Delicious Christmas

Sitting at the kitchen table in the glowing main room of my parents' house, deep in the soggy, dripping woods on the Sunday after Christmas. My dad is reading Oliver "The Little Engine That Could," Sarah is immersed in the new book by Barbara Kingsolver, Alonso is lost in the world of a novel and Mom and I are getting ready to finish making our seed order while rain drums on the roof. Bliss! This has been a particularly lovely Christmas--a cheerful hubbub of voices, laughter, pots and dishes clinking, the fire roaring, and a gorgeous cedar filling the center of the room. Among other things we've had a lot of very good food.

Christmas Eve Menu
Leek and Potato Soup (leeks from the garden the highlight of this delicate soup)
Four Pizzas: potato and creme fresh with rosemary; caramelized onions with olives, goat cheese and Gruyere; tomato sauce, mushrooms and olives; tomato sauce, fresh mozzarella and baby spinach (the spinach goes on after the pizza come out of the oven).
Green Salad
Pumpkin Cobbler

Christmas Menu
Leek and Mushroom Gallettes (one with goat cheese, one with Gruyere)
Wild rice and hazelnut salad
Roasted butternut squash (from the garden!)
Cranberries two ways--cooked with apple juice and cranberry orange relish
Pumpkin Pie with Blackberry Ice Cream

Fall garden and chicken pictures

Black-eyed-Susans, Sage, and Hungarian Hot Wax Peppers

The beautiful chicken coop--finally finished, with a roof, a perch and everything!
Oliver with three of the girls.

Oliver enjoying his pole bean teepee. I think I'll try it again with much taller poles. We planted Scarlet Runner Beans, and the flowers were really pretty. I'm leaving some of the beans on the plants now, and hoping to use them as dry beans.

This was my first year trying to grow beans for drying. It takes so many beans to get just one cup dry! I can't believe how cheap a can of beans is now that I have tried to grow them myself. These are beautiful, though, and I'm hoping they will be extra delicious. It's an heirloom variety from Pine Tree Seeds--I think it's called Jacob's Cattle.

The first butternut squash! And the tomato and summer squash harvest continuing, although much slower now that the weather has cooled and the days are so much shorter.


The nesting box with two eggs ready for collecting! The girls are giving us about 3-4 eggs a day right now. The eggs started out tiny, but are full sized now, and quite delicious.

Matilda Hersh

I've been thinking a lot about my grandma tonight, who died one month ago. I had a lot of half-worked sentences about her floating through my head in the days after her death, but my dad got words on paper before I did, and did a beautiful job, too. I'm going to post what he wrote here.

I want to put this in Oliver's baby book too. I think one of the saddest things about losing her is that Oliver will never get a chance to make his own memories of his Bubbe. I am so glad, though, that they were able to meet each other.

Maltida was born in 1912 to Russian immigrant parents. Gifted and precocious, she graduated high school at the age of 15. She had great potential for advanced education, but agreed, instead, to help the family by entering the workplace. This sense of unselfish responsibility and service toward others – especially the family - was a trait that would define the whole of her life.

Matilda was also a talented dancer and a beautiful young woman who was proud of winning the “Miss Brooklyn Avenue” pageant. Part of a lively group, she met Rudolph Hersh, was energetically courted, fell in love, and began a marriage that lasted more than 60 years. This was not just a union that survived; it remained fresh and devoted, full of spontaneous affection and intense loyalty.

When her three children were older, Matilda pursued a career as executive secretary, administrative assistant, and, eventually, corporate officer; she took great pleasure in exercising her intellectual and organizational skills and helping advance both business and charitable enterprises.

The foundation of her life, however, and her greatest source of joy, remained her family: her husband, Rudolph, her beloved mother, Eva, her father, Samuel, her sisters Dottie, Bernice, and Phairal and brothers Jack and Jimmy, her cousins, and, above all else, her children Mona, Sunny and Howard, and her many grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Blessed with an uncanny youthfulness, she will be remembered for the happy visits to her home, where she would take her grandchildren by their hands and dance around the kitchen, and finish by bringing out the coffee cakes to which the young people always looked forward.

Until her last day, she remained generous and charming to others and continued to seek the right word or simple touch that would engage and bring happiness to those around her.

Matilda faced the challenges of life with determination and sacrifice. She sought love, gave love, and received it in return. Those who survive her will continue to be nourished and enriched by that love, and will serve her memory by passing it along to new generations.

Tomatoes, garden plans for next year, and chicken drama

I got to steal an hour to be out in the garden at dusk tonight. I love feeling the seasons shift. The air is much cooler, the wind has picked up and the leaves are starting to rustle and swirl.

Tonight the moon was out--Oliver came out with me just before bed and said hi to the man in the moon. I said:

The man in the moon
Looked down from the moon
and what do you think he said?
It's time for all children on earth
to be thinking of going to bed.

And Oliver responded, "yeah." So from now on, maybe the moon needs to be the one to say it's bedtime, since I don't usually get such a positive response!

Anyway, before that sweet moon-time, I did some serious tomato picking. I have four big bowls of tomatoes in the house now, just waiting for me to make sauce. I'm not sure what I'll do once it's made, though, because the freezer is already full and I don't have a canner. Maybe time to invest in one, or in a stand-alone freezer for under the house.

I have to move my tomato beds next year. This year the plants have some kind of disease. They are looking miserable, and a couple of them are actually dead. So, at least one year off from tomatoes in that spot, maybe more.

Other garden plans for next year:

Turn one of the beds into a raspberry patch. My mom suggested yellow raspberries, and I sampled one of hers. MMM. So good. I'm also planning to expand the strawberry bed. I love having our own fresh fruit, and both of those two types of berries are two fragile to hold up well when they are sold.

More cucumbers! I said that last year, planted three plants this year, but only ended up with two, and that still wasn't enough.

More bell peppers and fewer hot peppers, since I'm the only one in this household that likes the spicy ones. They sure are beautiful, though!

More green beans. I never have more than a handful at a time, which is really not enough to motivate me to cook them. I love making a big bowl of steamed and dressed beans.

Start the tomatoes earlier, with frost protection. I may try pruning them, too, to see if that helps them to ripen more fruit.

I'm also going to try to grow some of the things the gophers love the most in wine barrels (garlic, onions, potatoes). We'll see!

So, the chickens have gotten too big to all fit comfortably on their roost, and they don't want to split up and use the second roost. Tonight poor Sally tried to get on the roost, engaged in some frantic wing-beating and sparring with the chicken she was trying to land on, fell right through the hole in the floor and landed on the ground outside, panting. I guess it's unfortunate that the roost is right over their "door" in the floor where their ladder comes through. We need to make a longer roost. The coop finally has a roof, though, so it is ready for the rains to start!

Directions for visiting your childhood home

1. Stumble inside, a little bleary and stiff from the car. Notice the warm glow of the wood and tile, the good smells of cooking.
2. Check the cupboards and fridge; catalog the snacks available for the weekend.
3. Survey the reading available in the bathroom--any good New Yorker articles?
4. Visit the long built-in bookshelves in the hallway. Greet old friends, consider re-reading a mystery or maybe a girl-meets-horse-faces-and-overcomes-adversity-wins-blue-ribbon story.
5. Check reflection in the bathroom mirror. Still more flattering than mirrors at home--why is that?
6. Go to bed in the darkest of velvety darks. Lie awake listening to the roar of crickets, tree and bull frogs, and the wind in the pine trees.

Being a stay-at-home mom is a such a strange brew of contradictions. I always feel I should be accomplishing so much more than I am, and yet getting the smallest task completed is completely daunting. The day stretches out ahead of us in a series of endless hours, and yet is so filled with diaper changes, negotiations over sweater wearing and hat donning, shoe-finding, book-reading, snack preparation, and the finely-tuned operation that leads to a smooth bed-time that going out more than once a day seems a feat not worth attempting. On the other hand, when I do manage to check something off my ever-evolving to-do list, I'm excited out of all proportion.

Maybe that's why I have a new appreciation for the idea of "homemaking." I'm a good feminist, I really am, and up until 21 months ago and Oliver's birth, my sense of self was defined fairly far away from the cleanliness of my refrigerator or the alphabetization of my pantry shelves. There's just something about being home so much more, though, that draws me in to the orbit of the house itself. Partly it's the fact that I spend a lot of time sitting on the floor playing trains, and I'm only a few inches away from the evidence that the rugs need a good vacuuming. Also, we are home making a mess, when before the house was left to the devices of two sleeping cats most of the day. Not to mention the destruction that one sweet and busy toddler can wreak in a matter of minutes.... But there's more to it than all that. Making soup, dusting the bookshelf, or putting away a pile of laundry are concrete accomplishments. They can be written on a to-do list and crossed off again, and they help me account for my time in a way that didn't seem as neccesary when I spent all day at work.

What I do know is that these occupations are secondary to the real work I'm doing these days (and what a joyful and difficult work it is!) of mothering my son. Parenting feels so vague sometimes, and is so focused on the long term. It's the most important and satisfying thing I have done so far, but not very conducive to the tidy format of the to-do list. So, I sweep the floor, take out the trash, and do load after load of laundry.

There's another aspect to all this, too--my growing realization of how much work it really takes to create a family-space that is warm, joyful, connected, and healthful. Always before, this work was crammed into the hours outside of my good and demanding job, and weekends were spent doing chores. I know I'm incredibly lucky to have this time at home with my son, and it makes me realize all the more that we all work way too much. Nothing wrong with work, and it sure beats being unemployed, but how did we get so far away from the idea that our lives are bigger than the work we do? I love Scott Nearing's take on how our time should be divided: 1/3 head, 1/3 bread, 1/3 community? That's not quite right, but little voice is saying "Mama come! Wash hands, nurse, nurse, wash hands, MamAAAA!"

Planting Peas

I wrote this post in 2009, and somehow it got stuck as a draft. I'm posting it now because it's so sweet to read about little Oliver, not yet two, now that he is so solidly located in "kid" and not a baby or even a toddler any longer. Love the saying: "The days are long and the years are short." -2011
Planting peas has always been one of my favorite things to do, and something I loved helping my mom with as a child. Something about the way you poke holes in the soil with one finger and drop in the pea, the feel of the damp, cool, early spring earth on your hands.... Anticipating the sweetness of a fresh pea, crunchy snow peas, juicy sugar snaps, the pling of shelling peas dropping into the bowl.

Today Oliver helped me plant peas. A toddler helping with such a task is very much like letting the wind do the planting. You may end up with all your seeds in one little section of the patch and the rest of the bed converted to a railroad track for small wooden trains. It will be so interesting to see what comes up where! Regardless, Oliver loved helping, and I loved getting to share this with him the way my mom has shared it with me.

After a row or two of peas, about as much as my patience could handle, we worked together on preparing a new bed for strawberries. This Oliver really loved. I dug with the pitchfork while he sat in the middle of the bed with a little yellow plastic trowel and a blue bucket, sorting through the earth and putting stones, clods of dirt and roots in the pail. The sun was warm on our backs, a flock of finches sang brightly from the bramble hedge a few feet away, and the wind sounded like a river high above our heads.

Seed Order

Ordering seeds just might be my favorite part of gardening. I just ordered a slew from Pinetree Seeds, which has wonderful varieties and is very cheap. Some of things things I (apparently!) am going to be growing this year:

PURPLE TRIONFO VIOLETTO BEAN (60 days)
RATTLESNAKE BEAN (65 days)
VERMONT CRANBERRY BEAN (85 days)
MR BIG PEA (shelling)
JACOBS CATTLE BEAN (83 days)
TENDER SWEET
ARGENT CORN (F1 hybrid 86 days)(silver)
HORN OF PLENTY (F1 hybrid 45 days) (yellow crookneck)
SPINACH MIX 1 oz
SUGAR SNAX CARROT (F1 hybrid 63 days)
PINETREE LETTUCE MIX - 1 OUNCE PACKAGE
BUNCHING CRIMSON FOREST (60 days)
EVERGREEN BUNCHING HESHIKO (65 days)
PRINCIPE BORGHESE TOMATO (78 days)
RHOES POPPY
DELICATA SQUASH (97 days)
FLAT LEAF PARSLEY
ITALIAN LARGE LEAF BASIL
CARANTAN LEEK
PINETREE BASIL MIX--has all their culinary basils
RED BEAUTY PEPPER
TORCH TITHONIA
AMBASSADOR SQUASH
NO AMERICAN WILDFLOWER MIX
SCARLET RUNNER BEAN
Statice