Free Range

This was the view outside our front door yesterday morning. Now there’s lots more of the white stuff!

Just a link (via Justinsomnia) to a very sobering set of pictures:

http://www.chrisjordan.com/current_set2.php?id=11

Making sugar from sugar cane. Rounding up hogs. Making clothes out of flour sacks. These are some of the skills that helped my father’s family through the Great Depression on their ranch in TX. One of my favorite things to do is ask him about those days, and hear about how self-reliant the family was, back in the day. Not to be a gloom-and-doomer, but it’s struck me that there are a few skills I’d like to polish (or pick up) so I can feel more confident in advance of the coming depression/end of oil/global food crisis, etc.

1. Growing organic food.
   
2. Animal husbandry.
   
3. Baking bread. (Been working on this one lately.)
   
4. Sewing.
   
5. Knitting. (Or maybe I should leave this one to my husband.)
   
6. Making cheese.
   
7. Canning.
   
8. Salting meat.
   

Any other ideas?

Update: Another thing to keep in mind… “Cooking on a Budget” suggestions from Simply Recipes.

UPDATE: To add to the list — butchery!

UPDATE: More on keeping old skills alive from Simple Mom.

Mystery fruit

Originally uploaded by Pamela PC

Immature pumpkin? Or super-thick zucchini? We planted a bunch of stuff at once (see here) and lost track of what was what. Any ideas?

UPDATE: Turns out it is a pumpkin. Here’s hoping our little pumpkin plant keeps producing through October, so we can do the jack o’lantern thing.

It seems we’re all getting in touch with the seasonality of our vegetables, thanks to folks like Michael Pollan. (You mean tomatoes and zucchini taste better in summer?) But have you ever thought about the best times of year for other foods? Zoe Brickley at cheese-mecca Murray’s has written a wonderful treatise on the seasonality of various cheeses. It all has to do with the breeding cycles (and resulting milking cycles) of the grazing animals, of course.

A brief excerpt, after a lament about the unavailability of ewe’s milk cheeses this time of year:

If you’d like to finger blame, please look past the sap responsible for sourcing your farmstead picks, and focus instead on Mother Nature’s convention of short-day breeding. While humans and cows follow a lunar cycle of fertility, a ewe’s inner Gaia revolves around the solstice. I think it has something to do with serotonin levels and pituitary glands, but the basic result is that all sheep in our longitudinal neck of the woods can only breed during the shortest days of the year. Here lies some of the pain and the beauty of cheese seasonality.

Very cool.

Via kraneland.

1. Hummingbirds flitting around our kitchen window.
   
2. Geese flying through in Spring and Fall.
   
3. Consistently warm (but not too warm) and sunny summer days. (A lack of need for air conditioning in our home can piggyback on this entry.)
   
4. Our little house, which is chock full of memories from our son’s first two years of life. (This one is really emotionally difficult, because we moved in with the hope of staying a long, long time.)
   
5. The proximity and ease-of-access to beautiful landscapes and landmarks — which aren’t crowded.
   
6. Being at company HQ (almost) daily.
   
7. Our amazing neighbors and the loving day care center where Callum feels so at home.
   
8. The relative ease of daily life with a car, especially where shopping is concerned.
   
9. Californians’ warm friendliness.
   
10. The agriculture, and the ability to “eat local” and have an abundance of organic choices.
    

P.S. Things I won’t miss include traffic jams (really, car commuting in general) and earthquakes.

In preparation for a camping trip this weekend, I rummaged through the garage this afternoon and dragged out a stuff sack full of gear that I’ve had since around 1994. (Yes, I’m getting old.) I remember buying most of the stuff for a trip to Belize I took with two guy friends. Their plan, which I bailed out of nearly immediately, was to start off in the Mountain Pine Ridge Forest Reserve and follow a river to a certain city. (It’s all a little vague, now…) There were no trails to follow, particularly. These guys — who had very little hiking or camping experience — planned to blaze them. I ended up staying most of the time in an amazing little campground. (God bless the Internet. It’s amazing how I can walk down memory lane now, online, and find out that the Turkish caretaker/owner we hung out with has apparently left the country.)

Anyway, I originally packed with the intention of spending quite a bit of time in the jungle — before I realized how ill-advised my friends’ plans were — so I prepared pretty seriously. This afternoon, item after item materialized from within the stuff sack — a first aid kit, a cook set, waterproof matches, a compass, a whistle, concentrated biodegradable soap, a camp towel, water purification tablets. It was all the stuff I needed to survive, by myself, back then. Just going through it, I felt this swelling of pride. I was a pretty damned good camper, I thought to myself. I had it going on. (I even made a Flickr set of some pics from the journey.)

This camping trip, however, is very different. And I found myself looking at my backpacker gear kind of wistfully, reminded of a time when all I had to worry about was myself. And I could ride the waves of circumstance: finding the campground, hanging out with some mountain biking guys, going cave exploring with a local guide, and returning to find out that my friends (those intrepid trail blazers) were hanging out by the pool in the gringo-friendly one-and-only hotel. (They’d given up on hiking after one day wielding machetes.)

On this camping trip, I’m taking my two-year-old son. It will be his first time camping. His first time sleeping in the outdoors. His first time tucking his toes into a sleeping bag. His first time. And I’ll be taking care of him, and vicariously enjoying those first-time, wide-eyed experiences. I don’t think we’ll need a compass this time, but I’m bringing along plenty of diapers and wipes.

—
My rummage through the stuff sack also turned up some really great camping checklists, that I think Justin will appreciate, and maybe others will, too. To give credit where credit is due, I should mention that these are from Oshman’s (now part of Sports Authority) and the Whole Earth Provision Company:

• Oshman’s Camping Checklist, Pg 1
  
• Oshman’s Camping Checklist, Pg 2
  
• Whole Earth Provision Company Checklist, Page 1
  
• Whole Earth Provision Company Checklist, Page 2
  

And they are amazing. Sort of creamy, and deep yellow/orange, and uneven in size and color. Some were brown, others white. The chickens, instead of eating corn, eat insects and Isn’t it fascinating how the imperfect-appearing foodstuffs — with uneven sizes and flawed skins — yield the most fully-realized flavors.