I finalized my seed orders and now a rather daunting pile of seed packets is staring at me from the dining room table.  The peas are in along with some cilantro (which the chickens promptly disrupted with enthusiastic dust baths) but I’ve still got a lot of planning ahead of me if I’m going to do that pile any justice.

The bulk of my seeds came from my current employer, Johnny’s Selected Seeds:  Lettuce, radishes, turnips, cukes, dry corn, wildflowers and herbs. From Seed Savers Exchange I’ve got a few rare dry beans, and I turned to Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds for some funky tomatoes, which my dear farmer friend Molly generously allowed me to start in her greenhouse. My hope for the season, which may be my hope for every future season, is that I will learn from my horticultural mistakes of year(s) previous. Specifically:

1) I will not sow a full pack of lettuce mix all in one go, a decision which resulted in 2 15-ft rows that reached a glorious harvest stage all at once. You can’t give away that much lettuce.
2) I will not grow carrots and beets. My summer employer, Peacemeal Farm, grows outstanding carrots and beets all season, and at least half of the carrots and beets I planted last May (again, all at once) sat in the garden all season, unpicked. They are now smushy remnants of their former selves, a wasteful reminder of my overzealous planting which only just made it to the compost bin.
3) I will not attempt to plant dry beans between rows of corn without first ensuring that the bean is actually a climber. The nice heirloom soup bean I’d chosen last year languished under the shade of the corn, and much too late I realized it was a bush bean. sigh. I reaped a harvest of 12 pods.
4) I will not direct seed watermelons in late June and expect a bounty of large melons to grace my garden in September. Watermelons originated in the fertile crescent, which is a touch warmer than central Maine.
5) I will fence my garden. This is perhaps the most important change, and also the hardest. I sincerely hope that a post doesn’t appear on this blog in July bemoaning the fact that I never got around to building it, accompanied by photos of tender plants devoured by deer.

Here’s the thing about Spring if you’re a farmer or gardener – it really does feel like your slate is wiped clean.  So you screwed everything up last year, who cares? Here’s a chance to start fresh.  The earth is patient and forgiving, plants are resilient, and all of those little packs of seeds are so full of hope and promise. And then there’s the “green-up”.  Don’t you love that phrase?  It’s jaunty and joyful and perfectly, simply evocative of what Spring means for us four-season growers. Just when everything seems to be at it’s grayest and dirtiest, just when you’ve reached the literal and figurative bottom of the root cellar barrel, little bits of green start to pop up everywhere, turning your frown upside down.  Fiddleheads, garlic, dandelion, daffodils, skunk cabbage, even bland, manicured lawns spring to life.  The Green-Up.

Thanks, Mother Nature. Thanks very much.

We all know the old saying, “March comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb”.  Well. I’m beginning to think it’s just something we say to ourselves in early March to get through what is certainly the most dismal month of the year. Perhaps it’s never been true for Maine. Or perhaps every year we just survive it and then block it out. A few weeks ago I thought we were entering mud season, a sloppy, inevitable time of year that generally gives way to flowers, robins and an improved mental outlook on the world.  Sadly, it proved a messy 2 day tease and now the “driveway” is a frozen mud puddle that crunches slightly as you walk across. The daffodils and lilies that poked up during said tease have not grown a fraction of an inch in the past 2 weeks and are likely just as irritated as I am about the whole thing. Earlier in March I was able to keep hope alive with a pile of bright and cheery seed catalogs, and by choosing some exciting new chicks to replace the 7 slaughtered by a pair of foxes in January. Now the fun is over. I’ve chosen my seeds for the year, ordered the chicks, sketched out a garden plan.  And now it’s snowing, again, with 6-10 inches expected.

I’m sick of last fall’s carrots, no matter how sweet they still are. I’m sick of creamy mashed potatoes and frozen kale, heck I’m even sick of home-canned tomatoes. The 1/4 pig we ordered is gone but I was sick of pork chops anyway.  I don’t feel like knitting anymore and even sitting by the woodstove has lost its charm.

Don’t get me wrong, I know I’ve got it good, but that doesn’t change how miserable this time of year can make you feel. I also know I’m not the only one, which makes me feel slightly better about being such a complainer. At the call center at Johnny’s Selected Seeds where I’m spending my days ’til May, nearly every Northeastern or Midwestern customer I talk to has the same discouraged tone in their voice that I’m trying to hide as I take their order or answer a question.  They usually ask about the weather in Maine, I usually tell them that it’s dismal, and they follow with how much snow they’ve still got on the ground.  Then we sigh and say something like “Well, Spring has to come soon, I guess.”

Since Nature seems to have nothing positive to offer me (and yes I know that’s surely not true, but nevertheless it’s how I feel), I find myself in the strange situation of turning to the internet for hope.

I’ve been corresponding periodically with a woman from Dublin named Ella McSweeney, a woman who I recently told someone I would like to think of as the Irish Anne, if the American Anne were more accomplished.  Two days ago she sent along a little video she’d just  shot of a family farmer letting his herd of dairy cows out onto the fresh spring pasture after 20 weeks indoors eating hay. “Today is the best day in any dairy farmer’s life”, he says in his charming accent, “when the cows go out to grass.”

The cows dash down the lane and into the pasture, literally kicking their heels with pleasure, in just the sort of joyous jig I imagine I’ll be doing when this latest snow melts and my case of the doldrums finally lifts.

I could provide all sorts of commentary on grassfed cows and raw dairy, and what a shame it is that most cows these days won’t get the same experience, but I think I’ll just leave you with the video in all it’s cheery, hopeful simplicity.

Here’s hoping Spring is just around the corner.

I haven’t written since May.  You all know that, of course – just look at the date of the last post.  I’m sitting here at the Bangor Public Library – it’s quiet, i’m surrounded by books, the sun shines in the big old windows behind me and I have to type in my shadow.  But I’m just not quite sure what to say.

Out of desperation I began going through my old musings stowed away in various files on this laptop, knowing that I’ve started dozens of pieces and posts that died a quick death, thinking perhaps I could finish something I’d started. And I find this piece that I wrote, over a year ago, before poundsweet.com, before I moved to Maine, before I spent a season working on a farm. It seems I abandoned it, but re-reading it now, it’s better than anything I’ve got in my brain.  And so I’ll post it, unedited, because it’s still true, and hope that it will inspire me to get crackin’.

Ellms’ Farm
I’ve spent the past few years getting to know farmers, working in their fields, traveling around and asking questions, writing stories, reading books, getting as intimately involved as I could, short of committing myself to one farm and one project. I travel around like a bit of a hobo, learning about yeoman plows here, heritage cattle breeds there, draft horses here. One morning I’m kneading dough for sourdough bread, another I’m learning to slaughter chickens. I’m picking up bits of knowledge, but in preparation for what?

I’m beginning to wonder – is it in preparation for a farm of my own?  I’ve daydreamed about it, of course.  How it would work, what I would grow and which animals I’d raise.  I think about where it would be, and what the buildings might look like.  I’ve written essays about connecting to our food heritage, getting back to the old ways that were sustainable and smart. If I stop, and think, all signs point to the Ellms Road in Ripley, Maine.  There, there is the farm that my great great grandparents worked. It’s still in the family – my step great-grandmother lives there now.  She’s 95.  She’s having the barn re-painted this year.

As a child, I spent hours with my sister exploring the barn, running through the fields when the grass was above our heads, climbing over stonewalls.  I feel desperately, painfully connected to the place. It’s not that I feel a sense of entitlement, or that I think the farm should be mine. It’s that I think it should be worked.  It pains me to see tools so well built that they look and feel as if they could be picked up and used at a moment’s notice, sitting idly.  To see the straight smooth shelves that held a year’s worth of preserves empty – they look sad, and lonely.  The latch on the muslin lined doors (the muslin is still there!) is worn smooth from decades of being turned as farmwives and daughters filled the shelves with jars of strawberry preserves and apple jelly, or took out a jar of brandied peaches on a wintry night.  I open the door to the root cellar, so ingeniously created to hold a steady temperature and preserve the harvest, and find no bags of potatoes, no bushels of apples, no barrels of cider.  The stone foundation that forms its walls is solid, impenetrable; it’s summer but it’s perfectly cool down there.

It’s one thing to see a farm that is crumbling before your eyes, or has been thoughtlessly retrofitted to suit modern times.  But to visit the Ellms farm is to step back in time.  The farm has not been worked in over 50 years, but it’s been kept up and it’s asking, to me, I suppose, it’s begging, to be put to use. The buildings are strong and well built, their lines straight; the hayloft begs to be filled with sweet-smelling prickly grasses from its acres of fields.  There’s a pile of logs, split who knows how many years before, ready to be tossed into a stove. The pump out front is wired shut but it still works.  I’m sure there are old apple trees, waiting for a stern pruning effort and ready to pump out bushels of apples for cider and pies.  I’m told that the old variety Pound Sweet used to grow there.

I’d like to think that my love for the Ellms farm is about more than nostalgia – that it’s about a drive to find new ways to live in this world, ways that respect, honor and learn from the past, while bringing in all of the hope and possibility of today and of the future.  I dream of showing the world, or at least my generation, that old-fashioned techniques and structures are sustainable, sustaining, and important.

A month ago I started working four days a week at Peacemeal Farm, an organic vegetable farm in Dixmont, Maine with 10 acres in cultivation.  After years of dabbling in apple picking, carrot weeding and chicken slaughtering on the farms of various friends in the Hudson Valley, I have to say that it feels darn good to have my hands in the dirt full-time.  (Or at least real world “forty hour work week” full-time)  The trouble is that it was much easier to write as a farm dabbler than it is as a full-time farmhand.  My writing has always been inspired by farms, farmers and food and I naively assumed that as my exposure to those things increased, so would my writing. And yet I’ve written nary a word in the past four weeks.

As I kneel by rows of carrots and beets, scuffle hoe the onions or pot in tomatoes in the greenhouse, my mind swirls with ideas and inspiration.  I’ve become convinced that there’s no better place to think up story ideas than in a field of head lettuce or garlic, and for ten hours a day that’s what I do.  And then I drive home, coated in dirt and sweat and sunscreen, crack a beer and start working on the house and before I know it I’m on my way to work the next day, another essay or book pitch pushed a bit further back in the overstuffed file folder that is my brain.

I am in awe of farmers like my friend Shannon Hayes who just released her third book while still farming full-time at her family’s Sap Bush Hollow Farm.  Honestly, I don’t know how she does it.  I can only hope that one day I’ll figure out what it takes.

For now, I’ll settle for a happily aching body, a well-fed belly and an inspired mind.

When I was in the Gambia 6 years ago, we took a trip “up country” stopping at several remote villages.  There was no refrigeration and it was too hot to cook – temperatures were steady at nearly 130F.   It was there, several hours up country along the Gambia River, that I was introduced to the sardine sandwich.  Cut a small baguette (baked daily in most locations) in half lengthwise and spread with mayonnaise on both sides.  Layer slices of tomato and several sardines, close sandwich, and eat.  I was skeptical, but the sandwich was delicious, and smart.  No cooking required (except for the baker who made the baguettes) and no refrigeration of ingredients (mayo contains oil, which is a preservative, sardines come in a can, tomatoes were grown fresh locally).  I ate sardine sandwiches often over the rest my time in the country.  I don’t think I’ve eaten once since, but I was thinking of that sandwich when I decided to buy sardines the other day.

This morning I heard that the last sardine cannery in Maine will close on Sunday.  I grabbed my can of sardines, packed, I thought, by a Maine company, and sure enough: “Produced in Canada for Bar Harbor Foods”.  You really don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.

The Sardine industry was once the largest industry in Maine, producing over 3 million cans of sardines in 1950, and employing thousands in the 50+ actively packing factories that dotted the coastline in the 1950s. For years, the industry has been in decline, giving way to canned tuna and more stringent fishing regulations. I’d heard about a sardine museum in Lubec, but a little googling revealed that it too has closed.  It seems another may have opened in Jonesport. On a positive note, I discovered a really neat Sardine Society.

More than likely the flourishing sardine industry went hand in hand with over-fishing and pollution of the coastline, but I can’t help but feel a little bit sad.  I think I’ll make a sardine sandwich for lunch.

I’ve always been fascinated by what we remember from childhood – which little snippets of life our brains hang onto for years and years.  Often, they are small and seemingly insignificant. I don’t remember my first day of school, but I remember learning the “16 Counties” song in kindergarten.  I don’t remember meeting my baby sister for the first time, but I remember being allowed to pick out a toy before we went to the hospital (a travel barbie with suitcase and pink blazer). I don’t remember much about the meals my family shared, but I remember, quite vividly, the chicken pies that my grandfather brought to camp throughout the summers of my childhood.

For non-Mainers, a “camp” is what you know as a “cottage”, or “lake house”, and a chicken pie is a chicken pot pie.   My extended family shares a camp on Lake Wassokeag, in the small Maine town of Dexter where my mother and her three sisters grew up. I spent my summers on the shores of that lake – a hazy blur of swimming, catching crawfish, shucking corn, and shelling peas. We would have made and eaten countless meals at camp, but it’s the chicken pies that stand out in my mind with perfect clarity. Rich and delicious with a flaky crust, they, along with soft serve vanilla ice cream cones with chocolate jimmies, were the stuff my summers were made of.
Grampy bought the pies from Mrs. Crouse, a woman who who’d been making pies for decades. He’d been buying them for decades, too, since my mom was a child.  Great deep-dish affairs, her pies had no vegetables, and my grandfather maintained that there was a whole chicken in each one. Each pie came with a small mason jar of gravy. My mother recalls that Mrs. Crouse raised her own chickens, at least early on. She didn’t have a storefront, or even a stock of pies ready to go – if you wanted a pie, you called in an order and then picked it up at her house.  One wonders if she killed the chicken after taking the call.

My grandfather died when I was about 12.  Mrs Crouse may have continued making pies, but that was the end of my experience with them.  I was never much tempted by the frozen mass-marketed versions, and so chicken pies became a distant, if delicious, memory.

Store-bought chicken pies are a staple for my housemates  Wyatt, Geoff and Josh,  Tall, workmen types, they tend to eat a pie apiece, and I suppose it was those pies that got me thinking about my grandfather, Mrs. Crouse, and the pies of my childhood. I’ve done a lot of cooking, heck, I’ve even killed a lot of chickens, but I had never made a chicken pie.

I started searching for the perfect recipe, the “authentic” version of the dish, the version that a housewife with a flock of chickens might have made in the 1950s and 60s.  As usual, the recipe I used with was a blend of about five others.  If you want to do it right, it seems you’ve got to start with a whole chicken, make a rich chicken stock, remove and shred all the meat, cook the carrots, peas and onions (Mrs Crouse may not have used vegetables, but I wanted to), and make a white sauce with butter, flour, stock and milk. And, make a crust from scratch.  Luckily, I’ve learned how to make each of those ingredients, and actually enjoy the frenetic energy that goes along with combining them. I think there is something amazing and energizing about dashing around the kitchen from pot to frying pan to floured counter top in the chaotic dance that is required when cooking something like a chicken pie.

I had such a good time in the kitchen that for a fleeting moment thought, “I could sell these!” So many men and women of my generation are trying to make a go of it in alternative ways, whether it be as a farmer, a stonemason, a writer (ahem), a painter, a woodworker, a photographer, a dancer…a chicken pie maker?   Then reality hit.

A whole chicken raised on pasture and supplemented with organic grain is not a cheap item, nor are locally grown carrots, peas and onions, milk and butter from grass-fed cows, sea salt, fresh ground pepper, and good flour.  I would like to point out that these ingredients should not be cheap – a lot of hard work goes into their production. Were I to sell the two pot pies I made, however, I would have had to charge at least $10 dollars apiece, and that’s with zero profit.  If I wanted to compensate myself for my time, I’d have to knock the price up to $20, and that’s paying myself just $10/hour.  If I raised the chickens and vegetables myself I could probably cut that a bit,  but I can’t imagine I could sell them for much less than $14 or $15.  I might pay that price for a pie from time to time, but I know plenty of people who wouldn’t.

As I picked chicken meat off the carcass and sautéed vegetables and rolled out my crust, I began to get lost in all of the issues that had come up for me – food justice, true cost of food, fair pay for farmers, fair pay for food producers, and animal rights.  And then I had a moment of clarity in which I realized that in making the chicken pies myself, in feeding the people I care about, in choosing clean ingredients, and choosing to spend two hours in the kitchen, I am doing something important and sustainable.

For me, the simple act of making a chicken pie from scratch made sense financially, ethically and spiritually – I fed four (including three large men) for about $20, I supported local farmers and organic producers, and I enjoyed myself a great deal.

The solution, I think, is not to find a way to make chicken pies cheaper, but to encourage and teach people to make their own chicken pies.  Because I understand ingredients, know how to cook, and prioritize time in the kitchen, I’m able to eat healthy, sustainable foods without breaking the bank. We don’t need food to be cheaper in this country, we need our skills to be stronger.

Henry IV, first Bourbon king of France, had a slogan – “A chicken in every peasant’s pot every Sunday.”  The Republican Party picked it up in 1928, adding a bonus – “A chicken in every pot. And a car in every backyard, to boot.”

Here’s mine – “A chicken in every pie.  And the skills to make it, to boot.”

**The Recipe**

For simplicity’s sake, I only made a top crust.  I think it’s plenty, but you can be the judge. You should read through the recipe entirely before you start.  The order of steps could change, depending on your style.  Also, I’ve decided I prefer recipes that read in paragraph format, the way they used to write recipes when everyone knew how to cook.  Let me know if it works for you!  You should have lots of extra chicken stock afterwards – strain it, let it cool completely, and then freeze.  I like freezing stock in zip lock bags, which stack up nicely in the freezer.

Chicken Pie
Makes 2 pies

1. Make a stock
   Place a whole chicken in a large pot along with a carrot or two, a few stalks of celery, and an onion cut in half – you can leave the skin on.   Bring to a boil, reduce heat and simmer until the chicken is done.  Remove chicken, and set aside. You can keep the vegetables cooking while the chicken cools.  Once chicken is cool remove the meat, cut it into chunks, and set aside.  Return chicken bones to the pot, add more water if necessary, and continue cooking.
2. Make a Pie Crust (do this while the stock is cooking)
   Put two cups of flour in a bowl.  Cut some cold butter into little pieces, about ¾ of a cup, give or take.   Add the butter bits, and using your fingers, break them up and work into the flour.  Stop when it feels like the consistency of cornmeal – nice little granules.  Add 1-2 tbsp of very cold water, by drops, and then you should be able to form it into 2 balls of dough. Wrap in parchment paper if you have it, plastic if you don’t, and refrigerate at least ½ an hour.  If I were a more prepared cook, I’d probably make a bunch of dough at once and freeze balls of it.  But I’m never that good.
3. Saute the Vegetables
   Finely chop 1 onion and begin to saute in butter.  Add chopped carrots, and finely minced celery.  When carrots are nearly cooked through add peas (I used frozen organic, since there aren’t any local peas right now) salt, pepper, and some herbs – I chose thyme and oregano. Cook just until peas are heated through and remove vegetables to another bowl.  Don’t clean the pan!  You can make your white sauce in it.
4. Make a White Sauce
   Have your chicken stock handy!  Probably it will just be on the back burner. Add some butter to the pan, 2-3 Tbsp, over medium heat and melt.  Add flour gradually, maybe a quarter to a half a cup, stirring constantly, it will immediately thicken into a paste.  Start adding chicken stock, a total of probably 1.5 – 2 cups, whisking as you go so the flour doesn’t lump up.  The sauce will start to thicken.  Add ½ cup or so of cream, milk, or a mixture of the two.  Continue whisking until the sauce is a consistency that you like – it should be thick, but not so thick that it won’t coat your pie ingredients nicely.  You want lots of it for a nice creamy pie.
5. Put it all together!
   You can mix the chicken, vegetables and white sauce right in the pans – I used casserole pans, but deep dish pie pans would work.   Roll out your two crusts to approximately the size of the tops of your pans, and then place on top of the pie mixture. You can brush the crust first with an egg wash, but I didn’t bother.  Make some slits in the top.  Bake in a preheated 400F oven for 20-30 minutes, until the crust is brown and the pie is bubbling up around it.
6. Enjoy!

Over some Tuesday dinner last year I jokingly asked what he would do if he had to graphically represent Anne Dailey. His response was intriguing enough for me to email him the next day to tell him that I’d been thinking about it, and I was serious.  I wanted a logo.  I struggle to see myself as a business person, but I was beginning to feel that I needed to get a bit more serious about self-promotion if I were ever going to make it as a freelancer.  Ever the intuitive fellow, Randall suggested  that we barter.  He’d design a logo and I’d teach him how to cook healthy meals for himself.  No money exchange necessary – my kind of deal.

One afternoon last summer I sat down with Randall on the back porch of his beautifully restored home in Beacon to make it happen.  He asked me to describe what I do.  If you know me, you can imagine the kind of incomprehensible/semi-inspired babble that I spewed at him.  He asked a few follow up questions, showed me a few historical design concepts that he’d pulled together before I showed up, and then I left him to his work. The result is what you see in my blog header, and on the homepage of my website [www.poundsweet.net]. Each time I look at that logo I am astounded by how he was able to capture what I care about and who I am.  I think the design is beautiful, and I like to think that it is me.  If I were a rich woman i would shower work and dollars on Randall Martin.  Instead, I periodically show up in his kitchen and we cook a meal together.  The last time I was there, I promised to start posting recipes for him – he thought it might be helpful to me also, might force me to write on this blog.  I agree.  This one’s for you, Randall. May many more follow.

Chicken Thighs Braised in Ginger Beer

Ingredients
1 onion, sliced thin
4 chicken thighs (the best quality you can find)
3 cloves garlic
extra virgin olive oil
Sea Salt & fresh pepper
1 Reed’s Ginger Beer

Method
1. Pour 1-2 Tbsp olive oil into a saute pan (preferably cast iron).  Once pan is warmed, add sliced onions.  Saute, stirring frequently over medium heat about 5 minutes.  Add Chicken Thighs and brown on each side – move them around enough that they don’t stick. Add salt & pepper

2.  Pour about 3/4 ginger beer into the pan and cover.  Allow to cook 15-20 minutes, or more, until chicken is cooked through.  If thighs are bone-in, it may take longer – say, 30 minutes.

3. Check on the progress of the sauce – if it’s still too liquid-ey for your taste, remove the cover and let it cook down a bit.  Probably it will be just fine.

Serve over rice.  Tonight I added some fresh broccoli about 5 minutes before it was done and just let it steam on top of the chicken (covered).  Usually I use regular beer – this recipe came to be because we were out of beer, and drinking dark & stormy’s.  Wyatt suggested using the ginger beer – I protested for about 15 minutes, until I came to terms with the fact that there was no other liquid on hand.  Luckily, it was delicious.

It’s hard to believe that my time at the farm is almost over. When I arrived, 7 weeks stretched out in front of me, seemingly forever. Now Hugh, Hanna, Christopher and Emma will be back in less than a week, and I’ll be on to the next step on this exciting, crazy journey of figuring out my life. Next stop: Maine. I’m ready to move on, I think. It’s been blissfully easy to slip into the daily routines of the farm, but the truth is that they’re not my routines and it’s not my farm. It’s time to begin making my own routines, in my own home. I’m tired of moving around, of having my pots and pans and books scattered in boxes in five different places. Specifically where I’ll settle, I don’t yet know… but I’m looking forward to it.

In the meantime I’m soaking in this experience, and savoring the last few days I’ll have here. Yesterday was an especially stunning morning – cold, clear and bright. Six or so inches of snow cover the ground (and my woodpile), and down the long farm road, away from sanding trucks and plows, the landscape is immaculate. After milking (which by now is routine and productive), John & Brendan went back to the house to work on a cultivator and I stayed behind to do some “tree stomping”. When the snow starts to pile up, voles arrive and make tunnels in and around the trees, often chewing on the bark. We stomp around each tree, pushing snow away and tamping it down to ground level. With just 6 inches of snow, we only needed to stomp around the young trees – six or seven rows. If we’d gotten over a foot, John says, we’d need to stomp the whole orchard.

I spent an exhilarating and satisfying hour of stomping.  Biscuit dashed about chasing nothing, the sun shone brilliantly, and I was entirely alone in the quiet of the farm – the only sounds my breath and the crunching snow. More than once I stopped and knelt in the snow for a few minutes to take it all in. Biscuit seemed to understand.

In a commercial orchard, which is to say 95% of orchards in this country, this task is unnecessary – the orchard is baited with poison in the fall to keep rodents away. True, it’s far easier to do things that way, but those farmers will never have the experience of tromping around their beautiful trees in the dead of winter, on a clear day, after a snowfall. I think they’re missing out.

*written December 10

I’m not sure anyone has ever summed up my philosophies on food so succinctly.  If you eliminate all the risks in life, love or food, you’re left with something bland, tasteless and boring. I prefer a bit of chance and excitement and flavor. Give me un-pastuerized milk that tastes like something and let me decide for myself if it’s safe.  Give me meat from an animal that died a respectful death on the farm on which it was raised, and let me decide if I think it could be contaminated.  Give me unsprayed apples that might not look perfect and sourdough bread that might not rise just right each time you bake. I’ll take variety and spice over plastic-wrapped uniformity and bland security any day.
Grohman’s quote comes in a paragraph under the heading “Centering”.  I am certainly beginning to feel more centered these days.  Every morning I wash the milk pails and bucket and fill one with hot water.  John picks me up and we drive to the farm with Biscuit.  Usually one or two cows have gotten out (this morning it was Biddy,  who, as illustrated in the photo below, made herself a nice bed in a fresh hay bale in the sunshine).

The ladies walk calmly into the milking part of the barn, and Milo the bull stays politely outside.  While John hooks each cow up to her spot I begin unfurling a big round bale and toss in enormous armfuls of hay that we distribute among the lady cows and into the manger for the calves who are waiting not-so-patiently to be let in with their moms.

When it’s time to milk, I wash off Fluckli’s udder by hand, talking to her as I do.  We rub a bit of Camphill’s udder cream on each teat – it’s soft and smells nice.  John says people always comment on his soft hands; he credits the milking and that cream.  These days, the milk comes quite quickly – almost easily.  Fluckli’s becoming used to me, I think, and doesn’t move so much anymore.  I understand the mechanics of what I’m doing, but more importantly I’m starting to sense the rhythm.  I think I’d like to milk a cow every day for the rest of my life.  It’s intoxicatingly satisfying and true. When all is said and done I scratch Fluckli’s neck for a bit and then head home on a 3 mile walk, partially through the woods and up through town.  It’s nice to walk the same route each day – I commented to a friend last night that I wish I’d done more of that in Beacon – taken the time to just walk Main Street – as part of a simple routine.

I’m 5 inches into my sweater now.  I’m well accustomed to the woodstove and Gypsy is well accustomed to the house.  I’m trying not to spoil Biscuit, who is, after all, a farm dog.  But she’s also darn cute and affectionate. This evening I made dinner alone – roasted All Red potatoes, garlic, and Alaria seaweed from Maine.  Everything was tossed with olive oil, salt and pepper, and roasted at 350 for about 45 minutes.  Then I tossed in last nights leftovers – Brussels sprouts and ham steak – and cooked it all another 5 minutes.  There’s something special about a solitary dinner and a drink (in this case a Pork Slap beer).  Without conversation or distraction, I take more time to slow down and savor the flavors.

This weekend I’m going back to Beacon for the day.  I need to visit friends, pop into some holiday parties and eat Erica’s cookies at her little shop.  I miss the hustle and  bustle of that town, and the people there. I think I’ll take a long, appreciative walk down Main Street.

Jen and Ezra, who are apprenticing at Hawthorne Valley Farm just up the road in Ghent, came over yesterday with about 6 gallons of their milk to add to my 6 from the week so that we could make butter.  We set up the milk separator and the kitchen aid and chatted about milking and dairy products and flipped through The Cheese Book daydreaming about recipes. We’ve decided to make every Friday a dairy day – next week it will be mozzarella. It’s nice being around other young people who want to farm, at least in some context.

I’m finding it easy to slip into the routines here – to let go of the frenetic energy that defined my last 6 months or so.  I know that I’m cloistering myself a bit right now, but I think I just need a break and some time for peace and reflection.  Yesterday I requested 6 books on homesteading from the library.  I’m most looking forward to reading A Handmade Life by Bill Copperthwaite.  He lives up in Machiasport Maine in a yurt and turns spoons and bowls and teaches other people how to live simply.  People I know keep bringing up his name, and seeing as he’s from Maine, I suppose I ought to see what he has to say.  I’ve been thinking about chicken coop plans and researching which heritage breeds are the best for both meat and eggs.  I’m coming to terms with the fact that I won’t get a cow for at least a few years, but maybe a pig or two.  In my head I’m sketching out layouts for vegetable gardens.  It’s fun to dream about what life can look like.  Even more fun, I imagine, to make it happen.

This morning Wyatt and I picked a giant rutabaga and some Brussels sprouts and I think I’ll thaw out a big sirloin steak. We’ve got that fresh butter and some amazing garlic.  Sea Salt from Maine. Fresh pepper. This afternoon I might make ricotta from today’s milk, to put on a pizza that we’ll fire in the oven tomorrow before making bread.  I can’t say I’ve got my life figured out, or that I know how I’ll get to wherever I need to go, or that it will be easy, but in the meantime, it sure is delicious.