• Dreaming

    September 1, 2009

    This past weekend we had our church retreat, and since it was the anniversary of MLK’s I Have A Dream speech, the theme was dreams. In one session we were told to take five minutes and make a list of thirty things we dreamed for. Here’s my off-the-cuff list, slightly edited and enhanced.

    I have a dream of…
    1. Being an actress
    2. Effective help with mental illnesses
    3. Baking bread in an outdoor oven, my outdoor oven
    4. Having twins (not possible anymore, but I still sometimes fantasize about it in my less lucid moments)
    5. Raising children who are kind, respectful, and good listeners
    6. Experiencing church without the church behavior (ie, the pantyhose and headache cocktail)—actually, I don’t wear pantyhose or get a headache, but you get the point
    7. A clear memory
    8. Time to write
    9. Having more patience
    10. Being more open-minded
    11. Having the ability to understand the other side of situations
    12. Finding a balance and maintaining it
    13. Everybody in the world cleaning toilets, eating homegrown tomatoes, and having a good night’s sleep
    14. My children developing lasting, deep friendships
    15. Conversations that are less superficial and more real
    16. Writing for publication
    17. Learning to make cuajada (a salty Nicaraguan cheese that lots of people hate and I happen to love)
    18. Our family traveling to Central America for a full month
    19. A paid vacation for Mr. Handsome
    20. A shop for Mr. Handsome
    21. Houseplants that look nice
    22. Everything in my home being fixed and in working order
    23. A fence for our field so that we can have steers and a horse
    24. That people (me included) learn to value ordinary work without feeling like they have to go somewhere to do good
    25. People understanding that homeschooling means learning at home, not school at home
    26. A mother’s helper
    27. Learning to bake real artisan bread
    28. Speaking coherently
    29. Having a fabulous wardrobe and looking sexy in everything I wear
    30. Learning about photography

    So there you have it, my train-of-thought wish list. What do you dream about? Take five minutes and tell me, please—I’d love to know.

    About One Year Ago: On Our Way, Smartly. And some other stuff that I wrote about one year and one week ago: High-End Pesto and Pasta with Sauteed Peppers and Onions and Losing My Marbles.

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  • Earthy ponderations: part three

    August 25, 2009

    I bet you thought I forgot that I said there were three parts, huh? You thought I was so wrapped up in maters that I forgot to finish pondering the earthy matters (part one and part two). Ha! Think again! What do you think I do while I chop and mince and blanch? I’ve got to do something with my brain to lift it out of the juicy mire. So, here we go…

    Mom is still doing the talking. She has the ability to hold forth, let me tell you (or maybe you already noticed)—and just for the record, her father was a preacher. (I think that’s relevant.)

    ***

    Mom: Overwhelmingly so, with or without technology’s strides, vacationing happens at nature’s expense, not to mention the less arcane costs. The ad for the hybrid SUV, picturing a shadowy, moss-carpeted forest and smugly tooting, “Finally, a vehicle that can take you to the very places you’re helping to preserve,” is really promising that for the $60,000 sticker price, wow-ee, you can get there without having to fold your legs into pretzels, and in addition, you’ll be conscientiously stomping down the lichens and sedge. Gas-hog transported somewhere or not, either way, on a grander or lesser scale, we’re invading.

    … Is the family sustaining anything beyond their bellies, by staying planted at home in the growing months, entrenched up to their ankles in their own blood and sweat and tears?

    I have no scientific answer for that! Just, sweet and simple, in defense of dirt:

    Number one, Hounding after nature a la vacationer style is probably a sham. Er, scam. Whatever.

    Number two, Furthermore, fleeing doesn’t get the flee-er anywhere.

    Number three, As compared to deifying nature, worshiping it to its ruin, loving nature means humbling ourselves in labor, even getting down on all fours. Tending the garden, mud squishing up between our toes, we can only laugh at ourselves—or cry.

    Me: Sustainability is more than us doing something. It’s about listening. We spend so much time trying to conquer nature—shipping our processed food from all over the world, using absurd amounts of electricity so we can stay up way late and sleep way late, pouring concrete wherever we might venture so as not to soil our shoes, building fancy, gas-guzzling contraptions that allow us to trot the globe on a whim, keeping our homes’ temperatures so even that we never break a sweat or shiver—that we miss out on some valuable lessons in patience and grit, not to mention some built in respites for sanity’s sake.

    That’s why working with our food supply, doing the gardening and cooking ourselves, is about the most down-to-earth a person can get. In this one small way we are forced to abide by the natural elements, heading the ebb and flow of the seasons, respecting the differences between night and day. We can’t go scampering off to visit far-away relatives when the beans are in season. The food can’t be put on hold; you have to act now.

    ***

    Well, except for the fact that I am compiling this series of Earthy Ponderations while I am hiding out at Panera Bread (after going shopping for clothes, of all things), ignoring the tomatoes, nectarines, and apples that were waiting to be turned into sauce, salsa, jams, and dried snacky foods. So see, I guess I have the same elitist attitude as everyone else, trying to get the upper hand, not wanting to kow-tow to nature’s demands.

    But right now, at this very moment—7:43 on Tuesday, August 18, 2009—I’ll take any excuse I can get: I’m tired. Let me fool myself a bit longer.

    About One Year Ago: How to make butter.

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  • The mater question

    August 24, 2009

    So I get this email from my girlfriend asking if I use the hot-water-bath method or the pressure canner method to can my tomatoes and I tell her that I use the hot water bath.

    And then a couple days later I get another email from her, this time asking if I do them raw pack or stewed.


    I haven’t a clue, to be honest, but I don’t tell her that. In fact, I don’t tell her anything at all, preferring instead to let her think the reason I haven’t gotten around to answering her email is because I’m too busy, rather than the cold, hard truth which is that I’m avoiding the question since I don’t have a quick answer. I’m a good friend like that—skipping out when the going gets tough.

    But I will now redeem myself by commencing to give a fully complete, well-rounded, all-encompassing (go redundancy!) answer to the Mater Question, as my girlfriend calls it, in the form of an entire (short) post. Maybe I’m not such a bad friend after all?

    One more thing to enhance the confusion factor: I call these tomatoes “stewed” but I don’t actually stew them before canning, so maybe they’re not stewed. Does that mean I’m lying when I call these “stewed tomatoes?”


    In any case, I think it’s an easy-peasy way to put up tomatoes.

    But then again, maybe the rest of you have easier-peasier ways? If so, please enlighten me (and my girlfriend).

    Stewed Tomatoes, Canned

    High-acid (red) tomatoes, such as Big Boy, Better Boy, Roma, etc.
    Salt

    1. Wash the tomatoes.


    2. Blanch the tomatoes, which means:

    Fill a large kettle with four inches of water and bring it to a boil. Drop enough tomatoes into the kettle to cover the bottom of the pan.


    Wait for thirty to sixty seconds, or until you see the tomato skins starting to split. Using a slotted spoon, transfer the tomatoes from the boiling water to a colander.


    Repeat the process (bringing the water back up to a boil between batches) until all the tomatoes have been blanched.

    3. Remove the skins, which means:

    Once the tomatoes are cool enough to touch, cut off their tops and any bad parts (use your sniffer to make sure you sliced all the yuck out—if you slice off a bad spot, make sure to rinse your knife before moving on to another tomato) and slip off the skins.


    4. Chop the skinned and scalped tomatoes into the desired size. Some people (like my mother) just chunk in the peeled tomatoes, but I prefer to chop mine up into smaller pieces because they are easier to use this way (just pop the top and dump) and less offensive to children.

    5. Fill your jars. At this point you get to decide what juice-tomato ratio you would like to have—for a more tomato-packed jar, leave out much of the tomato juice, and for a more juicy tomato-y jar, add less chunks and more juice. (That was probably way too obvious, but I felt compelled to say it anyway.)

    6. Add salt—one teaspoon per quart and one-half teaspoon per pint—wipe the lip of the jar, put the lids on, and screw on the rings.

    7. Process the jars of tomatoes in a hot water bath—ten minutes at a gentle boil.

    About One Year Ago: So why did I marry him? Thirteen years and counting!

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