What's for dinner?

Our great experiment with weaning ourselves off of grocery store food continues. We've had to make a couple of trips to the store in the last couple of weeks, because really, I can't just feed my family sorrel, bread, and potatoes all week. But I am getting some great inspirations for cooking dinner using what we have on hand, and not going to the store specifically for one or two items.

Tonight's dinner was probably the best idea that I've stolen from a cookbook in a long time: a potato, red pepper, and Gruyere tart, with a side of leftover cucumber salad that has been jazzed up with a handful of fresh pea shoots.

The idea for the tart wasn't entirely my own. I'm a huge fan of author and cook Mollie Katzen, and in one of the many cookbooks by her that I own, there's a recipe for a potato, red pepper, and Gruyere tart. I changed the recipe a little bit, using the Russet potatoes that we got from the CSA instead of red new potatoes, and instead of a tart crust, I used a loaf of bread that Tom made over the weekend.

Tom has been experimenting with the many flours and grains that we have available to us through the CSA, and this one came out a bit...flat. Literally. Instead of poufing up into a nice, fluffy loaf, it came out flat and cracked. But no worries! I sliced off the top bit, hollowing it out a bit. I put the potato slices and red pepper slices in a deep skillet and boiled them for about twenty minutes in vegetable broth. Then I removed them with a slotted spoon, piled them on top of the bread, covered it with waaaaaay too much Gruyere, and baked it for ten minutes until that cheese got so gooey and melty, I thought I was going to swoon. Delicious!

I stretched out the leftover cucumber salad from last night with a big handful of the fresh pea shoots, also from the CSA. Cucumbers, tomatoes, yellow peppers, and just a tiny hint of oil and vinegar made this absolutely the most refreshing part of last night's dinner.

And of course, when I told Colden and Tom that dinner was ready, I was told by my four year old, "No, that's okay, Mommy, you go ahead - me and Daddy are too busy, gardenin'!" So, once again, I am eating dinner alone while the boys run around outside.

To be fair, it was an exceedingly beautiful day today. Here is Moose, our very own canine solar collector:

Had a wonderful chat with a good friend tonight who I miss very, very much, and had an extremely productive day at "work". If you can call it that. It was a good day.

How to Bezel Practically Anything

That's the name of an eBook I'm finishing up this weekend, getting ready to double check my instructions and put it in PDF format for downloading in my Etsy shop. And even though I covered making beaded bezels in peyote stitch, brick stitch, herringbone stitch, right-angle weave, and bead embroidery, I could NOT for the life of me figure out how to make a beaded bezel using netting stitch that wasn't completely fugly.

Thankfully, I figured it out, just in time to get up and make dinner. (It figures, right?) But I did it, and I can't show you a picture just yet, but no worries, it should be up and ready before next week!

Lots of blogging to do this week, and newsletter-making, and Hootsuiteing, in preparation for my vacation next week. Going to take a week off, focus on my beadwork, write up some new tutorials, get ready for my farmer's market season, and prepare for my upcoming trip to NYC to see the fab duo of Betcey Ventrella and Nikia Angel! I got to meet up with both of these amazingly talented ladies in Tucson back in February, and I can't wait to spend a weekend beading with them in NYC in June!

Lots more to write about, but it'll have to wait for later...so, until then, bead happy, friends! It's a beautiful day!

Summer Porch

Since we're pretty much past the nights of freezing temperatures (except for the odd frost warning here and there), Tom decided that today was the day to put all the plants back on the porch for the summer.

You can see why we love it out here. This is where we eat most of our meals and do our socializing in the warmer months. It's like a little mini jungle with all the lush greenery, and the furniture is actually quite comfortable. The wrought iron bench and table is where I like to set up shop on a warm summer day, with the ceiling fan spinning in lazy circles above my head to keep the air moving.

The view of the Jay Range from the big window to the south is almost distracting some days. All you can see is big, green mountains and blue sky!

Some friends gave us this big, antique-looking cabinet where we keep our collection of natural artifacts (sticks, rocks, an old paper wasp nest) and the egg collecting baskets. We also keep the bird seed in a big tin bucket on the bottom shelf.

Late at night during the summer, if Tom and I can stay awake, we move this candle holder to the metal table and light a candle while we listen to the sounds of a summer night. This is, I think, the third one of these that we've purchased since we moved to the Adirondacks back in 1999. The first two fell victim to unabashed doggy joy, first with Rosie, then with Moose. By the time the second one broke, the Mexican store in Saranac Lake where tom bought it had closed, and I don't remember where he found the replacement.

We've watched some crazy storms from that back porch in the last few years. When Colden was just six or seven months old, we watched a storm blow through that got so bad, we decided to take refuge in the basement until it was over. I remember when we came back upstairs, we discovered that the wind had been so strong that it knocked over the wood pile under the pole barn, and the metal pole of our clothes hanger was bent in half.

So, if you're looking for me this summer, chances are you'll find me out here on my back porch, most likely with my beads, my computer, and a big, cold drink.

After talking to a couple of folks this week, we seem to have come to a solution for the raw dairy problem. Tom got a gallon of raw milk from the CSA yesterday, and tonight or tomorrow, we're going to pasteurize it ourselves before we give it to Colden. I know the chances that we might actually get sick from the raw dairy are very slim, but still, it's a risk that I just can't justify.

On the Dairy Fence

So, we're going to head back to Essex Farm on Friday afternoon for our second pickup, but I still have a hard time with the idea of feeding raw (unpasteurized) milk to Colden.

I mean, part of it is probably because it's not a concept I'm entirely comfortable with, yet. All my life, I grew up eating pasteurized dairy and milk. I just took it for granted that my food was safe, because it came from the grocery store.

But these days, with all the crazy GMO cow feed and growth hormones floating around, who knows what affect that will have on our health in ten, twenty, or thirty years? It seems like every time I turn around, I hear about someone else who was diagnosed with a brain tumor, or cancer in some organ. And while medical science is doing a great deal to find ways to cure cancer, I have to wonder if maybe we should start spending more time looking at ways to prevent cancer, and taking a good, hard look at our food system.

So, really, does this mean that if I choose to feed my kid pasteurized milk from the grocery store that I'm just choosing a far-off risk over a more imminent one?

I read an article about raw dairy, and raw milk in particular, this afternoon. The author summed it up like this: drinking raw milk is like driving in a car without a seat belt. Chances are, you won't have an accident, but if you do, the consequences could be catastrophic. That sort of struck a nerve with me.

I wouldn't let my son ride in a car without his seat belt, so why would I feed him something that could potentially make him critically ill, or even kill him?

I don't want to raise my kid in a bubble, by any means. I don't want to be a fear monger when it comes to things like natural and organic foods. But I just don't feel like I have enough good information on this to make an educated decision, and when it comes to keeping my kid, my ONLY kid, safe, well, that's a pretty big deal.

I know that there's always a risk with food. Anything you eat has the potential to make you sick. Look at all the outbreaks of e.Coli in spinach and peanut butter in the last few years. Those foods are supposed to be safe, but when you industrialize your food system, you introduce a greater risk of disease on a wide scale.

So for now, we're going to keep feeding Colden milk from the store. I'll go out of my way to find organic milk, if that's what I have to do. But until I  know more, I just can't bring myself to take that chance with Colden.

If anyone reading has any experience or any more information on raw milk and raw dairy, please, send it on to me. I'd love to read more about this.

Monday Morning

And I am so not into things. Went to sleep late last night because I was working on some brilliant, killer ideas I had. Woke up after only a few hours of sleep due to a graphic, full-color, horrific nightmare. (I swear, if I could write these up as horror movies and sell them to Hollywood producers, we'd be millionaires by now.) Dragged myself out of bed to hear Colden say, "Mommy, there's a MUSHROOM in my pull-up!", which meant, of course, that he FINALLY pooped - after holding it in for 8 days and repeated doses of stool softener/laxative.

Got Colden off to preschool, came home and made myself a nice, warm breakfast, and then called the pediatrician to find out what else we can do to prevent Colden from holding his poop in for a week at a time. Then called the insurance company to find out why the hell they paid my most recent claim to Adirondack Medical Center when the doctor that I saw has nothing to do with AMC.

The internet connection has been wonky here at the house this morning, too, adding to my frustrations.

Now I'm trying to get into the swing of things at work - deadlines, etc., - and thinking about my upcoming farmer's market season. I really need to get back to the markets this year. I have a ton of inventory sitting around, collecting dust (although I'd really like to keep half of it for myself), and I think we could use the extra money this summer with all the projects we have going on. (We need a new, bigger tiller for the gardens. I have a car payment now. We have Colden's preschool to pay for now.)

The first thing I need to do is get some new packaging and a new stack of business cards. I need to wash the table coverings and get a few new displays. I need to figure out my schedule for the summer and send in my membership fee to the market. I also need to round out my inventory a bit with a few new pieces - in all my spare time, of course.

On the recommendation of Michelle Mach, I've been reading this book called Creating Time.

It's actually a great book, full of useful ideas and exercises, but boy, it is NOT an easy read. It's slow going, which is a bit frustrating for me right now, being the excitable little grasshopper that I am...

At any rate. I need to get down to the post office quickly and check the mail, and then get into my first newsletters of the day. Lots of stuff to write, lots of beading to do, and lots of great things on the horizon! I need to find some energy from somewhere for today and just hope that Colden will allow Tom to do bedtime tonight so that I can get some rest!

Dinner, Day 1: Asparagus and sorrel soup with whole wheat bread

Our dinner tonight, made with ingredients we picked up at Essex Farm yesterday:

After being obsessed with the taste of that sorrel, I decided to make an asparagus and sorrel soup and spoon it over rice. The only thing that I was disappointed about was that that delicious, lemony zing of the sorrel was somewhat diluted when I blended it up in the soup. I'm thinking that tomorrow night, I'll make a shredded beet and sorrel salad for dinner with a light dressing so I can really taste it.

The soup wasn't as easy as the recipe made it look. At the end of her book, Kristin said something about if you don't have an immersion blender, you need to drop everything and go get one. And she's right.

This soup required two turns in the food processor to blend it, and it didn't do a very good job. I want a new immersion blender. (We used to have one, a Christmas present from Tom the year I was pregnant with Colden, but according to Tom, "we" melted it in the dishwasher.)

Tom made two loaves of dense, crusty bread with the whole wheat flour we picked up yesterday, too.

We could hardly wait to taste the bread as soon as it came out of the oven! It was not like the whole wheat breads that Tom made with store-bought whole wheat flour. This was a fluffy, slightly sweet, very chewy loaf. I spread it with a little bit of the butter from Essex Farm, and dunked it in the soup.

All I have to say about that butter is, DAMN! That's some butter. Tom and I agreed that getting used to the strong, bovine-scented dairy products is going to be a big adjustment. My entire life, all my dairy products have been pasteurized and processed to within an inch of their lives, and the butter that comes out of a waxed paper wrapped just does not taste the same as the thick, musky, creamy stuff that comes out of the glass jar from Essex Farm.

I told Tom that I think the trick to getting used to these dairy products is going to be for me to use them sparingly. Just a pinch goes a long way, apparently!

I'm feeling better about the whole raw dairy thing now. I've done a lot of reading, and the health benefits of eating raw dairy definitely outweigh the risks, especially if the folks making the raw dairy (like Mark and his crew) know what they're doing. 

I was glad that we had some rice in the pantry, and sliced up a couple of the tomatoes from last week's grocery shopping trip to round out the meal. Desert was (what else?) leftover birthday cake.

Unfortunately, Colden had a major potty training meltdown and spent dinner in our room, watching How to Train Your Dragon. Oy.

We went to Max's birthday party this morning over at the Jay fire house, and Colden had such a blast!

He was so tired when we got home that he actually took a nap, after which he put his fireman hat on and ran around the backyard, "putting out fires". Everything was on fire - Moose, the chickens, the box elder tree...

Tomorrow, I tackle making my very first English muffins. No more buying those from the grocery store, either, and it's the only thing I can think to do with that buttermilk that looks more like yogurt!

To be continued...

First CSA Pickup

We headed out to Essex Farm this afternoon for our first pickup from the CSA. We were both a little nervous, I think, not knowing what to expect. We loaded up the car with our bags and glass dishes and plastic storage containers, and Tom brought the largest cooler we own.

It took a few minutes to find someone who could show us around, but finally, a lovely woman in her early 20s named Jen helped us get signed up and then showed us around.

The pickup area was set up with three refrigerated trailers. The first one was Dairy World.

In Dairy World, we picked up a half gallon of skim milk, a container of butter, a container of yogurt, two dozen eggs, and because we were new, buttermilk, two quarts of sour cream that wasn't being offered to the general membership this week. The place was freezing cold, and I'm sure it will feel great in the heat of August, but on this chilly May evening, my teeth were chattering.

Next we went over to Vegetable World, where we saw what was being offered. The veggie pickins were slim this week, but we picked up some beets and potatoes, a couple of huge red onions, two handfuls of the thickest, purplest asparagus I've ever seen, a few pounds of sorrel, and a huge handful of green onions. I was too chicken to put on a glove and grab a few handfuls of stinging nettles, though. (Maybe after I get a little braver.)

I asked Jen, our tour guide, about the sorrel. I've never eaten it before, and I was curious as to how it tasted, so she told me to take a nibble.

I crunched on a green leaf, fresh from the field, and tasted a wonderful, zingy, citrus tang. It was probably one of the most delicious things I've ever eaten. And now I can't stop thinking about how I'm going to cook this stuff up!

We moved on to Meat World, where I didn't really see anything that interested me, but Tom loaded up with some spicy sausage, spicy ground boar, pork chops, and a couple of packages of thinly sliced beef.

Our last stop was the container shed where they also stored the grains and dry beans. There were two kinds of dry beans, which we didn't take because we have so many dried beans stored in our cabinet right now. But there were five or six different kinds of flours, soft and hard wheatberries, corn meal, popcorn, and some kind of cracked soft wheat with the directions to soak 1/2 cup in 1 1/2 cups of water overnight, boil the next day, season, and enjoy.

We stocked up on some of the flours, all of which were milled right there on the premises. I'm looking forward to baking with those this week and practicing my muffin and biscuit making skills.

So. The bottom line. Our cost: $130. Was it worth it? I don't know. We certainly didn't get nearly as many veggies as we get at the store, so for this week, I'm going to have to dive into our own stores of canned vegetables from the garden, which is probably what everyone else is doing.

I'm also more than a little nervous about the idea of giving Colden raw dairy products like milk and butter and yogurt. Tom and Mark both reminded me that Mark's kids, about Colden's age, have had nothing but raw dairy from the farm their entire lives. Mark and Kristin have been doing this for seven years, and no one has ever gotten sick or died from any of their food. It's just as safe, if not safer, than the food we get from the grocery store. Tom said that he has no problems giving Colden raw dairy from the farm. And I know I need to get used to the idea, because it's something so completely different from what I know.

The dairy products are completely unlike any dairy that I've ever seen or tasted before. The sour cream? It's like toothpaste, thick and creamy and so much tangier than any other sour cream I've ever tasted. The skim milk tastes like our regular milk. The buttermilk? Forget about pouring it - I think this is going to be what I end up baking with all week. Even the yogurt is thicker and zestier than the stuff we've had from the store. Even the stuff labeled "USDA Organic" can't hold a candle to this stuff, fresh from the farm. It's definitely going to take some getting used to, particularly for me, the girl who doesn't like terribly rich food.

Because we have so much stuff stocked in our pantry right now (hoarded?), I don't think we'll have to do any grocery shopping this week, and I'm starting to realize that weaning ourselves off processed food is going to be more of a gradual process, instead of the leap off the cliff that I had imagined.

On our way out, we stopped in to leave some additional information for Mark, and we stopped at the plate of snacks they had out. One a large plate was sliced cheese, labeled, "Barbara's Mozzarella". We each took a piece to try it.

Well. That was the richest damn mozzarella cheese I've ever tasted. You could taste the milk fat in every bite, and it stuck in our throats to the point where we stopped at the first gas station/convenience store we found in Essex and bought a box of saltines to try to wash it down.

We now understand why people drink wine with *real* cheese: because the wine is really the only thing that will cut that taste of thick milk fat once you've swallowed the cheese!

And to celebrate our new commitment to local food? We went back to Tom's parents' house tonight to celebrate my birthday with pizza and cake.

Panic

So, after my metrics meeting, I picked up The Dirty Life again and read a few more chapters. And now I'm starting to panic. This morning, Mona said that there's a lot of meat that comes from this CSA. And in the book, Kristin talks about eating things like beef heart, scrapple, livers, and kidney.

I've never been a fan of organ meat, even before my digestive system and my gallbladder decided to rebel. And now we're going to spend our grocery money on a diet that consists of largely meat? Am I fucking crazy?

We'll have to see after this Friday's pickup at the farm. I don't know if I'm starting to get cold feet or what. Now I'm starting to panic.

Hoarding

I've been hoarding seed beads for a long, long time, but today, I hoarded something else.

I had to make a quick trip to Target to get some Pyrex glass pans with lids for our first CSA pickup on Friday. Mark told me to bring a few Pyrex dishes with lids for the meat - and apparently, it's a lot of meat. We have exactly two glass dishes with lids, so I figured this would be a wise investment.

While I was there, I went down the dried fruit aisle. Every morning for breakfast, I usually throw a handful of dried cranberries into my oatmeal, along with some toasted pecans. No more grocery trips = no more cranberries and pecans. (Unless I buy the pecans from my friend in New Mexico who has an itty bitty pecan farm, but she doesn't have any pecans for sale at the moment.)

Long story short, I wound up buying half a dozen bags of cranberries and a few bags of pecans. Cost: $17. How long will they last me? I don't know. Hopefully, long enough to wean myself off the habit of eating pecans and cranberries on my oatmeal every morning.

Tom will probably flip out when he sees that I've hoarded these items, but I sort of feel like I need to hold on to something during the beginning of this experiment.

T-minus 48 hours until we begin...

Experiment Update

I spoke with Mark over at Essex Farm yesterday morning, and Tom, Colden, and I are all heading out there on Friday afternoon to pick up our first week's worth of food from the Essex Farm CSA. Mark requested that we sample a week before we join, and we're eager to dive in, so this Friday, it is.

I've had a couple of people asking me questions about this whole diet CSA experiment. What about things like avocados, bananas, olive oil? We'll probably still splurge for those things once in a while, yes. But the idea is to wean ourselves off grocery store shopping on a weekly basis and to reduce our dependence on processed foods like breads, English muffins, and pasta. (Not that we eat a lot of pasta around here, but you get the idea.)

Truthfully, I'm a little nervous about this journey. I'm picturing some of my more spectacular and epic baking fails, wondering how I'm going to be able to make our own English muffins and breads and flat beads. I'm wondering what I'll do for a green salad in the dead of winter - the answer being, probably not eat any green salad, since it won't really be in season.

But then I thought a little bit about Colden, and what this will mean for him. It means: homemade jams and fruit preserves. Good, whole, food for our meals here at home. And it means that he gets to help us in the kitchen when it comes time to bake, cook, can, preserve, freeze, and store our food. It's a different kind of experience for him and for us. My memories of cooking in the kitchen when I was a kid consist of standing in front of the stove, flipping my mother's hamburger over and over until the damn thing was cooked, or watching her warm up a bowl of the blended pasta and vegetable gruel she would make for herself. (But that, and her eating disorder, is a whole other story.)

Tom has expressed doubts that I will be able to carry through with this experiment, but I'm determined. I will learn to like new things, and I'll help move my family towards a better model of sustainability. Yes, I will.

Nature

Back when I was in college, I took a wonderful class on social ecology from an equally wonderful professor who also happened to be a Native American storyteller. You can imagine how much fun his classes were! I also have to admit that it was one of the more difficult classes I took in college - every exam was essay format, open book. And he expected citations to back up your arguments.

One of the things that I took away from that class was a whole new idea of what "nature" is and how it is defined. The class opened me up to the wonderful world of philosopher and activist Murray Bookchin, and his ideas on social ecology. (The late Mr. Bookchin also happened to give a series of lectures at the college while I was attending classes there, so I had the opportunity to hear him speak.)

This new idea of nature was not an easy one to wrap your head around. After growing up thinking that pavement and my little suburban neighborhood (and the bordering urban city) where not nature, I started to understand that we as humans beings, and by extension anything of our creation, are all included in the definition of nature. That means that the wrought iron bench on which I sit right now is included in the definition of nature. Our vehicles and our buildings can also be considered "natural", as they are the product of our imaginations, and human beings are natural beings.

So I sometimes find it ironic that I live in what's considered to be the East Coast's last great wilderness area, but I find myself plugged into a computer for 8 hours a day. Nature? Maybe. But here are some photographs of nature in my backyard, in the middle of this great, green wilderness I call home.

Tom planted this row of apple trees when we first moved into this house back in 2003. They were twigs, really, from the Arbor Day Foundation. We had a couple of years where the deer just nibbled them down to nothing, and Tom was afraid that they would die. But no, last year, we had our first couple of apples, and this year, they are positively loaded down with apple blossoms! Love those delicate pink and white flowers on the tiny branches.

Our backyard looks a little wild in spring, with its purposely neglected back acreage. We just let the wildflowers and trees grow. On a day when I need to get outside, walking through our yard can be just what I need to make me feel a little more in touch with the natural world around me.

And yes, this is natural, too. As natural beings, we rely on other organisms for food. This is the head of one of Tom's deer from last winter, wired into a tree while it decomposes. Tom uses as many parts of that deer as he can. The hides are turned into pillows, rugs, or blankets. The meat will last him and Colden through the winter.

Last but not least, my little man playing outside. To him, nature is everything. I love that his preschool places an emphasis on experiencing the outdoors. They don't need a lot of fancy playground equipment - a couple of big rocks for climbing, a huge sand pit for digging, a big open field, and a forest full of trails. So lucky that he gets to do this every single day. Where I grew up, experiencing "nature" like that was reserved for the long drive up to the environmental education center.

More of my thoughts on nature later, particularly about how they pertain to food...to be continued!

An Experiment

My sister sent me my birthday presents a little early last week, and among them was a copy of this book, The Dirty Life, by Kristin Kimball.

Last summer, this book was EVERYWHERE up here. It was on NPR, it was in the news, it was in the local papers. Everywhere you looked, there was this book. And truthfully, I wasn't really interested in reading it, figuring that it was just another book about a wealthy Manhattanite who decided to move up to the "country" in the Adirondacks and spend their money farming.

But, no. The other night, I was totally exhausted after playing the second round of Hide and Go Poop with Colden and not sleeping at all the night before, and right after dinner, I put on my jammies and went to bed, feeling too tired to lift a limb.

My fingers, however, worked, and I decided to start reading the book from my sister.

It was totally NOT what I expected. Yes, she was from Manhattan, but this book wasn't just about ditching city life for country life. Kristin's husband, Mark, has a vision: about food, about farming, and about community. These are not people who came into farming with a load of money. But they came into it with a set of core beliefs, and those beliefs have led them to create the first total-diet CSA.

In case you're not sure what a CSA is, it stands for Community Supported Agriculture. It's the idea that a group of people will "subscribe" to a small farm and pay them for a share of whatever that farm produces on a monthly, quarterly, or yearly basis. Most CSAs provide vegetables, and sometimes meat, but Essex Farm produces its own flour, grains, three kinds of meat, over fifty kinds of vegetables, eggs, milk, and even soap!

After reading three chapters, I went to her website and looked up the CSA that she and Mark run out of Essex Farm. I checked the cost, and what at first seemed to be unaffordable turned out to be exactly what we spend per month on groceries.

So, I posed the question to Tom: what if we stopped going to the grocery store and instead lived off of whatever we got from this CSA? No more prepared foods. No more buying a pack of English muffins when we want a breakfast sandwich - I'd make our own with the flour. We'd make our own bread with their flours, too.

Once I showed Tom what we were spending every month on groceries and showed him what Essex Farm has to offer in terms of a total diet, he didn't need much convincing.

There's another reason why I'm so excited about the possibility of joining this CSA. Every time I turn around lately, I'm hearing about pesticides that are causing bees to die off; vegetables that have been genetically altered with unknown consequences; factory farming practices that are wreaking havoc with antibiotic resistant bacteria; outbreaks of e.Coli from vegetables, meats, eggs, and processed foods. It's not just that I'm being paranoid - these things are real. In this industrialized society, we just don't know where our food is coming from anymore. We even went so far this year as to buy non-GMO seeds for our own gardens, concerned about what we were growing ourselves.

With a small CSA like this one, we know exactly where our food is coming from. And we know who is growing it. We know how they are growing it, and we know that they aren't using commercial pesticides, fertilizers, and GMO seeds.

I'm wondering what our friends and family are going to say when they hear about this crazy plan. No more trips to the grocery store? Well, yes, we'll still need dog food and toilet paper and toothpaste, so yes, we will still be going somewhere to purchase those things. But what this means for us is a whole new layer of things to do in the kitchen.

Our plan, if they have a spot in the CSA for us this year, is to go to Essex Farm every Friday for the pick ups. Bring home everything we get, and then spend Saturday and part of Sunday cooking for the week, and freeze our meals ahead of time. Sundays will probably be spent baking everything we need for the week - muffins, breads, cookies, etc. I'll probably have to invest in a few more items of bakeware.We'll start making our own cheese and butter.

But the payoff? Locally grown, totally organic food, including meats. Sure, it'll take a little more time, and yes, it will cost more in terms of time. But for us, this is going to be a small step towards a life that will be happier and healthier for everyone.

And who knows? Maybe I'll start nibbling on some of that locally raised grass fed beef this summer...

Something I Can't Live Without

My family.

This is an old picture of Tom and Colden, taken when Colden was about five months old, the week after my mom died. But still. Of all the things that I originally thought I couldn't live without (my hot chocolate, my beads, a warm bath or a hot shower, my favorite pair of jeans), this is the only one that really makes sense. I can survive without all of those other things, but without my family, I'm nothing.

Lines

This is how my son colors inside the lines.

I bought Colden a new coloring book yesterday while we were at Michael's, complete with its own set of markers. He was so excited, and I think he was still feeling a little punked out after his latest bout of How Long Can I Hold My Poop In, so he started coloring pretty much as soon as we got home.

I hope my colors his life inside the lines like this, too. It's not fun to stay inside the lines all the time. Sometimes, you gotta venture out and see what's there.

My Hometown

For this photo-a-day challenge, today is supposed to be a photo of your home town. I'm still going back and forth about that, since I've lived here in Jay for nearly twelve years now, but I still think of my home town as Maplewood, N.J., where I grew up.

A couple of years ago, I made a trip into NYC for a seminar when I was working at About.com, and while I was there, I took an extra day and revisited some of my old haunts in Maplewood. This is a shot of Maplewood Village, the "old" downtown area full of shops and cafes and restaurants.

I was happy to see there was still an independent book shop in town. When I was a kid, this place was called The Book Stop, and my parents would bribe us to clean up our room by offering a reward of ten new paperbacks each to my sister and I if we complied. (And then, of course, we had twenty new books with which to mess up our bedroom all over again!)

The Maplewood train station and some of the artwork that adorns the walls of the passage between tracks.

My old street and the house where I grew up. The house is for sale again, if anyone is interested. I think the asking price is $350,000. And the inside looks nothing like it did when we were living there.

I don't have too many photos of my current home town of Jay. But here are a couple of pictures of a crazy snow storm we had back in 2011.

This was our road at ten a.m. on the morning of a blizzard. It was one of those mornings where it was perfectly safe to just walk out into the middle of the road, since the snow was coming down so hard and so fast and it was so quiet that you could hear a car or a plow coming from miles away.

And our house in that same blizzard. It was one of those winters where it felt like everything was going to be covered in snow forever, and you almost forgot what the sun looked like. Thankfully, we have our wonderful wood stove to provide heat and light through the darkest days of winter.

On to other things today... Have to try to get some beadwork done, have newsletters to proof out to the team, and Colden is home with a case of self-imposed constipation today. That should make for an interesting blog.

One Year

One year ago today, I walked into the offices at Interweave Press in Loveland, Colorado and straight into the Job of My Dreams. For real. I regret that I didn't take too many pictures of my time in Colorado during that first week of orientation, but the memories are still as fresh as they were when I got home a few days later.

Since then, I have been having such an awesome time at Beading Daily: beading, writing, putting my statistical analysis skills to good use, and just generally getting to do a whole lot of cool, cool stuff. So this morning, to celebrate, I started off with an early morning hair appointment.

Purple! My hair is now purple! I've never, ever dyed my hair before. And now I have. And it's purple, and I love it.

Colden smiled when I picked him up at lunchtime from preschool, and he called out to his friend, "Hey, Cooper, come look at my mom's hair!" So freaking cute!

I love the color. Love it, love it, love it. I've never thought that I'd be daring enough to do something like this, but hey - I'm almost 38. And why the heck not? Holly at River Rock Salon is an amazing hair and makeup artist, and I put myself entirely in her hands and trusted her completely. She mixed two colors together to get this wonderful shade of purple, highlighted my natural deep brown, and let my grey hair take up a lot of the color. That woman totally knows what she's doing!

So, to add one more thing to my pile of "to do" items...

A photo and a blog post every day - why not, right?

I hope I'm not cheating, but I'll use today's new-hair-coloring photograph as #1 and #2 on the list. A new self-portrait, with my Favorite Color of the Moment: purple.

Colden always asks what my favorite color is, and it's hard for me to answer with just one! I love so many different shades of brown, pink, purple, green, and blue... They're all wonderful in their own way, and it's hard for me to choose one, unless it happens to be the one that I'm using at the moment.

Tomorrow's photo will be a little more difficult, but I think I can find something. For now, back to work!

Waiting For Spring...

I can hardly believe that one year ago today was the night before I got on a plane and flew to Loveland, Colorado to start my dream job working at Interweave Press. It was so much warmer, and much wetter, than this year. We had already had some close calls where roads were closed due to flooding, and we were having what seemed like nonstop rain.

A couple of weeks ago, Colden and I went exploring in the backyard and noticed that the buds were coming out on the box elder tree.

We also noticed some asparagus coming up in the asparagus patch, right next to the rhubarb. But alas, last night it was down in the 20s again, and the tender asparagus spears got zapped with the cold.

The forecast is calling for temperatures in the 70s later this week, and I can only hope it's correct! I just could not get warm today, no matter what I did. I finally wasted an entire hour trying to get a fire going in the wood stove, and if there's one thing that is most likely to set me off into a bad mood, it's my inability to get a fire going when I'm freezing cold.

Tomorrow would have also been my parents' 39th wedding anniversary. Mom has been gone for four years now, but it doesn't feel like that long. Sometimes I wonder if my dad thinks about her on their anniversary. True, their marriage was far from ideal, and I know he's happy now with his new partner. But I can't help but remember the anniversaries.

It also means that my birthday is coming up, too. In just ten days, I'll be 38. Edging ever so closer to 40. I've decided to do something crazy for myself this year. So, yes, on Wednesday, nine days before my birthday, I'll be getting a haircut and color. And not just to cover up the grey, either. Something a little more...daring.

I haven't told Tom about my upcoming hair color transformation. Or his parents. Hmmmm...

Anyway. Cozying up in front of the fire in the wood stove now, and Colden is asking Daddy if they can camp out on the back porch and sleep in the tent again tonight. Which will totally suck, because after sleeping in bed with Colden for the last ten days, I could not get to sleep without him last night. Ugh. Everyone was telling me how Colden wouldn't be able to get to sleep without me if I kept that up, but in reality, it's ME that's having the problem falling asleep without HIM! Ugh.

I started stitching peyote bezels around some of those new Czech spike beads that I got from The Hole Bead Shop last week. And then I thought, huh, what the heck am I going to do with them all? This afternoon, I think I found a way to use them, although the design looks an awful lot like other designs I've seen before... I just hope I'm not stepping on any toes with it.

Destruction

We went back to the Cultural Center this morning - all of us - to watch the ceremony where the sand mandala built by the monks was destroyed and carried to the river.

I should say that we didn't stay for the entire two-hour ceremony. Colden was not fond of the loud music of the horns and the cymbals, and we didn't want to stay so long that he got restless and disturbed the other attendees, so after about forty-five minutes, Tom took him outside to play on the steps of the Cultural Center while I stayed inside.

When we arrived, the monks had already begun the ceremony and were saying prayers. We hung back at first, but I moved closer and Tom stayed with Colden. The Tibetan woman who owns the restaurant and gift shop downtown recognized me and motioned for me to come sit next to her, right behind the monks. Front row seat! I gladly sat and listened to the prayers for about twenty minutes before they started the actual destruction of the mandala.

First, two of the monks donned ceremonial headdresses and walked around the mandala several times, chanting and praying and burning incense. (I didn't take photos of some of the ceremony, because I didn't want to be disrespectful.)

Then one of the monks took a pinch of sand from each of the four sides, or gates, of the mandala and put them into a small brass dish. He set the dish aside, and reached under the table to retrieve two ordinary paint brushes. He handed one of the brushes to the kid who, ironically, walked across the edge of the mandala earlier in the week after it had been finished.

They swept up all the sand, moving inward from the outside edges. All the beautiful designs and intricate patterns - all that WORK - became just a pile of crushed, colored marble in mere seconds. It was beautiful and sad all at the same time.

The pile of sand was then scooped up into a receptacle while the prayers and chanting continued.

And the vase was set on the table and covered with a ceremonial cloth.

At this point, I looked around and realized that Tom and Colden were gone, and I didn't know if Colden was getting cranky or not, so to play it safe, I left the ceremony.

After we were gone, the remaining sand was walked down to the Saranac River and scattered in the water, to bring the wisdom manifest in the making of the mandala to all the creatures of the river, who would in turn pass it on to other sentient beings.

Earlier in the week, one of the coordinators of the program at the Cultural Center had said that the ceremony of the destruction of the mandala was a little bit like a funeral, and he was right. It was sobering to see that intricate piece of art turned into just a pile of sand in only a few seconds, but it did bring home the concept of impermanence.

And not in a bad way, either. All that beautiful beadwork I make? One day, the thread will disintegrate and it will fall apart. The beads will simply just be a pile of beads again. Eventually, even those beads will disintegrate or be crushed and destroyed and will be turned back into their original materials of sand.

On our way down the front path of the Cultural Center, Colden asked if we could get some of the colorful prayer flags that were hung from the building. So we walked over to the Tibetan shop down the block and bought three sets of prayer flags, two for the box elder tree in the backyard and one for his bedroom.

Tomorrow is the farewell feast for the monks at the Tibetan restaurant in Plattsburgh. I wish we could attend, but I don't think we can go with Colden. So, today will be my good-bye to the Buddhist monks, and now it's up to me to put into practice everything I've learned and been inspired by during this last week.

Taxes

With all the news surrounding local school budget cuts, federal cuts in school meals for children and intense pressure from local governments to slash their work force, just to save a few bucks in taxes for residents, I want to say something to anyone who thinks that paying taxes is a bad thing.

Sure, there's waste in government, especially in OUR government. But you know what?

Public services cost money.

Read that again, just in case you missed it.

Public services cost money.

When you turn on the tap and clean, drinkable water comes out, that costs money. When you flush your toilet and the waste doesn't get backed up and flood your bathroom or contaminate local rivers and streams, that costs money.

Do you enjoy driving on roads that are well-maintained? You want to be sure that the bridge you're about to drive across won't collapse and send you plunging down into the river below?

Those things cost money.

We live in a country where we have the privilege of having functional public services. All these things we take for granted - public schools, public libraries, safe and accessible roads, public drinking water, public utilities - cost money.

When you pay your local taxes, that money goes to pay someone's salary. That someone probably works at a drinking water plant, wastewater treatment plant, electric plant, or highway department. They aren't there because they looooove getting sweaty and dirty and handling dangerous chemicals on a daily basis. They are there because they need a job.

Sure, we could take away all those jobs and just privatize everything. No more public water. You want clean drinking water? You'll have to deal with a large corporation (like Monsanto, maybe?) who only answers to its shareholders, not to its customers.

You want reliable roads? Sorry, you'll have to fill out this form and wait for a customer service representative to get back to you.

If you think you can do without public services like these, please, I beg you, go spend six months in sub-Saharan Africa where there are NO functioning public services.

No public schools. No public libraries. No drinkable water. No roads. No reliable electric service.

Wouldn't you gladly pay for these services? So what's the difference between paying your taxes and paying a corporation?

The difference is that the public government should have your best interests at heart. A corporation cares for no one.

Enough about that for now. More about beads later.

Food

One of the items of overly processed food that I need to stop eating is salad dressing. I know, of all things, this is probably one of the worst! To make myself feel better, I grabbed a couple of bottles of organic salad dressing off the shelves at the grocery store last weekend. But this is what the ingredient label looked like for one of them:

So, does anyone else find it amusing that after that ginormous list of ingredients full of words that you can't pronounce, it says in big, bold letters, "Contains: Soybeans and Wheat."

I know soy and wheat are allergens and things that folks with gluten intolerance and celiac disease want to steer clear of, but really, shouldn't you be worried about the vague "smoke flavor"?

Relatively speaking, this label doesn't have as many scary ingredients as some of the items I've seen at the grocery store. You read the labels and can't pronounce half of the ingredients and have no idea what they are, and then it says in big, bold letters: "Contains: Milk, eggs, wheat." I'm more worried about the fact that my kid is eating something that contains soy lecithin, sodium acid pyrophosphate, and high fructose corn syrup!

My next task for myself is to learn how to make my own salad dressings. I have to be careful with dressings that have a lot of oil in them, because my poor stomach still can't handle a nice oil and vinegar dressing anymore. But there's got to be a way to make my own honey mustard or Green Goddess dressings without having to buy them anymore.

The other thing that I worry about is that all of these ingredients were most likely processed before they were put into the salad dressing, and then they were processed AGAIN. Is there any nutritional value left in this salad dressing? Not bloody likely.

(And if the picture of the salad dressing ingredients magically disappears, you'll know that the company that manufactures it has most likely contacted me with a cease and desist letter, or some other threatening legal language.)

Sleeping In

So, in this rarest of phenomena, Colden has been sleeping through the night for the last five nights or so - as long as I sleep in bed with him all night.

Now, before anyone gets all huffy and puffy and tells me that I'm a horrible parent for sharing a bed with my child (as some did when we were co-sleeping while he was an infant), let me tell you that I have not had five nights of uninterrupted sleep in a row since Colden was born in 2008. And if this is how Colden and I (and Tom, for that matter) can get some restful, healing sleep, then so be it.

Truthfully, it feels good some nights to cuddle down with my little boy. He's growing up so fast, and it won't be long before he won't want to cuddle with me at night. It reminds me of the days when he was an infant and would fall asleep snuggled up on my shoulder after I nursed him.

And after YEARS of waking up 2 or 3 times in the night to help him get back to sleep, quite frankly, it's a relief to be able to close my eyes at 9:00 p.m.and not open them again until 5:30 or 6 the next morning!

This morning, Colden slept in until almost 7 a.m. So you better believe that there was no way in hell I was going to wake him up, even if it meant missing morning prayers with the monks. I wanted my kid to get some rest, for a change, and he woke up just as I was getting out of the shower. He was happy and woke up gently, stretching and yawning and smiling. It was such a welcome change to how he usually wakes up - crying, upset, calling for me.

I couldn't get it together in time to get to Plattsburgh for morning prayers, but I may be able to coordinate with Tom to get there this afternoon. And then on Saturday, we're going to the ceremony where they will destroy the sand mandala.

This is the idea for the bead embroidered cuff bracelet that I had the other evening after afternoon prayers with Tom. I can't show you the whole thing, but this is the start of it. The other designs are still coming, and I hope to actually have the entire thing finished before the ceremony on Saturday.

We are STILL waiting for spring to arrive. Cold again this morning, with temperatures in the 30s when I dropped Colden off at preschool. Snow predicted again for tomorrow and Saturday. The forecast doesn't call for anything warmer than 45 until the middle/end of next week!

Meanwhile, things are greening up all around us, but it's still freaking cold. Tom brought in another load of firewood last night so that I could keep the house warm while I sat on my butt and worked all day today.

In other rare news, I may actually have some time today and tomorrow to do some beading! And I need to write about some of the new glass art beads I've added to my collection lately, as well as the humongous order that I just received from The Hole Bead Shop, courtesy of their annual Tax Relief Sale and a little extra cash that I had earlier this month...

More With the Monks

I took Tom to see the Buddhist monks yesterday for him to have a pulse reading, and then we stayed for afternoon prayers. Tom was a little hesitant to stay for afternoon prayers (fear of the unknown?) but told me as we left that he enjoyed it and was glad that we stayed.

The monks had just finished the sand mandala, and were packing away their containers of colored sand when a seven or eight year old boy walked right across the outside edge of the mandala.

He just wasn't looking down at where his feet were walking - he was looking straight ahead. The room let out a collective gasp, but then the monks just laughed and brushed it off and brought out the colored sand to do a quick repair job.

And this is how the mandala looked this morning when I arrived for morning prayers:

I'm not sure if you can see it in these photos, but there is amazing detail in the little piles of sand used to construct the mandala.

I've decided that I will go to the ceremony on Saturday where they destroy the mandala and carry the sand down to the river. Someone told me that it's sort of like a funeral, and not that I enjoy funerals, but I would like to see the ceremony.

I took some more photos of the main gallery at the Cultural Center this morning, too.

This is the main altar set up with the sand mandala in front of it. The mandala was flat on the ground before it was finished yesterday, and then they placed it on a sturdy table.

These are some of the Thangka paintings that have been hung in the Cultural Center. A Thankgka painting is a Tibetan silk painting done with embroidery, usually picturing a Buddhist deity, scene or mandala. I've seen them before in the collections at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and they always move me. I might not always understand exactly what's being depicted (the same as I don't understand exactly what's being said during prayers), but I am moved by the work and the colors and the textures that I see.

Last, but not least, we brought a deity home with us last night, too.

Ganesha has always been a favorite deity of mine. A sort of balance-keeper in the universe, he places obstacles where they are needed and removes them when they are a hindrance. To me, he is a reminder that I should keep a steady pace - not too fast, not too slow. We found this one in the Tibetan Asian shop on Margaret Street in downtown Plattsburgh while we waited for afternoon prayers to start.

Tomorrow morning will be the last morning that I can attend prayers and meditation with the monks before they leave, so I am looking forward to it very much. It's been worth the early rising and crazy cost of gas to get to and from Plattsburgh every day. Being able to sit so near these monks and listen to them brings me much-needed calm and inspiration. When I think about their lives, I think more about my own and it reminds me to bring good intentions to all of my actions.

To be continued...