Starting Over: 2016

Its January, and although I am a little late to my usual party, I am finally in full-on clean slate mode. Tomorrow I am beginning a Whole 30 food commitment which will take me off of all sugars except for fruit for 30 days. Time for clean eating. Giving up coffee will also be in the plan (time for some dandelion root tea!) as will adding in some things I have been dropping out of my life in a spotty kind of way: meditation and listening prayer, yoga, drinking my daily allotment of water and getting my workout in, fitting in Special Time with my kids and getting up early before the family. Its time to polish my boots and get back in gear. My brain is foggy, my waistline is pudgy, my motivation is gone and I am itching to get back at it.

Dear January, here in California you are bringing me the first flowers, fresh lemons off the tree outside my kitchen door and a blessed lack of snow. I do need to book a skiing weekend to satisfy A and the boys who have a yen for cold and downhill thrills that won't be satisfied by any number of lemons or palm trees. I will do it though. I will also plan a night away by myself in the coming months and I will hunt up a friend who will go horseback riding with me nearby. This is a new year and it is time to start putting things to rights.

Today I worked on the garage (sorting through boxes, flattening empty cardboard and filling the van for a Goodwill run). The boys helped me pull about a third of the garage out into the driveway and work on categorizing it a bit. When it began to sprinkle (rainy season!) and we ran around shoving all the things back into the garage, there was decidedly less heaped up! So exciting and hopeful. I am looking forward to the Craigslist postings going up for selling larger items, the mopping of the big concrete floor and the set-up and general assembly of the little guest cottage and art studio that I am dreaming of.

It is fun to start over. But, wow...I need to get my body re-booted again so that I have the clean energy to do it all!

Strawberry Mama

The strawberries are ripe. We're eating them at every meal now after our big trip the u-pick farm. We always mean to look further afield and one year we went to our CSA's organic field for them but we usually end up at Jones Farm like we did this year. The taste of a field-ripe strawberry is cliche but it still has to be remembered every single year that they are so, so, so much better than the ones we buy in the grocery store all winter to tide ourselves over.

Yesterday I finished putting the last of the jars of freezer jam into the freezer. A joined us around the dining room table this year and helped mash berries and boil pectin with the boys and I. Said he truly had no idea there was exactly that much sugar in jam. Heh. Now you know why I substitute that low-sugar pectin stuff that I buy at Whole Foods, eh buddy?

It does make me feel good to have him start noticing how much sugar is in a given food, not just have me be the food-nazi around the house, always on everyone's case about "feeding the children good things." Nobody likes to be the lone policeman. To be fair though, despite my very wholesome nutritional training there was a time when I was in his shoes, not paying much attention to what went into the jam.

Once as a teen I made jam(one of my favorite summer activities) with one of my best chums whose mom was a devoted naturist hippie type, committed to real foods and the avoidance of processed goods. We'd been out picking wild strawberries together which was all very idyllic and then ended the day in my parents kitchen, with everything we'd picked, intent on making them into jam. My friend balked at the amount of sugar in the recipe and told me that her mom would never go for that....and asked me if we could possibly substitute a smaller amount of honey or fruit juice or even skip the sweetener all together. At the time I didn't exactly get it but here I am, mama of my own domain and retroactively impressed by my friend's scruples and I kinda wish we'd just eaten those little berries raw and fresh instead of boiling the daylights out of them with a wagon load of sugar on top. I hope my own little boys learn the same standards my friend espoused, even when her mom wasn't watching. That's what Pamona's Universal Pectin is all about I guess....at least as far as jam is concerned.

So, there is jam, and there are plenty of "leftover" fresh berries and last night there was even a pie. And for breakfast tomorrow, I'm going to have some strawberries in cream...just a little maple syrup drizzled on top to keep it on the straight and narrow. You haven't lived until you've eaten fresh berries in cream.

Related articles

• Small Batch Recipe: Strawberry Thyme Jam Urban Preserving with Marisa McClellan

  ---

• Day 112 - A Strawberry Workday and Strawberry Fruit Leather

  ---

• Berry Resource: Uses for Strawberries

  ---

• Homemade Strawberry Freezer Jam

  ---

We Be Jammin'!

We picked strawberries this past weekend at our local u-pick strawberry farm. Such a highlight of the year! I always make enough strawberry freezer jam to last us all winter and pretty much every time we get out a new jar we have a conversation about how good the jam is and how when it is June, we'll go pick more together. I am part squirrel, I swear, there's a manic little rodent thing in my soul that is mad for storing away goods. I love to pick and dry and can and freeze and all the other things one can do to fruits and nuts and berries and mushrooms. One of the hardest things about our annual strawberry pick for me is stopping. There are so many berries and I could pick for hours...days maybe, I've never tested my resolve.

When I was a little girl, I always rallied all my younger sisters (all four of them) and marched them down the road with baskets in hand to the top of a meadow on a two-track where wild strawberries grew. We'd pick every last wild strawberry we could find, and then I'd come home with my greedy little hoard of tiny berries and I'd make wild berry jam. My siblings were incredibly tolerant of my driving really, that's love. I hope I didn't injure any of their psyches too deeply, I still think gratefully about their faithful support of my obsession every year when we go picking big, abundant domestic berries.

It was important to the little girl me to be out there in the field on my hands and knees every summer, with all my sisters around me, rolling those tiny red bits into our baskets. I looked forward to it every year, it made me feel frugal and special and I felt really loved by my little sisters for their dedicated picking, even though it wasn't their personal dream. I don't think I could have made wild strawberry jam by myself, but many hands made light enough work that we could pull it off. And I felt like I had rubies in my pantry after I'd jarred up a glittering jar or two, all full of our tiny, hard earned prizes.

 Delicious, and mommy-friendly level of work recipe for the strawberry pie I made with the "leftovers," can be found right here!

I was lucky to marry a man who loves fresh fruit and u-picking almost as much as I do. He's absorbed my foraging love and eats my canned goods with gusto. (I love you A!) He marks strawberry season and cherry season and peach picking in his calendar and makes sure that we schedule each picking event. And my little boys have now the joined the team, energetic pickers, even little Nib plucking berries and saying smilingly "Hep! Hep!" ( Baby-speak for "I help, Mommy!") And my squirrel-mommy heart swells. Such a good life.

Sugaring Festival

Image via Wikipedia

We drove a great deal this weekend and managed to get all the way up to the top of the state to the part of Connecticut where there is still snow. Far away, up there it is still the end of winter and the maple sap is flowing. A generous farm decided to host a local sugaring festival for free for anyone who wanted to come celebrate. We had a grand time.

There were pony rides (Ru was a very smug fan. I wish I still could fit on a pony.), there were sap and syrup tastings, there pancakes hot off the griddle, there demonstrations of maple cookery and a big evaporator steaming up the attic of the sugar house with the effort of cooking down the farm's arboreal takings.

And then they made sugar-on-the-snow, just like in Lara Ingalls Wilder's story about sugaring off in Little House In The Big Woods.

I've never actually seen it made or tasted it, although I grew up in a family that made maple syrup. I totally get why it is described so fondly in the book. Wow.

The syrup turns into this lovely, moist taffy stuff that is a glowing gold as it spins on your fork (you twirl it up off the snow after it is ladled out) and it mixes with the cold crystals from the snow and ice and gives you this warm/cold feeling as you eat it. So great.

We left remembering just exactly how fond we both feel of this local, American product and decided that next year, maybe we'll try tapping the  maple trees by our house. There are two that would be unobtrusive to tap, in our back yard and then if we got brave we could tap the two others along the street in the front yard. Do you know any stories of urban tapping?