Meet the Neighbors
Barbara Kingsolver is one of my favorite authors. Her book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle chronicles her family’s adventure in eating local and seasonal for a whole year. It’s years now since I read it and the details are fuzzy but I ought to credit it with the premise of the Foodshed Challenge. I believe they settled on their county of residence as the parameter for their sources, with only a few ingredients and personal luxury items chosen as exceptions. Farm in the Southeast, committed for 365 straight rather than just 3 days a month, still the same general experiment. Get to know the sources of your food and its cycles, its schedule. Source your food from places you can see, from people you could know.
I met the good people of Root Cellar Farm in Onalaska through a mutual friend last spring. They run a mostly vegetable CSA and have a booth at the farmer’s market in Longview. They also had an on-site farm stand last year though are setting that aside in ’21 to focus on other things. I have done several mornings of work trade for produce credit with them and got invited to a few picnics last summer and fall. Being the new kid in town during quarantine, living alone and sometimes going days without seeing a human face, I was starved for social interaction. It was delightful to have a way to be around like-minded people with the casual camaraderie that shared manual labor tends to entail. The chicken eggs, butternut squash, beets, and garlic featured in the April county foodshed meals all come from them. The eggs I got fresh last week. (Check out their fancy new packaging—oooh!) Everything else kept in my root cellar or pump house since September or October of last year.
April 10 – County Foodshed Day
**All food grown/raised/foraged/hunted in Lewis County, WA excepting imports allowed on Homegrown days (coffee, olive oil, salt, and yeast) + County and State days (chocolate, butter, maple syrup, and spices that do not grow in WA).**
Morning of April 10 it was snowing and the day barely and briefly broke 50. April 17 as I wrote the first draft of this by hand (I can’t write well on computers, I can’t think well in front of a screen) the high was 82 and it felt great to sit still indoors out of the sun.
Breakfast: Scrambled Eggs, Coffee
Chicken eggs (Root Cellar Farm), butter.
If the butter is Organic Valley, it is pasture raised and sourced from small farms somewhere in the Midwest or PNW. If the butter is Kerrygold, it’s from Ireland and it’s amazing. I have no intention of ever entirely giving up Trader Joe’s. For years I bought Tillamook butter but a couple years ago they did something to make it “extra creamy” which made it both taste like plastic and disagree with my innards. One or two seasons many years ago there was a dairy at a north Seattle farmer’s market that sold butter that they farmed. Butter is not something I’m inclined to mail order or drive more than 10 miles out of my way to acquire so until I find a worthy nearby source, Organic Valley or Kerrygold it will be.
Morning Snack: Apple Leather 2.0, Rose Hip Tea
This time I pureed the apple mash and put plastic wrap down on the dehydrator trays. Cleanup was sure a lot easier and the fruit leather came out in one piece. It took much longer to dry and did so unevenly. And, plastic. Meh. I really try not to use disposable plastic. I just bought parchment paper for round 3. Home compostable and chlorine free. Winning. Plus, it’ll breathe.
Rose hips are beautiful. You could use a jar or a dish of them for decoration if you had space for that kind of thing. I have a whole stand of them—they’re the fruit of the wild rose—I harvested them last fall when they were still plump and starting to turn bright red, after a hard frost but before the winter sogginess had totally set in. I took less than 20% of what was there and left the rest for the birds. They dried admirably on glass plates set beneath the belly of the wood stove. This took about a week. I had them in paper grocery bags for a day or two before I had time to pick them off of their stems. The tea is mildly tangy and fruity and extremely high in Vitamin C. I usually mix it with chamomile and a little honey but it is pleasant enough on its own.
Lunch: Butternut Squash Soup, Egg Salad, Apple
Butternut squash (Root Cellar Farm) cubed boiled and pureed, rosemary (home), cardamom (PCC, and before that ?), cooking sherry (Safeway, bottled in IL—maybe in 3 years when this 16 oz bottle is gone I’ll be making my own), salt (Really Himalayan? Who knows . . .), parsley (home) for garnish.
Hard boiled duck eggs (Rylee), olive oil (Tunisia and Spain), lemon juice (CA via PCC), chives (home), and a pinch of salt on a bed of kale (home) and sheep sorrel (home).
Apple (home).
The duck eggs are from Mossyrock, about 15 minutes up the road. My new friend Rylee is just getting into homesteading herself but has kept livestock for several years and is new to gardening, quite the reverse of me. We will be able to trade knowledge as well as surplus. I bartered homemade cookies for these. Duck eggs have a richer, creamier texture than chicken eggs and a subtle gamey flavor. They are excellent in general but especially superior to chicken eggs hard boiled.
Afternoon Snack: Blackberry Sublime, Double Mint Tea
If one is going to be playing with one’s food, one might as well have fun with names in the bargain. Consider it a sundae without the ice cream. Blackberries (home) topped with maple syrup (USA and Canada via Grocery Outlet) and two squares of Theo Sea Salt Dark (raw bean to wrapper at a little factory in Seattle—I’ve done the tour several times). Next time you eat chocolate, thank an Aztec. Considering the absurd quantity of this substance that I have consumed in my lifetime I probably own their gods a shrine.
Fresh sprigs of mint, varieties ‘Chocolate’ and ‘Mojito’ because that is what the garden center had when I was buying herbs last spring. I enjoyed token garnish amounts last year of one kind or the other. They’re even better in combination. Today’s harvest, the first of the season, exceeded the above-ground biomass of the little starts a year ago. They were still in 3” pots through late spring, up to 10” pots by fall, with dense roots but still somewhat sparse greens. Around the beginning of April they started going bonkers. I moved them into 10 gallon half-barrel pots a couple days ago. At the rate they’re growing they will fill those in a couple months. Mint for days. If you don’t keep mint in pots you will never be able to take it back. I put the fresh sprigs straight in the mug and poured in hot water just off a boil.
Dinner: Venison Burger with Chanterelles, Fried Beets, Dandelion Greens, Cider
My mechanic hunts with his sons, butchers the elk and deer at home, and fills a chest freezer to keep his family in meat all winter. I traded him a large bag of apples for several pounds of game which I have been keeping in my chest freezer for special occasions. The rest of the pound-odd of ground venison left after making one burger went into a stroganoff then next night.
Last fall I had the honor of being invited mushroom hunting with friends who run the marina up the road where I go once a week to get an 8-minute hot shower for $1. I came home with 2 lbs of chanterelles. These had been sauteed in butter and frozen in a small glass jar. Warmed on the stove top they tasted good as new.
Beets (Root Cellar Farm) sliced thin and dipped in olive oil, sizzled in the frying pan until barely brown on either side.
Dandelion greens (home) rinsed and sauteed in butter with minced garlic (Root Cellar Farm) and a pinch of salt.
A cup of home-grown and pressed apple cider, frozen day-fresh and thawed yesterday. I bought a 5-gallon hand crank press that looks like a barrel with gaps between the slats. One batch yields about 3 quarts of cider and 3 gallons of mash. Cider pressing gets its own story in the fall.
Now THAT is a dinner.
Lest there be any doubt, it is the plants keeping me alive more than the other way around. Body and soul. The plants feed the animals who in turn (if things are not mis-managed) feed the soil by their droppings and their deaths. For my living here, my ability to make a go of it and to enjoy it, I owe a debt of gratitude to so many humans as well, only a fraction of whom received mention today for their direct connection to my meals.
The people who owned this place before me, who planted that apple tree 50 years ago and built the root cellar. My neighbor who drove me to see the mechanic when my car suddenly broke down last July. A different neighbor who drove me to go get it after it was fixed, the AAA guy who towed it for me. Zack, who cut and split the firewood that heats my home and cooks my food, who was referred to me by my mechanic and who introduced me to his girlfriend Rylee because he thought we’d get along. The authors of my foraging books. The Japanese craftsman who forged my favorite 3-pronged hand weeding tool. How many links outward do you reach? How far back in time do you go?
Homesteading really isn’t about self-sufficiency. It’s about responsible interdependence. We are all in this together. It’s not a question of the fact of the connections but the quality, whether they are life-enriching or life-diminishing. Honor the connections. Treasure them. There is no such thing as going it alone.