He's in Oklahoma...

And homeward bound.  Happy Valentines Day / Happy Anniversary, Pierre!

Safe journey home!

(Valentines borrowed from AngelBaby Shelby, on Facebook.  Thanks, AB!)

New Year's Day

Happy New Year!   We brought a treat of cabbage to the girls on the farm today, for good luck.  They nearly rioted for it.  Those pregnant ladies are ravenous!  They're building their babies rapidly now; you can see that they're carrying a wonderful load.

Miss Faith had some manners.

Dolly looks like she's carrying triplets! 

 Since the goats were bred through the month of October, they could begin to deliver anytime from the first week of March until the last week or so of March.  It looks like they should go sooner, doesn't it?  Dolly is one of the older goats, and an excellent breeder.  She always carries heavy like this, and retains a bit of a belly throughout the year.  I can relate, at least to the "rest of the year" part!

Faith and a friend enjoying lunch.

 On the way to the farm, I spotted a tree full of oyster mushrooms.  Can you believe that?  On January 1st, after all that freezing weather?  They were pretty dry, but still firm and insect free, so I picked them and will finish dehydrating them at home.  Score!

Naturally dehydrated oyster mushrooms!

A close-up of the gills

The picture above is of the bottom side of the largest mushroom.  Beautiful, isn't it?  They smell almost as good as earlier specimens.  Oyster mushrooms always smell rich and buttery to me.  They are one of Nature's many gifts.   And today felt like a real bonus!  Happy New Year!

Remote Posting

Hello, my friends!  I'm taking the evening off to cook our traditional New Year's Eve dinner, but I hear Faith did a little writing over at Faith's Funny Farm.  Why don't you go on over and check it out?  There are lots of pictures there from Lights in the Woods, including lots of Faith's good friends.  Have a safe New Year's Eve, and I'll catch you on the flip side!

Urgently Nesting

I'm in denial. Denial that in just a few days I'll be back at it, racing out of the house in the pre-dawn dark, hoping my socks match, drying my frozen hair in the truck's blower (set on high), hoping I have time to stop for a bagel on my way to room 601, where I'll meet up with 20 young people who feel pretty much the same way I do.  We'll wake up together over morning announcements, wipe the sleep from our eyes, and shake off our dreams while we adjust to the harsh reality of early morning academia. And we'll make the best of it; it'll grow on us again, and we'll share some laughs while we start on our new year together.  But right now, all I'm thinking of is home.

Home.  Where the heart is, where the comfortable mess waits for a creative touch, where the projects wait for some love and attention, and where the plants have languished during my recent manic fall semester.  Where my freezer is brimming with foods I've lovingly saved there, just waiting for a culinary muse to overtake me...which she did, last night after my second glass of holiday reisling.  What to do?  Mushrooms, of course.

Heaven in a Pot

Morels, chantarelles, oyster mushrooms, chicken mushrooms, giant puffballs and shiitakes all found their way into my pot; most were frozen over the late summer months.  The morels and chantarelles were dehydrated, purchased at the Amish grocery store in Fleetwood, and are decidedly local.  The whole mess was rehydrated if necessary, sauteed, seasoned lightly, and married with a single cube of last spring's chopped garlic scapes, from my stash in the freezer. A pasta dough was made and patiently rolled out with my hand cranked pasta maker, and the final results (wild mushroom ravioli) found their into my freezer before I stumbled off to bed. The elves came and did the dishes for me. 

We Will Love Them Sometime Soon

The same elf that cleaned up after my chaotic kitchen event slept late this morning, while I continued on my nesting mission.  I've just finished a good book, The Dirty Life by Kristin Kimball, and it has made me hyper-aware of the beauty of worn, homey objects that are useful and well loved (namely, everything we own).  She waxes poetic about setting seeds in soil, about calves and kittens, and still manages to keep it real.  In that "school of harsh reality" mood, I decided to tackle the project that has been looming large in my mind: the "Elephant in the Room", aka the "Plants I Neglected All Fall in the Sun Room."

I'm not a negligent plant keeper, most times.  I've raised my own food, orchids, herbs; I've been said to have a green thumb.  That thumb has apparently been somewhere less productive (in terms of plant life) for the last few months.  Of course, I did get an "A" on the course I was taking, and wrote two pretty decent research papers using APA style (for the first time).  Tell that to my dead herbs...they're compost now. The wages of academic war: herbal collateral damage.

I performed triage on the table of withered herbs and flowers, setting the goners out on the deck for the birds to pick at, and trimming the wounded down to manageable sizes.  The orchids fared better than the Christmas cacti, believe it or not; one optimistic little trooper had even sprouted a blossom spike.  Anything with a glimmer of hope got a nice soaking shower and a haircut before being returned to the sun room table they call home. I think we'll call it "the infirmary" for the time being.

The Infirmary

Four out of five African Violets survived as well, spunky little troopers that they are.  I carefully snuck a good watering under their drooping velvet leaves and set them up high, where they like it, above our multicultural cat chachka collection.

Gris-Gris, Supervising

The rest of the room got a good cleaning, too.  We (Peter was awake by then) topped off the event by filling the bird feeders and settling in with Hobie and Gris-Gris for a little passive bird-watching.

I am determined to soak up every moment of home time I can, between social events and fundraisers.  Tonight's Lights in the Woods will bring a welcome end to the long, cold evenings of people, hot-dogs, and blown fuses, and a return to the tranquility I yearn for on the farm when I volunteer there.  And tomorrow, after I visit David and Bonnie in Niantic, and get the goats fed and watered, I'll come home to my comfortable, freshly cleaned and nurtured sun room, and enjoy my last two days of winter vacation.  Cleaning this:

The Studio

Wish me luck!

Catching my Breath

With the majority of the holiday hoo-ha behind me, I feel I can finally settle myself by the computer long enough to catch up.  Christmas is full of lessons for me; I learn every year.

One thing I re-learned this year is the importance of making time for family and friends, despite a deep need for solitude.  It's expected, necessary; those planned moments seal our affection for each other, join our widely-spread tribe for a shared meal or cocktail, and maintain the emotional ties that are so vital to our feelings of wholeness as a community of like minded friends.  Though we were fighting off a nagging cold that had us both exhausted, and were committed to help with several nights of Lights in the Woods at the farm (our winter fundraiser), Peter and I managed to spend time with many of our dearest friends during the last week.  Those we haven't seen are either traveling, or too remote to visit on our tight budget.

The Drafts at Lights in the Woods, Flint Hill Farm

Speaking of tight budgets, I'm amazed at the sense of abundance I've been feeling, despite the lower flow of cash.  My freezer and pantry have yielded up a bounty of wholesome meals, thanks to this year's gardening, foraging, and gifts of farm fresh meat and home made concoctions from like minded friends.  Our Solstice locavore dinner, held with Stephanie and Mike and hosted at their larger, tidier home, was a testament to the fecundity of our Pennsylvania farmlands, with a wealth of locavore pot-luck goodies provided by the 20-something guests.  It was a refreshing blend of old friends and new ones, all mingling warmly and hailing the holidays on the longest night of the year; a celebration of readiness. Solstice brings an instinctual hunkering down, a nesting urge, one we painfully ignore in our contemporary artificially lighted lifestyle.  Instead of yielding to the increased desire to eat comfort food, sleep deeply, and semi-hibernate, our industrial culture has sold us a bill of goods that requires us to plod on...with a sour winter temper resulting from our neglected subconscious desires.  Of course, bills must be paid, cows must be milked, children must be taught; but I propose we embrace our desire to simply sleep and be comforted by a warm fire and a hot meal occasionally, and remember that life is actually a rather simple and beautiful thing, with waxing and waning rhythms, like the moon and the seasons.  Why fight it?  Our Solstice dinner was, for me, a symbolic reminder of that idea.

Christmas came, and with it the family gatherings and meals, made a bit more difficult this year by our distance from my daughter.  The core of the celebration has shifted, as it should have, to the home she's made with her fiance and the five children they share, and we older folks are adjusting to the new dynamic.  I'm finding the transition rather beautiful; seeing my daughter blossom into her full adult power is an awesome experience.  She fills me with a quiet pride.  She's strong and beautiful, with a steadiness grown of experience.  She loves calmly and deeply. She couldn't give me a better gift. 

Megan, During Warmer Days

Our drive was long that day, with a trip south to pick up her grandmother, then the longer trip north to see her.  I spent the second leg of the trip, from Granny's apartment in Phoenixville to Megan's house in Forty-Fort, PA (near Wilkes-Barre), stuffed into the coffin-sized extended cab of my little truck like cord wood.  It was good for a laugh, and not nearly as bad as it sounds.  We had the space decked out with a large couch pillow and a sleeping bag, so it was comfortable enough, even if I did have to make the trip with one arm wedged over my head.  I'm beginning to appreciate the potential story-making qualities in difficult situations these days, even as they're occurring.  The inherently amusing silver lining. 

The house was a riot of people, most of them small; there were cats and dogs and new in-laws and food and drinks; too much activity to worry about social amenities.  It was a crazily busy few hours of chaotic merry-making, with kids coming and going, adults sneaking outside for brief moments of quiet and cool air, and much gifting and picture-taking.  It was exhausting fun, and we left with Megan's car, complete with my two grandsons, instead of the truck; they needed a ride to their father's house in Hellertown, which became our next stop in the Christmas-day marathon.

Trevor and Hobie

Love transcends physical discomfort.  It makes you agree to do things that are hard, and like it.  Christmas was one of those days, for all of us, and it was beautiful.

Thanksgiving Weekend Highlights

Gratuitous Snow on Thanksgiving Morning

On Thanksgiving morning, it snowed just enough to make it pretty outside; what a nice touch for a relaxed holiday weekend!  As you know from my previous blog, we decided on a non-traditional meal this year.  We went with paella, which was lovely, and shared our evening with our good friend El.  We've shared many holidays over the last 20 years.

A Toast to Good Friends

 The weekend was spent doing various chores and cleaning up, and today (Monday) was spent with the grand kids, who arrived last night a few hours before bedtime. There's just something wonderful about little boys.

They do things like this...

And this...

And this.  And it's all great, and really funny.

Then you take them somewhere else (like the farm), and they do more stuff.



They're Crazy!

And cute...

And frisky.

 And they grow up way too fast, just like their mother did. 

Thrifty Thanksgiving...and Not So Much

About a month ago, I found this smoker at the local thrift store.  Brand new.  Never used. $14.  We had been talking about smoking cheese, and I thought we might be able to figure something out; cheese smoking is a cold, indirect process, obviously, and this little beauty is essentially a charcoal grill with a basin inside and a cover to hold the smoke.  In other words, it's HOT.  Not cold.  So it sat unused on the back porch.  Until today.

Now, we hadn't planned to have a traditional Thanksgiving.  My daughter moved farther away, and my mother doesn't care much about the holiday (she's German; it isn't HER holiday.  Besides, she never cooked the meal.  It just isn't her thing).  The only person who was nearby and who wanted a communal meal was our friend El.  And she doesn't like turkey, so we decided upon paella.  More about that later.

Here's the clincher: our new neighbors gave us their extra turkey.  It's a small one, about 12 pounds.  It was already thawed, so we couldn't just toss it in the freezer.  What to do with an extra turkey?  And a useless smoker? Experiment!!!!!

I found a website that made the process look easy, and proceeded.  The first step was to soak the wood chips; we had a few hickory chunks, and a bag of mesquite chips.  I also had some basil stems and a bundle of herbs I burn occasionally like incense.  Everything went into a pot and got a good soaking while we sprayed the inside of the smoker with cooking oil, then lit the charcoal.

The pieces got put back together (the wood chips go on the hot coals, and the soaking liquid goes in the bowl over the coals, then the bird goes on the grill on top).

And then it smokes.  For a long time.  Smells heavenly.

So...my free turkey is smoking in my almost-free smoker, and will eventually wind up in my free-zer.  Life's good.  And by the way, did I mention that it gratuitously snowed this morning?  Just to look pretty? I'll update with the finished turkey pictures and the paella report later.

Finished bird: three bags of smoked turkey for the freezer, minus legs and wings for tomorrow's dinner.  Oh My.

And here's our Thanksgiving dinner...I'll elucidate tomorrow.  Right now, I need a nap.