Winter Is Coming

From left to right: Pesto, garlic-jalapeno carrots, pickled shallots, pickled garlic, sourdough starter, orange oil (not for eating but for cleaning), apple vinegar, and kombucha.

From left to right: Kombucha. Lots of it.

I have started in on my goal of preserving the bulk of my food for the winter. This includes anything besides water that I want to drink. I’ll be buying flour, sugar, rice, and most of my spices, but the idea is for everything else to come from my own stores. This little row is just a small sample of what my ‘fermenting shelf’ is now holding. I keep being told that working on (3!) a farm will eventually break me of my constant search for food and eliminate the urge to glean and forage – so far these feelings have only intensified. Having very little income, a whole slew of food allergies and intolerance, and a life long love of foraging and cooking makes me believe that I’ll never grow out of it. I promise to post as much about each individual project as I can, but for now, pictures of pretty bottles and jars!

Natick Organic Community Farm Spring Spectacular!

This Sunday, May 19th, come out to the Natick Organic Community Farm for the annual Spring Spectacular. I’ll be driving the hay rides all morning, and there will be face painting, many chances to meet the animals, an organic seedling sale, ice cream making, ceramics, weaving, and other craft demonstrations, lots of delicious local and organic food – just to name a few of the day’s activities.

The event is from 10 – 2, rain or shine and admission is $6 -Adults, $5 -Children over 3, and free for children under 3 for Members, and $10 – Adults, $5 – Children over 3, $3 – Children under 3 for non-members. Everyone can save a dollar on admission by biking, walking, or taking public transportation to the event.

For more information, check out their website at  Natick Spring Spectacular.

 

 

Goat Appreciation Post

Just sharing some goat-love from an April Break camp I co-taught at the Natick Organic Community Farm. Who can’t love a goat??

 

 

Kale Chips

A surplus of overwintered and flowering kale means I have a surplus of delicious kale chips about to be made. I modified a recipe I found on the whole food’s website to use what I had on hand – my primary cooking strategy.

Not everything is pictured here, but the main recipe goes as such:

2 lbs kale – torn into 1″-2″ pieces

1 Green bell pepper – roasted and peeled

1 c almonds, soaked for an hour

1/2 c nutritional yeast

1/3 c rice milk

4 cloves garlic (I used early volunteer garlic that I pulled from around the farm and included the greens as well as the bulbs – ended up using about 1/2 lb)

1 scallion

1 T lemon juice

1/4 t sea salt

Combine all of the ingredients, except the kale, in a food processor and blitz until a uniform paste. Toss the kale with the sauce and spread on a cookie sheet prepared with parchment paper. Bake at 250 F for about 3 hours, turning over half way through.

I became very impatient with the oven (which is also incredibly filthy) and wasn’t entirely satisfied with the texture so I switched over to my dehydrator and left it at 125F overnight and was very pleased with how the chips turned out. Crunchy, cheezy, and gone before I ever got a chance to take pictures. I will have to make way more chips if I plan on having this snack added to my winter-food stash.

What’s your favorite way to prepare kale?

 

Banana Sandwich Bread

Peanut butter, honey, banana sandwiches – one of the greatest sandwich creations to ever grace a lunchbox. Bananas have always been low on my grocery list for a number of reasons spanning from price to ethics to I just don’t really like them when they’re not in bread or cookie form. Lately though, the grocery store around the corner has regularly had them on the clearance rack for a grand .49 cents a pound (.69 cents a pound when they’re organic). So hello, banana bread. More specifically, banana sandwich bread. All you have to do is make a peanut butter and honey sandwich and it’s delicious! No bananas to slice or turn brown or have a weird mushy texture (I know, I’m weird. I hate mushy texture…). Instead, you have four loaves of golden brown lofty bread that smells amazing.

Banana Sandwich Bread (4 loaves – very easily frozen or divided down)

8 bananas
1 c cane sugar or 1/2 c honey
4T olive oil
4 eggs
4 T yeast
5 1/2 c unbleached flour
1 c wheat germ
4 T cinnamon
1 T salt
2 T mace

Mash the bananas together with the sugar (or honey), stir in the yeast, olive oil, eggs, cinnamon, mace, and wheat germ and let sit for about an hour.

After an hour of bubbling away, gently stir in the salt. Then begin adding the flour and kneading as you go. You’ll knead for about 10 minutes until the dough gets to a good smooth consistency, only slightly sticky. If you need to add a T of flour or a T of water to get the dough there, then go ahead, but make sure you wait until after you’ve been kneading it for awhile because I promise the consistency changes drastically through the kneading process.

Let the dough rest in an oiled bowl, covered in a clean damp dish towel. It will rise for about an
hour, or until doubled in size.

After it has doubled, punch down the dough and knead for about 5 minutes. Divide the dough into four balls and shape into loaves. I like to make sure that my dough seam is on the bottom where it will rest in the pan – purely aesthetic. Let this rest for about 30 minutes, giving you time to preheat the oven to 325 F. Pop them in the oven for about an hour – check the loaves for doneness by thumping on the top, if they sound hollow they are ready to pull out. I will sometimes start the oven at a higher temperature, say 350 F and then lower it to 325 F halfway through – I get a more substantial crust without burning the bread.

Then there you have it, delicious banana sandwich bread. Slice a piece, pop it in the toaster, then drown it in honey and peanut butter and don’t tell me it isn’t the best thing you’ve ever eaten.

Antibodies and The Dibbler

The operator of the Dibbler is the Supreme Being of the farm. Each and every plant owes its life or death to the accuracy of the Dibbler’s holes – if a seedling is too far from its intended place in the bed, a cultivator will soon come along and end its happy little green life. A plant’s chance for success is decided by someone else at almost every stage of its life. Was it transplanted at the right depth, at the right time, in the right place? Did it get a row cover to protect from bugs and birds or was it left to the mercy of early frosts and geese? Has the field been irrigated or is it relying on the clouds to provide? Obviously, there is not much a plant can do to affect its circumstances so these external forces are really the only chances it gets.

For a person, there can be many of the same kind of seemingly final life events; born into poverty or wealth, availability of education and healthcare, the love and attention of a family or caregiver. Nature vs nurture is a hotly debated topic and is something I am nervous to even dance around. I have been incredibly lucky with regards to almost every one of these circumstance – I love and am loved by my family, I live somewhere that a good education was readily available, I have been encouraged and supported by my loved ones to pursue my own interests and I am, on a day to day basis, strong and (as I am hearing more and more often) otherwise healthy. Because of this, I feel like I have to do everything I can to make the most of what I have been given and do something worthwhile with my life, like I owe it to whoever was operating the Dibbler and transplanted me in a straight line. I’ll not only grow beautiful leaves but I’ll produce the best damn tomatoes you’ve ever tasted (in this metaphor I am a tomato plant). There are also constant reminders in my life of how important it is to take advantage of what I have while I have it and not take anything for granted.

I’ve been diabetic for almost 10 years and it has been a struggle to come to terms with how this is a factor that is completely out of my control and that I have to learn how to work with it instead of rail against it. Increasingly over the past two years I have been unable to digest proteins – first meat, then dairy, and now soy. Like the diabetes, my doctors and I believe these intolerances are the result of an autoimmune disease. Since I was 14, my body has been hell bent on destroying itself without even knowing it. We are still doing tests to figure out what this mystery disease is, and because I am still on my parent’s insurance, it is something I can afford to do and will probably be able to afford to treat. It is definitely something that I avoid thinking about for the most part – my most used pep-talk for awhile has been ‘Being upset doesn’t help, doing something helps’. Since there is nothing I can do to get my body to stop being an idiot, I do everything to make sure to not forget that I am still alive and living and not dead yet and until I am physically incapable of it, I will be out making the most of my life.

Studio Time

Until now, studio time has always been fit in around work. I have always wanted to make it my priority but have never actively created a schedule that made it so. Moving 2000 miles to satisfy a gut feeling, it only seems appropriate to finally be making what I love doing my priority.

I have been writing up workshop proposals (and so far have had every submission approved), I have been arranging my weeks so that at least 2 days a week are 9-5 studio work days, and I have been actively engaging with other artists in a variety of ways.

My workshops are geared towards younger students – starting at age 7. I want to keep working with kiddos and be able to introduce them to whole new ways of thinking and creating. One workshop is a beginner’s knitting theme. We will be making our own knitting needles and learning basic knit and purl techniques to make a small summer satchel or bracelet. The other workshop is a 2 session beginner’s shibori class – we will be using natural vegetable dyes to create silk scarf samplers. I want to teach some weaving workshops and have been playing around with building inkle looms and card weaving.

My workspace is about as fancy as a chair set up by the edge of my mattress. I use this space to eat, type, sew, watch movies, sleep, and hang out. All-in-one-in-one. But it does the job for now, especially since I’ve been focusing mostly on quilting and embroidery. Once I have a series finished I’ll post some pictures.

I have been, not entirely on purpose, surrounding myself with people who are also arranging their lives to accommodate their work. Being an artist, it seems, requires a good amount of selfishness, naivety, and bullheadedness when the naivety wears away. To be willing to live like a rat and bust your butt to make rent and enough extra money to buy lumber to make stretcher frames, to put your family through all kinds of stress because they know you are living like a rat with 2 bachelor degrees, a teaching certificate, and 2 semesters of grad school under your belt. To choose to work in the dirt and to ride a bike to make ends meet instead of a Mon-Fri 9-5 job that you sleep through and hate. I need to be friends with people who are choosing to do this too; extra validation in times of self doubt, extra motivation in times of self confidence.

I feel incredibly lucky to be able to even have the option to live this kind of life. I am lucky to live somewhere that I have enough job options to choose from that I can turn down a 9-5 in favor of a whenever-to-whenever. I am lucky to have good doctors that can help me be able to work and be healthy despite being diabetic and having numerous food allergies and nutrition issues. I am lucky to have the opportunity to pursue what I love, to work with people that I love, to be happy and not feel like I am wasting the chances I have been given.