pears and blueberries

it's been a good year for pears and blueberries. the apple blossoms all got hit by a hard frost, but the pear blossoms survived and our pear tree produced an abundance of beautiful pears this year. our blueberries down by the lake are very happy as well and produced more than ever before.
 

so after freezing some and making jam, i decided to cook them up together and try my hand at making fruit leather. the recipe is from my favorite river cottage preserves cookbook. it's the book i turn to again and again. 

once they were cooked down, i strained everything out and got this beautiful puree. it was such a gorgeous color. i put in some honey and spread it out on a baking sheet and put it in the oven to dry. i had enough for two pans. 

it was in the oven on a low temperature (50°c) for about 12 hours to get dry enough. and then i rolled it up, just like the fruit leathers we would get at REI as a kid. only so much more flavorful!

i cut them up into smaller pieces and put them in a jar in the fridge. now husband can take a couple along on his long bike rides for quick energy and i can eat some as a snack. i should really see if i can pick one more batch of blueberries (i've still got a basket of pears) and make one more batch before the season is over.

future me will thank present me for making this herb salt

all the herbs in the garden are at their peak. i wanted to preserve some of their goodness for the long, dark winter ahead. usually, i make herb salt by just whizzing all the herbs together in the food processor, then pouring heated sea salt onto them and then spreading them on a baking sheet on low heat to dry out. this makes for a rather green herb salt and you can't see any traces of the original herbs. 

i wanted to try something different, to preserve a bit of color and the variety of the herbs. so this time, i picked a bit of everything - thyme, basil, tarragon, oregano, marjoram, sorrel, sage, nasturtium flowers and leaves, cornflower, oregano flowers, bay leaves, a single sprig of rosemary, chives and a bit of mint, including the flowers. i layered them all in my dehydrator and dried them out for a few hours. 

then it was into the mortar and pestle to bash them without obliterating them since i wanted to be able to see the colors and bits and pieces of each of the herbs and flowers. 

then i mixed in fine atlantic sea salt until i liked how it looked. i never measure anything, but it was maybe about a cup and a half of salt. 

it filled up this old mustard jar. there was some left and that went into the salt jar i keep by the stovetop for daily use. it has a beautiful, green, herby flavor and it still looks beautiful with the flecks of bright color from the nasturtium and cornflowers. i think i'll make another batch for gifts before the season is over. 

no need to waste time on the weekend

30 days of lists - day 4: favorite time wasters

i could have added glee to this list. i've been watching it most of the weekend. tho' i don't sit down to watch, i carry the little iPad around and watch while ironing and cooking and loading the dishwasher and folding laundry and doing a thorough cleaning of our bedroom (it was high time) and untangling all of my necklaces, which had been severely tangled by kittens. so i guess it wasn't really a waste of time. tho i'm well into season 2, i think i'm really mostly watching for the singing (i've always been a fan of musical theatre). the characters are caricatures and the situations quite absurd and the manipulations, oh, the manipulations, make me tired. but those kids can sing. it's not going to be one where i rush to find other sources for episodes not yet available on netflix, i can tell you that, but it was good to have as company while cleaning.

we turned all of the apples from our tree and two of a neighbor's trees into 30 liters of cider. it has an alcohol potential of 6%, so the apples were pretty sweet! half of the house and the back terrace were permeated with the sweet smell of apples. both husband and i feel so industrious working on such a project. even tho' all i really did was wash all those apples, husband crushed them and pressed them in his big apple press. he's already planning improvements in the design for next year. i have a big jar of the crushed apples in the pantry, fermenting into apple cider vinegar. these experiments in homesteading are conscious moments of happiness for both of us. we're looking forward to tasting and then bottling the cider in a few weeks.  

i tried my hand at making agnolotti (basically a fancy name for a little gnocchi-sized ravioli), using this recipe. they were a big success and i even have two bags of them in the freezer for another couple of meals. i made a sage brown butter instead of cilantro because it seemed more autumnal, plus i had sage and no cilantro left in the herb bed. i highly recommend them. they are time-consuming but pretty easy to make. and they'll impress the socks off your guests (provided you'd like them to lose their socks, that is). i know i've said it before, but my moments of conscious happiness often take place in the kitchen.

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if you put this longitude & latitude into google earth and zoom in, you will see something interesting:

16° 51′ 55″ N, 11° 57′ 10″ E

read more about it here.

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here's wish you all a happy and productive week.
may all your phone calls be good news.

on pears and waste and doing what you can

windy and rainy weather have not been kind to the pears. many have blown to the ground and are now bruised and unusable. it makes me rather sad. i've canned some and made pear-ginger jam, but still, it's an incredible waste lying there on the ground, rotting. i have this feeling i should have done more. i should have made pear cider. i should have canned more. i should have made more jam. should have, should have, should have... i have an almost overwhelming sense of guilt at the waste.

my jam is delicious - plenty of ginger, organic sugar and vanilla with the pears. but i'm not really that good at jam other than achieving good flavor. i have trouble with it setting properly, so this is really quite runny and more of an ice cream topping than a jam per se. and i don't know why that is. i do the test on a cold plate and that always appears to set up, but once i put it in jars, i almost never get a proper set. i used jam sugar, which has pectin in it for this batch, as pears have almost no pectin themselves. i followed the instructions on the package and in pam corbin's wonderful river cottage preserves book, but still, it's a thin syrup. but it tastes great, especially with a bit of blue cheese on a nice cracker, so we're using it anyway.

i guess i'll just have to try harder next year.

crazy chicken lady

i've been uncharacteristically absent here of late, letting several days go by between posts. it's partially that my words are going elsewhere at the moment (occupational hazard) as i scramble to finish some projects before the summer holiday. it's partially a few days of glorious sunshine last week and weekend that meant i spent every possible moment outdoors. but it's largely because i've become a crazy chicken lady.

we got nine hens and three roosters last summer. i was a bit skeptical of keeping chickens, since they don't seem to be the brightest animals around, but the lure of fresh eggs was too great. we got two nordic heritage breeds - danish land chickens and black swedish ones. and i got a bit of a kick out of them, way more than i thought i would. late in the winter, several of them became broody. pretty soon, the nest boxes were full of broody hens and the egg production had ground to a halt. husband built an addition at the back of chez poulet. all that early brooding resulted in one single little chick, just in time for easter.

he's now grown into a funny, motley rooster that's clearly a combination of both breeds. until his mother hatched out more chicks recently, he was even still getting in with her at night, sitting on top of her in the nest box, tho' he was getting far too big for that. now he's bottom rooster and has to content himself with a corner of the perch, rather far from everyone else. poor dear.

in recent weeks, the five brown hens have managed to hatch out another 14 chicks - 4 little brown ones and 10 black (which i suspect will be combination chickens like the motley rooster - as one of the brown roosters is top dog). the black hens were clearly very sneaky at getting their eggs under the brooding brownies, getting them to do all of the work of hatching out the chicks. we are consequently referring to the chicks all as SHE this time around, as we want them to be future hens. we certainly don't need another rooster around here. in fact, in the near future, one or two are going to be dinner.

there were 5 little brown chicks, but they killed off the first one that had hatched out. he did seem to be a little bit off in the eyes, so we think they knew something we didn't, tho' i was still unaccountably sad about it when i found him. it has made me a bit worried about the rest, so whenever i need a break from writing and editing and planning workshops, i head out to check on them. at the beginning, i needed gloves to lift the brooding hens, but now i just ignore their attempts to peck me and unceremoniously lift them up with my bare hands to see what's going on with the eggs. i find little peeps and help them find their mama again when they've wandered too far away into the tall grass. in other words, i perform all the duties of a crazy chicken lady. i can almost see the hens rolling their eyes at me.

the chicks are of varying ages, hatched out several weeks apart, but there are four brown hens sharing the tending duties between them. there's still one brown hen, sitting on a nest that's down to 7 eggs - and one more hatches every few days. then, when they're big enough to jump down from the nest box, they go and join the others and one of the tending mamas takes them in. the little motley rooster does a mighty duty in chasing the over-interested cats away and thus far, all the chicks have been safe thanks to his efforts. it really does seem to take a village to raise the chicks.

nature is cool.

what to do on your staycation

eat strawberries (picked in your own garden) with plenty of cream

weed the garden.

go to legoland. twice.

pick bouquets of flowers from the garden.

make friends with a cow.

eat outdoors.

harvest honey from your own bees.

make lots of things from berries.

cooking and evolution

a number of years ago, when my father-in-law was still alive, i sent him an article from the new york times on how cooking had pushed evolution. he was the inventor and first professor of technolution, the study of how technologies have pushed evolution, so i always had an eye out for articles and books that explored such themes. his thinking about the article resulted in the illumination above, which hangs in my kitchen, right near my stove. peter had developed a pictorial language through which he expressed the concepts. all of the drawings have human figures and a circle within a square inspired by davinci's vetruvian man.

harvard anthropologist richard wrangham has written a book called catching fire in which he explores the importance of cooking to human development. peter would have been so interested to read it (he died just after new year's four years ago). what's interesting is that wrangham pushes back the cooking a lot farther in time than has previously been postulated (tho' you can see from peter's illumination that he thought that too). he says that already 1.9-1.8 million years ago, on the cusp between australopithecus and homo erectus, our ancestors began to cook. further, the relationships created around the hearth between men and women were essential for our development into the evolutionary stage we've reached today.

cooking our food, especially meat, gives us quicker access to the nourishment and the energy it brings with it. wrangham argues that our small teeth, small stomach and relatively short intestinal system point to food being cooked much earlier than previously thought. already as homo erectus, we were cooking, he postulates. and it was important that while the men were out hunting, the women were at home tending the fire, so it would be ready when the men returned with the meat. of course, the women also learned to cook roots and things while they were waiting around for the meat to be delivered. i've read only a review of the book, not the actual book, but it's on my amazon wish list for sure and i'm anxious to read more.

interestingly the roles haven't changed all that much. tho' today's men can do some cooking too, it is still a task that falls largely on women's shoulders. and i know that our nightly meal is an essential part of our day, something that mostly i prepare, tho' husband is very helpful in the kitchen. we eat together, as a family, around the table. and although it's much easier on us what with kitchen aid mixers and smeg stoves and such, maybe it's not all that different than our distant ancestors. i do wish peter was here to discuss it.

craft is cool

not long ago, my sister said, "you're too educated for all those arts & crafts." she was making fun of me for my constant preoccupation with whether or not i'm being creative. and she was, of course, trying to be funny and perhaps a little bit trying to appeal to my inner snob (that would be the one who went to the U of C). but, her statement actually gets at a larger issue. it seems that a return to traditional ways of being and doing things is on the rise.

mmm, homemade schnapps

just a couple of years ago, i would not even have imagined myself knitting or quilting or embroidering (still having trouble on the knitting, tho' i'm only a mildly retarded monkey now, not a profoundly retarded one like before). it seems there is a whole community of people all over the world who are making these old-fashioned handicrafts fashionable and hip again. handmade is totally in--whether it's pickles, flavoring your own alcohol, making coffee cozies and coasters, crocheting covers for stones, knitting for your friend's baby, giving a quilt to someone special for christmas. it's not just for little old hunched over grannies anymore. craft is cool.

i wonder what these are going to be when they grow up?

and why is that? what is it in the zeitgeist that makes us want to remember how to DO things with our own hands? is it a reaction to the information age? to the fact that most of us work in some kind of service sector and don't actually MAKE anything anymore in our jobs (except a bunch of meaningless consultant speak fashionable words that say a lot without really saying anything)? are we driven by some kind of biological instinct to want to make things with our own two hands?

or is it, as denis dutton (editor of the fabulous arts & letters daily) suggests, that appreciation of art is the result of human evolution--sexual selection--to help us find the right mate. actually, he's talking more about the ability to appreciate beautiful, artistic things, rather than the ability to produce them, but this quick overview of his theory is worth a click and a bit of a think anyway.

my theory, and it's still under development, is that this desire to hold the fruits of our own labors in our hands is a reaction to the world having gotten so fast. information travels at light speed. i'm spending a lot of time hanging out in cyberspace with people from around the world, having what i can only term real friendships with people i've never met in person. so some part of the core of who i am desires to have something that's here and now with me, in my own two hands (and which isn't a pretty mac keyboard, which is often what's at least near, if not in my hands). there's so much information out there that our grasp of it is only fleeting, and by the time we might grasp it, it's already moved on to the next thing. therefore we feel a need to have something to hold onto.

free form embroidery by sabin

i think that's why i'm--despite two master's degrees, fulbright, an ABD Ph.D. that i probably won't ever finish, and a rather meaningful career in shipping that takes me around the world--spending all of my spare time doing arts and crafts (or thinking about doing them, as the case may be). it makes me feel in touch with my here and now. it's tangible. it brings beauty into my home and my very molecules into alignment (which usually only happens in the lobby of the manila pen). it feels meaningful to see sabin sewing around the edge of her cards for her swap or helping her thread a needle so she can embroider a flower that she drew onto some fabric with a chalk pencil. it makes me feel good to make gifts for the people i love. it feels like it was time well spent and yes, i also feel proud that i have the ability to make something with my own hands. so, i guess i'll keep doing it, despite being over-educated for it.

maybe it's a product of a childhood spent reading the laura ingalls wilder books over and over. i just want to homestead. homesteading in the 21st century, that's what this is. i really can't wait for spring so i can get started on the garden. i vow that we're gonna have enough tomatoes to can some next summer!