At The Starting Gate...
Day one of my local/seasonal eating challenge.

Pink Banana Squash from the garden.

This is the first day of my year of eating seasonally and locally. There have been some more discoveries in the last couple of days which have seemingly complicated my challenge. While there is a plethora of dairy activity here in Oregon, most of the stores around here sell milk that comes from Washington. ??? Philip tells me I will have to go to Safeway or Harvest Fresh to find the one company he knows of that makes milk locally. Which I know is going to be expensive because both those stores have inflated prices. It's kind of funny because we have, less than a half a mile from our house, a huge creamery. They make butter. So a ton of cream goes through there but you can't buy milk from them.

I have a tremendous urge to make some roasted tomato soup. Tomatoes are almost finished here because of the rains and cold weather which causes tomatoes to split and then rot. I am trying to convince Lisa K. to take me to Bernards farm today for one last bucket of tomatoes. I'm trying to lure her because she desperately wants me to make some delicious eggplant sandwiches for her but I've explained that the only local source for eggplant is at Bernards. I feel like I might wither and die if I can't have (and freeze) some tomato soup. OK, that's a bit dramatic, I admit. Lisa K. feels that being dragged to one farm on her vacation is quite enough. I told her that if she wants to avoid farms, she needs to plan her visits to me between November and May. How can anyone not love visiting farms????????

Alright, alright...I know. It would be the same as if she took me to a boating convention. Or a scuba diving club. I get that we're all different. Lots of people don't find farm visiting all that exciting and can't for the life of them understand why I would. Takes all types.

I'll have to provide a very strong lure. I can't take my scooter out there in this stormy weather. I do ride it in the rain, but I won't take it on a fast highway in these conditions. Tomato soup...tomato soup...can't you feel the warm sunshine of it in your body just thinking about it?

So, about citrus. I can live without oranges or tangerines for one year. But lemons? This is not something I have thought a lot about. I'm thinking about it now because I don't think there's a local source for them. Growing lemons here is possible, but most people don't because they require serious winter protection. What I realized is that all the teas I make in the winter to help stave off colds or to soothe myself when I've already got them require lemon. I don't think they would be quite as effective without the lemon. If I can find a local source then I need to get a GIANT bag of lemons and freeze them in ice cube trays. This is what I'll do. So if anyone around here knows of a local source for lemons...please speak up.

All day yesterday I was thinking about a drink my mom used to make us sometimes as kids. I have to admit that she made us fast once a week and this was supposed to sustain us. She used to heat up lemonade and sprinkle cayenne pepper into it. Very warming. I mean, this can kick the pants off of a cold. All day yesterday I was kind of wishing I had some.

If not? Well, this is one of those things experiments like this teach us, right? Taking on a challenge like this helps us really understand just how much we've come to depend on oil to fulfill our every desire. What I try to think of is how it was for people back when only things that could really travel dusty bumpy roads well, for months at a time, would be available from outside your area. Spices, for example. We often think that our quality of life depends on being able to get our hands on absolutely everything from everywhere. Modern shipping did improve our lives quite a bit, especially for areas with extremely short growing seasons. But I think many of us, myself included, have failed to recognize that the overall price for this kind of global grocery store is much greater than any of us thought it could be, and the consequences are pretty dire.

Oil spills from ocean liners, pollution from airplanes which carry much of our exotic produce to us in the winter, pollution from trucks, and decreased quality of goods due to picking them unripe, or growing varieties strictly for their traveling abilities... all of this means that every one's quality of life is actually deteriorating. Not enough clean air and water are very serious problems. So, if I look at it like this, and turn my appetite to the things that grow well here, where I am, I think I will be able to adjust to a more locally focused life.

I think I should mention here, though, that I fully intend to plant lemon trees in my yard this year. I don't have room in my house to bring them inside in the winter, but I think they should be alright if I make really large coverings for them for the coldest parts of the season. I've seen such coverings in Northern California where it does actually get as cold as it does here, sometimes, killing off unprotected citrus plants.

A couple of nights ago I finally watched "Babette's Feast" which many MANY people have told me I would love. It's foreign so I did have my reservations. Foreign films are often quite depressing, except for British films. I have to say that everyone who recommended it was right. I loved it. I loved the bleak landscape* in it (I told Philip that I would like to take a little retreat to that pretend village, for a little alone time) but in spite of a bleak landscape it wasn't at all depressing. I loved the food preparations in it. It was marvelous. I will admit that it really made me wish I was knitting again so I can knit myself some cozy shawls. However, we all have to draw the line somewhere. Maybe in another year or two I can take it up again. Oh, but I can make myself a wool cape!! I want to wear puritan style clothes from the eighteen hundreds. Yes I do. Watching that film made me realize that I need to get a new pair of boots.

Boot love.

Portland is such a lovely city. It was raining most of the time we were there and I thought it was such an inviting place to be in such weather. It did make me think of you Violette Crumble! I was thinking about how the grey rainy weather gets to you and I was thinking about how you are in a better overall climate for your spirit now. Still, I was thinking about how you lived there for quite a while and I wished I could have met up with you.

I need to go get dressed so I can package up all of the orders that need to ship out today. Then I need to go and pluck all the winter squashes from my yard that are laying around in mud now. Then I will bend my mind to the job of convincing Lisa K. that it's in her best interests to take me to the farm.

An Update: My Back Went Out. Shit.
!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

*Part of the reason it is so difficult to figure out what films I would like is that what depresses me is not easy to know. A bleak landscape actually makes me feel scoured clean, it makes me feel weirdly happy. Like rocky cold beaches or rugged unfriendly looking hills. What depresses me most are bad relationships between people. Or people who are small minded and mean. Or people who have lost all hope. I find relationships difficult to watch. But give me a cold grey windy rainy landscape and I come alive. Oh it feels so good!

A Seasonal Year

I'm kind of sad to be winding down with the canning. My back will be happy. I have a hard time winding down because my squirrel instincts say to bury nuts as long as there are nuts to bury. There's still tomatoes out there. Some late season corn, some green beans, zucchini, and more peppers. I should keep going...keep picking...keep storing things in my cheeks... Eventually you must pack up the picking bags, the canning salt, the ever present canner, and move on to other endeavors.

One of the things I'm going to be doing is looking for a local e-bay consignment facility to liquidate all my store stock that isn't stuff I made. I'm paring back and simplifying Dustpan Alley. This is going to take some time and tedious sorting. The great thing is that I am quite clear now on what I need to be doing, what I ought to have been doing all along. Once I've revamped my website and blog (they will be combined in the near future so that they are in one location) I will probably have to still go get work. Part time hopefully. Whatever Dustpan Alley is able to become, it will take time. So the goal is to clean it up, and also clean up my own house so that I can manage both much more easily even if I have to work outside the home. I'm taking the pressure off of my business to help us out of our dark financial times.

In the meantime, I'll be learning to do cool homestead-y things like using the tomato liquids from my canning to cook beans in. Isn't that totally depression era style thinking? I'm ridiculously proud of having done this. I have another big bowl of watery tomato juice today so the beans I made yesterday will go in my FREEZER! (See how useful my freezer is?) I will make another batch today. It worked very well.

The beans cooked up into a rich smelling thick plain stew. I never use a crock pot to cook meals in because I have had nothing but poor results from them. Lisa B. mentioned using a crock pot to cook beans in though and I've been wanting to try it for a few months. I got rid of my crock pot years ago but Philip bought this one so we could serve hot cider in the store, but his ulterior motive was to then make real gesso in it using rabbit skin powder. Isn't that disgusting? I think he will have to get himself another crock pot for that purpose. This one is for cooking beans in now.

I need help with something I have on my mind. I am thinking about challenging myself to eat seasonally for one year. Coming up with the parameters for such a challenge is not so easy though. You can't rely on grocery stores to guide you in what's seasonal because even health food stores are importing things from around the world; what isn't seasonal for us right here right now is in season somewhere else. I want to eat more locally too, but I think to restrict myself to only truly local as well as seasonal might be too much to do all at once. On the other hand, why not? How about I define local as within my own state? That's still fairly broad. Can you help me devise a plan?

Here's what I have so far:

• I was thinking that I would not buy any commercially canned goods for a year. That's my starting point. When we put things by ourselves it's very nearly always from local sources or from things you've grown yourself.
  

• I was also thinking I would not buy any commercially frozen vegetables for a year. Though I will say that I hardly ever buy frozen vegetables anyway.
  

• Anything Max eats is not a part of this challenge because he eats so few things anyway, I'm not messing with him. The challenge is for me and Philip who has agreed to participate.

• We will only eat seasonal produce. But this is hard to figure out, as I said. I haven't had a fall garden here yet so how do I know when to stop buying cabbage, broccoli, and cauliflower?

• During the winter I will include the following staples on my list because most of them I could have conceivably grown myself and stored in a root cellar for most of the winter. If I had a farm, that is. So I will allow myself: potatoes, celery*, onions, garlic, beets, winter squash, and carrots.

• I think I'm going to scramble my bahookie into gear and get a bed of lettuce, spinach, and chard growing in my own garden. At some point, probably right around Christmas, I think the only thing that will be "in season" are hardy winter greens like kale and chard. Greens that can withstand some frost.

I would like this to be a local challenge as well. One year. The idea is to find out what it feels like to eat in such a way that is more connected to the natural cycles of the earth, that uses a lot less energy to create (less oil to transport being one way in which eating locally saves energy) and in accordance with the spirit of urban homesteading, which to me is living life in as self sustaining a way as possible in a more urban or suburban context. We don't all have farms but we can use the local farms to supplement our food stores, we can grow some things in our own gardens, we can do a lot for ourselves, even in a concrete jungle, than most people push themselves to do.

Obviously I need to stop re-watching Firefly episodes and start reading more books for inspiration such as Barbara Kingsolver's "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle".

What will I be missing out on in such a challenge? Imported foods for one. No kalamata olives for a year? What about Parmesan? How far do I take it? No bananas for the rest of my life? No avocados? Should there be a short list of acceptable foreign products? I think that would spoil the spirit of the whole thing.

If I did the local challenge that means I'll have to make my own feta cheese because although there are some amazing cheese artisans around here, I won't be able to afford to eat their products. We are lucky though that Oregon has so much produce, dairy, and other agricultural products available. One of my favorite flour mills is less than fifty miles from here. Most or all of the bulk beans I bought were grown less than fifty miles from here too.

Spices will have to be excluded though. There is no way I'm going to find salt made here in Oregon. Though I can get (and have been using) a salt that is made in Utah which is a state over from us. That's not too bad. (That's the really expensive salt that i love because it's kind of pinkish in color.)

I don't want to do this to torture myself or make my modern life more complicated, in some ways I think it will simplify things. I very much doubt I can face a lifetime of no avocados or kalamata olives, but one year seems doable. A year in which to shift the way I shop, preserve, garden, and cook. A year in which to really appreciate what life was like before trucking took over. Before cargo planes made it possible to ship produce.

Perhaps I could talk to the produce manager at Harvest Fresh to find out what local produce is available at different times of the fall and winter and when those sources dry up. They do try to buy local produce all year round. So I might get a clearer picture from that.

Oh yes, and I am not going to throw out any foods in my pantry that don't match this challenge, that would be a total waste and I can't afford to do it. I have a few jars of kalamatas for example, which I intend to eat. But I won't buy any more of them.

Well, it's eleven am and I have a bunch of food to finish up processing. I'm not even out of my jammies yet. Off I go....


*celery being the one that isn't storable for the winter. But I'm not sure I can cook without it. Maybe I should take it off the list and just learn? It's certainly a cool weather vegetable. But when does it stop being in season?

Forty-Two Pecks Of Pickles

Late Thursday morning I got a call from Lisa E. that she had procured two cases of pickling cucumbers and could I come over right away and start canning them up? I had been sitting at my computer kind of staring at it in an abstract way for about a half an hour because I was still getting over the whole stress of the twenty minute bloody nose of Max's. So I wasn't quite ready to jet. I had to gather myself up from the ether where my head was hanging out and eat food and think about how I was going to survive the ride on Highway 240. It was important to take advantage of this opportunity though because this year pickling cucumbers have not been available for picking at my favorite farm (due to crop failure) and it's nearly the end of the road for them everywhere.

You have to understand that Lisa and I both have friends and family absolutely boiling with anticipation for more of the kind of pickles we made last year because they were better than most pickles any of us have ever had. Well, that's what my sister, a pickle connoisseur, thought about them. Then my friend Sid, who I haven't heard a peep from since last April and who I miss dearly, said the same thing. She's another pickle connoisseur. So people want more. Obviously I cannot disappoint anyone.

The scooter ride to Lisa's house would be very pleasant if it weren't for all the cars I have to share the road with. There is a fifty five mile an hour speed limit on highway 240, a small two lane back road to Dundee from McMinnville. My scooter can keep up that speed limit without problems and I manage to hold that speed, sometimes a little bit faster, and yet there is not a car out there that doesn't feel it has to pass me. It makes me nuts. If everyone is going to insist on passing me (something that makes me nervous whether it's legal or not) then I may as well just go forty miles per hour and have myself a pleasant pastoral drive.

I have come to realize that people feel one of two things when they share the road with a shiny Vespa: 1) they are scared that they might run into me and so out of deep concern for my personal safety they must pass my flimsy excuse for a vehicle, or 2) it bugs the crap out of them that my waspy little scooter can go fast enough to keep up with traffic and they must show me that they are bigger and faster and pass me and then go fifteen miles an hour over the speed limit to stay ahead of me. I don't find this relaxing at all.

I may as well say here that I am constantly annoyed with people on the road anyway because I don't understand every one's desperate need to go as fast as the cops will let them get away with. It's like a rule with people that they must always go at least fifteen miles faster than the posted limit. Stop rushing around people. A lot of times people will pass me on highway 99 and I'll continually catch up with them at red lights. They jet ahead (oh how attractive that makes them, really sexy, you know?) and show me what they're made of and then I casually end up at the same light as them. Me, who tries to stick to the posted speed limit.

Speed is not sexy to me. This is so far off topic I'm not sure how to get back to the pecks of pickles in question. I guess the only way is to just dive in.

The day was just a jangle of noise and action to me. I had been contemplating getting into bed because I felt a cold coming on and what sounded good was to just stop working. But you can't ignore a pickle emergency so I gathered myself up and it only took me an hour to get out of the house. Like lightning-that's me. I finally arrived at Lisa's house at around twelve forty am. I didn't leave until eight pm. We put up forty two quarts of pickles. I am nervous of the results. Philip says I'm obsessing but the pickles remind me a little bit of shriveled uncircumcised penises. We couldn't get our hands on the freshest cucumbers so we took what we could get and they were a little old. They tell you in all the canning manuals not to use pickles that are old because they will be inferior. They don't tell you they will look like shriveled man parts, though, I guess that's what I'm here for.

A number of you will be thrilled to know that in addition to the dills, we also made a batch of bread and butter pickles. Just to see. Lisa has tried them before and said that even though she doesn't like sweet pickles, she remembers bread and butter pickles being quite savory and good. We cut the sugar in half though. Was that a big mistake?

I feel relieved to have put up the dills. They were so good last year. Even if they aren't quite as good this year because of not being canned the same day they were picked, I feel that we'll all enjoy them.

Stuck At The Starting Gate

So, I have my gleaming white brand new freezer, waiting to be filled with goodness. Just waiting for one hundred pounds of summer tomatoes, roasted eggplant, and any summer fruit I can scrounge up at the last moment. Seriously. It's in there humming away feeling empty, like a trashcan in a hoarder's house. This is practically abuse. However, today is a holiday and I'm stuck at the start gate because my favorite farm isn't answering their phone. I think they are actually taking a day off.

I'm trying to soothe my itchy desire to freeze stuff by concentrating on the super good dinner I'm planning to make: Fresh tomato mozzarella tart with a basil crust, rosemary roasted new potatoes from the garden, and baby beet salad with kalamata olives and feta. AND...if I'm up to the task: fresh peach tart with vanilla custard. Oh boy. That should keep me plenty busy.

Plus, I have to clean up the house just a little because we're having new people over. People we met the day we moved into our last store location. I don't go in for impressing people really. Because the sooner they know who I really am, how crazy, how untidy, how my dinner conversation has been known to fell giants with iron stomachs, the better. However, I think there's a limit to how dirty my house should be when people are coming over. Even when our very closest friends who are more like family come over, I care about not having my house look like the aftermath of a drug raid.

The thing is, Chick chewed up a piece of drift wood and it now covers our entire living room carpet in drifts of salty sandy goodness. I've been averting my gaze for days now, not having time to deal with it. You don't believe me? OK, it's true, I could have made time but instead I made eggplant. And chair cushion covers.

My plan is to do a deep cleaning tomorrow. The first day back to school for Max. I plan to scrub and do (AND FOLD) laundry. Shut up. Seriously, I really will fold the laundry. All of it. Stop laughing. I will prove it to you in pictures. Oops, can't do that because our computer is broken. That's it, no rosemary potatoes for you! I plan to clean up the garage a little. I plan to scrub our bathroom (the "master suite" bathroom that I don't let company use anymore because it's so dirty). I plan to sweep and scrub and scrub and sweep until my house is no longer the supreme example of the grand entropy of life.

So for today, I am merely going to make it a little less scary in here.

The lucky thing is that I do have ratatouille to freeze. So there will be at least a meager offering for the rapacious 14.1 cu. ft. freezer whirring dolorously away in the garage. Soon, my little ice cube, I will stuff you silly with summer food.

I do talk to my appliances occasionally. But isn't that so much more acceptable than leaving them notes all over the house as I used to do for the cockroaches when I lived alone in San Francisco?

I have to go shopping for school supplies for Max too. Which I am going to do the moment I walk away from this laptop. I leave these things for the last possible moment. Hopefully this town will not have run out of #2 pencils by now.

One last note: apparently second degree burns don't heal all that fast. Or remain painless.

Eggplant, Death, and Taxes

I have a plethora of pretty eggplant pictures to share but my six year old broke my computer so I'm writing from our laptop which I haven't been able to upload pictures to.

Yesterday I did a lot. I worked from morning until night while letting Max ruin my computer playing some car racing game. I made ratatouille. I grilled eggplant rounds. I baked eggplant. I took pictures of the baked eggplant I gutted and stuffed with the most wonderful lemon thyme stuffing that I made up on the spur of the moment. Then I ate eggplant. I burned my tongue on eggplant. If I was a cartoon I would have eggplant reflections in my eyes instead of pupils.

I want more eggplant. But first I need to finally procure the freezer I've decided to buy. I found it at Lowe's for a good price. A 14.1 cubic foot upright manual defrost unit made by Fridgidaire. I plan to fill it with eggplant so that when I am longing for an eggplant sandwich in the middle of winter when the icy rain is coming down, I can defrost myself some sunshine. I want to also fill the freezer with tomatoes.

I find it fascinating that my favorite vegetables are all related to bella donna. Potatoes, tomatoes, and eggplant all belong to the same family. All of them have either been believed to be poisonous at one time or another, or actually have poisonous components (as in: potato leaves). I hear about all these diet restrictions that people impose on themselves through a nutritionist's advice, or through blood-type diets and tomatoes are frequently cited as a problem food.

So could a person like myself be suffering because of eating too many tomatoes, but not realize the life of blooming health I could be experiencing, if only I would give up tomatoes? I wonder, because in my experience, when one is allergic to a food, even in a mild way, one can't help but notice that they don't feel good after eating said food. If tomatoes are bad for me, I think I wouldn't feel so damn good after eating them. They don't just taste good to me, they feel good in every way.

I don't eat bell peppers because they repeat on me. They've been repeating on me since I was a small child. I would watch my mother prepare stuffed green peppers with dread because I never felt good after eating them. I didn't get sick, I would just burp them up for twelve hours afterwards. It wasn't until I was an adult, cooking for myself, that I realized I didn't have to eat them anymore, and that if my body consistently burped them up no matter how they were prepared or whether they were red or green or yellow, I probably was mildly allergic to them or incapable of digesting them well. Both good reasons not to eat them. Since eradicating them from my diet, I have been much happier and felt much better.

You'd be amazed at how many dishes bell peppers end up in. You could macerate them and hide them and I will always know if they've been in the food I'm eating. It's like meat, you could make a dish that gave no hint of meat, cleverly disguising it, but I will know within an hour that I have eaten flesh or eaten something that's been cooked with flesh. Why? My stomach doesn't digest it. I burp up meat flavor. Seriously. Can you think of anything more revolting? I know, I can too. But still, burping flavors I don't like in the first place is one of those experiences in life that I can just do without.

You know what freaks me out? To eat black bean soup and an hour later suddenly burp up pig flavor. That happened to me once. Do you know how freaky it is to never eat meat, not even as a kid, and suddenly have meat burps? When that happened to me I dug the soup can out of the trash can at work where I had eaten it and read the ingredients. Sure enough, the beans had been cooked with ham hocks or some such piggy parts.

Potatoes are one of those foods I can eat endlessly. Every single day. Almost any way. Except with bell peppers or meat, obviously. I love potato lore, it's history, it's plenitude. I love it's earthiness. I love how well it goes with everything. I don't actually eat potatoes as often as I would like. Especially since vowing never to buy conventionally grown ones ever again.* So I have my twenty pounds of garden potatoes that I've been slowly working on from the pantry since early summer, and the supply is getting low.

Today I'm reluctantly setting aside my obsession with storing nuts in my cheeks for the winter and I'm going to work in my studio. Finish up a few projects. (To pay for the freezer, actually). But my mind is going to be drifting through recipe books, the farm fields where tomatoes and eggplants continue to ripen just for me. I'm sending them messages that I will come for them, like a mother-ship to her alien babies.**

My own garden is finished for the year. I just picked the last bowl of produce last night. If I had had my act together, I would have planted a winter garden and it would be gearing up. But I didn't. That's alright. There's always next year. Unless death or taxes get to me first.




*You won't either if you read Michael Pollan's book "The Botany Of Desire".
**What the??!!!!!!

17 eggplants, 20 tomatoes, 5 zucchinis, 7 hot peppers, 2 bunches basil, 3 onions, and 2 cucumbers for: $23.18

I picked the eggplants and tomatoes myself. Now, in my new bargain shopping ways, wouldn't you say that I got quite a lot of produce for my money? Considering that I once paid $9.00 for three tomatoes at a pricey (but gorgeous) upscale market* I feel like I've done quite well here. The way to shop during the summer is to do as much u-pick as possible, preserve tons of what you can't eat fresh, and don't buy any produce between four walls.

This is nice in theory, but I do still have to buy some things in the market like cilantro because no local farms are selling it. This region is very short on fresh grown herbs.

I think Russian accents are way sexier than Italian or British accents.

You weren't expecting that, were you? It's one of those things that is just randomly floating around in my head.

It's already 10:27 and I haven't started my laundry yet, which is a problem because I haven't got any clean underwear. So I should go start a load right now. But there's nothing I feel like doing less.**

That was also floating around in there.

Some good news is that our refinance loan got approved! Yay! So if it all goes through smoothly, we will be able to keep our house, for the time being. Plus there may be a part time job I can do from home, but I won't know if I'll get it for a few weeks.

There are lots of little things nagging at my brain right now. I wish they would go away, but they're like fast fruit flies that are always just ahead of the swatting hand. They slip into shadow where I can't find them until the air is still and then they're right there again, hanging onto the wall of my brain. In case anyone is wondering what it's like to have a clinical problem with anxiety, this is how it is most of the time. Medication really helps with the bigger issues but it doesn't really kill the brain flies. Without constant maintenance the flies multiply quickly. Sometimes I worry that they'll start coming out of my nose. They do often come out of my mouth in the form of random and often inappropriate thoughts being expressed without regard to the company I'm in.

Life is much too messy for a person like me. I feel best when I am immersed in a project that takes absolutely all of my concentration and the hours fill with the drive to see to the task at hand. Which is why I love becoming obsessed with preserving food in the summer. I can temporarily forget all my concerns. As soon as I slow down, like today, all the little threads that need tending start to press in on me and I want to crawl away from them and have someone clean up all the messes while I'm not looking.

At least my burn is no longer leaking.

Zac Ephron (the "hunk" in all the magazines who is in some show I've never seen about a high school musical, which frankly sounds like an awful nightmare to me) looks like a pre-teen. It makes me uncomfortable that such a baby face is being called a hunk in grown up gossip rags. Are adult women swooning over him? Why is he everywhere? He looks like a girl.

More things floating around in my noggin.

I think the word "hunk" should stop being used. I hate it. I think it sounds very course.

Well, I better go get dressed. Lots to do today. Like place an order for oilcloth. Finish up two courage boxes. Take photos for Etsy. Copy some recipes from my well used cookbooks into my recipe box. Make tons of food to can and freeze. Work on a cushion covering project. Work on sending out an Etsy order. And do laundry.

Max's bloody noses are back. I'll leave you with that little bit of brain float. Have a great afternoon!

*For the record, I had no idea the tomatoes were going to be that expensive until I was rung in. I have a problem making a ruckus at check out stands, a little problem of mine, and so I meekly paid for the tomatoes while feeling that I had just robbed Max of his college education.

**Right after I wrote that I decided to drag my reluctant bones to the laundry room with a load and I found my "last" clean pair. That's in quotations because who knows if there's really another pair lurking in that mountain of wrinkled clean clothes?

37 half pints+10 pints= 5 cranky kids
(I am surprisingly good at math)

On Tuesday of this week I went to pick silvanberries with the two Lisas and all of our children combined (six for the picking and then Maddy went to play with a friend so we had five for the canning). We went to the Efimov berry farm near Woodburn. I would have written about this earlier in the week but I promised myself I would first write an article to submit to my local paper. An exercise in restraint and humility. I don't actually think my local paper prints free-lance articles but the writer for the home and garden section did say she's interested in covering more on canning and preserving and would like to talk to me next week. That's pretty cool.

So now that they've declined publishing my slightly more conservative article (isn't it weird how the newspaper never prints swear words even in editorial pieces?)* I am free to tell you all about our day of berry picking and canning. In spite of the fact that I find large numbers of little people pretty stressful, I had a lot of fun and said little people only required periodical refereeing. They were cute little buttons picking berries and smooshing them all over their pretty faces and dresses. I have to say that I'm very fond of all of these little people. Even the bigger more tidy ones who aren't pictured above. (Maddy, Rex, and Max).

It took us at least two hours to pick thirty five pounds of silvanberries. Did I not already tell you about these berries? Oh my. They are so delicious! The charming Ana Efimov (who dresses in modest clothes and a headscarf that make her look like a Russian immigrant from the turn of the century, you know I almost fainted with excitement! Uh, I should mention here that she doesn't do it for the fashion, but for religious reasons.) isn't even positive what was crossed to produce silvanberries. She thinks it may be a blackberry/tayberry cross. They are huge, juicy (so very delicate when ripe) and have a flavor that captures the musky wildness of a blackberry with the tang and zip of a raspberry. I'm in love with this berry.

When children pick berries with you you have to pick through the berries later (when they're not looking) to remove all the moldy ones. The most helpful child is not as discerning as us seasoned adults. This work that you see here is messy. We milled the berries to remove most of the seeds and then cooked them down with sugar to make jam.

We cooked each batch for forty minutes. I'm still not sure if we ended up with mostly sauce or if it all set up. It's difficult to know until a couple of days later. In either case, it will be delicious! It's really quite fun to be so industrious with people you love spending time with. Way better than a party in my opinion.

The rewards of canning are so tangible. I love tangible rewards. We watched the lines of jars multiply into the night. We didn't finish the last batch until almost nine pm. The kids were getting quite cranky. Well, mine especially.

I am going to list a few good reasons to can or otherwise preserve your own foods:

• Because it's FUN!!! (many more serious and grown up reasons to follow)

• At a time when I often feel powerless about the things going on in the world, canning gives me a feeling of control. It makes me feel like I'm productive, capable, independent (if all trucking stops, I'll still be able to put produce up for the winter), and it connects me with the past as well which makes me feel a sense of continuity and flow.
  

• Food preserving is a skill and a science that has been practiced for thousands of years. By learning to do it and teaching others to do it too, we are all preserving extremely important skills. It used to be that everyone knew how to do it. If we all just let corporations make and preserve our food for us we lose a lot of knowledge that is pretty fundamental. Food preserving is a life skill. Like building shelter. Like clothing ourselves. Civilization would not have been able to industrialize without people having learned to preserve food against lean times and long voyages. This isn't a cute little old granny skill (though many cute grannies have kept the torch lit for us).
  

• You have more control over the quality of the food you feed your family. In the USDA booklet on canning they say that the quality of properly home canned food is higher and the nutritional value often greater than most store bought canned goods. When you select the fruits and vegetables to be canned yourself you can make sure you don't use old, bruised, or unripe foods.

• Canning or preserving foods that you have either grown yourself or bought from local farms means that the food you are putting up has used a minimum of gas to be produced. The less miles your food has to travel to get to you, the better it is for all of us. Canning your own food is green in more than just one way though. As I will point out.

• Buying food to put up from local sources means that you can find out who uses pesticides and make choices about what you put on your family's table. A lot of small farmers are responding to consumers wishes to have less toxic pesticides used on food, many are not using chemicals at all even if they don't have an official organic certification. When you buy from a local farmer you can know who is growing your food and what practices they use because you can ask them in person. It is empowering to know the person who grows the food that feeds your family.

• Buying produce from local sources to put up for the winter also supports your local economy, and when a local economy is being well supported by its people, it grows stronger and healthier which helps it withstand the influences of the greater global economy which we have a lot less control over. Buying locally is both a green choice and a political choice.

• When you produce your own canned goods you reduce packaging waste. Generally speaking, most canners use glass canning jars which can be used again and again for many years to come. You can't reuse the cans from the supermarket and the jars from the supermarket are not made for repeated use and so aren't as reliably shatter proof. Although you have to use plastics for freezing, the home canner uses a lot less packaging than commercially made food. So canning is a great way to be more green.

• Plus, did I mention how FUN it is?!

*Yah, I know. It's not weird at all. I was being sarcastic. Wasn't that obvious? Am I losing my edge already by trying to write for the masses?

Note: I don't have a lot of local readers that I know of, but if you are local and you want to pick some silvanberries, you can do it now but you have to move fast because they're almost done for the year. You can call the Efimov farm at: 503-634-2813 for directions and information. Their address is: 34885 S. Barlow Road, Woodburn Oregon. The Efimovs also grow boysenberries and marionberries. All of these berries will be available for the next week but probably not long after that.

The Hot Hot Future

Peppers from the summer harvest. The flash on my camera made them look like cheap garish vegetables, rather than the complex cayennes they really are.

Remember summer tomatoes? I'm still hoping for more snow here in McMinnville, so it's not as though I'm pining for the summer yet. As I recall it, it was pretty miserably hot here and I wore a lot of heat rashes in July. That's not a look that inspires admiration. Or comfort. Still, I've been thinking a lot about produce lately, how there isn't much to choose from around here, and in plotting to never buy any vegetables ever again I was trolling through pictures from the summer garden; getting hungry. I went to Roth's recently, the posh grocery store, just to have a break from the miserable health food store. Here's what I have to choose from:

Safeway: a place that is contributing mightily to the destruction of our local economy, global warming, chemical poisoning, and the spread of the corporate disease. We buy most of Max's food at Safeway because he was sent to us from the devil and will only eat Ritz Bitz and Goldfish.* I avoid buying produce there as much as possible, mostly on principle, but also because I bought broccoli there this past year that, when steamed, smelled really wrong. It had a strong foul chemical aroma.

Harvest Fresh: Their prices aren't all that bad. Not great, but I have made immense efforts to support them since they aren't corporate, they sell "good quality" products, and they support lots of local farmers. I want to give the owners a swift kick in the butt though for trying to sell produce way past it's prime, for not controlling the aggressive unappetising clouds of fruit flies always hovering over the produce, and for not staying on top of general expiration dates. Oh yes, and their mediocre food makes me upset too because there's no excuse for it.

Roth's: This is where you go when you have annoying stacks of greenbacks burning holes in your pockets. Or when you just get so tired of your other choices you break down and go there against your better judgement. I will ask you this: what grocery store doesn't carry swiss chard in the winter? Oh yes, and: who can afford to spend $2.99 per pound for "heirloom" oranges? I'm sure the Donald wouldn't blink twice at that price. But only because he has probably never gone to the grocery store in his entire life. (That alone deserves my scorn.)

There's the fourth, secret, choice: GROW ALL MY OWN FOOD.

Because all this spare time and acreage I've got is really bringing me down.**

Seriously, this has been on my mind a lot this past week. Partly that's because this is the time to plan the garden. But also because I feel like the only way any of us can eat produce that's healthy, tasty, and not prohibitively priced is to grow it ourselves. There's something wrong with farmers using chemicals they won't let their own family touch. That's right, there's at least one commercial farmer out there who isn't buying the whole "pesticides are harmless" crap the chemical companies are trying to shove down our throats, but who, none the less, is using them to grow commercial crops. There's one farmer out there who won't let his family eat the food he grows for the rest of us. He has an untreated patch of potatoes for his own family. There is something so morally wrong with him being willing to feed the rest of us this poison when he isn't willing to give it to himself, his wife, or his children.

I'm not actually trying to bust the farmer's balls. I mean, someone should, but right now I'm trying to focus on what I can do for myself. All good change starts not from pointing fingers at others but pointing them at ourselves and asking what the hell we can do about it. I have my own hens, so I have eggs whose origin and content I am in complete control of. I give my girls lots of good scraps and I keep them pretty clean, and they are pretty happy for a bunch of fluffy birds. Some people don't think this makes a difference. But it does. Oh yes, it does. It just isn't a difference that's going to make you richer.

I can grow some of my own produce too. Which I do, every single year. If I had the time I would grow a lot more. And once I'd used up my yard, I would, if I could afford it, either buy more land or rent more. There is no more powerful thing you can do for yourself than to grow some of your own food. Go ahead, doubt me. Remember the victory gardens everyone was growing during World War II? Millions of people were gardening because of food shortages. People were on rations. Do people think this couldn't happen again? What a bubble we live in.

All of these thoughts combined with all of the research I've been doing for the store have made some ideas sharpen. I've become focused on how to make Dustpan Alley not only become successful, different from our competition, but also a company that reflects what's truly important to me, to us, and if not to you, then what should be important to you. Sustainability, high quality lives, environmental awareness, and self sufficiency.

By self sufficiency, I don't mean that we all need to become creepy cult-like woods dwelling self righteous people who don't participate in culture, and make our own tools as well as grow our own wheat. I mean, more power to you if you embrace that level of self sufficiency. Just don't stock-pile weapons and ammunition please. By self sufficiency I mean we all need to have more independence. Most of us can't grow all of our own food. But as I've mentioned before, everyone can grow some fresh herbs. Almost everyone can grow a tomato plant or two, some lettuce. I mean that it's empowering to make things for ourselves.

Most people have to work a lot of hours away from home just to pay the bills. Even when you do this you can learn to cook healthy food for yourself, you can learn to use some tools to build small things for your home and garden. You can sew things. You can fit so much in life that's fun and gives you a little more personal power than you had before. How can anyone not want that?

I suppose I'm preaching to the choir here. I want my store to have ready made gifts in it, because I'd be stupid not to have plenty of cool things for people to buy that don't require any assembly. But what I want more of is kits. Kits that help people get started learning new things such as how to make small useful items like key chains. Kits to get people started making their own natural body care products. Kits for making soap. These aren't original thoughts or kits. That doesn't mean there shouldn't be more of that out there. Who doesn't love kits?!

OK, I know, plenty of people don't care about kits. But they will when they see mine.

You can't see it from your screen, but my mind is rearranging itself. My mind is taking what we've already done and is starting to hone in on what might really work, distinguish us, and offer something truly valuable. A lot of my inspiration comes from my creative friends who all around me are making fantastic things. Beautiful knits, magical toys, incredible food. Not just my friends right around me, and the ones I left behind in California. But you. You who might be reading this right now.

Right around the new year I was asking some pretty important questions about my business. Not comfortable questions, but important. I'm coming up with answers now. That doesn't mean I'm going to have it all figured out any time soon. But my mission, my vision has become much more obvious and my path more clear. Even if at the end of the year our brick and mortar isn't paying enough of the bills to keep us floating, it won't necessarily mean the end of Dustpan Alley. My original vision for my company, thought up several years ago when I became a housewife, has gotten a little obscured. Yet all I had to do was some serious brainstorming to find out that I'm still building what I wanted to build, it just got complicated by opening an actual store and having to fill it.

I feel like I'm making almost no sense because my head is buzzing. I'm not on drugs. I'm not drunk. It's buzzing with ideas. Like I hit the idea jackpot and I need three more bodies so I can develop all of them simultaneously. In fact, I have to get back to organizing the projects and do more research. I guess if I didn't make sense today, you'll just have to wait and see what develops here. I will get that camera battery replaced so you can see some of the projects as they are taking shape.

*Mild exaggeration. He wasn't really sent by the devil.
**Total lie. Unfortunately.