When I was full-time farming and homeschooling, summer was nonstop and never-ending work. Now with a teaching and school schedule, summer feels much different. It has still been an incredibly busy summer, though, with camping, cooking, growing, swimming, medicine-making, WWOOFing for a week in Vermont milking goats and learning to make cheese, hosting some free days at the school garden, and figuring out some big changes with the upcoming year.

It is a lot to pour into one newsletter, but here are some ideas of what I recommend to do with the rest of your summer, based on my highlights :).

1. Camp in the Adirondacks: This year, my goal was to do a camping trip, but more luxurious: that is, not having to set up our own tent. We instead had a tent set up on a platform–not even sleeping on the ground, which honestly, a tent on a platform felt like a 5-star hotel. We fixed and brought our nicer camping stove, swam in the river, and rafted and tubed down the Hudson (which is crystal clear in the Adirondacks, just FYI). I know the tent on the platform was a splurge, but highly recommend! (It was also Huck’s birthday during our camping trip. We, of course, swapped cake for s’mores.)

2. Donate vegetables to the food pantry: I have continued donating to the local food pantry from the school garden. Technically, I am “off” this summer, but still volunteering to work in the now semi-neglected garden. Food insecurity is at an all-time high in this country right now. If you are growing anything in any kind of quantity and can take your surplus to your local food pantry, do it.

3. Read/Research. Summer is for reading! I am bummed our local library does not have a summer reading program for adults. But it’s ok–just have to have my own I guess. I am mostly reading nonfiction (lots of farming and herbal medicine books, as usual) but I did also finish the novel Yesteryear, which people seemed to love or hate—I’m on the love team, personally!.

4. Ferment things! Made another sauerkraut with parsley and oregano. Also lots of pickles. (Save that fermented pickle brine! See number six for why!).

5. Make prototypes for your business. Friends, I promised the logo reveal! Here you go—done by a Vermont wood-carving artist. With my microbusiness, all I have done thus far has been giving sample products to friends and to the school, but it is a start. I made a sample batch of kombucha I gave to friends (that I brewed with my grown herbs and foraged berries). I have been drying herbs for teas, and provided tea for the school’s graduation this year. Still a lot of work to be done to really launch things off the ground, and also need to find land to grow more eventually, but it is something!

6. 6. Make new recipes, like Pickle Lemonade. While at a local county fair, a large “fresh-squeezed lemonade” stand (the kind with a big green and yellow tent) was selling something called “Pickle Lemonade”. Being a food enthusiast, I of course had to inquire: yes, it was made with lemons, sugar, and a pickle brine from a local pickle company. Yes, it was very popular–their “most popular drink”, in fact. I got a large (to share!), and it was, though perhaps a tad overly sweet, very sour and salty and delicious, and very refreshing; I sucked down nearly the whole thing, minus a few shared sips. A few weeks later I came across a “Pickle Lemonade” recipe in the New York Times cooking section; certainly it has come a long way from the rural county fair! Anyway, besides kombucha, cold brew coffee and iced herbal teas, this is the most thirst-quenching thing I make, except instead of using vinegar-based pickle brine, I am using the probiotic-rich homemade salt water fermented kind, and am using coconut sugar or maple sugar (though white sugar would work, if you are really needing that classic lemonade-stand lemonade). Good way to use up that salty brine!

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   7. Volunteer, through WWOOF, on a raw milk goat dairy for a week. The intention was that while my youngest, River, was at sleepaway camp, to take Huck to WWOOF with me in Vermont, where we could milk goats and learn to make cheese together. Huck, however, really wanted to stay working at his paid internship (he’s working at a place called Innovation lab, doing modeling and building of equipment and learning different computer programs—NERD ALERT just kidding. I don’t know, but it certainly does not sound as fun as milking goats!!). Therefore, it ended up just being me. There was plenty of farm work involved, where the farmers, inspired by Switzerland, had their goats wear bells. Milking goats in the Green Mountains with the faint tinkling of bells around their adorable necks made me feel like Heidi (one of my dream icons). I also learned a good amount about making different cheeses! (I had no idea, for instance, that ricotta cheese is a by-product cheese made from whey discard? So cool!).

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8. 8. Host people. We had the amazing gift of out-of-town guests, mostly from around Chicago, of friends and family come out, and it was so fun and truly made me feel less alone out here! We miss you, Midwest. It has been hard to have years of trying to find an opportunity to move back and continually hitting brick walls; our Midwest friends coming out to us has definitely been the next best thing.

9. 9. Try to figure out changes that are coming! Ok, this one might not apply to you, but just know that if there are major life-shifting things happening for you, I can sympathize. For a variety of reasons I can touch on later, just recently, we made the hard decision to unenroll the boys from the Montessori school they’ve been going to and that I have been teaching at. I was reminded of a theme of my life and really, a thread of this newsletter–with a crisis comes opportunity. Just trying to figure out what that might be! (The options, naturally, being either homeschool this year, or put them into a local public school.) We will see!

Look out for the next newsletter being a re-introduction of this newsletter, where I will talk more about what is coming. Thank you to all subscribers for staying with me! Your support has meant a lot!

Last spring break, last year, we went to Montreal, which is a five-hour drive from our house. We (barely) spoke French, bought croissants, drank espresso from tiny cups, went to museums and walked on cobblestone streets in the old part of town–a little slice of Europe for those without plane tickets.

This year, we barely left the house, which was actually just as nice.

When we did leave, it was done on the cheap. Here is how we spent almost no money this break:

1. We volunteered at milking the goats with our 4-H club. As you might remember, these boys have been made by me to join 4-H, and (sang in the key of Rhianna): “Ba–by, this is what we came for…”. I never want these boys to lose their farming skills, and to know that milk doesn’t just come in a plastic bottle. Milking an animal by hand is a lost art for most people. I had lamented that we have had so many lost years without goats, but readers, having teenagers milk goats instead of small children is a world of difference–they are natural milkers, fast and strong, much to my relief. Now we just need to get some goats of our own again! (One day.)

2. We also ordered six chickens from our local ag store. Since we had the great black bear eating incident of two years ago, we didn’t get any this last year, but I felt sad without them, so we bought some new kinds with various and adorable speckling; two Americanas, two Cream Leghorns, and two Olive Eggers: ones that lay brown, green, and blue eggs. Also, as I had mentioned the first time, it is more fun having six instead of eight hundred, even if a bear does get almost all of them in the end! (Just kidding, I am sure we are going to fix that problem this year?). Also, tick season is upon us, so having chickens is our yard’s answer to natural tick prevention. Ok fine, these chickens are not free, but they were cheap (cheap cheap LOL!!) (jk) so it technically counts as spending not much money.

3. I worked and made the boys help with the school garden. I wanted to make sure things were all ready for when kids got back to school, so we went over to the garden a few times to prep some beds outside. I had one more bed I wanted to seed inside the hoophouse, which I made the boys do, of radishes and carrots. I actually had remembered something an old-school gardener in Wisconsin had taught me: that when she was young, her family had always planted radishes and carrots together in the same bed, alternating the lines of carrot seeds and radish seeds. That way, weeds are shaded out by the quick growing radishes for the carrots, and since they are harvested after about a month, the carrots are left to still grow for about another month. It is a great way to grow when you don’t have a lot of space. I remember her being shocked I had never heard of this before. She had shaken her head, I am sure sad at the state of lost farmer knowledge and just said to herself, “I thought everyone knew these things.”

4. We had Ostara. I had actually intended to have Passover this year, and also Easter. But then I remembered that I am basically a Pagan Witch these days, so even though I actually like both of those ritual-infused holidays and the food that goes with them, what I really wanted to celebrate was nature and spring and say a prayer to heal the earth. Enter Ostara. Rooted in pagan and Wiccan traditions, it celebrates new life, renewal, and fertility. We painted eggs from the farm here with symbols (mostly plants, flowers, the sun and moon) and yes, I did hide them. The boys also still got an Easter basket–instead of candy, though, I got up early to bake chocolate chip cookies, wrapped them in parchment paper, and put them in two twin baskets I found at the Salvation Army months ago. I also quickly made some watercolor painted cards. We invited a neighboring family over for Ostara brunch, in which I made a quiche with nettles, sausage, and some of our last frozen vegetables from last season. Before our egg hunt and after our coffee, we read tarot cards together and I read a poem about the spring equinox. The whole day reminded me of my Waldorf-y homeschool days, which made me feel slightly wistful, but I also felt accomplished that I am still able, once in a while, to pull something together out of (almost) thin air.

5. We did spend, as I like to say, intentional money; we went to a political puppet show. Bread and Puppet theater is something I have actually wanted to see since high school–but back then, in the Chicago suburbs, my thoughts were basically, “wow, they’re in Vermont–oh well, guess I will never actually see them.” Now we are just a couple of hours of the Vermont border, in a place I never actually thought we’d end up, so I seized the day. They normally do a spring and summer tour, so when I saw they were playing a show a little over an hour away from us in Hudson, New York, I clicked to buy tickets for me and the boys (I knew Alex couldn’t get away at all this break). We bought dinner that the actors made as part of their fundraiser. Bread and Puppet is very inspirational for those that are interested; giant puppets are made by the actors of paper mache and recycled materials and, basically, trash like old cardboard boxes and used art supplies. The show was slightly darker than I thought it would be (a lot of it had to do with ICE kidnapping people off the street, and the bombing of an Iranian school), but it was beautifully done and inspirational and hopeful in all the ways.

6. Lastly, we reinstated our after-dinner walk. I really do think that this has been key to ending our days in better, less stressed-out moods. Lately it has been easier, too, partly because all of the hoophouses are across the street at the farm that Alex has to close up at night, so we can all help with it this way. Walking after a meal helps with blood sugar and digestion. It also is just a reminder for me that the body loves motion, and anytime you can do it, it is a good thing. And since we have been aiming for screen-free weekdays (we have been trying so many things!), dinner together and a walk afterwards at least creates an activity where the boys don’t ask for their phones and actually talk to us (even if it is just a few sentences sometimes. Sometimes they also just walk ahead of us and talk to each other, which honestly is just as good).

Stay tuned for more updates in the next newsletter; I swear, updates are coming!

First, you should find and tap some maple trees. This year, we tapped five trees in the woods in the back of our house. We live in company housing, so nothing here is ours, but once I identified some maple trees out back, I was very eager to start tapping them. I have written extensively about the miraculous and sustainable sugar of this xylem sap, and have done everything from going to lots of maple syrup demonstrations to being mentored last year by the founder of my sons’ school in order to teach the lessons as the farm teacher. So this year, I bought some used metal maple syrup buckets, along with lids and spiles, so we could do some as a family.

With maple syrup, it takes a lot of sap to make one shapely bottle of this brown nectar. The sap is just slightly sweet liquid that looks like water as it drips from the spile, but when boiled down, it will take forty gallons of it to make just one gallon of syrup. Obviously, we are not going to do that with five trees and our camping stove (which leads me to mention: you want to make sure you are cooking this outside, unless you are looking forward to a sticky ceiling and walls). So what to do?

Long ago, Native Americans made maple sugar, syrup, and drank the sap. Colonizers learned from them, and infiltrated their capitalist ideals to take over many of these sugar bushes to make and commodify the popular maple syrup, but drinking sap did not become a marketable, commercial product.

Maple sap, the sweetish water that drips from the spile on the days where it starts to thaw and warm while nights are still frosted over, can be collected and drank, a good alternative for the impatient maple tapper, but also a good compromise for those that only have only a few trees to tap and only a few buckets to use. You could drink it straight like barely-sweet water, or you can do what we are doing, and just partly boil it down to a sugary drink.

It is important that when you find these trees (they can be any maple trees, not just sugar maples–we tapped two red maples as well), you tap them in a holistic way in order to not harm the tree. You are, after all, taking the trees’ lifeblood that would otherwise go into the strengthening of branches and leaves. You must find trees that are big enough and strong enough to withstand a tiny wound; it must have a minimum diameter of 10 to twelve inches, ensuring it is likely thirty or forty years old. It is also crucial to just make one hole instead of multiple in order not to stress it, but you can do two if the tree is big enough. (You can tell the tree you aren’t going to be there forever, and you are just taking some of its sap, not all!).

We have been collecting the sap daily for a couple of weeks now. With each collected bucket, we put it all into one pot, start cooking to boil it, and let it evaporate until we have a little more than half of what we started with. It is therefore a very pale brown liquid instead of a deep amber syrup, perfectly sweet, and a delicious drink. Maple flavors can differ depending on where you live, which must attribute itself to soil’s minerals. Here in New York state, our state soil is Honeyoye, but elevation and the differing rock content will affect the growing of trees and plants. In our Catskill mountainous region, I feel our terrain gives the maple sap a distinct flavor of vanilla and caramel, brought to you by iron-red mud and rocks. However, maple farmers in different places will offer varying opinions; I have heard that in the Finger Lakes region in this state, farmers will say that their maple trees give a unique buttery flavor, a taste that is very distinct to that area.

We use a lot of maple syrup in our house. It is a sugar we can find locally, high in minerals, does not cause the ecological damage that cane sugar does, and is more low-glycemic than honey (though honey is usually a close second choice for me). The fact that we can harvest our own sweetener just lets us check another box of something else we don’t have to get at the store. Though we aren’t making actual syrup, I have used the very sweet sap to make teas (chai, matcha, any tea that would use sugar or honey), homemade marshmallows, and chocolate syrup: anywhere you need a sweet liquid.

Next, you should join your local 4-H. Besides making the boys become maple syrup farmers, we have also rejoined our Goat-themed 4-H club (called the Goat Getters—adorable). Since we are unable to have goats of our own at this time, this has been a very important antidote for my sadness (brought on by my severe lack of goats). Among our meetings, we attended a few hands-on goat workshops, including one where we learned about assisting goats in birth and learned how to do castration ourselves (something I had previously just called a vet to do). Even if you don’t always use the methods, workshops for me are a reminder that it is always empowering to learn new skills and know you are able to handle things yourself.

The sugar snow is also bringing us our last days of, well, snow–we had a snow day where I am pretty sure will be our last sledding day this winter, and River has his final snowboarding club day this week. Yesterday I took a long walk in the snow, with the sun glinting off its tiny, melting, crunchy flakes, and though I am looking forward to spring, doing a lot of thumbing through glossy garden catalogues for the school’s garden, really felt I will miss snow–which is strange, because we have had a lot of it this winter! It is all part of my gratitude practice I suppose; I appreciate you, snow!

I want to start out and acknowledge that I have started a new draft of a newsletter many times, but have then gotten bogged down about what has been going on in the world, and especially domestically, with this administration. I read someone calling it being “news poisoned”, which is pretty on the nose–and I know it isn’t healthy. And while sometimes I feel that writing a silly little food newsletter is pointless, I know that we need to all eat and be healthy. Also, making tiny protests with your wallet and fork is cumulative and powerful; while currently protesting on the streets can be dangerous in many areas right now, protesting from home by buying as little as you can from massive corporations (support local!), and providing mutual aid when you can is important, too. Remember that community building is resistance.

Besides parts of the United States becoming the incarnation of Nazi Germany (remember that Nazi ideology actually modeled their white supremacist strategies on the American south’s Jim Crow era laws–what a circle!), there are many ugly and horrible laws that have been passed essentially uprooting tons of environmental progress and food security acts; bad for people in poverty, of course, but also bad for anyone who eats and breathes. It is now more important than ever to support your local farmer, grow some food if you can, support organic food in general, donate and volunteer with hunger relief organizations, and just do more cooking at home. With new laws being enacted that now allow previously banned pesticides sprayed onto crops, be cautious what you are eating. (Reminder that taking one processed ingredient–Red Dye 40–out of food is a distraction; these corporations do not care about people or their health.)

I don’t want this to be a total bummer of a newsletter (too late–sorry!!), but it is hard to sometimes want to talk about something like cozy winter casseroles when atrocities are happening. However! People need to eat and not just curl up with a blanket and wish to sink into their couch cushions as the world burns. So I am here to inspire: be healthy! Don’t support extractive capitalist corporations as much as possible! And cook at home as much as you can!

The truth is, I actually love winter. I even love walking in single digit weather, on top of crisp snow, sometimes with cramp-ons in for walking on ice (seriously life-changing purchase! Highly recommend). I walk to work with snow or ice blowing in my face, and it makes me feel–alive? I also love being indoors: cooking, drinking hot cocoa, baking, and also some non-food hobbies like knitting and embroidery.

Some recommendations for a healthy winter:

When I was in herbalism school, it was pressed to me that winter is the resting period in Chinese Medicine and Ayurveda. (In other words, your urge to stay home is valid and healthy during this time of year.) It is a time for warming, cooked foods, teas, resting, doing low-impact activities like walking or hiking, and getting enough sleep by going to bed early.

The boys had a three-day overnight field trip to the Berkshires a few weeks ago (sounds fancy! I don’t know, I’ve never been) where they studied colonial history and sustainable infrastructure, and when they got home, they had severely chapped lips. I made both boys stick out their tongues to see if they had a slight white coating. “Why are my lips so chapped!” River said to his reflected mirror image. I told two pairs of rolling eyes that it was because of what they had eaten the past few days.

I asked if they had any iced drinks (they apparently had big glasses of iced lemonade all weekend). They also ate lots of sugary treats they were not used to having, like plenty of hard candies, cold foods like sandwiches and some salads, ice cream, and iced coffee.

I explained that chapped lips are usually a sign of weak, sluggish digestion. In winter, everything slows down, from the microbes in the soil to the ones in our bodies. Cold, icy foods are not what you want to eat in winter, especially consistently; cold foods only exacerbate that weakened system. Instead, think warming foods: ginger tea, a slightly spicy butternut squash soup, stir-fries with garlic and onions.

Anyway: long story short, no one believed me but I immediately changed what they were eating for their three main meals for several days, and their lips are now fine. (They tell me they still don’t believe it though and are still in their Jolly Rancher-laced denial.) Here are some winter food ideas for good health:

Homemade marshmallows:

Starting out sweet! I know I just said to take it easy on the sugar, but hot cocoa is my must-have for winter. Yes, you can actually make a very healing cup of hot cocoa. I will use either raw milk, or organic whole milk if you can’t find that. Otherwise, if I use a plant-based one, I try and look for a soy milk. Chicago folks are lucky and get to buy Jenni’s soy milk, but I can’t seem to find one here that good—I need to make my own I guess! Just make sure to skip the ones with lots of ingredients. I’ve waxed on about hazelnut milk that you can make yourself, which might be the most sustainable nut milk I can think of, but soy milk is a good choice, too, especially nutritionally speaking.

I do have a new cozy recipe for hot cocoa (which includes the warming spice of cinnamon), but I want to talk about marshmallows. If you want to do it herbally, you can use marshmallow root to make a strong tea to make them with; otherwise, you can use plain water to mix with your gelatin—maybe most importantly, grass-fed gelatin and maple syrup give the marshmallows minerals and healthy, gut-healing components. (Remember that maple syrup is my preferred sweetener to make these, not only because of its mineral content but also it being more of a low-glycemic sweetener than honey. Hey, I never said sweet can’t be healthy!) I will soon give my recipe for both hot cocoa and marshmallows, but in the meantime, there are lots available online that feature natural sweeteners and grass-fed gelatin.

Yogi Tea

Like hot beverages in general, tea is important. Chai or “yogi tea” with milk and honey (or milk and maple syrup) is great when you don’t feel like hot cocoa. I started making mine with just a pot of water, a thumb of ginger, a cinnamon stick, black peppercorns, a few cloves, and a cardamon pod if I have it. Also, if you happen to see goji berries anywhere, three or four are great thrown into any tea for extra immune-boosting properties. (Winter is all about the warming and the immune-boosting!).

Casseroles

I can write a whole newsletter on casseroles (maybe I will, actually!) but making something both easy and cozy this time of year is essential. Also, so many ideas! A chicken pot pie casserole, a Shepard’s pie, broccoli and potato au gratin–the list goes on. Generally, I have been doing one a week. Sunday is usually our casserole day. To get through the school and work week, I try to make enough to freeze at the end so I can unfreeze a dinner during the week. I do this a lot with soups, too! Any dinner you can have leftovers to freeze for another dinner is very welcome during a busy weekday. You will thank your past self over and over.

Soups

Oh my god, can I shut up about soup? Answer: no. This winter, I’ve had kids at school harvest a big crates of spinach and carrots from the hoop house. One day this last month I made a simple lemon curry soup (garlic, onion, salt, pepper, lemon, curry spices, turmeric, carrots, chickpeas, spinach, canned tomatoes, olive oil) for the school. Everyone–teachers and students–got a small sampling. Everyone wants a recipe for something I literally threw together, so I need to think on that. But! It just goes to show there is really nothing better than a hot soup on a blustery winter day. I also wanted to make the soup to show students there are food options that one can make that are truly simple—things they can cook at home that are healthy and not expensive. Make this soup as something quick and full of nutrition–like I’ve mentioned, I am big on soup as an afterschool snack.

In many ways, I am your just your stereotypical sweater-clad, fall-loving woman, minus the Starbucks coffee cup; after frost has crippled the basil and tomato plants outside and the sky has turned into a semi-permanent pewter, it is time to get cozy and burrow into my hobbit hole. Coziness for me entails baking, watercolor painting, soup-making, and going to bed early. It also involves walking and looking up at trees, drenched in flame-colored leaves, dripping them off their spindly stalks like water droplets. These leaves, having taken their last IV sip of sweet chlorophyll, are cut off as soon as the weather gets cold. They then twirl in the air as they are released from the tree’s branches, entering into their majestic spiral of death. (I guess leaf-peeping can be kind of morbid if you really think of it? Still beautiful, though!).

These trees release their leaves because of sheer panic. Without the long, lazy sun-soaked days, they realize they cannot survive an impending winter and also be thousands of leaves’ sugar factories; they must save themselves! They must survive the winter with whatever means necessary. Those dead leaf bodies will also sacrifice themselves to provide much needed habitat for important pollinator larvae and feed microbial life in the soil (my perpetual PSA: if you can, please leave your leaves on the ground for these reasons!). Like trees, we must also do our best to survive–and like leaving leaves to nourish the soil around us, we must nourish ourselves when a frosty dip blows our way.

Ideas to have a Nourishing Fall:

1. Soup

As any reader of this newsletter knows, I like to talk about soup. Soup is the ultimate nourishing food. In Chinese and Ayurvedic medicine traditions, nothing is more digestible and gives you the plethora of nutrients like soup can. It also can prevent waste; as I have talked about before, “refrigerator soup” is basically a way of just getting the odds and ends out of your fridge. I froze a lot of broccoli from the farm this fall—I have bags and bags in my freezer, currently— but I had some leftover in the fridge that I just couldn’t pack in there. Soup seemed to be the only thing I could do with so much; I used our leftover mashed potatoes, an onion, a winter radish I had hanging around, leftover chicken from the night before, and a slightly wilty parsley bunch I had forgotten about. If you have any drying herbs, even better; I added some of my dried thyme and rosemary and garlic (all anti-viral and good for your respiratory system!). If you have broth, that is great (I often have bone broth I have made or am making from leftover chicken carcasses), but water if fine too! Just as long as you have a good fat to cook it in (I used butter.) Start with the chopped onion, add the other veggies, leftover meats or beans, and then the water. I ended up using my immersion blender to blend it all together (that way no one has a chance to complain about the radish). I added some cream and then topped it with some shredded cheddar cheese from the last of my cheddar block I had (to be sure that no one would complain!). I didn’t have a lot of cheese, so I also added some nutritional yeast to the pot to hope for more cheesy flavor. Don’t forget enough salt and lots of black pepper. There are lots of options!

And it isn’t just nutrition, either–I’ve been reading how in the fall and winter months, the Danish usually have a pot of soup on the stove for when kids come home for school, so they can grab a bowl as their after-school snack. I am just in love with this image, which just oozes coziness for me, and this is a goal of mine for this winter, especially as temps drop to the 20s this week in upstate New York. (Soup in a slow cooker, though, instead of the stove, if I’m being practical.)

2. Pumpkins and Winter Squash

Though I do hate a lot about commercial Halloween, I love all things pumpkin. Another nourishing, grounding element of fall is winter squash season. While I am telling you to skip the Starbucks pumpkin spice-chemical cocktail, there is reason to embrace the real deal. The real spices of cinnamon (get the ceylon kind if you can!), nutmeg, ginger, and cloves are all warming, aid in digestion, reduce inflammation and boost your immune system. They pair great with any winter squash, and not just pumpkin. Match it with the orange or yellow flesh of a squash, and get that beta carotene, potassium, and gut-healing fiber. (Make sure to always pair it with a good fat like butter, or even coconut oil, to make the vitamins bioavailable for your body.) Lots of ways to make winter squash, and not just sweet, either! A butternut squash soup is good, but honestly, I usually just roast it and add salted butter as a side dish.

4. Rendering your own cooking fat

Next week, lard rendering is on my November to-do list. If you have a grass-based, holistic farm you buy pork from, I strongly recommend getting some lard to render for the winter! Not only do you feel like a pioneer in your log cabin, but you have a sustainable cooking fat that is healthy in vitamins that will last a very long time.

5. Time to Ferment

One of my many fermented projects I made this month: this one is a sauerkraut with cabbage, shredded radishes, carrots, dried oregano, hot peppers, and dried nettles.

6. Watercolor painting

For a while we occasionally still have something I did when we were homeschooling, and that is have a “family art night”. Friday nights are still our too-tired-to-do-much night, which is family movie and easy dinner night (formerly movie and homemade pizza night). Though nowadays there are many Fridays the boys want to do their own thing, we still occasionally do this together! Last winter, I got really into watercolor painting, whether at night or on one of our many snow days. It’s easy to just do simple ones (I get ideas from Pinterest) and sometimes the boys join me. If you need to sometimes quiet an overactive mind, for either adults or kids or teenagers, I recommend it!

7. Donating things and Buying Nothing

Being a long-time anti-consumerist for environmental reasons, this is something I already strive for. In my twenties, when I had stickers on my bike that said things like “end oil addiction” and “stop buying things”, I became really interested in the “buy nothing” Christmas movement. I announced to my parents that was what we should do–my mom was definitely not into it. Neither was anyone else, really. Now that we are in the hellish economy we are in, I think my point is finally being heard–at least in my own direct family! My goal is to give things away, and then look at freecycle lists for presents, but mostly focus on experiences. For fall, donating is going to be a main goal; not just food, but also things–outgrown clothes, boots, games, toys, old homeschool materials–so many things! It also involves having reminder conversations with the boys that there does not need to be more “stuff” in this world. When we all stop buying, things stop being made, and sooty, chemical-spewing factories that are horrible to workers can cease to exist. I think there has been plenty of media that has shown us this reality, but this society and humans in general seem to have amnesia, or there are brain-blockers as soon as the Christmas lights begin to sparkle.

Lastly, updates:

As usual, I have plenty of balls in the air that I am juggling, including restarting my herbal business (get ready for my new logo reveal!), and I just did my last harvest at the small plot I got to borrow this year. It’s been complicated, so I am having to re-work some of my plans for various reasons, but it will just have to look different and keep growing year by year until I get a more permanent spot.

I am finally starting to settle into my new schedule at work, which means I am finally starting to do one of my goals this fall and winter: plan and post my online courses! More on this later, but my planning is almost complete (finally!).

Camping is a cheap, adventurous way to take a vacation. Though it does take a bit of effort, and it’s not always comfortable to sleep on the ground, it is much more climate-friendly than a carbon emissions-heavy Air B and B and, frankly, food is best cooked outside in the summer (in my opinion!).

When I first started camping in my 20s (I never went on camping trips as a kid), I would buy “camping food”: dehydrated bean chilis and black bean soups that came in bags that could be easily backpacked into a site. For breakfast, lunch, and dinner, I would boil some water over my Bunsen burner stove and, in a stainless steel pot, mix in the powder, and call it a meal. Luckily for my camping-in-my-40s self, I now cook actual food outdoors. These meals take me less than twenty minutes to make. Here are my main, literally I make every time, camping staples* (*note: these boys have been camping since they were babies, but we haven’t had a real backpacking-to-our-campsite trip since they were born. These meals contain ingredients that are for a bulky cooler, and not for a trekking-to-your-site kind of trip!):

*Bean and Cheese Tacos. For long-time readers and people who know me, know that I am obsessed with tacos. I grew up most of my childhood in Texas, and Alex makes fun of how I could eat Mexican food or Tex-Mex for every meal for the rest of my life and be fine. Anyway, tacos are a great, easy camping food. We pack a small cooler that has everything we need, but beans can be either be canned or in a pouch, both already cooked. You then simply heat up the tortillas in a little avocado or olive oil, then heat up the beans. Either bring a shredder to shred the cheese or get pre-shred; then add any vegetables you have. We happened to camp when cucumbers were really booming at the farm, so instead of lettuce to top with, I chopped up cucumbers, added tomatoes and onion, shredded some carrots, and mixed. I squeezed some lime juice, added salt, chili pepper and dried oregano, and a little olive oil—an in-season farm-y pico de gallo (i.e., what we happened to have). A present/souvenir I get for myself whenever we travel somewhere is a local hot sauce, so I usually add that too.

*Egg scramble. We bring unwashed eggs from the farm on trips so we don’t have to worry about refrigeration (I also bring ice packs which will last at least a day), and then just do an egg scramble with literally whatever we have–the camping trip to the finger lakes was peppers, onion, zucchini, and kale, and Vermont’s scramble was tomatoes, garlic, basil, and collards. Sometimes we bring bacon to add, and I always add cheese and some hot sauce so the boys don’t groan “UGH! EGGS AGAIN?!”. (Someday these boys will be grateful that they ate like kings!).

*Sausage and Veggies. The bean tacos are the most common lunch or dinner we have (we have it multiple times a trip), but sometimes on the first or second night we will have either sausage or ground meat with whatever vegetables we have available (mostly, peppers, greens, and onions. Zucchini if we have it. Even carrots work. You get the idea!). Sometimes I will keep a frozen ground beef as a temporary ice pack in there, but usually we will have cured sausage to make it more shelf-stable. (If using ground beef, I am usually just adding in any herbs I have, but if you just buy a pre-mix spice blend to make it easy, like a taco seasoning packet, that works too!)

Remember that your meals can just be proteins (beans, some meats), good fats (cook with avocado oil or olive oil), and fiber (plenty of random vegetables and fruit). Bring good salt, some spices or seasoning packets, and some acid (vinegar or lemon) and you have (easy) meals to cook!

We did not eat out at all in Finger Lakes, in an effort to be thrifty, but ate three times in Vermont and had three extremely disappointing meals; after we ate at all three restaurants (that were recommended to us!), I swore I would never eat out again. Alex thinks no one is able to use enough salt in Vermont (Vermont taste buds, where you at?), and maybe that is the problem, but I felt it was more than that; that everything we ate at a restaurant was extremely uninspired. In fact, I was actually in a bad mood after every meal out. (As you know, I love Vermont, and will not judge a state based on three meals, but I need them to throw me a bone! I am sure it will get redeemed next time; I just need to pick a different town to visit. After all, there are places in Vermont that I definitely recommend eating at.).

We also had to have the obligatory ice cream of Vermont: the maple creamee. They are served and sold everywhere, but especially places where there are maple sugar shacks. It felt mandatory that we have at least one cone. Readers, I am afraid I was underwhelmed at this also–-Vermonters, what is the deal?! Wasn’t it just standard soft-serve with some maple syrup mixed in? I am mystified at its social salience. Someone help me understand!

Finally, school has started! I have already harvested most of the carrots for the food bank and for the school snack program, and have started planting out the greens that I hope to harvest soon. However, we have a groundhog issue; I walked into the hoophouse to find my some of my plantings decimated. A bed of basil had totally gotten eaten, leaf by leaf, leaving two hundred spindly green skeleton stems. The tomato plants I had planted had almost all of its fruits half-eaten and hanging on the vines like sad, droopy puppets. Crushed, I had to think fast; what was eating it and how was I going to stop it? The heart-dropping feeling of seeing your hard work poured into the soil to just see it demolished entirely was making me panicked, especially when I have such a tight space to work with; there is not much room for error! Since I knew it was most likely a groundhog, practically an epidemic in this area, I searched around the hoophouse and finally found a hole, one that burrowed deep into the ground at the end of my row for tomatoes. I found a live-trap that I set up outside of the hole, baiting it with a half-eaten tomato it had already started. That evening, I drove back to check on the trap to find that I had actually caught it. (Alex is usually the trapper, so I felt pretty empowered, and a little like a frontier woman. But more of a pseudo one–like an American Girls doll version?).

The problem with a live trap is that it is not a snap trap (where it will instantly kill whatever creature it gets); instead, it, well, traps them alive in a little rectangular cage, and then what?

An unspoken rule of farmers here is that you can’t just “drive it to another location”. You are then, inadvertently, making it someone else’s problem, and with an already explosive population of groundhogs here decimating so many crops, it just isn’t a neighborly thing to do. Instead, I had to really buckle down and kill the thing myself. I knew I had to make it quick–it was darkening outside and streetlights had just popped on. I was in pajama pants, and this school’s hoophouse is literally in the center of town—a shotgun isn’t going to exactly fly. (And I don’t know how to shoot one anyway! That’s Alex’s job.) The easiest, quickest way to do so was to drown it--which I promptly did in a bin I filled with water from the school’s garden hose. (If only my 9th grade vegetarian self could see me now.) I still felt that familiar pang of remorse at first (which somewhat vanished when I reminded myself of what a feast it had been having). Luckily, drowning it was over in a matter of seconds. I then called Alex to toss its lifeless body in some woods far out from the school.

So much of farming is life and death–easing and coaxing plants and animals in and out of this world, but attempting to do so in the most humane and environmentally-aware way possible. These life-and-death threads tie the rural and urban farm communities together in their joint missions; some of the same issues, problems and successes are really universal between us. Food is truly the great connector, which includes the growing of it; what is interesting to me this year is that Alex is a mile and a half away in a much more rural location, and I am on essentially a tiny city plot, allowing me to examine its dichotomy. Though we are surrounded by mountains here, the campus that I am on now is in the heart of the town rather than an outside forest, and it has a more urban feeling to it; compost trucked in and dumped by the school’s parking lot; the air carrying the entwined smells of soil and city grit, of concrete and damp pine needles and decaying leaves mixed with crushed wet brick. Farming in a city or town is sound of a basketball thumping and goldenrod seeds tapping hoophouse walls simultaneously. It is the occasional trash of a plastic bottle that has blown over from the bike trail into a raised bed of mustard greens, irrigation coming from a town water pipe rather than a bubbling brook. It gives me new challenges to work with, different from those of last year, like getting a rainwater harvesting system going, and testing the soil in the gardens that are closer to the asphalt driveway to look for any potential heavy metals. Growing food in both rural and urban areas are both important to do in the right way, environmentally speaking. Right now I am planning a kind of city farming curriculum that speaks to that; I am also hoping to tie it to nutrition like I did last year, but with older kids in mind, so I can get more advanced with it. I’ll keep you posted!

Meanwhile, I have the live trap set again; I am hoping that groundhog was the only one and he doesn’t have a bunch of housemates in that hole, as I just planted a whole bed of lettuce yesterday afternoon.

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Well, it was not my intention to take a nearly year-long hiatus (wait, maybe not that long? I don’t even know!) but I am wiping off the proverbial dust and ready to cook up some content once again. Get your wooden spoons ready and poised! But first, here are some updates for the curious:

*Alex is still hard at work as Farm Director here at Center for Discovery. It is middle of CSA season, so he is, naturally, incredibly busy, and on average, working six or seven days a week. But the farm is bountiful!

*This past school year I worked as the farm teacher/outdoor educator at my sons’ school, at the lower campus, where River was one of my sixth grade students. This September, I start teaching and farming at the upper campus, where both Huck and River will be attending. The commute will be better (we can all ride our bikes to school now!).

*This summer, I have been working on the hoop house garden at the school, which donates harvested vegetables to a local hunger relief organization and will continue to do so throughout the school year. Sometimes I feel a sense of paralyzing overwhelm when it comes to doing anything to combat the current slow-burning dystopian landscape we are living in, but I remind myself that doing small things still add up, and eighty pounds of bok choy is still eighty pounds of bok choy. I have also started my own plot at a different location, where I am slowly starting my herbal medicine microbusiness and mini-farm. More on this later!

*Unfortunately, I do not have backyard farm animals this season–but I will remedy this next year, one way or another, mark my words! Our small chicken flock was unfortunately eaten by a bear, except for one, which I promptly butchered myself and stuck in the freezer before the bear came back. We decided not to get more chickens this spring, and also were too late to get any goats that I had wanted to buy. Story for another time, though.

*On a not-fun note, River was tested for Lyme disease at my request, and the test came back that he has had a “past infection”, meaning it could have been from a tick bite years ago. A lot of my summer has been doing lots of trying-not-to-stress-out Lyme disease research, and figuring out what to even do with a “non-active” Lyme diagnosis. I have been especially focusing on a lot of herbal and nutrition research. Lots to learn. (If anyone has experience with this, let me know!). Anyway, that’s another newsletter!

And now, let me start on things that have been making me happy this summer:

*Swimming. We have swum more this summer than any other–I have been trying to take the boys and go swim almost every day, whether over at a river, a creek, or a lake. Here in the Catskills, everything has felt hot and green since June; being in water just makes me in a better mood, even if we dip in a river for only ten minutes. If I didn’t have any swimming in my life, I would want to curl up in my non-air conditioned bedroom and die. (Not to sound dramatic.).

*Cold Brew Coffee. Friends, if you do not make your own cold brew at home, you are all fools. Joking! I literally did not until this summer. In fact, I have been just making “iced coffee” for years, where I just drink that morning’s lukewarm coffee with ice, cream, and maple syrup. Readers, why have I been doing this to myself! The impetus: Alex got tested for high cholesterol this summer, and I made the suggestion to eliminate our French press coffee, which will let oils in that can heighten cholesterol. We switched to using a reusable filter for our coffee (we do pour-over now) and I bought one on a whim that is just for cold brew. It is made of organic cotton and made in Texas (woo-hoo!) and called the CoffeeSock. I recommend it! Make it at home! It is easy and saves money–you will never have to buy that five-dollar brew in a plastic cup with a turtle-killing straw again.

*My Tarot Cards. I decided to really treat myself a few months ago and bought something not from a thrift shop and not a CoffeeSock: in a stumbled-upon witchy store in Port Jervis, New York, I bought a tarot deck from a local Vermont artist. It is gorgeous; just holding it makes me happy! And I swear, it is helping me feel better, especially when there are big decisions on the–ahem–table (ha!). I think a tarot’s greatest power is shifting energy in your mind, perhaps helping you to realize that not everything has to be a burden or an ill-informed decision, and invisible forces are helping you everywhere: a Three of Cups overflowing with bubbling joy. (Sorry, I’ve turned weird this summer.)

*Camping. I mean, I sometimes complain about camping, and setting up a tent and the no running water thing is honestly kind of annoying, but we have been lucky to be able to schedule two weekend camping trips this summer. The best part of camping is that it is a very affordable vacation. The last camping trip we did, we cooked every meal outside, got to swim at a pond at night, picked blueberries and slept through a thunderstorm with rain pelting our tent—adventure!

*Cooking and Growing. I have been growing and drying lots of herbs this summer and am finally ready to start making medicine with them. Also, I’ve been creating new recipes, and challenging myself to make nutrient-dense snacks for me and the boys, especially with the insatiable teenage appetites they now have. This one was inspired by “Sardine Toast”, a recipe I discovered from the New York Times that my mom introduced me to. It’s a pantry meal; a there’s-no-actual-stuff-I-have-in-the-house-to-make-an-actual-meal meal, something that can be easily thrown together. Here I made it with bread, smeared with butter and garlic, then sardines, sliced tomato, salt, sprigs of dill, a dash of sauerkraut, a squeeze of lemon, and then a drizzle of olive oil and salt. Obviously, things can be left out and substituted and it will all taste great, all while giving you plenty of vitamins, protein, good fats and fiber!

*Re-igniting and writing this newsletter. Paid subscriptions have been off for a while, I know, with my teaching and lesson planning and getting used to a new job that took over my brain for a while there, but I will be starting up again (TBD). I’m excited for what I have planned!

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I don’t drink a lot of milk and do not think it is imperative that one does, but I do love a good iced coffee with milk or cream. (I need to write a whole newsletter on iced coffee.)

This summer, I started milking a cow.  Just one.  Her name is Luna Lovegood, she’s a tri-colored mini-Jersey, and she gives two gallons of rich, butter-colored milk every morning that I bring home in mason jars and tastes like the sunshine-dappled field and forest where she grazes.

I found Luna on Facebook marketplace.  I looked up a woman’s hobby farm and offered my services; did she need animal duty help, maybe gardening work? (#Willworkforfood).  I knew I was off this summer from teaching and was focused on doing several things for the break, and I was determined for one of those things to be milking animals and hopefully be able to trade for it.    

In my twenties, I started working on farms where I milked goats and sold the raw milk from the farm.  Though drinking raw milk was and remains controversial in terms of safety (it is important to take the proper protocols, but there are ways to make it safe), my farming journey was heavily influenced by Sally Fallon’s Nourishing Traditions and Jessica Prentice’s Full Moon Feast, both authors being strong raw milk advocates.  When Huck was born too early and diagnosed with Chronic Lung Disease, doctors said he would always have asthma and various lung problems.  I remembered a study I read in my early farming years about Amish kids rarely ever having asthma, attributing it to their daily intake of raw milk (simply referred to as “farm milk” by the Amish community).1  I did more research to find out that kids’ exposure to animals, soil, and the outdoors in general were important keys to unlocking immunity functions of growing bodies.  I link a lot of Huck’s progress with his lungs to this exposure of outdoor life and the food he has been brought up on, which have knitted his bones and built his organs, from soil to fork.   

Milk has been an important food source in our family and a big chunk of our calories, and milking a pasture-raised animal by hand feels like a lost art.  It is just too easy to go to a grocery store’s buzzing refrigerated section and pull out a carton or plastic gallon to purchase from out under a fluorescent white glow.  (If it wasn’t clear from my writing, my main goal in life is to live as much in a Lucy Maud Montgomery novel as possible, so my preference is to milk a cow as opposed to going to Whole Foods.) 

These boys have also been raised on raw cow’s milk from various grass-based, organic farms, or milk from our own pasture-raised goats, since they were babies.  They still drink it now, but less by the cup, as we now make more hot chocolate and ice cream with it.  I am incredibly wary of buying certain kinds of organic milk from grocery stores (and especially here, where, if I haven’t complained enough about it, our closest store is a Wal-Mart, where I avoid going at all costs whenever I can).  Many large, industrial organic farm companies operate much as ordinary CAFO factory farm pollution nightmares, just with organic feed replacing the regular GMO stuff; factory farms are huge emitters of methane gas and carbon dioxide, contributing 57 percent of food’s greenhouse gas emissions but only providing 18 percent of our calories, vastly accelerating climate change and under-nourishing people with nutrient-deficient food.  (Operations vary, of course: Organic Valley milk operates with only family farms, and is therefore much better and more ethical than Horizon Farms, for example.  It’s important to research!  There are also some good, smaller dairies out there available in many grocery stores).       

Looking at food through a climate-friendly lens, what are other ideas when it comes to dairy?  And what about plant-based milks?  I know not everyone can look at Facebook marketplace and find someone with a small farm and a cow whose farmer is looking for someone to trade milking duties for milk, or find a small farm that is focused with their herd sequestering carbon and regenerating a field full of healthy green pasture and fertile soil.  Before I found this cow, I took a long break from drinking dairy milk, and instead traded hot chocolate to be made with a sustainable nut milk I made myself from hazelnuts.  

Hazelnuts are an environmentalist’s dream nut and permaculture darling; they can be grown easily in different regions (as opposed to almonds’ obstinate affinity for California), are great at halting soil erosion, are hardy-growing alongside other plants and trees, and require no pesticides.  They don’t need the intense amount of water that almonds do (over in drought country to boot).  They are also a nutrient dense nut, full of vitamins and good fats.  As usual, it’s important to know its roots: commercially, be careful when purchasing hazelnuts from a store; the majority of the world’s hazelnuts for sale are from Turkey and are rife with child labor abuse issues.  Oregon is the largest provider for US-grown hazelnuts, but doing an online search can help find them more locally.  I buy mine when available from a local farm stand here in New York, the nuts loose in a paper bag and labeled with a sharpie.  

Other nut milks have other environmental and other issues that make it incredibly hard for me to want to buy; almonds, as I mentioned, take an absolutely horrid amount of water and can generally only grow in a drought-prone area of California, and it is difficult to grow them organically.  Cashews, which I generally purchase only if they are fair-trade (I try not to even get the nut butter), have salient problems of only being grown far away, with heaps of carbon miles (India, North Africa, and Vietnam the most common places), but are also replete with horrible labor abuses, where workers are paid very little to or are forced to shell the nuts, which exposes their fingers’ skin to caustic oils.  

I like foraging and trading and growing your own because I am anti-capitalist and believe in a barter economy, a sharing of the wealth, and a localized food system.  I wish I could do more trading in general, but I trade when I can.  Foraging is also an important part of a sustainable-minded eater; lately I have been cooking the lamb’s quarters from the garden and collecting blackberries until my fingers are pricked and bleeding.  I am paid at the farm when I do weeding (the farmer insisted on that), but I like that I am doing milking duties in trade for the milk, as not only do I get to keep the milk, but it gives the farmer a break (and helping out with the surplus, as she has so much milk that she was feeding much of it to her chickens.)

It seems like a fair deal, not just between me and the farmer, but also with Luna; she eagerly shuffles into the wooden milk house to hop on her rickety stanchion and receive her hay, organic nutrients, and beet pulp from a yellow bucket (the pulp helps with milk production), and I have gotten quick at milking her.  She thanks me with the delicious milk, and then is on her way to go back into the grassy field and cool mossy woods and be with her mom, a lovely brown cow (who is not being milked, but keeping Luna company, as it is not good for a cow to be alone).  She is off to eat the tops of feathery native grasses with deep root systems, helping to regenerate the plants and in turn sequestering carbon, and feeding the soil with her manure.  Luna might also be pregnant soon, which would give only a few months more of milking before letting her build her baby calf, and then letting the calf have the milk for a while.  When that happens, I will probably be back to taking a dairy break and making hazelnut milk again.  I, after all, believe in seasonality just as much as I believe in anti-capitalist food systems.    

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The second week of August we are trying something new; instead of a pricy overnight camp for the boys, Huck and River and I will be going to Vermont for Farm and River camp, where the three of us will all be tent camping and they will be gone for the day.  Half-way through we will be meeting my wonderful sister-in-law who will rate my camp cooking. I am hoping to get some school planning done while also occasionally swimming in a river.  I also am thinking and planning out the camp meals for this trip, so I am aiming to soon write about the adventure of cooking healthy meals outside!

What I have been making:  fermenting pickles, canning tomatoes, making homemade chili crisp (no bad oils, no sugar), sourdough bread and focaccia, and testing recipes for vegetarian tikka masala-inspired dishes using chickpeas and a ton of vegetables.  And homemade ice cream, of course.

The New York school year is much longer than any midwestern one I know of, so we just ended school only a little bit ago.  (For those that don’t know, I was teaching at the Center for Discovery’s Farm school, where I worked as a T.A. for this last year.)  The boys and I all finished the same day and the three of us are now on summer break for the months of July and August–this summer I am working one day a week on a woman’s farm, milking her cow and weeding her garden, but other than that, I am aiming to focus on this newsletter and trying to give the boys a fun summer where I basically try to get them to do anything that gets them off their computers.  (Activities include: chores, going out more to the farm, taking care of six chickens, making ice cream, going to hidden wild blueberry patches and swimming holes it took me a year to find).

Life is strange.  Here, my life is not what I was really hoping for; we still have a very small yard that gets little sun, making gardening hard, but I do have a few thrifted terra cotta pots on the deck and a small raised bed that Alex and the boys built (which doesn’t get much sun!).  I realize, though, without any kind of real garden space, I cannot do the things I really want to do (I can’t make a salve from the four calendula flowers I have out there). Aside from that, though technically Alex is supposed to get vacation time, vacation doesn’t really exist when you are understaffed at the farm that produces food for a sizeable CSA, a cafe that serves a big staff, as well as live-in residents and a number of the school’s students.  Instead of any real time off to go somewhere, it means being tethered here for the time being, work always looming in the background.  To make up for these things, I am trying to really focus on the small things, the tiny things, the backyard things; spotting a rosy maple moth, the smallest of the silk moths, on a maple tree; watching ants spread seeds by carrying them back to their colonies, eating an attachment to the seed called the elaiosome, and then discarding the unneeded seed to later be germinated in the ground.  These are the small things I am researching that give me hope for everything else. 

I am in talks to possibly be the Farm and Garden teacher at my son’s school (where I would be focusing on outdoor and garden education, along with herbal studies).  As many of you know, herbal, farm and outdoor education was always my main passion at our farm, so it is basically a dream job to be able to teach it at a school.  I am starting to map out a curriculum, and doing so, remembering how incredible the world of the miniscule truly is, and why I love permaculture so much.  Currently, I am brushing up on how to teach the miracle of the nitrogen-fixing abilities of the pea/legume family.  Almost 90% of the plants in this family form symbiotic relations with soil bacteria called rhizobia.  This bacteria is found on tiny pearl-like nodules on the roots.  In return for these microscopic bacteria magical wizards supplying the plant with usable nitrogen, the plant uses photosynthesis to give them shelter and nutrients; a true, health-building partnership.  It is why I became drawn to permaculture in my early twenties; spiritually speaking, I feel that God gave us a blueprint when creating nature’s scientific systems for how us humans should live.  Things work in cycles, with symmetry and symbiosis, in fractals, in patterns.  “Nothing is wasted in nature” is one of permaculture’s many mantras.  Everything works together; an earthworm does not do things to only help its earthworm self; it works in a glittering and speckled food web.  Nature showcases how ecology works like puzzle pieces sliding next to each other, helping everything work correctly.  Unfortunately, humanity is rooted in self-absorption that takes effort to realize and fight against; it is hard for humans to work with each other and not only do things that benefit the individual self.

Cooking for and nourishing yourself and others is also a tangible way to do something small–much like a foraging worker ant finding a seed with food attached, carrying it on his back, and making the long trek to deliver it to its colony.  Nourishing your community can make you feel grounded in this insane, often sad world.  

Ways I have been attempting to be a joyous miniaturist is to do little (free) things, like making our family eat outside almost every day we can (we have a covered back deck, so we can do so even in the rain).  Not farming has made it so I am not spending more time outside than inside anymore, and even though I worked at the Center’s farm school last year, the classes I was helping teach were not outside as much as I wished they were.  That, then, left a lot of time indoors.

Humans evolved to live outside, which is one reason I believe our mood can increase when we are outdoors.  Eating outside is a way we can be “living” outside more (an outdoor kitchen is next on my list, perhaps when we actually own a home one day!).  Back when we were living in the RV bus and I would spend late nights scrolling Zillow (never again, too depressing), I realized there was a common, almost cut-and-paste phrase that I read over and over; something to the extent of “drink coffee every morning outside on your front porch!” or “drink your coffee outside looking at your beautiful back/front yard/lovely view”!  It took me reading this over and over to realize that I never even thought to drink coffee outside in the morning, and I lived in a freakin RV–I was camping for two whole years, and somehow, it was just too chilly in the mornings, our outdoor space was too dewy to sit, or the barely lit early hours were too buggy.  Maybe I knew we were to be outside most of the day working on various farms, or hiking in the afternoons, to bother having my cup of coffee anywhere but my extremely small table inside our tight bus, wrapped in a blanket.  The thought did not appeal to me, and selling this idea as the American dream of home ownership seemed strange.  That said, there is something deep in us that maybe we are drawn to spending more time just outside our door; thus in the evenings, we never missed the chance to eat dinner outside, diligently carrying our plates to a picnic blanket or small folding table or already-there wooden picnic table, depending on where we were. (We also just didn’t really have room inside with that tiny table for all of us).

Now we live in an actual house, and we still do not miss a day to eat outside, and sometimes take an after-dinner walk down the road, and it really does elevate my mood every time, even if it is just a little.  It is something so small, but perhaps small is sometimes what we can handle, or the most accessible or least overwhelming.  Perhaps the small is something we should be modeling our life from; like what is taught in permaculture, the small miracles can be the map of what we are to follow.  If you are needing a pick-me-up, I recommend starting small; take your dinner plate out your door, sit at a table or a stoop or a blanket or chair, and be enchanted by the grass or trees or birds.  After your dinner, a bonus idea would be to lie in some grass somewhere, and watch an ant’s seed dispersal; with a little patience, you can see them perform their act of nourishment for their fellow ants while also helping to spread important seeds.  Maybe you can take it as inspiration–maybe we all should.

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This newsletter was on hold from being released because I suddenly somehow came down with covid, and I do not mix well with covid.  I am finally feeling better, but I still cannot smell anything (a nightmare for the family cook and an herbalist constantly trying to identify plants by leaf arrangements and scents!) and it has not been real fun to eat anything.  I finally have energy to cook tonight (it’s Mediterranean night with beet salad, chickpeas, baba ganoush and our fermented pickled cucumbers).  Hopefully I can taste something besides just salt!

Paid memberships have been on pause for a while now, and when I was teaching during the school year, I felt for many reasons I wouldn’t be able to do it justice.  I am planning on starting them up again and unpausing membership at the end of summer, giving me enough time to plan and work on it, so that it can be as educational and information-packed as possible.  It will be less on recipes and more on kitchen witchery (how to stock a healthy and medicinal food pantry, how-to tutorials, meal planning, etc.).  Likely I will be teaching somewhere in the fall, like I mentioned, but I will just carve out the time for it all!  

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People often ask what my favorite state was when we were working while traveling for two years (a refresher: we refurbished an RV bus to be off-grid while we circled the United States–twice!--and worked at different farms, for months at a time).  We went to almost every state (I am counting ones that we were passing through and ended up breaking down in, causing us to stay past the amount of time we intended.  Looking at you, Utah!).  Some I don’t care that we missed (South Dakota) and a couple that I am sad we did not get to (Montana).  Some I would love to live in but ultimately decided to not settle in for various reasons, whether too expensive or too dry or too far (Oregon, New Mexico, Maine, Colorado), and one state that I would love to live in because it is my ancestral homeland and is the only one I have ever felt truly where I belonged (Texas).  Aside from that, I have other trivial opinions about all of the different states (I love Minnesota and Wisconsin, but the rest of the Midwest is a big shrug from me).  I was inspired by so many of the farms we visited and worked at, and by those areas’ foodscape scenes.

And with that, there is one state that truly has my heart: Vermont.

When I tell people that, they always ask, “Why Vermont?”.  Even Alex is confused; even though this is his ancestral homeland, he likes it only ok, and sort of likens it to a lot of beautiful places we were at.  Maybe I can’t exactly explain it, but I will try.  

1.  Obviously, it is beautiful.  We spent a quick weekend (bookended by chaotic trips from the farm and back to the farm) at a Purim/Maple Syrup celebration in the northern mountains at a farm community, where we got completely snowed in.  We were told they had 20 inches of snow the weekend before, so the 10 inches that had just happened seemed like a dusting to these people.  A big snow like that may seem like kind of a nightmare to some, but when you are cross-country skiing through a magical whipped cream forest while pixie dust ice crystals dot your face and coat you learn to forgive the fact that you can’t get your car out to the food co-op to pick up some groceries for a day and a half. 

2. Skiing.  This was the first time I or the boys had ever cross-country skied, and the first time I have ever skied at all.  I am pretty sure I will not like down-hill skiing, but I just loved cross-country.  We don’t own skis, but someone was nice enough to lend us theirs, and since then I have been scouring Facebook Marketplace to buy our sets for next winter.  Cross-country is actually a good sport for anywhere, even flat places like the Midwest, but there is something special about a thick forest and a rushing river that you are skiing alongside, listening to the silent snow and bubbling water over large storm-colored granite rocks.

3. Food.  I hope to always live in a good food area, and there are so many of them (even if the state is not, of course you can find good food pockets, wherever you are!) but there are definite food apartheids happening all over, in both urban areas and rural areas.  I remember one town in northern Arizona, near the Utah border, right outside of the Navajo Nation (which is deemed a “food desert” by the United States Department of Agriculture), that had two gas stations, a casino and no grocery store–just lots of pale brown and reddish sand alongside its desert-encrusted roads, land that is nearly impossible to grow plants into besides a few select spiky survivors, and everywhere felt barren and thirsty for water.  We spent the night in a truck stop parking lot and we left quickly the next morning, even though the local gas attendant told me there was “lots of good hiking” nearby.  This is an area of the United States that is working on food sovereignty and climate resilient growing, despite its many challenges. (At some point I’d love to work with an organization doing food work in the desert, as I’m so fascinated with the growing conditions). Vermont obviously is in a much different area, but even though it is a mostly a rural state, there is such an emphasis on local food, small environmentally-sound businesses, and the strength of small farms; it is utterly baked into its culture, and you see it supported everywhere.

Of course, nowhere is perfect, and Vermont, unfortunately, is much more expensive than other states, so farming there can be filled with obstacles.  Vermont is also not immune to the other problems plaguing the nation, like climate change issues (like flooding, as we saw last summer) and the wealth gap that has been slowing widening over the last couple decades.  And while it’s not this tiny state’s fault (you should see how many off-grid solar-powered farms we saw!), because of this planet’s human activity, no one is truly safe from climate change and other catastrophes, as we know.  But like those communities that are putting up solar panels, we still have to live in this world, and try our best while we do; Vermont is just good at leading by example.

What I’ve been cooking:

After Vermont, my and the boys’ schools had spring break start.  The boys and I took a very fast trip to Chicago where I just holed up at my parents’ house, who are both dealing with separate broken bone issues, among other things, making it difficult or not possible for my parents to cook, drive, or do much at all.  I spent hours cooking food and freezing it for them so I can put my mind at ease that they can at least have healthy meals to eat.  I focused on bone-building foods (like bone broth and green vegetables) and put in tons of medicinal spices.  The main freezer meals I got done were: white bean chicken chili, black bean and kale enchilada casserole, beef and vegetable curry, and then a Asian-inspired chicken cooked salad.  It was pretty tiring and it rained basically every day we were there, but I did at least do what I set out to do.  It also made me wonder why I don’t do freezer meals for us here.

We also had a horrible airport experience where we had to land in Pittsburgh en route back to New York, and then got stuck in the airport for a whole day and had to eventually get a hotel to fly out the next morning.  We spent many hours in a food court, and it sent me into a rabbit hole of remembering mall food courts (I had to explain to the boys about going to a mall) and remembering ordering the ubiquitous 80s and 90s mall drink, the Orange Julius. Anyone remember those?  Something about the dreamsicle-in-a-cup, creamy orange drink that I just think of as one of the best combinations of all time.   I then developed how to make a healthy Orange Julius–it is not as sweet as what you might remember, so add more honey if you’d like.    

Oranges and citrus season is ending soon (move over winter fruit, make way for spring and summer!).  So enjoy the end of its season with this treat.

Healthy Orange Julius

1 cup orange juice

2-4 whole tangerines, peeled

1 container coconut yogurt (unsweetened)

½ teaspoon vanilla

1 tablespoon of vanilla collagen powder (optional)

1 tablespoon of honey

A tad of tangerine zest to add to the top of each drink (optional)

Put all ingredients in a blender and mix until smooth.  Serve with a glass or metal straw for the true mall experience.

In Other News:

This week is Hudson Valley Restaurant Week, so a lot of restaurants around here have set menus for a very reasonable price.  Chicago and its surrounding areas always had so many amazing restaurants that participated in Restaurant Weeks, but while we had the farm we were always too busy and too poor and too kid-bound to go to any of them.  (Restaurant week aside, we basically didn’t go out to eat at a nice restaurant for approximately 10 years.)  We went last night to the DeBruce, a farm-to-table restaurant where we had the fixed menu of sunchoke soup (amazing), roasted local trout with shaved brussel sprouts (so good), and elderflower ice cream for dessert.  (There were choices to these three courses, so Huck got the mushroom gnocchi and River and Alex got the bone marrow-onion cheeseburgers instead of the trout.  I think the trout was the best dish though!).  Since we don’t go out to eat often, I really soak up these experiences for inspiration of what I can do at home.  Every bite was eaten since our boys have become insatiable at the table, and also, Alex and I went right from work to pick them up from school to drive straight there, so we were all starving.  Anyway, it was a really fun experience, and probably the prettiest restaurant I have ever eaten at, with windows viewing the mountains and being seated right by the woodstove.   Someone, take me back!

While we definitely don’t live in a foodie town or a good food city (see: Chicago, any town in Vermont), luckily there are a couple of places that we can eat at seldomly, and the rest of the time, we just have to be our own farm-to-table restaurant.  I just need to learn how to make that sunchoke soup and cook a perfect roasted trout!

And finally! Obviously, I have not relaunched the paid newsletters yet—but the relaunch is coming, complete with bells and whistles, and what that looks like will be explained soon, in all of its delicious glory! Thanks in advance for your support!

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Readers, it has been a while–a whole fall and winter have nearly passed, and we are almost to spring.  There’s no time to catch up on everything, but things have been busy, and–who knew how hard a transition to new jobs, new state, new schools would be?  (Just kidding, of course it would be hard, but I just didn’t think of the extent of its difficulty!).  Alas, we are overall doing fine here, albeit working a lot–Alex is doing good things at his job of Farm Director, and I got a job teaching at the farm school, which I have been doing since September, where many of my students are nonverbal autistic teenagers.  Though there are farm chores to do with them, I am not doing as much farming as I would like, and March is really when I really start getting the itch–the moment I see the crocuses begin to burst through earth is when I start to think about all of the perennials and infrastructure we left at our old place, wishing I had some of that now.  

But!  No time to be sad about the past.  I also don’t want to talk too much about the future, for I am trying to just be ever-present in the now. We are still trying to figure out things and I promise to be more update-y whenever things take shape; for now, though, I am just concentrating on getting through the school year, and attempting to think positive.  One nice thing about my current job is that it does allow me to leave work and pick up the boys from school (on foot), then come home to cook dinner, which is what I look forward to everyday.

With that, I have started to master the art of the quick, healthy dinner.  Paid subscriptions will be starting up again soon (!!), and one of the first posts I am working on is “The Medicinal Pantry”, which will talk about quick meals that can be thrown together using some pantry staples you can get or already have on hand. More stuff in the works, too!     

I had been thinking of the quick, healthy, budget-friendly, climate-friendly dinner for a while, taking notes and doing research, when I read about Kellogg’s tone-deaf campaign to encourage cash-strapped families to “eat cereal for dinner”.  At first, I thought it was a parody; it just seemed a little too YA Dystopian Novel to think of the Kellogg’s CEO, in his golden palace eating lamb stew, telling the commoners they should just chow down on a bowl of corn flakes to save money.  After a quick youtube search, though, I am sorry to say that it is a real commercial, one that received a well-deserved amount of backlash.  

Many, many problems, of course, underscore this idea, as others have pointed out.  Firstly, a box of cereal is not that inexpensive for a lower-income family trying to get dinner on the table.  (A package of tempeh, a head of broccoli and a bag of rice can be bought for roughly the same price of a cereal box, not to mention the milk.)  Then there is the problem with nutrition and the actual cost of health, in which processed breakfast food is abysmal and should be avoided even in the morning (I say this as someone whose bones and body were built as a child by Frosted Flakes and Lucky Charms).   Aside from these cereals not being good for you to eat for any meal, they are also terrible for the environment.  I agree with the social media campaign to boycott Kellogg’s cereals (#LetThemEatCereal), pointing out the atrocious wealth gap in our ugly, circuitous capitalist society, but people who are boycotting Kellogg’s for the sake of them to lower their prices are missing the point.  

Processed foods commit numerous environmental crimes, from the pesticide-ridden, water-guzzling, soil-destroying components of using cocoa, sugar, and GMO grains (not to mention the imperialism of its use of unfair labor practices and modern-day slavery).  The cereal factories themselves also take a horrendous amount of energy, with its grinding, boiling, and puffing of making crispy cereal bites (energy currently derived from coal plants until alternative energies take root).  Lessening the price of an $8 box of cereal only feeds into labor abuse, from the harvesting of cocoa beans to the machine labor in a polluting factory; yes, Walmart has cheaper prices and Tyson makes cheap frozen chicken nuggets, but by paying those cheaper prices, you are simply supporting their exploitive labor and encouraging the suffering of workers, animals, and the environment.  

There are many alternatives to a fast, cheap-ish dinner that don’t involve processed flakes in a plastic bag in a box.  If we are going with the breakfast theme, eggs are nutrient powerhouses.  Springtime is when we should remember the humble egg (it traditionally being a seasonal food) and you can find good ones almost everywhere. In the beginning of March, even though there are chickens on the farm here and I do chicken chores every week with my students, somehow it wasn’t enough, and my overdoing-it brain made me order a small flock of chickens to just have in our backyard so the boys can collect their own eggs, as well as for pest control and manure for a tiny garden this year.  (Always a homeschool teacher, I also thought it would be fun for the boys to learn to build a chicken coop from old scraps of wood!).  We currently have very little space in the yard (we will see how this goes), and I know that raising a flock of seven chickens is not exactly possible for someone in an apartment, but buying a dozen eggs from a local farmer at roughly the same price of a box of cereal sure beats Cheerios for a meal in every single way: nutritionally, environmentally, and sustainably speaking.  I understand that corporations have no moral core, but if people as rich and powerful as the Kellogg’s CEO actually cared about poor people getting dinner on the table instead of filling their own wallets, then something like local eggs would be the option that would be shared in the news. The suffering of living things everywhere is overwhelming, but sometimes making simple, healthy, earth- and labor- friendly choices can be as easy and inexpensive as making a quick egg-and-veggie scramble for dinner. 

What I am Cooking:

Many things will be coming to this newsletter!  I have been practicing making my own pantry and refrigerator staples.  We are coming out of everyone in this house being sick, and this past Sunday, even though the sky was the color of ashes and everything felt very gloomy, I put on a podcast and made most things on my list.  I mean, it took me most of the day and I was definitely wiped out, but I made a sourdough focaccia, a jar of homemade chili crisp, cookies for a school fundraiser, and a gallon of hazelnut milk from these local hazelnuts I got forever ago.  I also made a vegetable root au gratin and roasted a chicken, and I felt very accomplished; mind you, again, this is the most I have made on a Sunday in a very long time, so calm down!   But it gave me lots of ideas of how-to tutorials to film, so I am excited about that.

Winter time is time for cooking lots of stews, in my opinion, when winter can be cozy but sometimes too dark; I am really ready for the transition into spring.  For months, we have been living off what we have preserved, from our fermented jars, our canning jars, our freezer, our pantry, and our mini “root cellar”.  I enjoy knowing I have plenty of canned beets and frozen green beans to get me through February (as I have talked about often, I have always secretly been Laura Ingalls Wilder in The Long Winter—good at eating when times are less plentiful! Or maybe I’m just a prepper).  Though we had spinach and kale in the hoop houses for most of the cold months, February and March have long been my toughest months to get through, waiting for other green things to burst out of the ground again, for snow to melt, for life to wake up.  And with a long winter and climate change and food injustice compacting everything, sometimes already-low thoughts can melt into depression and only get twisted up in misery, so much so it just makes me want to give up and throw my wooden spoon against the wall in a “isn’t there a pizza place I can just call” kind of way.  That is how I know I need to dig myself out and, like a smiling patch of springtime daffodils, crawl my way back up and keep on going. I need to keep making meals and feeding my family, even when they’re very quick and simple meals, because our health is our most valuable asset.

I am reviving this newsletter to again come out regularly, its mission being to inspire and teach. For the next few weeks, the free newsletters will be going out.   Paid ones will restart and relaunch soon–exciting things are coming with those.  (Thank you all for your patience and support on this!!).

Next week I will be talking about food and festivities, and about the quick trip to Vermont we are taking this weekend (where we are going to a maple syrup and Purim festival—I swear we never go anywhere, so kind of a big deal to start getting out of town occasionally!).

Well, here we are, readers.  It is hard to really feel like you are really home when “home” has changed locations so many times in the last few years; in fact, we have been pretty mobile since 2019, which, again, was not my plan, and I have been tentative about whether to really call this home yet, based on a few things.  First, I wanted to see if Alex really liked this job (he does!).  Unexpectedly for us, he is being moved up to Director of Farming Operations instead of Assistant, which is great for him.  

I also really wanted to know if we liked this area, and if the boys would like it, and, so far, so good.  They actually really like living in a town, even if it is louder than they are used to (the bike trail’s parking lot right near us seems to be party-town on the certain Fridays and Saturdays).  We have an adorable, organic, farm-focused charcuterie shop down the road that we visit every week and where I am able to work part-time at, an awesome bike path through the woods outside our house, and a movie theater and performance center next door that had a music festival just happen and where we saw the excellent new Miles Morales Spider-verse sequel.  Hurleyville, a small town on the brink of major revitalization, has the tagline of “the liveliest little hamlet in the mountains”.  And because Alex does feel good about his job, I am doing my best to really focus my energy into liking it here, and what we can make happen.

Of course, as many of you know of our saga, Alex and I had major disagreements with what we should do after having to leave our farm rental property.  I was deadset on finding another farm; I knew a time would come when the kids were older and I could help out more and do more fieldwork, which was always my intention, and with their ages now being ten and twelve, that time has finally come….but alas, we have no farm where I am suddenly able to do more at.  That is sad for me, and if had been completely up to me, we would have transitioned to a farm that we were able to have rented-to-own or taken over (at one time, we had three very viable options).  But it was not just my decision, and I did agree to Alex accepting this job, mostly because he wanted it, and mostly because I was so tired of us saying no to everything.  I just wanted to say yes to something, and this is what Alex was excited about, and what was in front of us.  I took a gamble, rolled the dice, closed my eyes and blew out the candles.  Now that we are here, I feel like all I want is to stay put and make it work.  The immense guilt about moving these kids around has really more gravity this year than it has in years prior, and part of me feels like never wanting to move again.  That said, I am homesick, and I think when I was just wanting to say “yes” to something, didn’t really think that one through.  I am going to resolve that by the planning of a trip back home for a week this summer with the boys.  Generally speaking, though, I’m hoping I can just get used to things enough, and maybe the homesickness can subside. 

In other news, I have some balls in the air that I will start talking about more soon.  My new friend, Eve, who works at the farm as the lead herbal grower, has let me help her in the greenhouse while we nerd-out about all things herbal medicine and biodynamic growing-related.  And, besides working on-call at the wonderful La Salumina, I have another project that I am starting and will talk about soon!

Besides all that, I started a small garden that is buoying me and my sanity, too, if I can keep the groundhogs out. (I also make the boys help me with planting and weeding while chiding them to not forget their farming roots—Huck is pretty much at the eyerolling stage of our relationship, but to his credit, he does a good job at trying to appease me.)  And lastly, speaking of animals in the we-are-definitely-not-in-Kansas-anymore sense, a few mornings ago I was sipping my coffee and staring out our back window when a large black bear sauntered past, stopping to sniff the glass.  It was the closest I have ever been to a bear, and as I squealed for Alex to hurry and come see, we stared, amazed, as it walked through our backyard, sniffed our compost, and left.  “I feel insulted it didn’t eat from that,” Alex said, but I was eager for it to go back into the woods and find real bear food; poor animals, I always think, getting their habitat taken over.  At least the Catskills seem to have enough forest for them.

And finally, food adventures!  Recipes are coming back!  I am finally getting my groove back in the kitchen, my sourdough starter is truly thriving, and we went to eat at a diner a few weeks ago (you know how I love me a good diner) that I have wanted to eat at for many years.  Regular newsletters will be back, and next newsletter will be all about diners and diner food and how I love them and am constantly inspired by them. 

While I do not have a picture of the bear (I couldn’t find my phone fast enough!), here are a few highlights from the last few weeks.

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Well, folks, we made the semi-last minute decision to accept a job in upstate New York for this season, so here we are, in a town nestled in the Catskill mountains, where we all pulled up to a house no one in our family had yet even seen pictures of, to work on a farm. While my job is being figured out, Alex is the Assistant Director of Farm Operations at the Center for Discovery, a non-profit that has an organic and biodynamic farm to feed all of the residents and staff. Reasons we took the job was that it paid well enough that we will actually be able to save money this year (I hope!), they provided us with a house (we finally sold our RV bus, so that was no longer an option!), and we get to go back to what we really love to do, which is holistically farm and feed people. I will say, dear readers, when we pulled up after twelve hours of driving, in the cold, grey rain, my first thought was, “oh no. We’ve made a mistake.” Alas, it was dreary, like English moor-Wuthering Heights dreary, but I just felt this surge of “omg what is this place, what is this town!”. Though the house backs up to one of the farm fields (our yard borders the deer fence), we live in an actual town, one where we have neighbors and we are down the street from a tiny Main street, the kind with actual storefronts and a restaurant or two, some empty dilapidated buildings mixed in, and even a small movie theater. Since Hurleyville is a mountain town, our house is on a hillside, so not exactly flat (good for sledding in the winter though, I suppose!), so it is a stranger yard than I am used to, and I am trying to figure out how to have a garden and chickens here. (That said, we do face a mountainous view, so pluses and minuses.).

Inside, our house is very old (I am destined to live in houses that are over 100 years old I guess), which is fine, but I also saw right away has some of the old farmhouse problems we have gotten accustomed to. We couldn’t afford to get a pod to bring actual furniture here, so we just packed up our “things” in a box truck (farm tools, kitchen stuff, books, toys, clothes), which, in retrospect, was very annoying to come here with no furniture at all, and it is something I will not do again!

I have also just accepted that moving time is take-out time, so we have had pizza three times in 5 days, which I am not ok with. Two days ago, I was so desperate to not have pizza or any take-out (most take-out is pizza here—guess I have to go to New York City for Ethiopian!), so I unpacked enough kitchen things to work on a recipe I wanted to create. I started the oven, pre-heating it to 350. Upon starting, a horrible smell began to fill the house. It was only the boys and me that were home, and River came out of his new room he was setting up to ask what on earth I was cooking. “Something residual I guess. I’m sure it will burn off in a few minutes!” I told him, the desperation permeating my whole body. I just wanted to cook real food, for the love of God! As we waited, the smell seemed to get worse. It also, I realized, was a smell I recognized: a dead animal. Frantically, I started looking in the oven for some sort of dead rodent I was accidently cooking; in the broiler, or underneath the stove top. Nothing. When Alex finally got home, it had been off and the windows were open, but he still said, “what is that?”.

After still looking and finding nothing, we figured it was likely a dead mouse somewhere that had just crawled in somewhere weird that we couldn’t locate. Long story short, we did call someone from the housing maintenance department (a new stove is being ordered for us?), but it really put me in a horrible mood; the shock of a new town, feeling unsure about a house, not sure about how we are going to grow in this yard, and now I couldn’t even roast something in our new, extremely cluttered kitchen! I went full-blown “I wish we never moved here!” to Alex, which was very unnecessary, but I couldn’t help it. I am better now, but we still have no oven, so I cooked this soup on the stove, hence the name, Desperation Soup.

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This week’s recipe is the healthy Borscht soup, a beet-based soup that has origins in Ukraine. The one I make is a vegetarian version, but many recipes call for beef, or beef bones. You can do either! The point of this simple, farm-based soup is really the nutrient-dense beets. It’s perfect for that end of winter, last-of-the-root-cellar beets, carrots and onions, before the spring vegetables start coming in.

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Spinach is extremely cold-hardy, making it a good winter growing plant. As temps dip, the sugar content in the leaves increase in the vasculature, which prevents it from freezing. (It also makes the leaves sweeter.)

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I did, however, start looking at the horrors of TikTok, first because River wants an account, and I am sort of looking into doing TikTok cooking vids (CookTok?), but I had barely glanced at it only to see you have to really sift through some truly pointless things! Although we did learn one TikTok dance (River and I do it together, since Huck and Alex refuse), I have also witnessed some mind-blowing vapidity. I don’t need to detail any videos, but just know that I watched one about a farm in the south, and it mentioned cold beer, tator tots and chicken-fried steak. This is where TikTok truly helped me this week; all I could think about was how good chicken-fried steak sounded.

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I suppose living in an RV bus for two years straight, and living and farming mostly in the desert for the past two winters, has really made me love the snow this year—maybe because we are in the Driftless area of Wisconsin, but I don’t remember the snow ever being so lovely. Clean and icy white, snow banks hugging creeks and topping hills and trees, pillowy mounds capping fence posts or, in sunlight, sparkly dust dripping from pine needles, snow everywhere here looks like a postcard scene. Living in the Chicago suburbs for so long, snow felt fleeting, and sometimes dirty and slushy—living in the woods, it just feels different, more extreme, and also cozier and more magical.

Or, possibly, I just appreciate it more now. I take the boys out every day for a walk, and I just love the walking in snow, even in the sinking in of snow. In Little House in the Big Woods, Laura Ingalls Wilder writes in the chapter “The Sugar Snow”:

Pa came in, shaking the soft snow from his shoulders and stamping it from his boots. “It’s a sugar snow,” he said. Laura put her tongue quickly to a little bit of the white snow that lay in a fold of his sleeve. It was nothing but wet on her tongue, like any snow. She was glad that nobody had seen her taste it.

Sugar snow, of course, actually refers to maple syrup-making snow, an early spring snow that insulates the tree, delaying the leafing of the tree and also keeping the ground from deep freezing. We spent a week in upstate New York and New Hampshire on, yes, farms, where we did participate in maple syrup making, along with other farm chores. It always reminds me what a gift maple syrup is, how capricious its production may become because of climate change, and how much work it truly is to make one little glossy bottle of this amber-hued gold.

In order to make maple syrup, you must drill a small hole, where you are then able to get the sap to drip into a strapped-on bucket. The sap flows in the vascular tissue of the tree, called the xylem, which flow up the tree in thick tube inside the tree. We tap the pressurized sugary water within the xylem that begins to rise as soon as the weather begins to warm just slightly after a long, snowy winter; the cycle of the low-freezing nights followed by above-freezing days makes it so the tiny bubbles in this pressurized liquid expands, forcing it to go up and down the tree, becoming accessible for our tapping into buckets.

In our house, local, Wisconsin-grown organic maple syrup is our main sweetener. We do not use white sugar—barely ever. (We actually do have one jar of it that I use to make kombucha, but I am even phasing that out, since I am trying to make more of kombucha’s cousin, Jun, which uses honey instead of sugar.) There is enough mainstream health news to tell you the depths of the evils of white sugar: studies show that refined sugar can feed cancer cells,1 is harmful to your microbiome,2 and depletes your immune system.

Besides the bodily damage it creates, sugar has also become (and been, for quite sometime) a very unsustainable sweetener choice; it is, to put it mildly, a horribly devastating-to-the-earth crop. An extremely water-intensive crop, sugar cane farms have steamrolled huge swaths of land, destroying biodiversity, creating soil erosion, and producing water and air pollution. Sugar mills, often nearby or right next to these behemoth farms, create emissions and massive quantities of sludge that end up flowing into freshwater and nearby oceans. When we were camping in Louisiana, it was like being in Illinois or Indiana with corn fields; the sugar cane farms were everywhere we drove. Sugar mills dotted the corners of these fields like huge industrial giants, spewing plumes of greyish white out metal stacks like enormous dragon mouths. Pools of silty water were everywhere, flowing out into streets off the land and from factories.

Louisiana’s sugar-cane industry is by itself worth $3 billion, with Domino Sugar (with their omnipresent yellow paper bags) being the largest sugar refinery. The United States sugar industry receives as much as four billion dollars in annual subsidies, fueling America’s soda and drugstore candy addictions.

Sugar cane also has a miserably dark history, steeped in slavery and greed and colonialization, which still permeates today’s sugar culture; sugar farms are largely owned by white people, passed on over generations, resulting a firm grasp on its racist roots. Labor abuse abounds on many farms, keeping steady the caste system of Black workers steeped in hardship, and of white-owned farms and mills making profits off of exploited labor. Though much of slavery’s historical records of destruction have been scrubbed and whitewashed in tours you can take on one of Louisiana’s plantations, the Whitney Plantation Museum does an accurate job of showcasing the state’s sugar history and how this racial hierarchy in the sugar industry still infiltrates, crystallizing the cycle of poverty.

The South is a complicated place. I can only speak to where myself and my family are from, and there are obviously many problems with the deep racism that still lays the groundwork in so many areas. The antebellum reign is still romanticized in so many ways—when I lived in Houston as a kid, I remember a Gone with the Wind-themed party at a school in Texas, a thought that horrifies me now. (Not my school, however—I went to a school in Houston for almost all of my elementary school years, where about half of my teachers and fellow students were Black. Our principal was Black, and so were a lot of our neighbors that lived on our street. People can think of all of the South as solely a bunch of racist white people, but I had never seen so much segregation as I saw when I moved up north to Illinois.) The sugar industry should be looked at as a large example of where racial inequality stems from, and how its systemic racism has carried over today. People are well-versed in the dangers of sugar in terms of obesity and diabetes, but I am always surprised that racist labor conditions and environmental destruction barely ever enter the conversation.

People should avoid cane sugar, in my opinion; it is horrible for the body, awful for humanity, and destructive to the planet. Its very roots are those of pain and devastation, and those sweet sips of Pepsi aren’t worth the demise of one’s health. Does that mean we should always reach for the bottle of organic maple syrup or biodynamic honey? Well, I would yes, but still sparingly. Maple syrup (especially organic) is not likely to be destructive to the environment (tapping a tree only gives the tree a tiny wound, which the tree can heal easily from). Keeping bees, if done right, can be an ecological activity. Maple syrup contains vitamins and minerals, while raw honey contains enzymes that help the digestive and immune systems. That said, maple syrup and honey are also still sugar to the body, and should be not abused. (I am guilty of maple syrup in my coffee every morning—I am one of America’s addicts, too!). Climate change will also affect these sweeteners, of course, like it will affect everything else, in a likely negative way, perhaps another reason to cut down on using them too much.

I think about impacts of food with every bite I eat—every glug of maple syrup is no different. When I bake cookies, I use coconut sugar, which, despite its carbon footprint, is more sustainably made and grown, and contains nutrients. I use honey for tea, or the occasional spread. These are better alternatives than cane sugar for sure, but should still be used thoughtfully and appreciatively. We are in no position to do otherwise.

Yes, we are back from our trip, where we got to visit friends and see farms and got to get ideas/helped work/get inspired. Now it is truly decision time! We have both been offered jobs in, now, multiple states, here or there, and it is just a matter of what we decide to do. The other option: work jobs while also starting a (very) small farm. A microfarm, if you will. At this point, it feels like I should not say anything until we just know what we are doing for sure. Obviously we are really thinking about our financials this time around, and what what we can really afford to do. Obviously spring is about here. So obviously we will figure it out soon, so I will update soon!

What I’m Cooking/Reading:

While we visited a farm in New Hampshire, we worked in the barn with the animals (really making my obsession with getting milking animals again stronger), helped with maple syrup, and harvested spinach from their hoophouse. We also had every meal cooked for us, which was fun! We slept in a one-room cabin down the road, which had no running water, though I would have been ok if not that the road was extremely frightening to walk down and I was constantly afraid of one of us being hit by huge trucks with Trump stickers at all times. So, downsides aside, it was a fun farm to visit/work at for a little bit.

Since I majorly got off my cooking game during this trip, we did have a really good meal at a farm-to-table eatery called the Pickled Owl in New York (I had a stew with mashed sunchokes, reminding me that I like sunchokes and need to grow them this year), and I treated myself to a cookbook from a used bookstore. So, not a lot of cooking, and not even a lot of reading, though I did finish both Tim Herd’s book, Maple Sugar, and Elizabeth Abbott’s Sugar: A Bittersweet History in preparation for this newsletter.

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This recipe uses chicken (preferably you have a source for non-industrial meat that you can get locally!). Vindaloo is supposed to be spicy. It originates from Goa, India, and the key component of it is vinegar. Some recipes use tomatoes, or tomato paste. I created this recipe by looking at lots of different variations, and also by memory of what my favorite versions have tasted like.

The important components of this recipe is that I have tried to incorporate the immune-boosting “trinity roots”: ginger, garlic and onion. Many writers say that vindaloo does not traditionally have potatoes or vegetables, but potatoes taste like the ones I have gotten from restaurants, so that is what is in here. I also added cauliflower, and when I made this recipe last, I only had two chicken thighs, making it so that the chicken is not the star of the dish, but instead let the vegetables have the spotlight.

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