Category Archives: Food

Gardening Gifts Set – 1 Pr Women’s Bamboo Gardening Gloves, 1 Kneeling Pad & 1 Essential Tips Growing Vegetables Booklet

Protection, comfortable gardening and success in growing vegetables is the 3-item goal of this excellent quality gardening gift set for women. The gloves, made from spun bamboo fiber, are naturally silky soft, anti-fungal, anti-bacterial and odor-inhibiting because they actually wick away moisture. The glove’s palms are coated with natural foam latex that provides extra grip. The gloves come in VERY stretchy medium size, equivalent to a Size 7 or 8 women’s glove. The foam garden kneeling pad is firm but offers comfortable support and excellent protection for your knees, where cushioning really matters! This pad is larger than standard. It is lightweight, water resistant, is designed with a built-in foam handle. It will protect your knees from gravel, concrete, sod and other hard surfaces. The final item in this bundle is a 72-page, detailed and colorfully illustrated booklet chock full of useful, easy-to-read information on garden techniques that insure your success as a gardener. It includes info on garden site preparation, inter-planting, succession planting, tool choice, cultivation, freezing, drying, curing and more; and how-to tips for growing over 42 common vegetables, annual and perennial herbs. Comes shrink wrapped as one unit and is a terrific gift for anyone interested in gardening.

Chocolate Beet Cake Recipe

Chocolate Beet CakeThis cake is outrageously good – moist and full bodied. Great texture too.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Oil or butter a 9 x 13 pan  (I use coconut oil spray).

Ingredients:

  • 1-1/2 cups cooked, peeled and pureed beets (should be consistency of applesauce  so you may need to add a little water) 
  • 6 tablespoons cocoa
  • 3 eggs 
  • 1-1/2 cups sugar 
  • 1 cup oil 
  • 1 tsp vanilla 
  • 1-3/4 c. flour 
  • 1-1/2 tsp baking soda 
  • 1-1/2 tsp baking powder
  • 1 c. chocolate chips

Mix wet ingredients together. Mix dry ingredients together. Combine dry and wet and mix well. Batter will be very red and thick; you can add a little water so you get cake batter consistency. (I mixed with my hand held mixer for a couple of minutes but take care to not overmix. Fold in chocolate chips. Pour into baking dish and bake 35 – 45 minutes. Cake comes out looking like dark chocolate.

I frosted with a small amount of genache…sugar, butter, cocoa, splash milk, splash of leftover coffee and cooked over stove top to soft stage; then added 1 tsp vanilla. (you could add rum). Cool slightly before frosting. It makes a glossy glaze.

Sugar Scrub

My aestheticism gave me a great recipe for a home made facial…baker’s sugar and olive oil.  Rub very gently into a clean face and then sponge off with a warm washcloth.  Makes your face feel like velvet and gets rid of old skin cells.  But definitely be gentle because the sugar has the capacity to leave your face red and raw if you get too vigorous.

Oh Deer!

Here on Whoopie (Whidbey) Island, I have no garden space.  It’s the first year in 25 years I haven’t actively lived and breathed through my garden.  I finally decided I HAD to have something, so I planted about 10 containers, with just the right (researched) soil mix, planted and waited through the weirdest summer weather I can remember in my adult life.  Finally, after way too long, it produced…beans, sunchokes, leafy chard, peas, herbs, and the tomatoes were hanging off the vines…and all of this was on my deck, not 3 feet from my front door.

Went to work one Thursday morning and visited all the plants on my way out the door. They were lookin’ good — full, lush. I was finally going to get a harvest!  Came home that evening and everything, and I mean everything (except the sage, rosemary and parsley) was eaten down to about 3 inches of stem.  All the beans, chard, peas, tomatoes and plants, chokes…the whole shebang…chewed off by a mamma doe and her two frisky fawns who’ve been hanging around, and who I NEVER thought would come within 3 ft. of the front door to steal the garden goodies.  Sigh.

With nice summer weather being so sporadic and fall already beginning, and no harvest, I feel like I’m in some kind of time warp.  Leaves are already turning on the maple outside my window.

The Sharpest Edge

On special days, remember your loved ones on the other side with candles, special foods, and offerings from nature.

“…here is the deepest secret nobody knows (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide) and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)”
— e.e. cummings

Today is All Saint’s Day.Tomorrow is All Soul’s Day. It is also a Full Moon, cycle of completion and fruition.

I woke last night to a bright light in my face, Grandmother Moon.It was All Hallow’s Eve, the night the veil is lifted between this world and the next.My Dead Loved Ones were closer and we whispered through the night, delighted to be together, consoling one another that on this side we’re doing OK, and on that side we’re doing OK.I’ll see you again some day, I’ll see you again some day.

I went outside in the deep fog and said prayers with Grandmother Moon.I greeted my recently departed and asked they take special care of some friends who just got there, and others who will be arriving soon.They will.The air was damp and cool in the night. My dog was by my side, wagging her tail, and I cried because I don’t want to say goodbye to her, someday soon.

This edge between the living and the dead is razor sharp.Life without our Loved One is living with a carved out space in our hearts that nothing can fill in.It feels like falling, like in those dreams where you are falling – but you don’t wake up and you keep on falling.It feels like nothing can help or save you and that you will never again find peace in your heart. My slim advice: cry and remember your Love to whomever will listen, as long as you need to do that. It will soften and shift.

It is a sharp edge also because of our own terror of our own death, of saying goodbye to family, kisses, strawberries, butterflies, babies, wind, water, dogs.We are afraid, most of us.And these days, because we are so separated from Mother Earth and our place in all things, because we have tangled and reduced our connections, we feel even more lost.

It will be OK.It will all work out, on both sides.

Remembering and honoring our Dead weaves new connections between the worlds, and roots us deeper to The Mother.When it is our time to die and to leave – and we will, like it or not – we may die in terror or in another more peaceful way. I pray we each die with a sense of connection to this side and to the next.

What helps me stand at the sharpest edge:

  1. Spending these days when the curtains part to visit and praise my Dead, along with millions of others around the world, connects me.You could make a special place to remember your ancestors and loved ones, put out a photo, light a candle, bring a bit of candy (we have lots of that hanging around today!) and a pretty leaf. And then remember Them with sweetness and honor as you go about your day.
  2. Stories and thoughts from other people: Fresh Air from WHYY: Terry Gross interviews poet Kathleen Sheeder Bonanno about her collection of poems, Slamming Open the Door.
  3. Being proactive and getting information: Funeral Consumers Alliance is a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting a consumer’s right to choose a meaningful, dignified, affordable funeral.
  4. Really good books: You Only Die Once and who doesn’t love Gary Larson!  This is a good one for kids: There’s a Hair in My Dirt

Peace Friends.

Weaving Community

Molly and AikoMolly wouldn’t get out of the car.  Hannah and I were in eastern Washington visiting Tara at 3-Bells Ranch and Molly, The Courageous Snake Finder, decided she would very much like a vacation to the Land of Somewhere Else.

As we were packing to leave, Hannah, who’d been praising Molly all weekend for her bright spirit, teasing that we’d like to take her home, found Molly waiting in the car. Molly pretended that she didn’t hear us tell her that she had to get out; that although we’d love to take her, Tara needed her.  She was, after all, a Very Brave Animal, highly prized and valued on the ranch. Molly sighed.  She needed a vacation…really she did.

Connecting With Each Other

Pondering the events of our excursion, it became clear to me that in order to survive in this rapidly changing world, we need to consider each other in more ways than ever before. As Tara turns her property into production growing hay and raising beef and rabbit I’m reminded that rising expenses, prohibitive fuel costs, and erratic consumer spending conspire to challenge us in ways that force both connection and creativity.

It’s the very thing that inspired this blog.

Buying close to home or from one another is a key principle of sustainability. When you click through from one of the ads on these pages, Hannah and I make a small commission on the sale that helps support us and this blog.  It’s just that direct.

Rural people understand what it takes. Patronizing and hiring friends and community members is a no-brainer. Not necessarily so in the cities, where selection is vast and people are used to sussing out ‘the best for the least.’ Sustaining those you care about, those you know, those you trust is the nucleus of community.

I bought and cooked some of Tara’s rabbit meat, knowing how the rabbits were raised and butchered; knowing that ultimately, they served to help her survive. I prepared that rabbit in a totally different spirit than I do the meat I buy in the store.  Although I buy organic and give thanks for the life that nourishes mine, I knew intimately the source of this food.  I could make conscious connection to all the elements, all the effort, that went into getting it to my table.

Rabbit Coq Au Vin ala Libby

One 3-4 pound domestic rabbit

2 large onions, chopped

3 cloves crushed garlic

Mushrooms, as many as you want

Flour for dredging (I used a gluten free mixture)

1 tsp salt

Pepper (as much as you like)

1 tsp smoked paprika

2 c. sake (Japanese white wine)

Olive Oil for browning, maybe 3 tablespoons

1 cup sour cream

Preheat oven to 325 degrees. Cut rabbit as you would a chicken; wash well and pat dry.  Mix flour, salt, pepper and paprika together and dredge rabbit in flour mixture.  Heat cast iron dutch oven; add olive oil (don’t let it get too hot); brown rabbit pieces; turning once.  (If the pot isn’t big enough, brown what it will hold and remove to platter until all pieces are browned and ready).

When all pieces are browned, return to cast iron pot, add garlic, chopped onion and sake.  Cover and bake for 1.5 – 2 hours, checking occasionally to add more moisture (water, sake or chicken broth if you like).  You should maintain 2 – 3 inches of liquid in the pot.

When rabbit is fork tender, remove from pot with slotted spoon.  Make a gravy by adding sour cream to pan drippings and whisk until smooth, adding a little of the dredging flour if you like thicker gravy. Season to taste. Add rabbit pieces back to the sour cream gravy and serve the whole thing over rice or noodles.  If you want a fancier presentation, spoon cooked rice or noodles onto a serving platter, top with rabbit pieces, pour sour cream gravy over the whole thing, sprinkle with shredded fresh parsley and a little paprika.  Delicious!


This Changing World

We all need to face the possibility that things are not going to return to ‘normal’ in this country, maybe even the world.  By ‘normal’ I mean before 9/11.  That event, whatever you may think or know about it, was a turning point that woke us up to facts and fictions that are still unfolding.  The economic collapse that we’re in was predicted; the events of the last decade follow a well-worn pattern, and although we don’t have all the pieces, we all sense that ‘something wicked this way comes.’

Sounds spooky, doesn’t it?  I waffle between fear and the thrill of possibility.  I know that all births are preceded by transition, and that transition is a touch and go time that can last moments or millenniums.  I sense that we’re in a big one and that’s really all I need to know.

Replacing fear thoughts with hope isn’t enough though. Action is what matters on the ground.  Connecting to each other, forming community, supporting one another’s endeavors, talking over the dimensions of change we see (or think we see), being open to new ways and willing to prune the dead weight…these are the steps that help midwife change.

Those of us that operate on the edge may not know what the next footfall will bring, but we are all pathfinding.  We are leaving footprints for others who might pass this way and need to find their way.

libby.tara.finding coordinates2
Tara and Libby trying to find their coordinates in an uncertain world.

Skin Tags

Ya know there’s something to Old Wives Tales.  Sometimes they’re just myths, sometimes yarns, sometimes true and sometimes ridiculous; but in my experience, they’re based around something or the ‘old wives’ wouldn’t have passed them along.  This page is dedicated to all the Old Wives and their wonderful Tales.  If you have one, leave it as a Comment on this blog and if it has merit, we’ll post it!

Here’s one for you.  It came from my mother…

You can get rid of skin tags by tying them off at the root with a silk thread.  Only a silk thread; nothing else will do.  Have I done it?  Yes, once.  And it worked but it took awhile.

Flu Remedy

Submitted on 2009/07/21 at 10:04pm

Hi,

I live in the woods, I use plants for things like burn salve and teas. I like to wild gather berries for pies and elderberry brandy. This recipe is for when everybody’s got a nasty flu or some other kind of plague, and its got you too. Recently a friend was visiting from out of town, and she got real sick….she was staying at a rented place, not mine – but she was down with swollen throat, infected ears, sinus infection – it was nasty. I gave her my best referrals and she got some meds and started feeling better. That’s when I went out to dinner with her – and the next day I had it.

Here’s my remedy – it kills anything – and it works in 24 – 48 hours for me, but I eat real healthy all the time, so that might make a difference. It definitely beats any meds they’ll give you – it’s a quick bounce back.

Take two capsules of goldenseal 4 times a day. Take vitamin C 1000 mg on the hour. Drink as much water as is humanly possible. And take a half dropper of Lomatium Osha tincture 4-6 times a day under the tongue (it tastes horrid at first). And sleep – sleep and sleep and sleep and sleep.

If you tend to have a pretty sugary or white diet, then you can alkalize your blood with two tablespoons of organic apple cider vinegar in a quart of water and drink that, or add some lemon to your water, or make a vegetable broth (any kind) – that really helps too.

When it’s all over, you need to take two caps of probiotics every morning 30 minutes before food (for two weeks), with a cup of warmish water to rebuild your intestinal flora that were killed by the golden seal.

Stay shining!

Saphir