BROOKLYN BUMPKIN

Butter update and confessions of a crap parent

2012-12-13T13:16:00.000-08:00

Butter update: Since starting the kids on a no-sugar, no-refined grains, a la Nourishing Traditions, just in time for the holidays seems ill-judged, I'm reigning in the butter consumption in the Pitkin-Kennedy household.

However, I'm fired up for January. Since I do have some trust issues with the Nourishing Traditions cookbook, I was very happy to find a source for similar information that appears more credible: http://www.traditional-foods.com/ It all seems a bit more scientifically and common sensically grounded.

Meanwhile, I'm thinking long and hard about homeschooling. In theory, I think it would be great for Forest.

2012-12-04T12:44:00.000-08:00

Life looks different through doom colored glasses. (See this post to understand why I'm sporting a pair.) Glasses of doom do not, as one might expect, have drab depressing tints. In fact, they are rather psychedelic, intensifying perceptions and emotions. Especially when you first start wearing them, especially when what is doomed is Life As We Know It and involves lots of people dying. (Of course, the numbers of people who die depends on how quickly we can get our act together on cutting emissions. And even if we all stop driving and switch off our computers right now there will be more "extreme weather events" that will kill people. The longer we keep the devices, the cars, and the appliances on, the more people will die.) Whatever the case, these glasses are so intense most people shut their eyes and/or perform all manner of mental tricks to get them off. That response is Read more »

Two important things about eating lots of butter

2012-11-26T12:36:00.000-08:00

All butters are not created equal, and I have been on a grueling quest to find the right butter for my family. Of course I want butter from raw milk, but I also want the best quality fats available. This means butter made out of grass.

Here are some of the butters to be found in our fridge:

As you can see, the large block of butter in the back is much yellower than the other two butters.

When we started getting eggs from our chickens, we were amazed by the color of the yolks. Our chickens roam around all day eating whatever they can find. The eggs that
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Our Goose is Cooked II

2012-11-21T11:37:00.002-08:00

Same basic idea as my post, just more comprehensive: Tom Zeller Jr. on the Huffington Post. Highly recommended reading.

Our goose is cooked

2012-11-20T12:13:00.000-08:00

One of the three geese in our freezer is now cooked, and it was tasty--more like roast beef than chicken--but leathery. There is a real learning curve to cooking wild game. But I'm glad to be getting my kids used to tough, gamey meat because barring a radical, geopolitical shift, it looks like our collective goose is cooked. It is entirely possible that someday they may have to rely on hunting to feed themselves.

I used to think my future grand kids
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I like it raw, baby.

2012-11-15T07:43:00.001-08:00

I haven’t had my cholesterol checked, but my butter & cream diet is working for me in one regard: my clothes are fitting better*. Eating such rich food is so sating. In part, I think there is an Atkins-esque effect which dampens my appetite so that
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Per-week butter consumption in my family = several pounds

2012-11-08T10:52:00.000-08:00

So, why the butter and cream diet? Well, this is phase one of a new restrictive diet we are rolling out in our house. We also have reduced added sugars to almost none and switched our dairy to raw and non-homogenized. I’m putting off rolling out the next phase: no refined grains, since I'm not ready to say goodbye to pie crust. That, and all the extra work I anticipate.

Why this new diet? Primarily for the kids’ health, but also for ours. The reasoning behind this new dietary experiment follows.

Sleeper and tarts

2012-11-07T08:15:00.000-08:00

I am now on a butter and cream diet. So naturally, I keep thinking of that scene in Woody Allen’s Sleeper when he learns that all the foods he thought were nutritious are not, whereas all the forbidden foods have proven wholesome and healthy.

For years, I read in the nutrition rags that sugar is nothing to get too worked up about—not nutritious calories, but not harmful either. Fat, on the other hand, was almost always to be minimized. I never thought the day would come that I’d be following Moosewood, Silver Palate, and Victory Garden recipes without reducing the called-for fat, while skimping on the sugar. But here I am, and boy, it’s a yummy place to be. This also explains my new obsession with tarts.

I'm still working on mastering pie/tart crust.

I guess I didn't add enough water this time.

But thanks to the pie crust pointers Phyllis of Dash and Bella shares here I have greater confidence when things don't come together just right. I had to press lots of loose crumbs into this and generally smush it together. Nor did I manage to roll it big enough to fill the pan.

I forged ahead regardless.

We brought in the remaining tomatoes from our three tomato plants, including the green ones, before getting a hard freeze. I've never cooked with green tomatoes before.

Conclusions:
Green tomatoes are surprisingly sweet.
Amateur tarts are surprisingly delicious.

More on why I’m eating so much butter and cream soon.

Forest's only hunting expedition (for now)

2012-11-06T07:15:00.002-08:00

Forest is not down with killing animals. Last night he told Aaron he only wanted to trap if they could look at the animals and then let them go, not if it meant killing them.

Not a NBK

So his first hunting expedition is his last for the time being (or forever, who knows).

I am curious if he will start questioning eating meat.

Aaron and Forest came up with a new plan: go "hunting" with a camera and play hide and seek in the woods.

Forest’s first hunting expedition

2012-11-05T05:49:00.000-08:00

Shortly after Forest’s third birthday, he wandered out of the house moments after Aaron had slit the throats of two cantankerous roosters. Aaron’s face was sprayed with blood, and one of the roosters was still convulsing. Forest stayed with Aaron while he processed the birds, and he seemed unfazed by the death and gore. But after they came back into the house, Aaron saw Forest studying himself in the mirror and saying, “Now I'm different.” Did Forest really see his first encounter with death as so significant, or are we simply over-laying our impressions on a random comment from him? Whatever the case, we never saw any signs that he was distressed by what he had witnessed.

Now, at just over four-and-a-half, Forest went on his first hunting trip last weekend. With enough time to make it home for lunch,

Where we live and what we do for fun

2012-10-30T12:43:00.001-07:00

As the leaves fall off the trees and vistas open up, I'm re-amazed at how beautiful it is around here.

Our backyard isn't in the running for any beauty prizes, but I love it regardless. Aaron has been building a fort with the boys in our backyard. We all worked on it this weekend. SuperDuperUperStorm Sandy didn't hit very hard here, but it has been windy enough that we wonder how our fort has fared.

Hunting season started on Saturday, hence the orange caps.

More evidence that patriarcy is effective

2012-10-25T12:31:00.000-07:00

I recently heard a piece on NPR about new research on social mobility (or lack therof) by economic historian Gregory Clark.

"If I just know that you share a rare surname with someone who was wealthy in 1800, I can predict now that you're nine times more likely to attend Oxford or Cambridge. You're going to live two years longer than an average person in England. You're going to have more wealth. You're more likely to be a doctor. You're more likely to be an attorney," Clark says.
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Heartfelt thanks

2012-10-22T06:42:00.000-07:00

It took all day for Aaron to process the three geese. Mostly, I was busy with other chores, but I did take pictures and do some plucking. The other birds I plucked, some chickens for a friends’ farm wedding years ago, had long clear worms in some of the feather follicles, and many little gnat-y, itchy “chicken fleas” that leapt of the chickens and onto us as we plucked. Iggy, iggy, iggy. The geese were pest-free and oddly endearing. I think because their feathers are so soft and because their beaks have a little up-turn at the base, so they appear quite cheerful about the whole affair.

Stop here if you don’t want to see dead-bird and dead-bird innards pictures.

Our goose ain't cooked

2012-10-17T11:53:00.001-07:00

Last Monday, Aaron went goose hunting and shot a Lesser Canada Goose:

His hunting partners were kind enough to give him two of their geese, so we now have three geese to cook. I thought I’d share our adventures in goose cooking.

Of course, when you kill the animal yourself, it takes a while to get to the cooking

That attitude of gratitude

2011-11-28T11:52:00.001-08:00

I enjoyed John Tierney's article on the importance of gratitude. I've long thought gratitude akin to flossing, but good for my mental, not dental, health. Still, despite my best intentions to focus on the full half of the glass, I often end up wondering if organized religion would help. It isn't that I don't feel gratitude on a frequent, regular, and heart-felt-basis, but rather that I one-eighty out of it so fast there isn't even any danger of whiplash, it's quantum. I'll be awash in warm-fuzzies when, like an “I Dream of Jeannie” special-effect, I'm facing the exact opposite way in the space of one frame, wondering why it was, exactly, that I thought having kids was a good idea, or bemoaning no closets, or pining for a dishwasher.

The fact of the matter is I have oodles to be grateful for this holiday season. Two shining examples are the drainpipe on our washing machine and our propane refrigerator. Prior to the drainpipe installation, each load of laundry meant carrying three carboys full of water from the utility room across the house to the kitchen sink for dumping. I didn't feel sorry for myself, but did spend a fair amount of time thinking, “this is ridiculous.” In October, Aaron hooked up a drainpipe and hot water to the washing machine (which involved running pipe from the utility room, under the house, across the house, to the kitchen sink drain). Now, it is a joy to put in a load and forget about it as I corral, cajole, and care-take the kidlets, hanging the laundry up to dry after they have gone to bed. And switching from an electric to a propane fridge has meant we run our generator about 75% less than we did and can go away for the weekend without getting rid of all of the food in the fridge and freezer. (Talk about an ultra-ridiculous situation.) Enjoy your refrigeration, it is energy intensive, but think how differently you'd be eating without it.

Anniversary

2011-11-22T10:45:00.001-08:00

I just had my one-year anniversary of moving out of Brooklyn. In the weeks before we left, Aaron kept asking me if I thought I was going to be happy living in the country. “I don't know,” was all I could answer, “would I be happy living on the moon?” To me, Maine, the country, not-New York, all felt as alien as a cold ball of rock and metal far, far away. (With much better potential, of course.) But the thing about moving to the moon—apart from the isolation—would be the crazy learning curve of adjusting to life on a space station, with all the maintenance, the repairs, the new weather conditions, the limited laundry, the connectivity issues (although internet access may well be faster up there, than it is here in our cabin), and learning to relax into all the other new-normals that are not yet the least bit normal. To go from the call-the-landlord-maintenance you get when renting an apartment to living on a non-town maintained road, in an ailing off-the-grid cabin has, in retrospect, meant a bit more chewing than we were ready for. The up side: we certainly have learned a lot. The down side: we have oh, so very much more to learn.

I wish I'd had the time and the wherewithal to keep this blog up over the past year, but my time (my life) has been swallowed up by these starlets:

I look forward to having more time for writing, someday...

Full circle

2011-05-03T18:24:00.000-07:00

This morning I looked down and saw a tick meandering across the jeans Forest left lying on the bathroom floor. And so, we are back where we started. I put the tick in the toilet and the jeans in the hamper. Then, a few moments later, I felt a tickle on the bottom of my foot. I pulled off my sock and found exactly what I expected to, nothing. The creepy-crawlies of tick season feel more real than the actual ticks.

Ahem

2011-05-01T18:23:00.000-07:00

No more than a quick throat clearing with this re-entry into blogging. Certain third world conditions around here currently have the upper hand over me. Which is to say, our water is not what it should be and, consequently, nor are my guts.

My apologies for the abrupt, unexplained hiatus from blogging. I blame winter, my children, and inertia. The long winter started to get me a little down by the absurdly protracted end of it. (Over a foot of snow on April 1!?!) My children don't let me sleep anywhere near enough for normal brain function. And inertia can be powerful. Once I stopped posting, staying stopped was comfy and easy. I'll do my best to get inertia working in the opposite direction.

Today, I transplanted the beet and rutabaga seedlings Aaron started in our house. Aaron also put in collards and swiss chard. We started at the top of our field and have many more trays of seedlings to go.

More soon.

So much to learn. (Vegetarian discretion advised)

2011-03-09T08:51:00.000-08:00

We were offered two aggressive roosters by vegetarian friends who keep chickens and don't like being attacked when entering the coop. As earlier mentioned, I feel that, as a meat eater, the responsible thing is to face the death behind at least a few of the meat-based meals I eat. But my feet started getting cold the night before the roosters were due to arrive. I was very glad somebody had to stay with the kids, leaving me no choice but to sit out yet another slaughter. Turns out, proximity to death matters. At one point, I went out to check on Aaron and make sure the attack roosters hadn't gotten the upper hand. I found him skinning the first bird, bright blood drippings on the dirty snow and milk carton he'd set under the now half naked rooster. Later, when Aaron came in, his cheek was dripping with blood. Happily, he'd been sprayed, not slashed.

After skinning both birds, Aaron finished the processing in our kitchen sink.

Forest was eager to eat the birds after getting over his initial disappointment that we weren't keeping them as pets. The blood, guts, and blue-grey feet didn't bother him in the least. I also watched the proceedings, impressed by Aaron's skill. Decapitating, skinning, eviscerating without any apparent hesitation or mistakes, Aaron turned two roosters crowing in their cat carriers into supper ingredients. The advantage of growing up hunting.

As happy as we were to have the meat, it made us both very sad. Aaron said the second bird almost got a last minute reprieve. “They were such beautiful birds. And it always makes me sad to kill.” I was also somber and, truth be told, a bit grossed out by the smell of fresh flesh. Then I started getting tired. Stupefyingly tired. My limbs felt melty, my mind went fuzzy, and I kept tripping. Aaron sent me to bed for a bit, while he bathed the kids. I felt guilty, but I was in such a torpor, I couldn't say no to rest. Was this a reaction to the death of these birds? As the evening wore on, my throat got sore and I had joint aches all over. I became convinced I was getting sick, but then I was perfectly health the next morning. We'll see what happens the next time we kill.

And, it turns out, there is a learning curve with cooking year-old roosters. Aaron wanted to roast one, despite my skepticism, we did. (Really, we steamed it since it was covered with tinfoil.) The result: delicious chicken-shoe, which is to say, excellent taste, awful texture. I wanted to stew one and picked a recipe intended for old roosters, coq au vin. I'm not all that experienced at cooking meat and totally flubbed the dish. (I guess the bacon and the brandy flambe step were more crucial than I thought.) The ingredients didn't come together and transform into a whole greater than the parts, instead the wine sauce tasted like greasy wine and the now purple chicken pieces tasted like greasy wine-flavored chicken. The texture, although better than the chicken-shoe, wasn't all that impressive either. Forest said, “It tastes funky,” and ate bread for dinner. I'm hoping (but not hopeful) that, as promised in the cookbook, the flavors will meld and improve with sitting overnight. Of course it is all the same to those roosters whether we enjoy eating them—in fact, probably nicer for them if we suffer a bit—, but to me it seems they deserved better for the lives we took from them.

I'm cooking as fast as I can

2011-03-02T19:06:00.000-08:00

Forest had his first day of preschool today. He obviously had a marvelous time, and I was planning to blog tonight, figuring I'd coast on that wave of one-kid-only productivity right into the evening. Then, as I was getting Walker to sleep, I started thinking about the next task on tap: preparing Forest's lunch for school tomorrow. With the cupboards as bare of prepared food as they are that meant starting from scratch. So, this evening I baked bread, hard-boiled eggs, made egg salad, and then, exhaustion be damned, blogged.

Way, way too much stuff

2011-02-14T17:54:00.000-08:00

Although Spring is in sniffing distance today, we are still deep in snow around here. And, sad to say, still deep in boxes. Yup, when you are prepping for Armageddon and future craft projects the stuff really piles up. Aaron and I usually agree on how we want to live our lives, but not, alas, on what should be saved and what should be thrown away. So, we save it all.

I'm probably the worst of the worst, an ex-crafter who wants to craft again. I know what's needed, but I don't actually use any of it. The other day, I had trouble parting with a piece of cardboard. It was the perfect weight to use as backing for, well, something that I might someday make with Forest (or, since the time flies so fast, with Walker). Meanwhile, Aaron can't part with the smallest scrap of cordage. (There is no string in this cabin, only cordage.) Apparently, you can never have enough of the stuff. And, since I'm obsessed with knitting, I have more boxes filled with yarn than I care to disclose. In fact, if Christo decided to wrap our cabin he wouldn't need to apply for any grants, we could probably make up to the roof with the yarn and cordage we have on hand. But, boy, if things really fall apart, we'll be sitting pretty with our freeze-dried butter powder and tubes of glitter glue.

Speaking of food

2011-02-08T17:10:00.000-08:00

As I mentioned, a big reason we are here is our interest in food production. Cooking our own food and eating family meals is also a priority. (Especially after reading Michael Pollan's In Defense of Food.) Now, while icicles are the only thing growing around our place, is a great time for using the oven, so I've been baking all our bread.

Meanwhile, after my creme fraiche success, I was eager to make more cheese. Here is some cream cheese I made, spread on homemade bread.

The jar with white stuff in it is the rest of the cream cheese, the yellow-green jar of liquid is the whey that drained off from the cream cheese. (I have since used the whey instead of water in a magically delicious loaf of bread.) The little hand is Forest's. He loves cream cheese and was very eager for this snack. Well, days later, that jar of cream cheese is still in the fridge. Although Forest ate the snack, he announced afterward that he didn't like this cream cheese, and I had to agree. It isn't bad, it just doesn't have that cream cheese tang and is plain old boring. My next dairy experiment will be yogurt.

Mr. Pollan notwithstanding, I go back and forth between feeling like all this food prep is a valid and important use of so very much of my time and feeling like I'm a nitwit for cooking my life away.

Sunny day.

2011-02-07T18:55:00.000-08:00

Forest loves all forms of snow removal.

Our driveway.

Looking down the road from our driveway.

The front steps.

Garden gate.

Formal invitation

2011-02-04T05:23:00.000-08:00

(This blog is intended for a general audience. This post, however, is written for my friends. Of course, all are welcome to read it.)

Aaron, Forest, and Walker all have February birthdays. So we are planning to have a triple-decker celebration President's Day weekend at my parents. We are hoping some New York people will make the trip. We figure Sunday, the 20th, makes most sense so people can travel on Sat and Mon.

Here are the invitations Forest wrote. This one says: "Everybody come."

This ones says: "Everybody came to the celebration"

This one says: "Come to Mummo and Grandpa's"

I'll spare you the rest of the invitations Forest wrote. We hope you can make it. (Let me know if you are thinking of coming.)

I dance with Mr. Bradley

2011-02-02T18:48:00.000-08:00

Another week, another dump of snow. All previous snows, Aaron has done the plowing with our David Bradley walk-behind tractor and ended the day an over-cooked noodle of exhaustion. I figured Aaron needed a break from plowing, and I knew I needed a break from child care, so I insisted this time it was my turn to plow, his turn to bathe the kids. As I left the house, he predicted I'd soon wish I was doing bath time.

Aaron had started the engine for me (a procedure requiring many pulls on the starter cord), so Mr. Bradley was growling in the driveway, clutch disengaged, waiting for me. I sighed, pulled down the clutch, and grabbed the handles to steer. The metal felt mighty cold through wet wool gloves. But in moments, I was gripping has hard as I could despite the mild pain. The throttle doesn't work, so there is only one speed, zombie speed: slow, steady, inexorable. I knew Aaron had said it was hard work plowing, and I believed him, but from the window, it doesn't look that hard, walking along at such a stately pace. However, I was finding steering so difficult, I didn't see the advantage over shoveling. Within 15 feet of my starting point, I was drifting out of the line cut by Aaron on the right side of the driveway, over to the left side of the driveway. I kept having to disengage the clutch to keep from going into the ditch. Despite my best repeated efforts, I could not get Mr. Bradley back to the right side of the driveway, he persisted in side-sliding towards the left-hand ditch no matter how hard I wrestled him.

I could see Aaron watching from the window. After some hand flapping, head shaking, and arm waving, we got out our cell phones. He was surprised to hear I couldn't control the plow. "It looked like you were doing fine." When I explained what was going on, he said he'd do the plowing. He did not want to have to get Mr. Bradley out of a ditch. Since I am stubborn, and since I really did need a break from the kids, I told him I'd try once more. This time, I didn't try to get back to the right side of the driveway, but rather stayed in the line Aaron cut on the left side. Things started going better. I figured out I shouldn't fight Mr. Bradely's zombie-ness, but work with it. If Mr. Bradley starts going sideways, he is simply doing what zombies do, if they can't push through, they go around, slowly, steadily, inexorably. Instead of trying to wrestle him back on track, it is simply a matter of pressing down on the handles, so the plow blade lifts up a bit and less snow needs pushing. With the resistance gone, David "Zombie" Bradley continues on his course. I was relieved to know that Aaron hadn't been working that hard all those hours. It also is a blessing that Mr. Bradley doesn't sound like a zombie, it would get tedious listening to droning about brains while plowing. Instead, he evokes memories of fishing with his put-puttering sounding like an outboard motor. Back at the top of the driveway, I ran inside for dry gloves and was comfortable thereafter.

After two hours of plowing, it seemed to me the only way to make more progress would be with a shovel. So much snow has already fallen, there is nowhere to push the new snow. The banks were as packed as Mr. Bradley could pack them, and I felt great. Maybe I could do some farm work after all. Plowing was arduous, but I got absorbed in the challenge of getting the path wide enough and smooth enough, and then, when I was done, I felt downright proud. Back in the cabin, I found the children bathed and playing with bath toys in the living room. I got Walker down for his nap and made dinner while Aaron shoveled back the left snow bank almost to the end of the drive, which took two hours. He went to bed a while ago, an over-cooked noodle of exhaustion. As satisfying a day as it was, I can't help but think of the White Queen. We're having to run awfully hard just to stay in place. And now, this already achy noodle is off to bed.