Chickens and tomatoes

I live in a new co-op called the East Blair. There are huge gardens of kale in every direction. Today my housemate Shannan and our neighbor Allison, a friend of my farmer pals Sarah and Andrew, did lots of work on the extended chicken coop for the members of the community who tend to be fowl. We didn't have any proper tools besides hammers and our materials were all scrappy bits of chicken wire and scrap wood. All in all, it's coming along really well. We are all done but the roof. The basic structure was done already when we started the day. The chickens are really friendly and keen on their new digs. Two of them enjoy dandelion greens and grass, and four of them prefer kale and cabbage. They let me pet them even though petting is not the usual sort of thing chickens enjoy.

Since I've been back in Eugene I've been on a tomato craze. I made canned sauce and dehydrated lots of sweet ones that are now kind of like tomatoey fruit leather. I'm going to dehydrate even more for snacks in my office.

Tomorrow I start school and rather than fiddle fart around in my office all day I decided to do around-the-house jobs. Laundry, weeding, and the chicken coop project. Tonight I'll make chips out of some root vegetables as yet another snack for when I'm too busy to cope with cooking elaborate things.

Out in the stoicks

Rather than an update about the specifics of what I've been up to for the last while, I thought I'd tell the story of how I came to be such a derelict blogger over the summer when I'm pretty organized about it during the school year.

I remember when I was about four or five that I would wander down the hill from my house to visit my grandparents. I walked through the peach orchard on a little path between two rows of the trees. The path was important because it was the only official path to the stairs going up the hill. Between all the other rows there were just weeds. Sometimes I went the wrong way on purpose to see if there was anything interesting in the other rows. I also remember sometimes I would just flop down in the weeds and look at the clouds and daydream. It seemed like I always had time for that.

Hills were important when I was 3, and even until I was 10 or so. There was the hill where our house was, the hill of dirt Jay and I had to play in, and the little hill in our backyard by the fort near the creek at our second house. There were many hills. Jay and I would so frequently crawl around in tall weeds on hills that it was almost a nightly ritual to have dad remove the slivers and thorns from our feet and hands. We called these "stoicks."

While picking blackberries the other day, my new friend suggested her favorite ways to avoid the painful wrath of the blackberry thorns. I realized that after an entire lifetime of running around barefoot in stickers and picking blackberries every summer, it had never occurred to me that a life without stoicks was even possible.

In order for me to maintain my life in front of the computer, in an office, in classrooms, and in a generally organized logical way, I believe I have to run wild at least once in awhile. This summer, like many others, was my time to return to my earlier status as a feral person. I encountered the usual kinds of stoicks; blackberry, wild carrot seeds, sharp rocks that get inside your socks and get stuck in your toes, thistles. I encountered a few new varieties as well as a few new kinds of itchy mosquito bites and a close call with a rattle snake. I did many things without real plans. I got dirt all over me several times on various farms, in muddy creeks, and while gardening.

I'm back in town domesticating myself with pre-planning for the year, my first to do lists, a lovely new place to live and a nicely arranged room. Structure, plans, and organization are starting again. This situation is quite conducive to blogging. My hands are relatively clean. My day is somewhat planned out. I'll start to squeeze in summer stories with the fall stories over the next while. Until I go feral again next summer.

What I'm undoing with my life

In the last few weeks I cut 8" off my hair, left Oregon, left California, ripped apart a book about 50s housewifery to cut up and glue onto things, and unravelled some articles for class using what might be called deconstructionist theory. I wore a hole in the armpit of my most favorite grey wool cardigan I found in the street in San Francisco, I magically made a dark chocolate, roasted almond, and sea salt bar disappear, I dusted and vacuumed away the lint and string bits in my room, I sang Sara by Bob Dylan on the accordion and heard the sounds vanish after I made them, I dug up the most gigantic burdock weed in history, made a hole in the soil where it used to live, then watched as I washed a lot of dirt from under my nails and all over my hands down the drain to nowhere in particular.

Before I decided to apply for a Ph.D and then come here for school, I spent countless hours trying to imagine what I could make or do with myself. Meanwhile I made many things like crafts and yarn, did many things like sail around on boats, dreamed up plots about swimming and paying off my debts, and kept many things and brought many of them to Eugene. I admit I was often afraid of ruining things, taking them apart, losing them, giving them up, or changing them.

Until now I didn't ever really notice all the things I undo, or that just undo themselves. I'm compelled and a little unsettled by how quickly something that was a certain way can be undone into something different.

I think I've undone myself a little after all the doing, making, keeping and whatnot that I did before I came here. It feels like I steadily and curiously kept taking out little stitches bit by bit that held the pieces of the old me all together. As it turns out, it's easier to mend the worn out pieces, wash the dirty pieces, and add new pieces when they are taken apart.

For the record, while I'm most undone I especially appreciate health food, comfort food, and bob dylan.


Homemade green juice for breakfast, biscuits and vegetarian gravy for dinner:

Green juice: It's gross. It's totally gross. It's bitter, sharp, weird looking, and I love all those things about it. I have a champion juicer, and any kind of juicer will work for this. Don't just blend 'em up, that will be inedible. The point is to get all the vitamins and filter out all the fiber so it's more digestible.

It's really best if you can pick these things the day you're juicing them, but not everyone lives in a co-op in the pacific northwest:

Mint leaves (any kind will do)
Kale
Lettuce
Spinach
Cucumber if you have it
Celery
Wheatgrass, arugula, spring mix, or any other green veg

Chop up all this stuff and put it through your juicer. Don't resort to chard unless you have to. Be prepared for the first sip to be really off putting. Have water ready to chase your juice. You'll feel really good once you drink it.

Vegetarian Gravy
Mushrooms
Onions
tofu
Nuts (Walnuts, cashews, hazelnuts, or almonds)
Garlic
Olive oil
Fresh or dry rosemary, sage, thyme, oregano
nutritional yeast
black pepper
salt
plain soy or rice milk
brown rice flour

Chop the tofu into 3/4" cubes, fry 'em up in the bottom of a big pot until they're golden on the outsides. Add onions, nuts, mushrooms, garlic, and spices in with them and the oil. Saute all these things together until the onions are clear. Add in the soy milk or rice milk. It's really up to you how much to add depending on how chunky you like your gravy. Add a bunch of nutritional yeast and salt. Let it cook for awhile before you hasten to thicken it up. Gravy is exciting, but it needs to coalesce a little while before you eat it. Add in the flour bit by bit and stir it vigorously. It will thicken a bit more once it cools.

I just wanted a grapefruit

I went into the kitchen today in search of a grapefruit. We used to have many, and I enjoyed some of them this weekend on the sidewalk in the sun. An odd grey cat strolled by and sniffed them. I think grapefruit might almost be tied with raspberries as my favorite.

I didn't find any grapefruit. Just an overwhelming proliferation of oranges. They are similar enough to remind me how much I wanted a grapefruit, but different enough to bother me a little. I started to eat one anyway. I thought it might be good.

Then I thought I would draw it and write about it for my blog. The drawing, although fairly accurate and aesthetic looks even more like a vagina than the orange in question. Not reasonable for this blog. I might draw flowers, fruit, seeds and whatnot but I draw the line at the more explicit.

My inadvertent artistic faux-pas reminded me of when I was three and participating in some kind of drawing project about what I wanted to be when I grew up. I definitely remember wanting to be an artist. I was pleased to think about spending my future drawing, coloring, painting and generally depicting life in colorful images. This isn't a dream I plan to give up on, even though I am fairly sure I might never officially be an "artist" and at the moment I'm displeased with my rendition of a citrus I didn't really want to eat.

Today I wrote an essay about the end of the traditional English pastoral, when the ideal of a pure, distinctly non-developed countryside could no longer exist. Interestingly, this simplified, misrepresentation of rural folks was really for the benefit of city people who needed to imagine a paradise outside the boundaries of their probably smelly, tedious, urban lives. It was a dream that even readers couldn't enjoy after a time because it wasn't possible to imagine anymore.

In general, I'd say that regarding literature and history, I don't really like to let escapist fantasies carry me too far afield from inquiry and critical thinking. However, I do wonder about what I really like to imagine and hope for. I hoped to be an artist and I hoped to eat a grapefruit. These ideals remain unrealized in my consciousness, and unrealistic in my present situation. Yet I'm not sure I know myself without some impractical schemes and visions for a perfect future I know I'll never have. Authors who write about such things tend to annoy me with their earnestness. My interest in grapefruit partially comes from my cynical attraction to things that are bittersweet, melancholy, that somewhat sharply remind me of what life is all about with pithy rinds, stringy membranes and delicious, sour, vitamin-filled juice.

I admit that I continue to reserve optimism for a few things, which I will tenuously admit to here: the mythic and most delicious grapefruit ever, rewarding relationships, some kind of artistic accomplishment, and a big garden some day where I can grow interesting foods and cats strolling by can visit me. In the case of the relationships, the garden, and the incidental cats, it is uncertain whether those are mythic figments of my imagination or real possibilities. Yet I reserve a special place in my mind for the grapefruit of my dreams that I know I can never have.

Perhaps it is the fantasy of the grapefruit that I really want.

Walkin around

This weekend I went on two lovely hikes and saw many flowers. Some of my favorites were the shooting stars.







Both hikes were much more like ambling around than hiking. I had time to notice little things like whether or not there were any four leaf clovers on the open oak savannah, how many different sounds the little streams made, how large the water droplets were on the pinky-nail sized leaves on mossy rocks next to waterfalls, and other such things.

Along with meandering at Mt. Pisgah and Silver Falls State Park, I'm pleased to say that my friends and I ate very indulgent pastrami sandwiches outside on the deck under the persimmon tree. It required a trip to the local butcher, the baker, the natural foods store, and the garden.

It's somewhat silly to provide a recipe for a pastrami sandwich, but there are several details of importance:

Good mustard

Sauerkraut (homemade? see below)

Thinly sliced warm pastrami. You can heat it in a cast iron skillet. (This will be heretical to some, but there's no reason you couldn't replace the meaty pastrami with grilled, marinated tempeh)

Toasted rye bread. The hippies at the natural food store almost tricked us into buying rye that had flax instead of caraway seeds. We figured it out and made the right choice. I got my favorite gluten free pumpernickel.

A side of horseradish if you're into that kind of thing. I am.

Swiss cheese is optional.

A salad of some kind on the side. We went with red potato, fresh garden arugula, sauteed onions, balsamic, salt and black pepper salad. Ok, I secretly admit there was bacon in it, but it's not a requirement.

Homemade sauerkraut

If you live in a giant co-op, have friends who are gardeners, or you just get over-zealous at the farmer's market, the problem of way too much cabbage can sneak up on you. Here's my solution:

Thinly slice the cabbage. Chop up some onion and a little garlic. Get a quart/half gallon jar and plenty of sea salt.

Put a little layer of cabbage/onion/garlic mix in the bottom of the jar, sprinkle a bunch of salt over it, then pummel it with your fist or some other implement until the salt macerates (pushes the water out) of the cabbage. Then add another layer of and repeat. Keep adding layers and pummeling until the jar is an inch or more from full and the fluid level is above the cabbage by at least half an inch. If the fluid is lower than that, just add a little water. Then, put something on top of the cabbage like a bowl with a rock or can on top of it to keep the cabbage under water. Cover it with cloth, leave it someplace dark and not too cold/not too hot and in several weeks it will be delicious sauerkraut. It shouldn't get moldy if it's salty enough, but mold can be ok as long as it's just the weird white salty mold on the top of the water, and not mold anywhere else. Check out this book about it: Wild Fermentation. I met this guy in Humboldt when he talked about fermenting a million different things in his co-op house.

Seeds

Last weekend I went out to see my friends Sarah and Andrew. We met when I was an undergrad at Humboldt and now they are farmers. They just started leasing a new farm and have a name, a plan, and all kinds of exciting stories about how they learned to grow open pollinated heirloom vegetables. Here's their seed project website: seed ambassadors

They gave a talk about seed saving. My favorite part was when their two ducks happened to waddle around next to Andrew just in time for him to explain how hybridization works and why it isn't good for seed savers. The cats were lurking in the audience thinking about how unfortunate it was that the ducks were just slightly too large to eat.

After the talk we unrolled two layers of plastic to put over their new greenhouse. The greenhouse is about 12 feet wide and 80 feet long. We got the plastic up just in time before it started pouring buckets.

Another time I was helping with chores, Sarah and I were hacking away at some invasive himalaya berry roots with the rusted old machetes in a giant mud hole in an attempt to clear out some space for the new fence and start to sort out a drainage problem in the old barn. She said that just as she began to get discouraged about the amount of work it would take to get her farm functional she thought about how I just started a five year long PhD program. She felt better. We both benefit from this analogy.

I can't say I've ever really committed to something for five years, even something I was really sure of. I can honestly say that when I decided to come to Oregon for school, I knew about as much about what my life would be like as a farmer might know about the future of a plant from just looking at a tiny seed.

Thankfully, so far this has been a good growing season for Ph.D students.

Speaking of seeds, here's my best guess at how I made tasty granola for my housemates. It's suspiciously nut free because one of my housemates can't eat nuts. If I were going to add nuts, I would add almonds, walnuts, and sesame seeds.

Rolled Oats
Dry Quinoa
Flax seeds
Brown Rice Flour
Goji berries
Raisins
Vanilla
Honey
Salt
Earth Balance (un-butter)
Nutmeg
Cinnamon

Let it be known that granola is more like a slightly nutritious carby dessert than a meal. That said, I can't emphasize enough how much butter or earth balance all these dry grains really want to soak up. So, put liberal quantities of honey and earth balance in a measuring cup and heat them in the microwave. Then mix them into the quinoa and oats. As for the flax, it is not digestible whole. I threw it into a food processor with the rice flour and then put all of that in with the other stuff. Mix it all together and make sure it's moist enough that the grains are sticking together in some places. Add the vanilla, nutmeg, salt and cinnamon to taste. Go ahead and add more earth balance and honey. It takes more than you think. Carby dessert.

*Don't throw the poor raisins and goji berries into an oven! They are already humiliated grapes, in the words of my friend Jeff. Add them later.

Then, cook the granola spread thinly on sheet pans on about 300 until it's brown and crunchy. Take it out a little before you think it's done and let it coast for a while on the pans while it cools. It goes from perfect to overcooked quickly.

Home in the spring

I acquired my second car ever, another yellow volvo named the creme brulee. It's funky in all the right ways along with being quite comfortable. On the road I listened to the gritty old cassette tapes dad "archived" from my childhood. One of my favorites is Don McLean on side 1 and Elton John's first album on side 2. This is the song I especially liked while driving north from Mt. Shasta: Winterwood on American Pie (1971)

At Grandma Betty's house, overlooking the oakey banks of the Sacramento River, we enjoyed our usual activities: knitting, watching Judge Judy, talking about genealogy, and doing chores. After my morning Yoga on the patio, I watered the plants to prepare for weeding. Then Grandma got out her favorite long narrow spade and I grabbed a five gallon bucket for the weeds. She sat down and worked on some insidious oxalis while I wrestled with several tall, prickly milkweeds (the kind that I had to squat down and grip with both hands to uproot). A few times when I finally yanked the stubborn ones up out out of the ground I fell back on my butt and got a tickley sprinkling of dirt all over my face and hair.

The last place we weeded was the wine barrel planter under the fig tree. There were a few scrawny reddish leaves shyly stretching up from the dark brown soil that was nearly vacant but for the leaves and a few acorns the squirrels buried for later. The leaves were two lonely beets, no bigger around than a quarter. My favorite of grandma's pickles (although they're a close second to dilly beans) are pickled beets. I remember delighting in them as a child and always being warned that they were capable of causing eternal stains on carpets, counters, clothes, and anything else of consequence. Grandma planted those little beets in the hopes that by my next visit there would be a few jars of my favorite pickles. For reasons unknown, the messy dark red (usually pickleable) roots averted their destiny and became weeds.

During my trip, I most vividly remember two feelings. The first was the overwhelming feeling of seeing people who really love me and really appreciate our time together (even though they know I'm a bit nutty). There was something very reassuring about all the hugs I got along the way from the Bay Area to Eugene.

The other feeling I had was a weird intrigue at the diversity of memories that all mean something like "home." Here are some tidbits from the dictionary:

Home: the place or region where something is native or most common. the place in which one's domestic affections are centered. the dwelling place or retreat of an animal.

I am most commonly found in the greater bioregion of Northern California and Southern Oregon. I have many dwelling places and retreats. A few of the ones I visited last week were:

Cal's used bookstore in Redding where I used to spend countless hours in dusty corners reading hardback copies of Vonnegut and Jean Rose's Herbal Body Book while the owner and his yellow cat got stoned together up front, filtering through the romance novels and setting aside beautiful art books, rarities, and poetry anthologies. I bought a large illustrated hardback called The Art of Natural History, a small cheap paperback from 1968 called Zen Macrobiotic Cooking, and a long awaited art book of Picasso.

Jasmin's room: My friend Jasmin has a simple, beautiful room with a strangely hideous light fixture on the ceiling. She lives in a classic San Francisco victorian flat with wood floors, tall ceilings, picture molding, and the light fixture in question has two off-white frosted glass pieces on it with tacky coral colored roses painted on the inside. The wires dangle out of the top. I like to rest on her bed, talking to her about our lives, and analyzing how such an otherwise beautiful room can have such an incongruously strange thing on the ceiling.

Eric's Car: A few years ago, after work my friend Eric would drive me home even though I lived only four blocks away. Four small San Francisco blocks. He would drive the 2 minutes then park in front of my basement door and we would talk and laugh for sometimes as much as an hour. Last week I got another equally short drive from his parking space on 19th and Valencia to a bar on 16th and Mission. Four short blocks. We circled around a few times to make sure our conversation could last as long as possible.

My parent's couch: It's not really for short people, as is true of most futons. They lean back just so that my legs don't touch the ground and the couch kind of eats my butt so it's hard to get up. Yet we all pile on there, cat included, to watch movies and laugh together. My parents have a whole house full of chairs, yet I can't resist the mostly uncomfortable couch.

As for the place where my domestic affections are centered, I must admit my affections are decentralized into many connected yet independent entities. I can't call Eugene home, and I learned by walking, driving, and singing my way around my commonly inhabited bioregion that there's no need to have just one home. In contrast to the certainty of the hugs, I remember thinking about the ambiguity of home. Like those sneaky little beets that refused to become my favorite pickle, I don't want to assume the inevitability that if I'm planted in Eugene, it will become my only home. I like the air, the ground, the sun, and the beets around here better if I know there are endless varieties of beets.