.  By the end we'll have five candles at different heights witnessing to the time we have waited, the steps we have taken to be ready to meet God face-to-face, and the anticipation we savored in it all.

Butter

We churned our first butter.  We got this old Dazey churn off ebay and it's amazingly fast.  Turning the handle requires no strength, it's just stirring milk, and it breaks in 15-20 minutes.  We have learned that it breaks easier if we culture it first.  I pour the cream in the jar, add some mesophilic culture, and leave it alone for 12-24 hours.  After it breaks (holds together in globs of butter), I spoon it into ice water and then knead it to remove the buttermilk.  After it's kneaded nicely, someone sprinkles a little salt on it for me and I knead that in.  You can churn commercial cream into butter yourself with a mixer.  It sure is good to have Christina butter on the counter again.

Zucca lasagna was on the menu.  We have mozzarella left over from before Christina dried off but we were out of ricotta.  I usually make ricotta from the whey left over from hard cheese, but we just made some from whole milk.  Ricotta is so easy.  Just heat a gallon of milk to 185-195F, foamy but not boiling, add about 1/4 cup of vinegar (or any acid), then pour into a cloth-lined colander.  I hung it for a little while to drain off the extra liquid, but you could probably just leave it sitting there too.  When it's done, salt to taste (about one teaspoon).

Our zucca lasagna was all homemade and almost all homegrown.  Lasagna noodles are easy to make using a roll pasta maker.  It's the grown up, "productive" version of play dough fun factory.  We make lasagna with lots of cheese.  I added it up and this lasagna had about 3.5 gallons of milk in various dairy ingredients.  The zucca (butternut squash) gives it a nice creamy flavor and consistency.

Christina update: The milk fever seems gone, but every day is still new.  We are now fighting mastitis.  The milk filtered very slowly yesterday, requiring two filters to get it all done and this morning the cream had already started to sour.  Dang.  This morning's milk was a little better but I still ran to the store to buy antibiotic.  We read that the old fashioned way to treat mastitis is to milk very thoroughly 3-6 times a day.  If we use the medicine, we have to throw the milk away for four days, so we are motivated.  We figured it wouldn't hurt to milk a few extra times, but in the daytime only! 

At 1pm we did our first extra milking and milked each teet into a different pot to see if we could identify which quarter was the worst.  I filtered each one separately and it actually all seemed pretty good.  It's possible we are beating it.  So, we'll milk again at 5pm and again at 9pm.  Christina's production is low, under three gallons a day, but we figure that is from not milking her much through the milk fever.  These extra milkings might help increase production too.

Fresh Eating

I tried a new recipe, Butternut Squash Lasagna, from Mother Earth News. It took a while to make, but it turned out really good.  Of course, we used homemade whole wheat lasagna noodles with homegrown/homemade mozzarella.  The kids liked it as well as we did.  The squash gave it a creamy quality.  Next time we'll use more cheese and add meat: hamburger cooked up with onions, peppers and spices.

Lamenting the pour word, squash, for this fruit, my cousin suggested that zucca is the Italian word.  We like it!  So last night we had zucca lasagna! It has a nice ring to it.

I've been hungry for something fresh, and lamenting that I didn't do a better job getting things like lettuce, spinach, and cabbage planted for a fall crop.  Then I remembered some carrots hiding under those huge broccoli plants.  They've been out there a while, probably over the heat of the summer, so I was figured they would be dry and woody.  But they weren't.  They were sweet and crisp.

While I was out there, I walked in the furrows, even though nothing is growing in the beds.  Some weeds have grown up so I didn't look too closely.  Then I realized that I was walking on spinach!  These must be from seed that washed into the furrow and waited for good weather to grow.  There was enough for a nice salad.  Fresh carrots and fresh spinach!!  Praise God!!

Vanilla beans are on sale for the holidays.  A friend of mind told me how easy it is to make vanilla — soak vanilla beans in vodka for six months.  I got the beans at Costco and sliced them open before putting them into jugs of vodka.  She said to put three beans in a flask, so I figured ten beans in the big 1.75l bottles would work.  Next May I'll pour them into smaller bottles to use.  In the end we probably spent as much as buying the vanilla straight, but I'm hoping it will taste better.

My older daughters are studying solubility in Chemistry.  This slow dissolving of the vanilla flavor was a good illustration of solubility level.

We are eight days from Christina's due date.  Her udder looks slightly less empty to me, but nothing else has changed.  We are all watching her closely.

Squash, Beans, and Frost

Today, November 9th, we had our first good frost.  It wasn't hard enough to knock all the vines down, but it did hit the walnut tress.  This morning, the leaves rained down in the back yard until, by noon, the trees were bare.

We moved the last of the winter squash into the basement to cure for two weeks before they go into the root cellar.  We have five different kinds — pumpkin, butternut, acorn, buttercup, and some light green thing that sort of looks familiar.  It doesn't look like all that many, laying out on the basement floor, but I counted them and there are 95. 

To finish these by next June, we need to eat over three a week.  Since each squash is about two recipes worth, that works out to squash almost every single day.  I'm not that fond of straight squash, and neither are my kids — and I wish it had a better name, "squash" just doesn't sound that good.  We'll give some to the cows, but the rest is food for us.  I need to find some good recipes.

Our list of things to get done by winter seems to go on and on.  Yesterday, we got the stakes pulled out of the garden and put away.  With this red stake puller, they just slide out of the ground.  It's one of my husband's favorite tools.

Every evening we continue to work on the dry beans.   Reading aloud keeps things interesting.  Even the littlest one was able to get quite a few beans done.  His little face lights up as he pulls out a bean and says, "I did it!"

There is a monotony to this food work.  Open pod, remove bean, repeat.  Open pod, remove bean, repeat... again and again and again.  It reminds me of the time the kids argued they shouldn't clean their room because it just gets dirty again.  In a moment of inspiration, I responded, "well, we feed you and you just get hungry again."  We never heard that argument again.

The work is monotonous.  Eating squash every day for nine months will be monotonous.  But then all eating could be called monotonous; you do it every day, after all.  Whereas I would say that eating is one of the enduring pleasures of life.  So is sleeping!  Perhaps I am finding that this work we repeat over and over encapsulates an enduring pleasure as well.

Paralyzed by Rain

It's rainy and cold.  Being from a place with average rainfall of only 12 inches a year, rain drives me inside.  I have a friend who grew up on the Oregon coast and he once commented about how people here are paralyzed by the rain.  It's true!  I'm paralyzed!  We just stay inside and wait for it to dry out.

Except that we can't sit inside!  The first frost is predicted for this evening so we are bringing in the last of the tender harvest — tomatoes, peppers, zucchini, and okra. 

The garage is getting fuller and fuller of stuff that needs attention but we're spending all our time getting stuff into the garage and not any further.  The piles of squash I set out to dry in the sun have been rained on, so we brought them in to dry off.

Because we are from such a dry climate, we call all liquid precipitation rain.  My nine-year-olds commented that we can tell from the chickens how hard it's raining.  They will stay out digging around in drizzle, but when it really starts coming down, they congregate under the coop. Even the chickies know to stay out of the rain!

The apples we have left to can are getting softer and softer.  I'm not yet recovered from last week's canning day, but we have to get going.  Today we started another batch.  It's a lot of work, but we love all things apples — fresh apples, applesauce, apple butter, dried apples, apple pie.  We're going to need more.

This working when I don't want to is part of normal life.  I've been an adult long enough to just plow through it.  It reminds me of God's presence in the everyday, even without the high emotions of mountain-top experiences.  It's easy to sense God in the midst of an intense retreat or an inspiring conference.  But in everyday life, the low emotions of valley experiences, God is just as present.  In these times of working just because it needs to be done not because I want to, I remember how God is with me whether I know it or not.  God is with me whether I want God or not.  God is just with me because of what God wants.

Harvest

With the last nice days of the season, we are bringing in the final harvest. As I look over the winter squash, like these acorn squash, I am amazed how many varieties we planted.  Last spring when I was looking at squash in the seed catalog, I must have been thinking preettttyyyyy and just ordered them all.  I think we have five or six varieties.

We got two varieties picked and stacked up to dry.  These are called Uncle David's Dakota Dessert.  I sure hope they live up to their name.  We pretty much only eat squash in custard and pie.  Squash custard is easy to make and we eat it for breakfast in the winter — squash, eggs, milk and not any more sugar than the kids would dump on their oatmeal.

We grew flour corn for the first time.  The book said to wait until the stalks dry out or freeze.  This variety is a native of the southwest and is supposed to make a good corn flour.  I think we'll need to let it dry for quite a while still.  If we want to make maza we need go through a hominy step and I haven't decided if we'll go to the effort.  Our two sweet corn varieties had some left overs so we let them dry for grain too.  We should be able to make cornmeal out of that.


After pulling the ears off, we cut the stalks off at the ground, gathered them up, and then stalked them up in the corners of the cow shed.  Corn stalks are decent food for cows.  People who are better at this than me will grind them up and make silage, which sounds like it goes through a fermentation process.  We're just feeding them straight to Christina and beefy. I read somewhere that corn stalks don't have much nutrition for cows, but it's fine in moderation.  So we've been giving them a few stalks a day.  It sure it fun to see them chomping away. 

We dug the last of the potatoes and got them put away in the root cellar.  In the end we probably only got a bushel or two.  I don't think they were too happy with where they were planted because most of the plants didn't produce that much, but then we would find one with lots of good sized potatoes.  My With fresh potatoes, my daughters have been making oven french fries most every day.

At the end of the day, we had a lot to show for our efforts.  We finished harvesting the dry beans.  With maybe only half of the corn done, we had three buckets.  It says that they store better in the husk, so we left them on.  In these last days of the season, the tomatoes are still ripening and we found lots.

Our first frost is forecast for next week.  We've had a few cold nights and some plants have gotten nipped, but the hard frost that knocks vines down hasn't happened yet.  Lots of things don't actually have to come in before the frost, but it still feels like a deadline.

Part of my rush is trying to beat the cold weather.  If it's hard to deal with 70F days, then how will I do with 55F days?  But I know that it'll be good for me to get out in the cooler air and work.  It will help reset my internal temperature gauge and make the cold easier to live with all winter.  I wish I looked forward to things that are good for me.