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.

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.

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.

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:

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.

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.

• 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?

Stuffed Squash

Cut squash in half.  Scrape out seeds.

Place halves in a baking dish with 1/2″ water in the bottom.  Bake at 375 for about 30 minutes or until the squash is softened.

Meanwhile, raid your fridge for random things to stuff that beauty with.  Start by saute-ing chopped onions and garlic in olive oil.  Throw in a bit of soy sauce, maybe some celery, chunks of mushrooms, bits of kale or any other greens that you might find down there.  Huck in some amazing sausage… like the breakfast kind or the stuff you can buy from the real, live meat counter.  When all of this is an amazing, bubbling mess, add torn up bread chunks or crumbled crackers.  Stir it all up and throw in a bit of shredded cheese (just enough to help all this stick together).  Weirdo variations that I have tried: nuts, raisins, grated carrots, grated zucchini, blue cheese, dried out parmesan, swiss chard (good!), beets (not so good!).

Pour off the water that you cooked the squash halves in, and flip them over so that they look like little boats.  Pack each half of squash with the stuffing mixture, pressing down to fill the fruit and then firmly mounding the additional stuffing.  Cook it all another 15-20 minutes or until it smells awesome.

Evelyn might well be my hardest worker around here.

She is laying almost every day.  This last week she popped out this MASSIVE egg.  It was the second of its kind to be presented by this lady.  When I told Brad that it was a double yoker, he was unduly surprised.  ”Those are real?” he said.  Of course they are real!  Even though he had heard about them all his life, because he had never seen one, he didn’t really believe they were real.  Weird denial of reality is what I call that.  I hear that the sun is made of gas, and you know what?  I believe it.

This is a comparison photo:  normal egg from Hasty, giHUGIC egg from Evelyn.  This worries me a bit actually.  It is fairly common for chickens who produce these huge suckers to get egg bind, a condition where the egg literally gets STUCK inside them.  A friend on our street lost a chicken to egg bind lately.  I am freaked out that I might have to reach up in a chicken and break an egg to get it out if this were to occur with one of our hens.  Here is hoping it doesn’t.  A friend of a friend also told me that she gave her hen a warm bath when she had egg bind.  The egg came right out.  Hmmm.  I guess I like baths.  I’ve never had one with a chicken though.

More photos to impress and (in the case of Anne) disgust?

Ahh yes!  Look at those old lady hands!  (It was because I was working with clay all day; I got a lot of terra cotta stuck in the cracks in my hands.)

We need to hurry up and come up with a use for this egg as it does not fit in the carton.  Really.

As much as I love to cook, I don’t care for following recipes.  I am distressed by food waste,(hence the compost, hence the chickens, hence the less packaging), and I try to manage our household to make the most use out of what we have.  I am not the type to go out and shop for specific things for just one recipe.  I struggle with recipes that tell you to use a quarter cup of onions when you are going to end up cutting the whole onion.  And no way am I using just half the can of tomatoes!  What will happen to the other half of that can?  In general, I make vast quantities of food, often freezing the left overs for another day or tweaking the ingredients.  In our house you find squash and chard for dinner day one, beef burritos day two, and squash, beef & chard enchiladas day three.

Here is a good website on trying to avoid food waste.

The truth is that I sort of hate following directions anyway, so recipes and cookbooks are used mostly as loose recommendations around here.  Even so, I still occasionally need a loose recommendation just to keep cooking foods that are interesting and to break out of my cuisine rut.  Here is a “loose recommendation” that turned out SOOOOO GOOD, even with me making it sort of following the recipe!  The kids loved it, it is pretty healthy, and I had most of the ingredients (and the ones that I didn’t have were easily substituted out).  I recommend it highly, especially served with rice.  Super good.

West African Peanut Soup

Ingredients:

1 cup cooked, skinless, chicken breast, diced

2/3 cup onion, diced

1 1/2 teaspoons garlic, minced

1 tablespoon toasted sesame oil

1 1/2 teaspoons curry powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon pepper

1/2 teaspoon crushed red pepper flakes

3 cups reduced sodium, fat free chicken broth

1 6-ounce can tomato paste

1 (14 1/2-ounce) can stewed tomatoes

1/2 cup reduced-fat peanut butter

Directions:

1. In a large pot, sauté onion in sesame oil until translucent; add garlic

and chicken and stir to heat through.

2. Add seasonings and sauté 1 minute longer.

3. Add broth, paste, tomatoes, and peanut butter.  Stir until well

combined.

4. Heat over medium heat until hot but not boiling.

5. Serve immediately.

6. Refrigerate leftovers within 2-3 hours.