Eggs in a Nest Part 2: Call it like it is.

Don't hate me...I think the English language is awesome. That's right, I said it. Other countries have committees to keep words out of their lexicon. We add words like, "D'oh" to our dictionaries. We have duplicate, triplicate, even quadruplicate words for things, including animals and food.

This can tell you something really interesting about our culture. Our words keep our food sources separate from the prepared, packaged food we buy in the grocery store. For example: You raise a cow on a farm. You eat beef. You raise pigs, you eat pork. You might drive by a nice pasture of fluffy sheep. You don't eat sheep...you eat mutton.

You can actually trace the origins of this back to the Norman invasion of England. When the wealthy French came and took over, they referred to their food (which was served to them already cooked) using French terms (boeuf, moutton, porc). The English peasants who actually raised the animals used the Old or Middle-English names to refer to their livestock.

We retain that separation of language today, and with it a weird tendancy to want to separate the food on our plate from the source. I beleive this goes beyond guilt about eating a cute little sheep. Somehow, we are disgusted by the dirtyness of eating. After all, it is killing another living thing to eat it. It puts us on the food chain. It makes us an animal.

I know how lucky I am to have grown up knowing exactly where my food comes from. One of my earliest vacation memories was a trip our family took to visit my father's friend on a dairy farm in upstate New York. We stayed in an (extra?) farm house, and ate our cereal with a pitcher of fresh milk on the table.

That week, we explored pastures, rode horses, and took a tour of the dairy barn. Other than my favorite pants being splattered with cow poop, it was a pretty ideal vacation for a little kid. In the back of my mind, I still harbor the fantasy of leaving it all behind, and going to live on a farm like that...until I remember that we were vacationing on a farm, not working on it.

It is a lot of work to take care of animals. We found this out when we raised chickens for 4-H. We had big, white Leghorns. They got so fat that you could see the skin between their feathers. And they were scary. I think they are evidence that dinosaurs didn't go extinct...they evolved into broiler chickens that peck at your legs when you get too close. We used to have to wear my dad's huge rubber boots when we fed them.

It was kind of a relief when it was time to off them. My mom got the dirty job. Those chickens had no idea what was coming. A loop of rope, a stump and a hatchet...we saw, literally, what it meant to run around like a chicken with its head cut off. But that year we ate chicken...not a clean little slab of shrink-wrapped boneless, skinless, white meat.

By the way, chicken is one of the words we use interchangeably for livestock and food. In fact, if you raise chickens, you might even call the young ones pullets - which comes from the French - poulet. Another example of the beauty of the English Language - no consistency whatsoever.

Later we got laying hens. They were beatiful Rhode Island Reds, with dark maroon iridescent feathers. In the morning we'd walk barefoot through the wet grass to the chicken coop (they were much gentler than the Leghorns). There were two sides to the coop, the goat side, and the chicken side. You let the goats out, and then unhooked the little, wooden door to get at the hens' boxes. They were lined with hay, and there were always warm eggs waiting for you in the morning.

All year long we made egg salad and scrambled eggs and eggnog. We gave them away to anyone who would take them (who knew how valuable those free range eggs were back then?). If the eggs went bad, we stood on the corner of the deck and used them for target practice, aiming for the tallest, straightest tree in the woods.

Sounds idealic, right? And then I remember cleaning the chicken coop. Ugh. It was so gross. The hay, woodchips, and chicken poop condensed on the floor into this wierd composite, almost like plywood. You had to chip it up with a shovel. The smell was awful. But it was all part of our food chain. We ate the eggs that came from that coop, so we had a stake in keeping it clean. (I'm spouting off about the interconnectednes of food now, but at the time I didn't think about it. I just hated cleaning the chicken coop.)

We never successfully had a vegetable garden. There was the random squash plant that showed up in my mom's flower garden. We lived in the woods in the middle of nowhere. It was a place where the tomatoes never ripened because of all the shade.

But we did raise pigs. We named them Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner. Dad built a pig-pen on the hill in the back yard. We filled their water trough, poured their feed, and zapped ourselves on the electric fence. In the summer the smell could drive you out of town, but in the winter, our freezer was stocked with hams and bacon. Dad even blew up one of the pig's bladders like Pa does in Little House in the Big Woods and let us play with it. Grossed out yet? Sorry. That's the reality of raising and eating food.

At the Burrow, we don't really have room for anything other than our dog. As much as I love that I grew up with pigs and goats and chickens, I'm not sure I'm up for the task as an adult. I now realize how much work my parents had to do...and we complained about having to feed and water them!

But we do live a half mile from the farm where we have a family share. On sunny days, I walk with Evan to pick up cabbages and beets, turnips and greens from the overflowing bins in the cool barn. We fill up the basket under his stroller seat, and park it at the edge of the row of dill and cilantro. After picking herbs for the week, we walk home. Our feet get dirty. Our fingers get stained from the vegetables. This is how your food should come.

I know that I am lucky to live so close to the farm, and to be able to buy a share. I think it is a crime that everyone can't get their food this way if they want to. Organic, fresh food is simply not affordable. Too many people are forced to buy whatever the grocery store happens to have in stock from the other side of the country. Even that is too expensive. What's affordable? Pasta. Rice. Not free range chicken. Not organic, local hakuri turnips.

I don't take the interconnectedness of food for granted anymore. And I'm grateful that Evan will grow up in a place where he has to get his hands dirty before he can wash them for dinner.

How to Make Pickles

We have this awesome room atached to our garage called the Man Room. It has a working, brick fireplace and a full kitchen. It is decorated with things like a pair of mounted horns my dad got on a college trip out west, a miniature moose with real fur (given to Nate by a customer at the bank), and a wooden sign engraved with the chemical compound testosterone (thanks Keith!). But before its days of masculine glory, the Man Room was the place where the ladies of C Street gathered to make jams and jellies.

"Yeah, we don't do it anymore," Helen told me one day, over the back fence, eyeing the pile of junk in our back shed, "But we used to all get together and can in there." In my mind's eye, I saw the wood panneled room filled wth bustling ladies in aprons, using canning jar tongs and sipping gin and tonics while pots of berries bubbled on the stove.

After that conversation, I found myself longing to can vegetables. There is something about the idea of people gathering together to preserve food that strikes a chord with me. It's the same reason I learned to bake bread. Not that I believe the world is going to end but...if it ever came down to living in a post-apocolyptic, zombie-ridden world, I would have the skills to survive.

And on a more practical note, I think it is important to bring community back into the kitchen. We eat our food so fast, without thinking about it. We barely know what it is we are putting into our bodies. There is something satisfying about knowing where your food comes from, and what is in it. So when I got the email from our farm share saying I could buy $20lbs of pickling cucumbers for $15, I jumped at the opportunity.

I bought the cucumbers and started calling in the troops: "Wanna make pickles?" I texted Erica. "Still interested in slow food?" I messaged Kelley. "Know any pickle recipes?" I facebooked...Three days later, armed with Mya's sweet pickle relish recipe, about $70 worth of pickling supplies (don't worry, I returned a lot of stuff...see below), and a round of CapeCodders and CapeNotters, Erica, Kelley, Cheryl and I gathered in the kitchen.

I won't go into the nitty-gritty details of actually making pickles, because it honestly isn't that hard. There is a lot of chopping, and boiling, but it is really pretty doable, especially with four people. I also won't share Mya's recipe because it is hers to share, but suffice-it-to-say, it is DELISCIOUS. I will share the link for the refridgerator pickle recipe that we used. And I will offer a bit of advice about preparing for your pickle making adventures ahead of time.

Step 1: Read ALL of the directions first.

This will save you embarassing return trips to the grocery store during which you sheepishly try to explain to the highschool checkout clerk that you would never return groceries, except, what are you supposed to do with the extra two gallons of vinegar you bought?

Step 2: Reread the directions.

This will ensure that your friend, who unfortunately got tasked with the tedious job of finely chopping 12 cups of vegetables, isn't nine onions short of a relish recipe. (Sorry Cheryl!)

Step 3: Ask for help.

Yes, there are people who want to come to your house and stand around in a steamy hot, un-airconditioned kitchen sterilizing jars and mincing vegetables and brewing vinegar concotions that make your breath catch in your throat.

Step 4: Get a babysitter.

Or maybe someone to sit in the living room and play with your son who for some reason refuses to take either a morning or afternoon nap on the day of your pickling extravaganza. Although, I must say, baby Adeline was a model participant.

Step 5: Remodel your kitchen.

Okay, this step may not be practical, but having all of those people working in my kitchen made me really think about how we want to lay out that room when we get around to renovating it.

Step 6: Clean off your camera card and charge your battery.

Or you won't be able to take any pictures of the beautiful cucumbers! Thank god Erica was there...check out her pics and post about pickling at http://www.lifeonharwich.blogspot.com/.

After that, it is simply a matter of good company, and patience. The refridgerator pickles we made should be ready for tasting sometime this afternoon, and ready for eating by the end of the week. The relish is already deliscious. And so is the sweet satistfaction of reestablishing a C Street tradition in the Burrow kitchen.

The Wind is in The Burrow

It is the first day of February vacation...ahhh. We are under a wind advisory here in Hampshire County and that suits me just fine. The fire is roaring, the tea is warming and I am looking forward to some homemade toast (for the second time this morning - vacations are made for such indulgences).

I did NOT slip on the way to the gym this morning (good omen!), and when I returned, Nate had picked up the house, made the coffee and set up the kindling in the stove. Just-add-bic and bingo: instant coziness!

Evan is snuggled up cozily in his crib. These late morning naps are really convenient! I wonder how long they will last? In the mean time, the wind is howling and pounding on the windows. But the Burrow is tight and snug. Let's have some tea!