ingrid

I’ve always liked sauerkraut.  I know my name is Ingrid, but I am not Germanic in the slightest.  My love of sauerkraut is a developed taste.  While I did volunteer work in Toronto, Canada, I had some somewhat late, wild nights in the exciting city.  As I was poor, I did a lot of walking (stumbling?) home from nightclubs at ungodly hours.  Yes, I was doing the work of God, but even so, I kept some ungodly hours.  Anyway, street vendors catered to the likes of me—you could always find a bratwurst vendor at 2am who was waiting to take your $2 and give you SERIOUSLY THE MOST PERFECT THING IN A BUN EVER— with tons of sauerkraut on it.  It was cold out, but bratwurst with sauerkraut on it tasted so perfect late at night.  Now I am in bed by about 10pm every night, but I still crave sauerkraut.

At first the goal was to find good sauerkraut.  Bubbies was a no.  Nalleys was a no.  Then I attended a Werth family gathering and had something so amazingly crunchy, so delightfully citrusy and light.  It was perfect.  The relative responsible for this culinary sensation told me how he MADE it.  I remember him describing a “stone” (huh?), the necessity to “weight” the kraut, the “crock” it sat in, how the crock kept you from needing to “skim” bad stuff.  I sort of half listened, or listened in a way that seems thorough at the time, but is woefully inadequate when I find myself trying to replicate someone else’s experiment.

I could write here about the health benefits of sauerkraut, but truthfully, others have done that and it is not the most interesting part of the whole undertaking for me.  I like the product, not the rationale behind it. If you are interested though….

I planted cabbage in the garden and watched it carefully until it was ready for harvest.  I got myself a food grade container.  I cut up the cabbage and salted it liberally (too liberally as it turned out).  I filled a jar with water to provide weight to push the cabbage under the brine, covered the entire thing and waited a couple weeks.

It was….okay.  It was….really salty actually.  And the white scum on top, while harmless, was sort of freaky to get around.

Fast forward a couple weeks.  The short comings of my procedure were pretty clear to me.  My jar had a narrow top which meant that the plate and jar that I used to push the cabbage down were actually too small to effectively do the job.  I did not dig scraping the white scum off the cabbage each day.  It just freaked me out.

So I got serious.  I got on-line.

I don’t really shop much.  I don’t buy clothes (at least not new ones) and I don’t have any expensive hobbies besides my chickens.  I don’t get haircuts or seek out fancy makeup or buy jewelry,(except from Brad’s cousin’s wife) so I feel justified in springing for cool toys every now and then.  My cool toy happens to be a sauerkraut crock.

It came all the way from Poland, so you know it is good!  It is a perfect cylinder, brown ceramic with a lid and this really cool air seal thing so that you know that bad germies are not getting in your goods.  Best of all, it has lovely weights that fit in there perfectly.  No fuss.

It is week three of my newest batch of sauerkraut.  The crock sits in our kitchen next to our refrigerator sort of out of the way.  Every now and then I hear a gentle “blub, blub”  of air escaping from the fermentation pot.  All is well in my crock.  Awesome.

The crock can ferment away for anytime from 2 weeks to 3 months.  I can’t wait to try our kraut!  Maybe in the dead of winter it will provide just that little bit of needed boost that only cabbage can give us.

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I realized that I sort of jumped the gun on the garden photos with my mulch post.  I just had to share my excitement while it was fresh.  I truly spread the mulch and then ran into the house to blog about it.  That is the sort of lightening-fast response time you can expect from me on important, breaking news about mulch!

This last weekend I plowed through the garden, putting most of it in on Sunday.  (Plowed!  Get it?!  Ba-dump-bum!)  It was a day of rest, but I couldn’t help but think of this work as the most enjoyable thing that I could have possibly done that day.  I remember reading in Little House on the Prairie how Laura wasn’t even allowed to cut dresses out of paper for her paper dolls on Sunday because that was “work”.  It doesn’t feel like work to dig around in the dirt, so I felt just fine laboring through the whole day.

I saved one bed for the kids to help finish off.  They like the whole “planting” part of the garden, but not the digging or breaking up soil clods part, so I prepared the beds and let them sprinkle seeds willy-nilly.  I’ll thin them out later.

plant waterer (?) Well, she is NEAR the plants at least.

We put in:

• cabbage
• cauliflower
• ONE zucchini
• ONE crook neck squash
• ONE lemon cucumber
• bush beans
• snap peas
• kale
• swiss chard
• three different types of lettuce
• onions
• marigolds (to ward off insects in the brassicaceae)
• beets
• sunflowers

Now how did we have room for all that?  The answer is—we didn’t, but I like to try to pack it all in.  I always get too many different varieties of seeds and starts.  I forget what we are planning to do that year, get swept up in the moment and buy it all.  In terms of food harvesting, I always want MORE.  I am something of a food hoarder, which is why my freezer is packed with too much meat, I pick more peaches than I can can, and I kill myself peeling too many apples for apple sauce all while wishing I had filled JUST ONE MORE BOX.  In the summer, some berries are not enough.  I want more.  (It just occurred to me that this is why I have TEN chickens instead of the FOUR we started off with.)  MORE!

bean sower

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Brad and I were amused by Zephyr after watching Star Wars for the first time.  Of all the interesting and funny things that happened in that movie, he thought the most important was C-3PO walking off in a different direction from R2D2 on Tatooine.  The big line he would repeat to tell this story?  “I’m not going THAT way!  That’s too rocky!”. And then he would laugh like crazy.

Yeah.  I don’t know that I would sum up the movie that way either.  And yet I sort of relate to fixating on minor lines or ideas.

This last week I put the garden to bed for the winter.  I hauled leaves, I hauled chicken manure, and then spread it to a depth of about two feet.  Things should rest and rot down until sometime in April when I will call out the forces and turn the soil (if I am lucky.  Last year it rained well into June, so I won’t count on April).  Before closing the case on the garden I pulled up the last of the onions.  They were small and I really shouldn’t have left them in this late.  Because they were out in the frost, they had a little slime on them, and yet I was so thrilled to have them.  They make me think of Sam in Lord of the Rings who just yearned for a bit of wild onion to improve the campfire food on the way to Mordor.  ”Oh for a bit of wild onion!”  I thought.  ”Oh for a bit of wild onion!”

I don’t know what it is about the yearning for wild onion that was so appealing (and memorable!) to me.  Why do I remember this about those books and not other, probably more important, elements?  While raking leaves, I thought:  maybe the onion is a theme!  If the onion is a theme, then it would be of Sam’s desire to give his best, to nurture his friends, even while in grave danger.  The onion is about a hobbit taking risks, but still desiring the good life—the life that an onion affords.

I don’t think the onion is a theme.

But my onions were good.  I made them into a soup.  Hobbit Onion soup.  Zephyr and I are not so different.

1 Comment | In: food, Projects That I Do With My Clever Little Fingers, urban farming | | #

It’s good to remember that for as many times as everything goes wrong and the day is a total mess, sometimes everything goes wrong and the world is unperturbedly perfect.

We decided to go berry picking on Sunday.  I had been out there earlier in the week and had affirmed that there were still berries to be found.  I was sure that there would be even more by the weekend as all the red marionberries would have ripened up.  Wrong.  We got out there and the fields were picked clean.  I had never really contemplated the phrase “slim pickings”, but that is what we found row after row after row.

You had to keep moving to find the smallest marionberry.  You also had to look all the difficult places—underneath, behind big thorns, down low on the ground.  In short, it sucked.

But still it was beautiful.  The farm was empty.  The island (Sauvie) was quiet.  The sun was preparing to tip over the edge of the earth, the birds were swooping through the air, and there was a sweet and light breeze making everything young and fresh.  Not many berries, but it sure was great being out there.

The kids got tired of picking fairly quickly so I sent them off down a row to a field beyond.  Inez toddled after them for all she was worth.  They found a barkdust pile and some ripe blueberries and were happy.  Brad and I could pick and chat quietly and we were happy.

This is of course when disaster struck.  Now that I think about it, it looks like the first stages of disaster are captured in this photo!  Inez decided to take off her diaper which was dirty.  Not being able to remove her overalls properly in order to escape the diaper, she manages to wrap clothing and diaper and sandal up in a horrible net of shit.  And then she stepped in it.  It is what our family likes to call a “shitastrophe”.  The older kids started screaming.  I come running (although slowly, I admit).  We didn’t bring any diapers with us as we like to live on the edge.

I try to extract the child from her excrement and then try to wash her up by dumping full water bottles over her backside.  Unfortunately for her they were ice water.  (That’ll teach her to excrete!).  I put her shirt back on her, wash up my hands over and over again, and get back to berry picking.  The kids amuse themselves throwing barkdust and flowers at us.  We tolerate it reasonably well.

After we quit tolerating it and both yell at them for throwing bark in the berries, they run off out of view to the next field and Brad and I consider chucking it in.  We have a pants-less baby, a nasty diaper, poor picking conditions, and questionably clean hands.  I call for the older kids.  No kids.  I call again.  Nope.  I decide that I need to go find them.  After wandering across a field of blueberries, I see a side field that looks promising.  Francis and Zephyr are standing in it, shoveling handfuls of thornless blackberries into their mouths.  The field is SO AMAZINGLY FULL OF BERRIES.  There are tons.  I send Francis back to fetch Brad and in the next 20 minutes we pick more than we had picked in the previous hour.  We fill bucket after bucket after bucket.  It is awesome.

Back at the farm stand, we pay for our berries, use soap and hot water on our hands, and improvise a diaper out of a sunhat and a clean onesie.  (Luckily we do find a clean diaper wrap in the car, and when you have one of those, you can shove just about anything in it and make it work.  Once at a movie, I removed my camisole from under my sweater and crammed that into a diaper wrap to get the kid through the next hour.)

Sometimes the world is great.  We’re dirty, we’re tired, but we have plenty berries, plenty joy.

9 Comments | In: family, food, My super freakin' cute kids | | #

I had a nightmare the other night that all the marionberries had ripened and been picked already.  I was facing the prospect of actually buying jam ALL YEAR LONG.  It terrified me.

After two days of worry and trying to shake my residual fright, I decided to face my fear.  Even though there wasn’t time in the day at all, I dragged the two youngest kids out to Sauvie Island to see for myself.  (Francis is in bike camp this week).  We picked for an hour or so, but it was obvious that the berries will be in the field for another week or maybe even two.  Ahhh.  Sweet reprieve.  I am going to make it.  Midnight berry picking will not be necessary.  Life is kind sometimes.

5 Comments | In: food, Projects That I Do With My Clever Little Fingers | | #

My sister Anne and I share many interests; composting, growing things, running (sometimes), art and fabric, weird exhibitions of language and learning, and bitching about why people can’t get their shit together.  For me, perhaps one of the most fun and surprising of our shared interests is our enthusiasm for eating…. most anything.  My most recent trip to Kobe was a great opportunity to indulge our shared love of good and pretty simple food.

When I first met up with Anne right off the plane, she had a long list of “things we would eat”.  Whereas many travelers might arrange their week around things to see, our week was shaping up to incorporate “the best sushi in this little shop”, “okonomiyaki that this old woman makes near my house”, and food on sticks in China town and at a little alley yakatori.

First stop after dropping off my wet luggage at her place was okonomiyaki, a fried pancake of egg & vegetables topped with sauciness.  I think they usually have meat in them, but Anne has hers “like the monks”, which essentially means vegetarian.  It was full of those long stringy mushrooms which I think would have been better if they were of a larger, less ropey variety.  Anne eschews meat, but admits she is a sucker for mayonnaise, an ingredient I have something of a weakness for to.  The whole thing was great!  The shop that she took me to was charming—an old woman worked over a grill in front of us so we were able to watch her creation while drinking super cold beers.  Anne kept up a comfortable banter in Japanese with the owners and I felt like a bit of a superstar to get to be eating okonomiyaki in a tiny hole-in-the-wall in Japan.

4 Comments | In: family, food, on the road again | | #

How often does this happen?  You go to your refrigerator trying to figure out what to do with your random left overs and each ingredient is somehow EXACTLY what you need to make one of your favorite things in the world?

We’re leaving for New Orleans on Thursday night, so I am trying to clean out the fridge before then.  I started out thinking I would make chicken broth by boiling down a denuded chicken, then I found some brown rice.  My refrigerator yielded up some more surprises.  Hey, some cabbage all ready chopped up!  Woa, look at these beets that need to be used!  Hey, these baked potatoes are nice.  And what about those diced onions?  Frozen carrot chunks?  Lo and behold– borscht!

I first had borscht in a quite unforgettable location.  I was locked up actually.  And it was midnight.  Intrigued yet?  My first taste of borscht was over a control panel in ______ County Juvenile Detention.  I was working there as a guard, (although they had some fancy name for us to make us sound nice and knowledgeable), and was filling in on an overnight shift with a very sweet man of Russian decent.  Knowing we were to pull a difficult (i.e., boring) shift together, making hourly checks on snoring juveniles and looking at cameras where nothing ever happened and no one ever went, he asked if he could share a special family recipe with me.  Little did I know, he intended to bring a crockpot into the facility and stew up some borscht overnight!  I am not sure how the kids slept considering that the smell pervaded the whole building, but it was delicious.  I loved it instantly.  It made a miserable job a bit better, at least for one night.

There are many recipes on The Internets about borscht, but I have had good luck just throwing stuff together.  Here is what I toss in there:

• beets (shredded)
• beet greens and stalks (chopped)
• cabbage
• onions
• carrots
• potatoes
• vegetable broth or chicken broth
• optional rice or barley
• touch of mustard powder

I like to finish the bowl of soup with a nice fatty dollop of sour cream.  Yum.

And now for your amusement, a picture of me from that time in the uniform that magically added about 20 pounds.  I was trying to look really tough:

4 Comments | In: Awesome!, food | | #

It’s too rainy.

I started turning soil over back in Mid March before the torrential rains set in.  I managed to carve out 6 sections in a different layout than last year.  This is so that I can “rotate” crops without really thinking about it too much.  I am also trying to account for a big walnut tree that will leaf out sometime in May and start to create too much shade for most seeds to germinate.

I have such a little tiny space to garden in, but I jealously guard every inch of it.  I laugh about this space too.  In my mind, the first year I gardened here was to be the last, as I intended to have a new garden shed in this spot “within the year”.  Three years later I am still turning the soil, with no shed nor even possible shed in sight.

The kids have high hopes for what they will plant.  Zephyr wants carrots (hard!), beets (easy!), and bless his soul, brussel sprouts.  I  hope those don’t get demolished by aphids.  I had better put in my order for beneficial nematodes right now!

Francis wants lettuce, lemon cucumbers and sugar snap peas.  The peas are in on the trellis you see on the back.  The boat owner is not so sure of me fencing him in, but his kid likes the sweet peas as much as mine do, so I figured it would be okay.

I’m growing all the stuff that the rest of the family SHOULD eat, but maybe no one would actually choose to eat: kale, spinach, swiss chard, and various squash family things.  Yes, I am going to pack it all in there.  Just watch me.  And then when it is finally sunny out, I will poke tomatoes in too.  Ha!

I am grateful that the kids are excited about the garden.  I am SOOOOO grateful that they actually eat vegetables.  My parents have this amazing thing called a TV, (that’s short for television), and it projects stories, like in moving pictures!  And there is sound too!  Anyway, while I was out visiting, I watched this program called “Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution” and there was this super depressing part where he visited a 1st grade classroom and showed kids various vegetables and they didn’t know the names to ANY of them.  It was the saddest thing I have ever seen.  I was so depressed after that, even though I know that my own children, even the proto-lingual one, know the names to most all of their vegetables, maybe except the kohlorabi.

7 Comments | In: food, My super freakin' cute kids, urban farming | | #

If you are now singing, “But! – it’s poetry in motion
And when she turned her eyes to me” (Doo doo doo doo deweee! ), then I know that you are my kind of person, or at least my age.

Annnnnyway, I am getting all scientific around here.  I decided that I would keep track of my chickens’ egg laying habits, in order to answer that burning question–”How many eggs do you get?”.  Needless to say, no one is really asking for a week-by-week break down, and yet, isn’t this interesting?  And what exactly is going on Wednesdays?

For the month of March, our chickens laid 131 eggs.  That is 29 eggs a week.  Now I am wondering, where have they all gone?  We do eat a lot of eggs around here, and what with baking (Brad does that!), and the kids liking hard-boiled eggs, I suppose it is possible that we go through that many.  More likely is that we gave some away here and there and I just can’t quite remember it.  Anyway, many are the eggs in our household, and this being despite the rainy weather and despite my leaving the chickens in a lot lately.

The girls know that there is a lot of good stuff to eat out in the yard, so they tend to cluster near the door whenever they see someone approach.

If you too have a lot of eggs, here is what you do with them—make a puffed oven pancake.  You can easily find the recipe on-line.  There are a million variations, but the basic ingredients are eggs, milk, flour and butter plus a cast iron skillet.  I don’t believe in using sugar, dividing eggs or doing anything fancy.  Those basic ingredients make the most awesome breakfast.  I don’t think you can go wrong.

5 Comments | In: Chickens Are Super Fabulous, food, urban farming | | #

I don’t know what it is about me and death hikes.  I keep finding them.  I forget that many places that are beautiful to go are

• wet
• high up in the air
• made by scrabbling a barely flat surface into a cliff wall

I was pondering why we always end up like this, a white-knuckle death grip on each kid as we inch along a rock face, hissing at our dear children with each clumsy step.  (I swear that Zephyr starts tripping every third or fourth step when we are up 100 feet in the air clinging to a metal cable.  Swear.)  Why does this always happen to us?  Then it occurred to me… it is the terrain dummy.  We keep hiking to these waterfalls in the gorge.  Gorge + waterfalls = rock walls with just a cable to cling to.  If I were in Death Valley say, this wouldn’t be happening to me.

Anyway, we had a break in the rain this last weekend and we raced for the outdoors.  I feel like such a caged animal these days, eager to get out be RUN around.  I am coming to terms with my true nature.  The truth is that I like exercise.

So why not get it here?

This was Eagle Creek Trail.  William Sullivan, Northwest hike guru has this to say about this particular trail:

The Eagle Creek Trail is one of Oregon’s most spectacular paths, passing half a dozen major waterfalls. The trail is also an engineering marvel. To maintain an easy grade through this rugged canyon, the builders blasted ledges out of sheer cliffs, bridged a colossal gorge and even chipped a tunnel through solid rock behind 120-foot Tunnel Falls.

Yes siree.  It was high up there.

We did this particular hike with our friends Jason and Angela and their two boys Soren and Anders.  It is fun to have a whole family of friends.  Everyone has someone to love!  That is definitely how we feel about these guys, so we were certainly open to risking our lives with them.

Brad is such a good sport.  I have yet to decide if he really likes hiking but pretends not to or if he really does not like hiking but thinks he should or if he just doesn’t like it and… you get the picture.  For him, the best thing about hiking in the gorge is that Edgefield is between us and Portland when we are done.  The kids, (all five of them), were so exhausted that they were really pretty mellow at dinner.  Who can resist?

7 Comments | In: family, food, My super freakin' cute kids, on the road again | | #