Simple Living
Hand Picked
{This is an old draft from a couple of years ago that I never posted. But I like it so here it is today.} As we pull in, the sun glints off the only other car in the gravel parking lot. It is early but the day is already warm and the sky is a brilliant blue. It takes a couple of minutes to disengage: unbuckle carseats; gather ourselves; make sure keys are in hand, not ignition, before shoving the door shut with my hip. We make our way through the opening in the hedge and up a path to a little market stand. The cedar shake roof is long and low and one wall is open to the fresh air revealing a wide counter and a cooler with vats of ice cream: raspberry cheesecake, bubblegum, maple walnut, moose tracks. There is no one behind the counter but after a minute, a woman calls out from the side of the building. We find her sitting at a picnic table playing cards with a young girl. She tells us that the best picking is to the right, anywhere we like. We clatter off, the four of us and our odd assortment of buckets. Noa, our thirteen month old daughter is not walking yet but we brought along her push toy: a bright yellow, orange and purple wagon with big wheels, a handle and a storage box under the seat. She toddles after us determinedly pushing the wagon over the gravel, falling every few steps but always quick to rise and push on. She has not yet figured out how to turn the wagon; her tactic whenever she encounters an obstacle is to look back at us with a grin and wait for help, one hand still resting on the handle. However, today she will need no such assistance. We have come to a pre-walking, wagon-pusher’s paradise: a blueberry farm. Our four year old son Rain runs ahead to choose our row. After a moment’s wait while we turn the wagon into the wide alley between waist high blueberry bushes, Noa is greeted with the longest unobstructed straight stretch she has ever seen. We set her free. Noa is instantly distracted from wagon pushing paradise when she notices the marble sized berries on the bushes. They are a deep dusky midnight blue and covered with a light powdery film. I am not sure that Noa has ever had blueberries and she has certainly never seen a blueberry bush. Call it human instinct; she drops to her knees, crawls to the nearest bush and begins to fill her mouth with berries with both hands. In fact, this is pretty much the reaction of all of us. We are all diverted from our intentions by the sweet, slightly sour fruit. I love the tanginess of the berries that still have a red blush to them. It takes a few minutes before we are able to get down to work, overwhelmed as we are by the plenitude on each bush, blueberries hanging in clumps like grapes. Eventually, we settle in. The rows are wide with freshly mown grass between. It is the perfect work space for a mom of young kids. Fully fenced to keep out the deer, bushes dense enough that it isn’t easy to get into another row, vast enough to provide a sense of freedom for roaming as far as they like and provided they stay in my row, I can always see them. Rain wanders off, imagination and monologue running a mile a minute as usual. He has a yogurt container laced on to his belt loop but he picks directly into his mouth. The only rule: Fill your bucket or fill your mouth but once the fruit is in my bucket, hands off. The small competitive spark in me flares up as I make it my goal to fill my large pail before we leave. Aaron and I begin working on opposite sides of the same bush so we are facing each other. Noa stays close for the most...
Read MoreSummer By Numbers
We’ve been counting a lot around our house lately. Here are some examples: Number of pounds of pickling cukes picked by Aaron and Rain while I jiggled and bounced Silas in the Ergo: 29 Number of pounds of pickling cukes bought from local farm stand: 10 Number of quart jars of homemade dill pickles made at 11pm after children were sleeping: 31 Number of times per night that Silas wakes to nurse: 8-12 Number of cute noises Silas makes per hour: 568* Number of annoying noises Silas makes per hour: 6 Number of decibels of annoying noises Silas makes: 100* Number of decibels of planes flying over our new house near the Air Force base: 130* Number of decibels of Rain’s constant singing & clapping: 75 Number of pints of strawberry jam canned while children watch movies: 13 Number of pounds of blueberries picked by 3 adults, 6 children & 1 sleeping baby: 16.5 Number of pounds of blueberries remaining after 2 weeks of pies, smoothies, snacking: 0 Number of coats of orange, yellow, red & purple paint (respectively) it took to paint our 1976 Dodge camper while the children slept and watched movies: 5, 2, 4, 3 Number of days on annual camping trip to Klein Lake (Sunshine Coast): 5 Number of sunny days on annual camping trip to Klein Lake (Sunshine Coast): 1.5 Number of teeth Silas has now: 6 * These numbers may or may not be slightly exaggerated. There you have it folks. That’s the way the final days of our summer are shaking down, in numbers. How did your summer add...
Read MoreCrafting My Life Guest Post
“The size of your success is measured by the strength of your desire; the size of your dream; and how you handle disappointment along the way.” – Robert Kiyosaki I’m excited to say that I’m guest-posting on that very theme over at Strocel.com today as part of Amber’s awesome Crafting My Life series. This is one of my favourite things on her blog and I’m honoured to have been able to contribute. She’s busy putting together a Crafting My Life e-course and I highly recommend that you check it out. And in the mean time, I hope you enjoy my post today. I have a dream. This dream began as a talk about what my husband Aaron and I envisioned for our retirement; then it morphed to include what we hope to provide for our kids as they grow up. A random conversation evolved into an elaborate picture of what we want our life to be like and I’m serious when I say elaborate. …Read the...
Read MoreYou Are What You Eat
Last night I had the pleasure of getting out for an evening with Aaron (!) and the privilege of seeing Joel Salatin speak. I first saw Joel in the movie Food, Inc. (which I highly recommend, by the way) and I was captivated by his passion for sustainable farming. He operates a family farm in Virginia called Polyface Farm and has been featured in Michael Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma and also in the documentary Fresh. Here is a clip of Joel from Fresh: Joel’s family raises pasture-fed beef, pork and poultry on their once totally depleted, almost soil-less farm which they completely revitalized without sowing any seed. Refining methods introduced by his father, Joel rotates his herds through his land using portable electric fences to allow the land to replenish itself naturally, without fertilizers. The animals eat grass and roam in the open air. This is the exact opposite of the feedlots and industrial food system. Salatin argues for the local food movement, for transparency in the food production system, for a re-integration of our rural and urban lifestyles where we respect our food producers and include them in the communities where we live and work. He urged us not to expect change overnight but to do what we can every day to change our food system. Ideas included turning the millions of acres of lawns in North America to edible food gardens, reinstating the kitchen as the heart of our homes where we make our food from scratch from real ingredients (not unpronounceable ingredients that come in packages), buying from local farms that allow us to tour the premises and of course, gardening with our children. With sparkling eyes and a big grin, he is a compelling, even mischievous speaker, as he said last night, “I definitely recommend that you break a lot of laws.” This was in response to the question at the end of the night from a man who stated that everything he wants to do is illegal so what laws should he break first. Of course, Joel is referring to the over-regulation of ordinary citizens who want to make their own choices about the food they eat: whether it’s to buy eggs from the neighbour, have backyard chickens or drink unpasteurized milk. I was already sold on his message, but I was further enamored when with a roll of his eyes he stated that our disconnect with food began back in the day when people decided that breastfeeding wasn’t good enough for our babies. He went on to tout the virtues of La Leche League, Lamaze and having dads in the delivery room as examples of ways the pendulum is starting to swing back towards an acceptance of the sanctity of life, even the sanctity of life of the least among us (the animals and plants we eat). Maybe it’s because I’m a hormonal pregnant woman but when he ended his speech by saying, “May your children call you blessed for they have inherited a better earth than we had,” I had just a little tear in my...
Read MoreBread & Butter
A few months ago, a potter friend of ours made Aaron a baking stone so we could try the artisan no-knead bread recipe from Mother Earth News. This went amazingly well but we’ve waxed and waned in our bread making over the months. We recently started up again. I wanted to try a bread that required kneading because it’s been suggested in the Waldorf school meetings that I have been attending that kids love to knead bread. I’ve tried the French Bread recipe from my Better Homes & Gardens cookbook a few times with varying degrees of success. Similarly, I’ve been wanting to try making our own butter. I remember fondly making butter as a kid by shaking it in a jar for, um, forever and I remember how delicious it was. We’ve been trying to make more and more food ourselves and I thought this would be a fun one to add. So last Tuesday (the only day the kids and I are home together the whole day without outside commitments like work, preschool or dance class), we decided to tackle homemade bread and butter. This time we used the Basic White Bread recipe from The Joy of Cooking. As predicted by our Waldorf friends, Rain loved kneading the bread. It was so fun that we forgot to take a picture. But here he is with the dough ready for the first rising: While that was rising, we started on the butter. You have to warm the cream to room temperature and meanwhile, stick the bowl you will be using in the fridge to cool it. Then you pour the cream into the bowl and whip it with your hand mixer. Notice the cloth on the counter. I did an awful lot of counter wiping as the cream sprayed everywhere, including all over the front of my sweater which later that evening, smelled like sour milk. I recommend an apron. The first stage is called the frothy stage: The next stage is meant to be the whipped cream stage, where it should get thick and start forming peaks. After this stage, it should get even thicker and start crumbling. The cream we were using came from a local farm and was unpasteurized. As a result, I do not know it’s exact fat content. It certainly didn’t seem as thick as a store bought whipping cream but resembled a cereal cream or half and half. We I whipped for a long time – Rain got bored and left – but it just wasn’t thickening into whipped cream as it should have. I whipped longer and longer until I noticed that there appeared to be curds floating in the foam. On closer examination, I discovered the curds were yellow. The longer I whipped, the more of these curds appeared so I just went with it. Then I strained off the buttermilk. I didn’t get nearly as much butter as I would have if I had used whipping cream. According to the internets, 1 quart of cream should have delivered up 1 Lb of butter. I used a quart of cream and got about 1.25 cups of butter. The next stage is to wash the butter. If any of the buttermilk remains in the butter, it will go bad quite quickly. To do this, you put the butter in your blender with some cold water. You blend it and then pour off the water. You repeat this process as many times as it takes for the water to be clear when you pour it off. Once you have cleaned the butter, the last thing to do is to squish it all together to form a solid chunk. I used a combination of a rubber spatula and my hands to do that part. It was a bit of a strange process because there was some water drops still in the butter and of course, water and oil don’t mix but the butter was soft so it was hard to squeeze the water out of it. I did manage in the end though....
Read MoreLeaping
The summer of 2002 everyone must have thought I went crazy. I started dating a friend (who was also the ex-boyfriend of a long-time friend of mine) and by the end of the summer, we announced that we were getting married in September. When I called my parents to tell them I was getting married they didn’t even know I was seeing anyone. That was only half of it. We also bought a 1984 Bluebird schoolbus and told everyone that we were going to convert it and live in it, in the middle of Vancouver. We owned it for a year and were slowly trying to do the conversion on the weekends and not making much progress. We thought if we moved into it, our progress would be quicker. My older sister and her family were moving to Vancouver around that time and we came up with the idea to try to find a house for them to rent where we could park the bus in their backyard. We thought we would subsidize their rent for two years before looking for somewhere else. We started keeping our eyes open for good potential houses. As we went about our business in the city, there was one house that we always noticed had the perfect space. It was on a corner, backing on to a huge green park with a lake complete with swimming beach and where the farmer’s market is held on Saturdays. On Sunday nights, there is firespinning in the park and every summer there is a lantern festival that attracts 10,000 people. The park is in the middle of metro Vancouver in a vibrant diverse multi-cultural neighbourhood. The yard was perfect and had just the right space for a 40′ long bus. My brother-in-law came to Vancouver to house hunt for his family and one evening, after dinner, we drove by the house just to give him an idea of the kind of sweet space we were dreaming of. A few days later, Stewart came back from his search with the classifieds and grinned “You’ll never guess what house I just looked at!” We couldn’t believe our luck that the house was actually for rent! We went to the open house with the landlord and there were a lot of other contenders. The rental market in Vancouver has been tight for a few years now and the house was reasonably priced. We thought it best to be upfront about our plans to park a 40′ bus on the property rather than ending up with a mad landlord on our hands later. We were very worried that the landlord would never want to rent to us with our crazy idea to park a bus there. The weekend passed slowly with much hand-wringing and driving by the corner wistfully staring. At the end of the weekend, the landlord called to let us know that he had decided to take a chance on us and it was ours. We called it the Destiny House. We stayed for 5 years. We got to know all of our neighbours. We built a parking pad for the bus, redid the whole yard including putting in a 40′ long veggie garden beside the bus. I developed a close relationship with my sister who I’d never been close to as she is seven years older than I am. Both of my kids were born there and all of our children grew up more like siblings than cousins. We became fixtures in the neighbourhood and we learned the meaning of the word community. What started as a bunch of crazy spontaneous ideas in 2002 became the most magical experience. I could never have imagined such a perfect vision of this dream made into reality. I wanted to live in the bus in the city and by taking a leap of faith, it came out way better than I even envisioned it. We’ve moved on now but we’ve been having a lot of discussions with my sister and we now share the mondo beyondo dream of creating a...
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