City Blog, Country Blog

Debi: Cornbread and Butter Beans

2010-03-18T11:52:00.002-08:00

This is our favorite song at home these days:

Cornbread and butter beans, and you across the table
Eating beans and making love as long as I am able
Hoeing corn and cotton too, and when the day is over
Ride a mule, then cut the fool and love again all over

It's a great song, old as dirt probably, and a perfect encapsulation of how we want to live. Of course, we aren't farmers -- far from it; we are city mice! -- but the idea that you can sum life up as a series of meals eaten together and sessions of love surrounding some honest work, well, that's just perfect.

Because we've been singing this obsessively since the new Carolina Chocolate Drops CD came out, I decided to try MAKING the very meal in the song. I am not all that good at cornbread, but using Stori's recipe, it came out pretty good! The butterbeans were a different story. David doesn't love beans like the kids and I do, so they had to be part of something bigger. We tried a butterbean stew, with carrots and leeks and mushrooms and peanut butter and soy sauce. It wasn't half-bad!

However, the cornbread was only a minor hit. Everyone had some, but there was a good half-pan left over. As a result, we had to find something to do with it before it dried out and became squirrel food in our alley garbage can. I did some google searching, and discovered this wonderful recipe for fried cornbread with blueberries. Wow. MAKE THIS NOW, PEOPLE.

So, THANK YOU, Stori, for getting that cornbread made over here. It was even better the next morning.

Stori: Great minds....

2010-03-12T15:36:00.003-09:00

It never ceases to amaze me how two women that live so far apart from each other and have never met in person can be connected by so many invisible hair thin threads.

Tonight we are having leftovers for supper. This happens about once a week, just to clean out the fridge, use up what foods we didn't finish at any particular supper, and it gives me a night off from cooking. Tonight we are having ham and pinto beans, spaghetti, and last night's moose stew. Along with ham n' beans and stew, I always serve cornbread. To not make cornbread would be the same as not frosting a chocolate cake. Sure it would still be good, but not as good as it should be. Since we already finished off the first round of cornbread, I have another batch in the oven baking right now.

After setting it to bake, I sit down at the computer to get my facebook fix only to find a post from Debi. She made my cornbread recipe for supper, along with some butter beans. She even baked it in a cast iron skillet. I'll need to remember to blog about my love affair with cast iron and maybe show a pic or 12 of my cast iron collection.

Not only does the fact that are we both feeding our families cornbread tonight connect us, but a secret ingredient in my moose stew does also. A couple years ago, Debi was sharing with me her recipe for "The Soup" (see previous blog entry) when she mentioned Garam Marsala. "Wait a minute," I stopped her. "What in the hell is Garam Marsala?" She goes to explain that it's a combination of spices based in Indian food that they use a lot in curries. Since I have never eaten a curry, I still had no idea what she was talking about. Along comes the holidays and in my very special Debi package I find it! This beautiful rust colored powder. It almost smells chili peppery, but also kinda cinnamon-y. In her explanation about the spice, she mentioned it's used a lot in soups. Ok, I can deal with that. The very next time I made moose stew, I took the plunge and added it in. The mixture of cubed moose, onions, garlic, carrots, potatoes, corn, and green beans blended so perfectly with the spice, it can never be left out again. Whenever I have the chance to share the stew with friends, they always comment on that one delicious thing they just can't figure out. I tell them it's Debi. She is there with me in my kitchen every single time from the start of the stew, to the serving. I can almost hear her laugh. Although I know she would never eat my stew (moose meat and vegans aren't very good friends) she's with me none the less.

Stori : out of my comfort zone

2010-03-06T10:54:00.002-09:00

I am not proud to say that I'm one of the pickiest eaters on the planet. I always have been, probably always will be. My mom likes to joke (but in a serious way) about how growing up the only food I ever actually ate was cheese and sugar. As I've grown older, I've increased my food list quite a bit, but probably not as big as it should be.

On the opposite end of the spectrum from me is my husband, Marc. That man will eat anything! The only food I've found he won't eat and enjoy is Swiss chard. He adventurous food spirit makes him a blast to cook for. Any experimental recipe I can throw at him will receive completely honest feedback. Good or bad.

A couple weeks ago someone in our family mentioned Reuben sandwiches. Marc mentioned how much he loves them. Now I am one of those finicky people that just KNOWS that I won't like something, so I will not ever try it. My mom is the same way. Yogurt has never touched that woman's lips because she just can't stand the thought of it. Corned beef and sauerkraut fall into that category. A couple days after the Reuben conversation, we seen a show on Food Network about corned beef. All the pieces seemed to fall in place yesterday when I went to the grocery store and found a cooler of corned beef brisket. I love to surprise Marc with new food he loves so I figured why not?

That leaves me standing in my kitchen looking at 2 jars of German sauerkraut, a package of Swiss cheese, a loaf of dark rye bread, and a corned beef brisket. There is not a single ingredient that I find appealing. Now what the heck do I do with it? I have a hard time cooking foods that I don't enjoy eating, but I'm willing to try anything.

The corned beef I could figure out on my own. Slow cooking seems to be the key to tender meat. I rinse the excess salt off the roast, wrap it in a tin foil pocket, add some liquid and pickling seasoning. Slow cook at 300* for about 3 hours. Approx. 1 hour per pound.

I now face the sauerkraut challenge. My mom worked in a German cafe when I was a little girl. The lady she worked for always cut the tartness of her kraut with applesauce. That just sounded too vague for me. So I turn to my resident German, Sylvia. My friend Sylvia moved to the US about 20 years ago from a small farming community in Germany. She has her own version of sauerkraut that she claims is fantastic. If any form of pickled/salted cabbage could be fantastic. Per her instructions, I drain and rinse (with water) the kraut in a colander. Using my hands, I squeeze out most of the remaining moisture from the kraut. Transfer to a big pot and cover, till floating, with water. Add 2-3 bay leaves, a couple whole cloves, and a couple tsp beef base. Bring to a boil then turn down heat and simmer for about an hour. Making sure to remove the cloves and bay leaves before serving.

The rest of the Reuben is pretty self explanatory. Butter the outside of the rye bread slices (like a grill cheese), place butter down on a hot griddle, layer with the Swiss cheese, kraut, and finished and sliced corned beef. Top with the other piece of buttered rye and toast.

It was a success! Both my dad and Marc kill a couple of these sandwiches. I forced myself, my mom, and my kids to try all the different ingredients. My mom actually likes kraut, so that part was easy for her. I tried without too much discomfort the corned beef. Salty, and almost jerky like. The kraut, however, about did my daughter and I in. I'm sure as far as sauerkraut goes, it was wonderful. To me, it was REPULSIVE!! Although I was very proud of myself for trying several new foods in one night, I can safely mark on my "never to eat again" list, Sauerkraut.

Debi: Making Things Last

2010-03-06T10:11:00.004-09:00

This is a shot of my backyard picnic table during the summer, after a harvest of my herb garden. This was just the limit of what I could comfortably dry at one time -- possibly less than a third of what was available at the moment. On that table is spearmint, oregano, basil, anise hyssop, and an unnamed mint we've not been able to identify (though it sure is nice in tea). All except the basil were here when we moved in, and much of the oregano and mint has taken over large parts of the garden -- even the cracks in the cement patio. If you look in the middle of the right side of this photo, you'll see a patch of green growing along the fence. That's more spearmint. Sammi, my youngest, loves to chew it, and will regularly run over there while playing, just to get another bright leaf to pop in her mouth.

I didn't always know about herbs. When I was a little girl, the only herb I ever saw growing -- and is it really an herb, or is it an allium? -- was chives. My mother grew them in a little patch next to our back door, and they were also wonderful to snag and nibble on as we ran past. They made their way into salads and scrambled eggs and stir-fry dinners. Though my mom grew lots of vegetables in her garden, and our yard was home to an apple and a pear tree, the only ever fresh herb I had seen was dill, which she didn't grow. She bought it in super-pricey little plastic containers whenever it was time to make matzo-ball soup.

I just thought herbs had to be utilized dry, shaken from tiny little containers you bought in the cooking aisle at the grocery store.

Of course, I grew out of that knowledge when we started receiving a box from Angelic Organics several years ago. Herbs start arriving early, big bunches of green fronds and leaves and spiky things, and, thank heavens, instructions on how to use them. The first time I put fresh basil in my food, I could not believe I'd used dried for this long, thinking that it was good. Fresh mint was outrageously good, and made the most fragrant, refreshing iced tea I'd ever had. I'd never really used thyme before, hadn't known what it was good for, but sauteed with mushrooms, it was like magic.

However, you can't use huge bunches of fresh herbs all at once, usually, not before they lose their punch and their beautiful appearance. I had to learn to preserve them, and I'm still learning. The easiest thing to do is to dry them, and so, in summer, my kitchen becomes a witch's laboratory, bunches of things hanging from thumbtacks under every cabinet. I now have a beautiful collection of organic dried herbs: thyme, summer savory, basil, sage, parsley, oregano, dill, mint, anise hyssop, mint. Maybe it's just the work I put into them, but I feel like they taste better than those little vials from the grocery store. I know they make me smile when I shake them into our dinner.

With dried herbs, my favorite thing to do is include them in sauces. I use this basic roux recipe to mix into vegetables in a savory pie. Here's how we did it last night, mixed with cauliflower, carrots, mushrooms, and leeks:

Basic Herbed Roux
2 tbsp margarine
4 tbsp flour
2 cups unsweetened soy milk
2 tsp dried tarragon
1/2 tsp dried summer savory
1/2 tsp dried oregano
1/4 tsp mustard powder
salt to taste

Melt the margarine in a saucepan and slowly add the flour, stirring all the time. Let the mixture get dark and toasted-smelling, then slowly whisk in the milk. Add the herbs and stir while bringing to a boil. Boil 5-7 minutes, stirring/whisking regularly to keep from burning on the bottom. Turn off the heat when it is at the perfect consistency.

Debi: The Soup

2010-03-02T05:09:00.003-09:00

You may think "The Soup" is a television show that wraps up the week's amusing entertainment news, but around here, it's an actual food. It's THE actual food, THE Soup, not just any soup, but THE soup, the soup to end all soups. It started as a recipe called "Chris' Aloo Chana Soup" in the cookbook called The Garden of Vegan, but at this point, I think I've tinkered with it enough to post my version without infringing on the intellectual property rights of the authors. (By the way: buy that cookbook. TONS of good stuff in it.)

Let me back up a little. I've always really loved soup, and when my youngest was just starting solid foods, several medical issues made swallowing difficult for her. Soup was a perfect food at that time: soft and liquidy, and it was easy to add extra nutrients and fat to her bowl without forcing the rest of us to eat heavy cream or, the granddaddy of all "supplements," virgin coconut oil (which, at room temperature, is the consistency of vaseline). In some other blog post, I'll write about the soup that got her from age 1 to 2 without her wasting away. But that's not The Soup.

I made The Soup for the first time about two years ago. It had looked daunting to me before then, since it has so many different herbs and spices in it. I thought surely it would be muddy-tasting, and if it didn't taste right, I wouldn't know what to add to make it better. One day, though, I had a hankering for Indian food but didn't want all the fire of curry. I decided to tackle this just once, promising that if it didn't turn out, we could always add it to some black beans or some rice to dilute the flavors.

Bite your tongue, naive Debi!!!

It was love at first sight. All those rich eastern colors pouring into the pot, resting on the sauteed vegetables before being swirled into the broth! The smells of someplace far away mixing with the familiar of onion and my own homemade stock! The luscious sharpness of the tomatoes adding the perfect amount of acid! This is truly the soup of the heavens.

You may have to shop for some of the ingredients. I have to send Garam Masala to Stori in Alaska every year, for example, but if you live near a major city, you should be able to find it reasonably cheaply. Here's my version of the original recipe from the cookbook. Take your time, and savor every moment.

Aloo Chana Soup
Original source: The Garden of Vegan (cookbook) with tinkering by Debi

Ingredients:
1 small onion, chopped
1 stalk celery, chopped
1 tbsp olive oil
1 tsp dried ginger
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 1/2 cups vegetable stock, ideally homemade to avoid the sodium
2 medium potatoes, cubed
1 large carrot, chopped
1 can chick peas
14 oz canned tomatoes, diced
1/4 tsp turmeric
1/4 tsp cumin
1/4 tsp cardamom
1/4 tsp garam masala
1/4 tsp salt
1/8 tsp cayenne pepper
1 tbsp dried mint
1 cup steamed broccoli

Preparation:
In a large soup pot, saute the onion, and celery in oil until the onions are translucent. Add the ginger and garlic and saute for another minute. Add the stock, potatoes, carrot, chickpeas, tomatoes, and stir in the turmeric, cumin, cardamom, garam masala, salt, and cayenne. Bring to a boil, then reduce heat to low. Simmer for 20-30 minutes. Remove from heat and stir in the mint and broccoli. Let stand covered for at least 5 minutes (or, in my case, all afternoon). Warm and serve. Mmm!

Stori- my Grandma

2010-03-01T13:51:00.003-09:00

Ever since reading Debi's post the other day on her grandmother's recipe, I have been thinking of my own Grandma.

My dad's mother is from back east, Massachusetts. She's a prim and proper woman, very cold emotionally. A fantastic cook and baker. While married to my grandfather, she was the camp cook for him many hunting clients. My grandpa was a hunting guide and outfitter in western Colorado. Running the camp with precision, she struck me as a woman who would allow little room for mistakes. After her marriage ended, Grandma went to work as a cake decorator. She created amazing works of art with cake and frosting. Her kitchen immaculate, her pantry well stocked, and always fresh cookies available.

This is not the grandma I have been thinking of.
If there was ever two opposites in Grandma land, those were mine.

My Mom's mother was the daughter of Scott immigrants. Her family moved often from one ranch to another in Colorado. Although I don't know much about her life before she became a mother and a wife, she's the grandmother I was closest to growing up. My grandparents had 15 kids together. 16 total counting a daughter my Grandpa had with his first wife who died in cow camp when their girl was only 2 years old. My mother was 12th out of the 15 kids. They grew up in a tiny green house in Meeker Colorado. Grandma was a cook by trade and necessity her entire life. Grandma's little house was always filled with people to the brim and where there was any extra room, you could find a house cat on some one's lap. Although cramped, cluttered, and crowded, there was always room for one more. Grandma's door was never locked and anybody was welcome. Immediately after coming in, Grandma would inevitably try to feed you. One of my favorite things to find when going to her house was Apple Pudding Cake. Heavy, sweet, filled with spices, apples, and raisins. The smell of this baking will immediately take me back to her tiny tilted kitchen, sitting on the stool between the basement stairs and the bathroom, watching Grandma. Whether puttering around the kitchen, sitting at the table playing solitaire, or stitching something on her sewing machine, she was mine. She wasn't perfect, she wasn't meticulous, she wasn't always filled with the right things to say, but she was mine. Her love of babies, the always present bobby pins in her hair, a constant pot of coffee on all times, and always a fluffy house cat to be snuggled with. I can go back any time in my mind with the first sniff of this dish.

Apple Pudding Cake
( i have no idea why this is called pudding cake, there is no pudding in it anywhere!)

1 cup sugar
1/4 cup shortening
5 medium apples - peeled, cored, and sliced
1 egg
1 cup flour
1 tsp baking soda
1 tsp nutmeg
1 tsp cinnamon
pinch of salt
good sized handful of both raisins and chopped walnuts

In a large bowl, cream together sugar and shortening. Add egg and mix well. Add in apples. In a separate bowl, sift together flour, baking soda, nutmeg, cinnamon, and salt. Stir into apple mixture. Pour into slightly greased 9x13 cake pan, top with crumble. Bake at 350* for about an hour or till toothpick inserted in middle comes out clean.

Crumble topping

3/4 cup brown sugar
1/4 cup cold butter or margarine
1 cup regular oatmeal
1/2 cup flour

Mix together all ingredients gently with fingers. Do not mix completely, you want this as a lumpy crumble topping.

Stori - food challenge throwdown!

2010-02-28T21:46:00.004-09:00

I went on a marvelous date today.

Monday is my nephew, Orin's, birthday. I needed to go to town to pick up a gift for him, my dad didn't want to go, my husband felt like staying at home. I left the 2 little kids with him and Paige and I went to town for a girl trip. Since it was just us two, I offered for us to go out to breakfast. Paige never turns down an opportunity to go out to eat.

There is a place in Fairbanks that is known for great breakfast called The Cookie Jar. I had only been there once before with Marc several years ago. I was not impressed either time. This place was recently featured on The Food Network show "Drivers, Drive-Ins, and Dives". The host went on and on about The Cookie Jar's famous cinnamon rolls. Shortly after being seated, the waitress even mentioned how wonderful they were and a what a perfect start to a Sunday morning. Paige didn't need any more encouragement than that.

I have changed my bread baking habits lately which in turn has produced several treats for my family. In the past, I always made my bread in 6 loaf batches. Leaving 1 or 2 thawed out and freezing the rest. It only takes us about 8 to 9 days to eat all 6 loaves, but the cold even permeates my outside freezer to the point where it will dry out the frozen bread pretty badly during the winter. To fix this, I have decided to cut down on my batch size and only make enough for 3 smaller loaves. I have been turning the batch into 2 loaves of bread and the remaining 1/3 gets put to good use as cinnamon rolls. These do not last long in this house.

After a horribly long wait, which included a full 40 minutes before even the 1st cup of coffee showed up, our breakfast arrived. I ordered biscuits and gravy, and Paige ordered a slice of french toast and a $4 cinnamon roll. Out came this monstrosity of a pastry, served on a big plate along with a steak knife. Paige knew there was no chance of her finishing off the entire thing, but was willing to give it her best shot. She cuts into this huge thing and takes a bite.......looks up at me....looks back down at her roll....back up at me....takes another bite...puts down her fork. I'm waiting to what my restaurant loving daughter's verdict would be. "This isn't very good Mom." she says. "Yours is way better!"

HA! Take that Guy Fieti!

Having to try the test myself, I try a bite. Paige was right. It wasn't very good. Was this what all the hoopla about? The bread was tough and chewy. The frosting more bland than sweet. A disappointing lack of cinnamon. What a let down. Paige took the remaining roll home to let her dad try. He only took one bite and stopped. He agreed. Mine is way better.

Now this is the point where I should dutifully jot down my recipe for home made cinnamon rolls. Nuh-uh, not gonna do it. The perfect cinnamon roll is so embarrassingly simple, I would be ashamed to put it down. Besides that, if I told how easy it was, I would lose my tricky baking reputation.

Instead, I'm including a different recipe. This is what I fixed tonight for supper. After our disappointing breakfast, we braved a trip to Walmart for a birthday gift. While there I seen they had a some half decent fresh asparagus and some nice little cremini mushrooms. These two ingredients sparked an idea for my potato chowder to be added to the menu. Although I claim the use of portebello mushrooms in this soup, creminins are nothing more than baby portebellos. Easier to prep and a lot cheaper than their grown up counter parts, they are one of my favorite shrooms to cook with.

Potato Chowder with asparagus and portebello mushrooms
(measurements are approximate since I don't measure anything)

6 good sized potatoes- peeled, washed, and cubed
1/2 onion- chopped
3 stalks celery- ribbed and chopped
3 cloves garlic- peeled and minced
1 bunch fresh asparagus- cut into 1 inch lengths
1 container cremini mushrooms- sliced
1/2 lb. bacon -cut into pieces and cooked crisp (optional! especially for Debi)
approx. 4 to 6 cups milk
salt
pepper
1 tsp sage
1/2 tsp thyme
1/2 tsp basil
about 1/2 cup flour

In a large pot, barely cover cubed potatoes with salted water and put on to boil. Put in the already crisped bacon into the potato pot. In a skillet, saute in margarine (or butter) the onions and celery till transparent. Right before they are done, add the garlic and sautee only till you can smell it. Add into potato pot. Next sautee the asparagus and mushrooms in butter till asparagus is bright green and mushrooms are still a bit firm. Add to potato pot. Add the seasonings and stir. Keep potatoes on a slow slimmer for about 20 to 30 minutes. You will want the potatoes to stay firm. Pour in about half the milk, stirring constantly. Bring back to simmer. In separate bowl, whisk together the flour and remaining milk. Pour milk/flour mixture into potatoes very slowly stirring the entire time. Bring back to simmer. If soup is too thick, thin it down with a little more milk. If too thin, do another blend of flour and milk. Taste and season with more salt desired.
Serve with toasted garlic bread or croutons.

Debi: What do you take to a potluck?

2010-02-19T13:50:00.003-09:00

Our synagogue is hosting a potluck dinner tonight for families of second graders. They requested vegetarian dishes with no nuts. As a vegetarian family, that's a slam-dunk for us -- most of our recipes would fit the bill -- but I asked our resident second-grader what she wanted to bring.

"Kugel!!!" she squealed. "The APRICOT kugel!"

Kugel is a traditional Eastern European casserole, and usually refers to the noodle-based variety, though at Passover time, people make potato or spinach kugels (yuck). I always thought all noodle kugels were sweet, but recently I was proven wrong. A few weeks ago, we went to another potluck for Ronni's elementary school (a regular old public school), and all parents were asked to bring a dish that represented their ethic heritage. I brought "the APRICOT kugel!," but it seemed all the Jewish families (5 or 6 of us) had the same idea, and it became The Night of the Many Kugels. I peeked at all of them, and one family had indeed made a savory kugel. I'd never heard of such a thing, but that was how their family always made them. Live and learn!

Our apricot kugel is a special thing, though. The recipe comes by way of my grandmother, my dad's mother, who died when my dad was only twelve. I never met her, obviously, and my grandfather remarried a year after she died, so by the time I came along, there wasn't anything of hers that my father could share with me aside from her name. I was named Deborah because she was named Dorothy -- sharing the first initial is a typical way of naming a child in honor of someone who has passed away.

So how, you might ask, do I have Grandma Dorothy's apricot kugel recipe?

Well, my dad's cousin was cleaning out some drawers one day, more than 50 years after my grandmother died, and found two index cards with recipes on them. Another cousin identified the handwriting as my grandmother's and immediately sent them to my father. My father scanned them and sent them to me. I made one adaptation to the apricot kugel recipe (used soy milk instead of whole milk), but otherwise have kept Grandma's recipe exactly as is. I haven't tried the other recipe yet, but I don't know if I even have to! This one is perfect. It is the comfort food to end all comfort foods. Just the smell of it in my house is enough to make all of us sigh happily, tuck our feet under our bottoms on the couch, and smile.

This spring, my mom declared me an accomplished enough cook to bequeath me one other beloved remnant of my grandmother's life as a housewife and mother: her tin measuring cup. I can't remember how my parents came to be in possession of it, but now it is mine. It seems wrong to use anything else for preparing this recipe.

Good sabbath, everyone.

Stori: under the weather

2010-02-18T15:01:00.002-09:00

This past week hasn't been all that fun as far as health was concerned. My oldest came down with a cold late last week. After having visited an indoor play yard, the two little ones ended up with a nasty stomach bug that included fevers of over 103 degrees. My mom had already experienced the fun stomach virus but Marc and I are now fighting both ailments. With my babies being sick, my priority is to help them feel better. The one way to do that, with my kids anyway, is to hold them. and hold them. and hold them some more. Complete meals have been pushed to the back burner.

Now that my family is getting closer to being back on their feed, it's time to do a full meal. Something to recharge the body batteries. Since my kids were sick over Valentine's Day, I didn't get the chance to make Marc's lemon meringue pie as I do every year. I have some making up to do. Lemon Meringue Pie being his absolute favorite food in the world, a close second is fried pork chops. Seasoned then coated in flour, browned in a hot cast iron skillet, then finished off in the oven, pork chops can get me forgiven for most any sin. With these I serve the standard (in this family) mashed potatoes and milk gravy, along with green beans cooked with onions and bacon. Since we have carrots from last fall's garden still left in cold storage, I figure I would add another favorite of Marc's, Honeyed Carrots. I stumbled on this dish a few years ago, and rarely prepare carrots or parsnips any other way.

Honeyed Carrots

6 medium carrots (julienne cut)
4 medium green onions (optional)
1/3 cup honey
1 Tbsp butter or margarine
2 Tbsp lemon juice
1/2 tsp kosher salt
In large skillet, heat 1 inch water to boiling- add carrots, heat back to boiling, reduce heat, cover & simmer for 5 minutes or till barely tender. Drain & remove from skillet, set aside. In same skillet cook remaining ingredients over low heat, stirring frequently till bubbly. Add carrots back in and stir to coat. Cook uncovered 2-3 minutes, stirring occasionally till carrots are glazed.
(note: I don't measure the lemon, butter, or honey. Just use your judgement and preference)

Debi: Trudge

2010-02-10T08:46:00.003-09:00

For all our east coast readers: yes, you got more snow than Chicago. Conceded. But we did just get a nice hearty snowfall here in the midwest, over a foot in 24 hours here by the lake, and for folks like our family who use footpower as our main mode of transportation, this adds several layers of work to our day -- pun intended!

Because it wasn't very cold here, this winter storm was easier to handle for us. While we had to be protected from getting wet, the temperatures in the twenties made it possible to stay outside for a while at a time -- quite necessary for shoveling. And shoveling. And shoveling again. Living in an urban area as we do, it's very easy to stand on a street and declare "good neighbor" and "bad neighbor" just by looking around. The good neighbors are the ones who shovel their sidewalks, maybe even adding a few handfuls of road salt to keep the remaining snow from becoming ice in our standard cycles of snow-light thaw-freeze. The bad neighbors don't shovel, leaving the good neighbors to pluck the elderly and infirm out of their knee-deep piles on the sidewalks.

Yesterday, we woke up to a pretty notable snowstorm happening outside our windows. That meant the winter gear we wore on the way to school had to keep us warm and dry on top and bottom -- not just snowboots and snowpants for the snow we'd trudge through, but something waterproof on top to keep our heads protected from the snow falling on us from above. Ronni, my oldest, remembered seeing a friend of ours in a ski mask and asked if we had one she could wear under her hood. Sammi, ever-stubborn, insisted her hat was plenty. I wore a ski hat and hood, and (dumbly) decided to just layer long-johns under my jeans instead of putting on snowpants. My reward for that was damp pant cuffs all day.

After I walked the kids from school, I had to run right home and get my car to meet a client in Chicago. That's a 30 minute drive in good weather, so I had no time to shovel before I left. I felt really guilty, but promised myself it would be the first thing I did when I got home. I parked my car outside our meeting place, and when I came out a few hours later, I had several inches of snow to brush off of it. When I arrived home, those inches covered our sidewalk and the path from our house to garage. Shoveling it took at least forty minutes.

I worked in the afternoon, made time for a quick run, and then raced to pick Ronni up from her after-school dance class and Sammi up from her extended-day at preschool. By the time I got home and realized that we had to be back at Ronni's school for parent-teacher conferences in an hour, AND that I'd offered to bring dinner for the teacher too, AND that I needed to shovel (again), it was clear that dinner had to be easy and fast. And portable! We brought Ronni's teacher the beans & corn in a little plastic container, with a separate container of salsa, a plastic bag with two tostados, and a package of tic-tacs once I realized how garlicky the beans had turned out.

Snowy-Day Hearty Fast Dinner!
1 can refried black beans
1 can whole black beans
2 cloves garlic
1 package hard tostados
shredded cheese
salsa
1 batch Sweet-n-Salty Corn, recipe below

Empty can of whole black beans into a pot and just cover with water. Cook until the beans are soft, then drain water and partially mash beans, leaving some whole pieces. Add can of refried black beans, and squeeze garlic cloves in your garlic press into the pot. Mix thoroughly and heat until hot.

Spread bean mixture on tostados, sprinkle cheese on top, and add a dollop of salsa. Serve with a side of Sweet & Salty Corn

Sweet & Salty Corn
1/2 bag of frozen corn
2 tbsp margarine
1/2 tsp cumin
1/2 tsp salt

Cook corn in microwave, melting margarine on top. Add cumin and salt and mix well.

Debi: Shabbos

2010-02-06T04:34:00.004-09:00

Friday nights are lovely, when I can get my act together to make them so!

Our family is Jewish, and while we're not very observant or religious, having a traditional sabbath meal on Friday nights is something that reminds the grownups of our own childhoods, our grandparents and parents, and the warm feeling of family at home for an evening together. We could eat anything for dinner, but it seems wrong somehow to make our Sabbath meal something exotic or experimental. What feels right is comfort food.

Last night, I decided to be a little ambitious, given the fact that the kids were underfoot and David wouldn't be home until dinner was ready. I made seitan cutlets (a faux-meat-like thing made from vital wheat gluten, broth, oil, tehini, and seasonings), which require several elaborate steps to develop the right consistency; homemade mushroom gravy (which, unlike Stori and her perfected pan-gravy methodology, I always struggle to keep lump-free); a nice big bowl of bright peas; homemade rice pudding; and challah.

Challah, a braided egg bread, is absolutely essential for a Shabbos table. After years of using my mother's recipe, several years ago I tried a recipe from my friend Hilary. Hers was far better, and so that is the one I use, with my own addition of eggs (how did she have a challah recipe with no eggs?!?). Here it is -- this recipe makes two loaves, so plan to give one to a friend:

--------------------------------------------
Challah

2 cups warm (not hot) water
½-3/4 cup sugar
1 tsp salt
1 envelop or 1 tbsp yeast
1/3 cup vegetable oil
3 eggs, beaten
6 cups flour + 1-2 cups for flouring surface & hands during kneading.

Preparation:
Put water in a large bowl. Dump in sugar, but don’t mix. Add salt. Add yeast, then mix, using only a quick once or twice around with a large spoon.

Dump in oil and add the 6 cups of flour to the same bowl. Add the eggs. Mix with spoon.

Remove from bowl and place on floured surface. Knead 15 minutes, or to the right texture plus 10 minutes more.

Place in lightly oiled bowl (using the 1/3 cup vegetable oil). Roll it around so it’s coated. Cover the bowl with a dishtowel and let rise until doubled (about 75 minutes).

Punch down and knead 3 minutes.

Let rise again 45-60 minutes.

Divide into two lumps, and divide each lump into three strands. Braid the strands to make two braided loaves, and brush each loaf with beaten egg. Sprinkle with coarse salt and bake 40-45 minutes at 350.
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The photo above is of a round challah that we made this fall for the Jewish high-holy days. Last night, our challah was still braided, but we left it long. It's easier to slice that way, anyway. Of all the delicious foods on our table last night, the kids (and secretly, the grownups) like the challah best. It's a soft, slightly sweet bread, chewy and moist and, since it takes so long to make, last night's challah was still warm when we gathered around our lit sabbath candles, put our arms around our children, and blessed it.

Stori ~ easy does it

2010-02-04T16:07:00.002-09:00

My phone rang this morning at around 8 with my dad on the other end. Since I have the two little kids with me, my dad is nice enough to feed the horses their morning hay for me so I don't have to dress the kids in their winter gear and go outside. He's calling to tell me that my big draft mix mare has once again, found trouble. Heidi is 1,400 pounds of lap puppy. She has a sweet disposition, never ending calmness, a quick busy mind, and a pension for mischief. She's the type of horse who likes to be busy or entertained. When left to her own boredom, she often gets into messes that requires me to clean up.

We feed our horses in a big wooden rectangular shaped bin. About 3 feet high on the ends, a few inches shorter on one long side (to accommodate the tiny pony we used to have), and about 3 1/2 feet on the high long side. Marc attached two tires side by side on each long side to prevent Heidi from tipping the box. This feed bin is about 6 foot long, just big enough for two horses to feed along side each other without crowding.

My 1,400 lb baby was standing inside the box.

Like most bratty toddlers, she's very good at getting herself IN things, but pretty pathetic at getting herself OUT. My mom shows up to tag team the kids, and out the door I go. 45 minutes later in -25 below zero weather and we have one giant horse out of one small box, one frustrated infuriated me, and one dislocated right shoulder. Pretty average score in the game of "Heidi and Me". I had dislocated my shoulder for the first time last May bringing another horse home. I don't know if injuries like that every completely heal, but I know mine never did. Maybe it was the lack of immobilizing I didn't do, or the fact I never slowed down my activities, but now I have to coddle that joint like a newborn. When I felt the sickening slip ~ pop! this morning, I knew my day could only get better from there. Thankfully I was able to slip it back into socket pretty quickly and without too much icky pain. Since I am nursing a limp and traitorous right arm, my family's supper for tonight will be:

Frozen lasagna

store bought garlic bread

They should feel lucky to get that much. It could have been cold cereal and a lot of whining from Momma's chair.

Stori ~ comfort food arctic style

2010-02-02T13:12:00.002-09:00

I have had an incredibly busy two weeks. My sister came up to visit from Colorado and it seemed as if everyday another activity would pop up. From birthday parties, to CMSA annual meetings, tattoo appointments, and road trips to Delta Junction to get grain. My little humdrum homebody lifestyle has been turned upside down! Although it's been very fun, I'm exhausted and ready to settle down and re-fluff my nest. Along with the activity comes eating poorly. Besides having some weight gain side effects from a medication my doctor prescribed, my diet has been lousy! These two things have combined to make me feel ....un-good, for lack of better terms. Not really poorly, just yucky.

Today has been set aside to put my life to order again. Cleaning house, finishing laundry, snuggling my babies, taking back my comfortable routine is a must. Part of my routine comes one of my families' favorite meals. Well most of my family anyway. Very balanced, zero preservatives, and all of the dishes coming from our hands and our land, once again we turn to moose steak. Prepared the way we make it, the meal is also surprisingly low in calories and very filling. Alaskan comfort food Thompson style. We start with the moose roast. Sliced into steaks, I put it through my tenderizer, then dredged in a seasoned flour and fried in a tiny bit of olive oil in a cast iron skillet. Several cast iron skillets actually. The second dish is mashed potatoes. Yukon Gold potatoes grown in our garden, dug by hand, cured in the dark at 50* for 7 days, then put in cold storage, our harvest lasts the entire year until the next year's potatoes are ready to dig. Peeled, cubed, washed, and then boiled in salted water. After draining water, adding milk then mashing, it's a happy belly dish. I usually always serve corn with this meal also. With the leftover dredging flour, and the remaining grease in my skillet, this will be the start to my pan gravy. I brown the flour in the grease, adding a little bit of salt and pepper, once flour is nice and toasted, I add the pitcher of milk (from our cow of course). Stirring constantly to break up the lumps, I bring the gravy to a boil and take it off the heat once it's thickened enough. Served with homemade bread and butter and a big glass of milk, it will be the final touch on the chore of returning my life to our version of normalcy.

Debi: It's THAT Kind of Day

2010-01-27T06:35:00.003-09:00

Yesterday morning, I woke up with a cold. I had gone to bed suspicious of the tickle in my nose and throat, and woke up with a confirmation of the drippy days to come. Since my string band, The Lopsiders, is playing a long-awaited gig on Thursday night, I wanted very much to nip this cold in the bud.

So, my solution was to hit my system with as much immunity-boosting power as possible. I downed my usual multivitamin, followed by an extra dose of zinc and a dose of astragalus, an herb known for its immune support. Since I'd dozed later than usual, it took all my attention to pack a lunch for my oldest, feed the two of them breakfast, stuff their backpacks, dress them and myself for the weather, and get out the door to school.

On the way from my younger daughter's preschool to my older daughter's elementary school, I started feeling woozy. The world looked a little wavy and too bright, and my stomach began rolling. By the time I got her to the door, I felt downright nauseous. Since she had been playing on Sunday at the house of a friend whose father had the stomach flu, I started to worry that I'd be singing on Thursday night through more than just the sniffles.

I had planned to walk from Ronni's school to the coffeeshop for a serious day of work, but decided to go home and get the car instead. It's a mile to the cafe, but if I really did have the flu, I wouldn't want to walk home. Once I got there, the nausea increased, and though I had just paid for and ordered my coffee, I decided quickly that I could not drink it. I left it there, shouting, "Free soy mocha for anyone who wants it!" as I ran out the door, sweating and breathing in big gulps of the cold air.

I went home and collapsed on the couch in sweatpants and a sweatshirt. I waited and waited for what I thought was the inevitable...but it never came. I nibbled the plain scone I'd bought, and felt a little better. Nibbled more, felt a little better. Suddenly it hit me: the vitamins. No breakfast. Oh boy.

I had an upset stomach from taking too many vitamins with no food.

I spent the rest of the day on the couch, working on my laptop and watching bad tv, until it was time to pick up the kids -- the younger one from her extended day at preschool; the older one from a creative movement class at the local park district. I had little appetite and no interest in cooking, so I called my husband and announced my abdication of the Kitchen Queen throne. His response, stereotypically, was "That's fine. Let's order in."

"Order in" means delivery food from a restaurant. Our default -- the one we chose last night -- is Siam Pasta, a thai restaurant that delivers reasonably priced noodle dishes. Thank heavens. By the time it arrived, my appetite had returned, and we enjoyed:

Pad Thai with tofu: Thin noodles stir-fried with scrambled egg, bean sprouts, onions & tofu topped with carrots, green onions & peanuts.
Pad See Eiw: Stir-fried wide noodles in a brown sauce with tofu, scrambled egg, Chinese broccoli & bean sprouts.
Pad Woon Sen: Stir-fried tiny glass noodles with tofu, scrambled egg, baby corn, mushrooms, carrots & green onions in a mild thin broth.

Thank heavens for Siam Pasta and the abundant leftovers in my fridge!

Stori~ we don't need no stinking electricity!

2010-01-20T22:07:00.004-09:00

My Dad called me this morning to tell me he had supper covered tonight. That only meant one thing, chicken fried moose steak cooked on his old wood burning cook stove. He picked up this old stove about 6 years back in Fairbanks. The stove was manufactured probably early 1900's, maybe even late 1800's. It's a beautiful mint green and ivory 6 burner. There are no actual "burners", it's just a flat top with one side being very hot, over the wood box, the other side gradually getting cooler the farther from the hot box it gets. This stove is a miracle worker when it comes to cooking things hot and fast. Grease splatter is never a problem, messy grease actually benefits the cast iron surface of the stove. He has the stove positioned in his arctic entry way, which is a good thing since it can put off enough heat to flat run you out of the house. My Momma always joked around about baking sugar cookies on an old wood burner, she would say "Just hold the cookie sheet in front of the oven door for about 30 seconds, you'll get perfect cookies." In the summer, he sometimes moves the stove out onto the porch itself, since it makes so much heat, it's unnecessary inside the house. The stove has warming ovens above the range, and a hot water tank in the back (which we never use).

These old stoves were a way of life for me growing up. My parents built a cabin outside of Meeker Colorado, off of Strawberry Creek Road when I was about 4 years old. We lived on that farm till I was in 8th grade. Meeker is known for being a boom/bust town. When the last oil shale mine shut down, my Daddy being the head of security, it left him jobless. My Momma waited tables to make ends meet. My Daddy raised milk cows, beef, pigs, chickens, sheep, and of course our horses. We sold the wiener pigs to the local 4-h kids, and whatever was left went to the livestock auctions in Silt. Out of our milk cows, my Momma ran a milk, cream, and egg route in town. Every day of the week, she would go to work early just to deliver the orders for milk, sold in gallon size glass jars. Cream out of glass quart jars, and eggs. We still store our fresh milk from our little cow the same way (and hell hath no fury like if you turn in a dirty jar!!) Our customers were diligent on taking the goods on a certain day of the week, and having the cleaned glass jars and weekly money waiting for Momma when she got there. We heated our entire cabin (until we built the add-on when I was about 9, then we had a secondary wood stove in the other part of the cabin) with an antique Majestic wood burning cook stove (much like the picture here, but this was not our exact stove). I remember as a little girl, being woken in my loft by the "whoofing" of the chimney as Momma got the morning fire going. She would wake up to a frozen cold floor about an hour earlier than us to get that stove going and have the house heated up before she woke us kids. The stove sat at the end of the supper table, our house had few walls, just like my own cabin now, a very open floor plan. The old Majestic sat on a bed of laid lava rock. Natural volcanic lava rock does not retain heat which is perfect for a very hot stove and a wooden house. We would keep our winter hats, scarves, and mittens behind the stove where they staid hot. Our little dog, Smudgie, could usually be found snoozing on top of our winter gear behind that stove. She loved a warm bed. My Momma would have a percolating coffee pot on the far back right corner of the stove, the simmer side, and our morning breakfast in the middle of the range. From pancakes to hot oatmeal, our breakfast was cooked on that 200 year old stove every morning of every winter of my childhood.

Having these stoves, we never have had to worry about heat or food with a power outage. No electricity needed. A good stock of split firewood and some cast iron cookware was all my family needed to stay safe, warm, and well fed. Always with a pot of hot coffee. Always with a warm place to sit by and warm your hands. It was the heartbeat of our home growing up.

Debi: Shhh! Don't tell anyone!

2010-01-19T09:11:00.004-09:00

Stori is right; I have the much-appreciated blessing of plentiful sources for fresh produce. In fact, the only things I buy in the can are beans, and that's just because I am too lazy to soak dried beans. I buy frozen peas, I suppose, but I don't know many people with kids who DON'T buy frozen peas. What else do you serve with macaroni & cheese?!

My favorite place to shop for fresh produce is The MarketPlace on Oakton, only about 4 miles from my house. My husband and I jokingly refer to it as "The Mafia Market," because the produce there is so cheap and of such high quality that we can only assume that it is a front for some other type of more nefarious business. (Note to police and any other interested parties: I have absolutely no evidence of this!) We shop here for produce in the winter months, when nothing much can grow locally. It is a miracle of a store, catering to many ethnic restaurants and shoppers, and so the selection can be exotic and exciting. Gigantic, frozen durians hang in bags above enormous, overflowing displays of oranges and apples and peaches and melons and pineapples and cherries; avocados are often 75 cents and rest in mounds next to crates of mangoes, just across the aisle from hundreds of pounds of every variety of potato, onion, and squash you can imagine. I can fill three enormous grocery sacks for less than $25.

I love to take my daughters to this market, where we can imagine any number of delicious meals and try new things. The last time we were there, Ronni had been clamoring for sweet potatoes, so in they went, along with leeks, broccoli, green beans, apples, pears, peaches, canteloup, pineapple, mangoes, grapes, garlic, dates, russet potatoes, and portobello mushrooms. Since the store also sells dry goods from all over the world, we browsed further and came home with canned green olives from Israel, clover honey from Wisconsin, soup noodles from China, pastry dough from Greece, and a big block of tofu from lord-knows-where, since it wasn't labeled.

But. Back to the sweet potatoes.

We are a big soup family here, and I'll put just about anything into a soup to see how it tastes. Though I'd never had sweet potato soup, one night last week, I took a look at the sweet potatoes and figured it couldn't be that hard to make a soup with them. I baked the potatoes before leaving the house for our after-school activities, figuring it would get me a step ahead for the dinner that would have to be quickly prepared when we got home. I found a recipe on the internet that looked like I could adapt it to my non-dairy, vegetarian needs, and voila! Between that and a pan of cornbread, hastily mixed and tossed into the oven 30 minutes before dinner, we had a great start. Here's my version of the recipe:

Sweet Potato Soup
2 tablespoons flour
2 tablespoons salted margarine
3 cup water, mixed with 3 tsp vegetable broth powder
2 tablespoons light brown sugar
3 cups cooked, smashed sweet potatoes
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
1/4 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/4 teaspoon ground nutmeg
2 cups vanilla soymilk

Make a roux-like mixture in your soup pot with the flour, margarine, and broth. Add the brown sugar and heat to a boil. Add the potatoes and spices and cook for 5 more minutes, then turn off the heat. Using an immersion blender, puree the potato mixture, then add the soymilk and heat again. Serve with CORNBREAD!

What to eat with this? Soup and cornbread is a nice start, but we need more than just this. A frantic bout of trimming green beans, and then a rapid-fire steam in the microwave, followed by liberal dousing of them with salted margarine and a tiny sprinkle of dried dill, was just what we needed. An overflowing bowl of chopped mango rounded it out nicely.

All in all, the prep time was perfect for a busy evening where dinner had to come together in less than 40 minutes. I won't lie; there are nights like this where we all eat cereal or yogurt for dinner, but having a fridge full of beautiful, bright fresh produce does inspire me to dig just a bit deeper for the creativity it takes to make a meal more than just fuel. Thank you, Market Place on Oakton!

Stori~ poor planning is the true mother of invention

2010-01-15T12:44:00.003-09:00

Since we raise, butcher, and process our own meat, I am required to take out and plan for supper several days in advance. I fully admit, I am not good at this. I rarely know what I'll be in the mood to fix or eat till the day of. Within a year's time, we have usually butchered at least one if not two full sized sow pig, one moose, and maybe a beef cow. That much meat takes up a ton of freezer space, so my mom and dad keep the moose over in their freezer, I have claim to the pork and beef. Because my dad is an expert planner, we are never without moose thawed out. I really wish I had inherited that gene. Now, I say all that, just to say this.

Yesterday I woke up with a plan in my hand and hankering for spaghetti for supper. I make my meat sauce out of pretty much any burger (beef, moose, pork, caribou). About 3 days ago I took out some pork to thaw for the week, thinking I was grabbing a roast and a package of burger. My spaghetti supper ingredients (so I thought) were taken care. So there I go to the fridge to grab my burger out around 3 in the afternoon only to find no burger package. Pork chops. What? Pork chops? But I didn't wanna make pork chops! I didn't have enough potatoes over at my house for mashed. They were still in cold storage over at Papa's. Besides the fact I really wanted pasta! There I was, time to get supper going, nothing thawed out, my pasta plans dashed. So I go to my pantry and do like any good cook does, I stare at the shelves and cuss at myself. To be honest, I felt a little iron cheffy at that point. The clock is ticking, 6 hungry people to feed, no meat thawed out, one craving for pasta....GO! I notice a can of artichoke hearts..hmmm, oooh then fire roasted diced tomatoes, ok, oh! penne pasta~ Colt's favorite! Things are starting to come together. What about the protein for my carnivorous family? Canned chicken breast! Yes! So, by guessing, and tinkering, tasting, and guessing, I accidentally came up with a dish that Marc has requested to be put in the supper rotation!

Unlike Debi, I do not have at my disposal several fresh and raw food markets to choose from. Alaska winters are not friendly to fresh produce, and a "quick" trip to the grocery store would take about 2 hours. If you could look into my pantry you would find row after row, shelf after shelf of canned goods. These may not be as tasty as fresh, but they work great for my family. Besides canning our own home grown, I always keep a fully stocked pantry filled with canned food. And, they don't go bad! So out of the basic staples I have on hand at all times, I was able to come up with a very heart warming, belly filling, taste pleasing meal.

Penne pasta bake with artichokes and red sauce
(feeds family of 7 with leftovers!)

3 large cans white chicken breast, drained and broken up
1/2 onion, chopped
4 cloves garlic, finely chopped
1 can fire roasted diced tomatoes
1 can artichoke hearts, drained and chopped
3 cans tomato sauce (not spaghetti sauce, just plain tomato sauce)
1 can v-8 juice
2 1lb. boxes penne pasta
2 cups shredded mozzarella cheese
kosher salt, pepper, sage, oregano, thyme

In a large heavy pan, saute onions and garlic in about 2 tablespoons olive oil. Add drained chicken and brown, stirring constantly. Add undrained tomatoes and chopped artichokes. Brown just a tiny bit more. Season with a couple pinches of kosher salt, some pepper, about a tsp. ground sage, and 1/2 tsp both oregano and thyme (pre-made italian seasoning would work too). Pour in tomato sauces and v-8 juice. Stir, turn to low, cover and let simmer. Can slowly simmer for several hours if you like. Cook pasta in salted boiling water, but only for about 7 minutes. You don't want it all the way done. Drain cooked pasta and mix with the sauce. Transfer mixture to a big casserole dish, I used a 9x13 stoneware and that wasn't quite big enough. Top with mozzarella cheese and bake at *350 for around 30 minutes.

Note to Debi ~ this sauce would be great meatless too!

Stori ~ death by bean

2010-01-12T11:21:00.003-09:00

The temperature is a brisk -46 below zero today. Temps that low cause everything to slow down. The well in the barn froze up this morning causing my poor Dad to haul water from the house. I decided against our weekly Tuesday ice skating date for Colt and I, it's not worth the risk to travel this cold. Paige will have a "carry your coat" day at school. That simply means that the students are required to carry their cold weather gear everywhere they go in case of an evacuation emergency where they would have to go outside. At least they will have indoor recess, they usually mandate that at -20 below.

Weather this cold would usually call for a full blown, 5 dish, hot meal to warm and fill bellies. Unfortunately, I have a fridge full of leftovers. I have been accused this week of trying to kill my husband via beans. I lovingly refer to my family as carnivores. With the exceptions of my son who has a problem swallowing, and my general disgust and distaste, they are a meat eating group. While trying to both combat the constant required meat every meal and me battling my winter weight gain, I turn to beans as a protein source. Although I'm sure the entire family will pay dearly for it tonight, once again, we have beans to eat up. The menu tonight is leftovers. We have a huge supply of very tasty and very low calorie Taco Soup (loaded with 4!! kinds of beans ). There is pinto beans and rice on corn tortillas. I still have a bowl leftover of black bean chili. And finally, to the relief of my husband, chicken breast and sausage jambalaya (no beans in that one, but it is loaded with rice!). Hopefully after supper with 7 people, my fridge will once again have a little more space to add more leftovers! Tomorrow, pork roast with mashed potatoes and gravy, roasted carrots and parsnips, and green beans. With everything having been provided by our land, it's one of my mother's favorite meals.

Debi: (Just Enough) Squash & Black Bean Empanadas, with Neighbors

2010-01-12T09:39:00.006-09:00

Last week, I decided that we had been eating entirely too much purely beige food. After a cooking frenzy over the holidays, I had grown tired of standing in my kitchen chopping and sauteeing and frying and baking and plating, only to come back an hour later and spend almost as much time scrubbing and wiping and wrapping and sudsing. I stepped back for about a week and we ate a combination of leftovers, boxed macaroni & cheese, pancakes, and take-out. By last Thursday, I decided that enough was enough; we had to eat something good.

One of my favorite cookbooks is Veganomicon, a vegan cookbook with some recipes so complicated that I put it aside for months at a time, exhausted by the prospect of "patshken zikh mit," a Yiddish phrase that translates roughly to "messing around with tiny details forever until you go nuts." However, I had rested my cooking brain for long enough to decide to attempt a recipe like that, and so I settled on "Roasted Acorn Squash and Black Bean Empanadas."

Ever roasted a squash? That actually takes as much time as preparing some entire meals. You have to chop it open, which, even with a good knife, should be considered a dangerous athletic event. Then roasting it, in your oven, takes an hour. Then it has to cool long enough to scrape the seeds out, and then there's cutting it up into the right size pieces for your recipe. And for this recipe, that's just to get past the first line in the ingredients: "1 roasted squash."

Fortunately (and I use that term ironically), in my house, the day often begins just after 6am, when my youngest wakes up. I had that squash roasted before taking my older daughter, Ronni, to school at 8:45. Nope. I'm not kidding.

So, the next thing on the list was to make the empanada dough. I mixed up a batch while Sammi, the resident 4 year old, watched cartoons, then set it in the fridge to chill. After a morning of lounging, playing the occasional board game, coloring, and eating a beige lunch, Sammi and I commenced the rolling process. This may very well be Sammi's whole reason for being alive. She loves to roll dough. Last year, for Hannukah, we gave her a little child's size set of real baking implements, and I think she'd sleep with her rolling pin if we gave her the chance. On a chair dragged to the kitchen counter, she rolled and rolled, dribbled the surface with flour, rolled again. She sang a cheerful tune to herself.

It is such a peaceful experience to bake with her -- both of us industrious, the kitchen warm and good-smelling, our hands busy and purposeful. This may be why she and I did not find our groove together until she was old enough for a "project." It's like we need a common cause, outside ourselves, to take the focus away from our early struggles as mother & daughter. She was such a sick and unhappy baby, and unable to tell me why -- and then I was such a distraught, helpless mother, unable to fix the trouble. Now we can talk and work together to roll out that dough, smooth out those lumps, mix in the herbs and leavening to make our friendship rise, sweet and spicy, in just the right amount of time.

So. Dough rolled out, it now needed to rest in the fridge, chilling until closer to dinner. It occurred to me in mid-afternoon that my neighbor's birthday was the next day. A quick call to confirm with my husband that he approved, and she and her husband were invited to join us for dinner. I added a cake to my mental list of things to make after picking up Ronni from school at 3:35.

We bundled up and dragged ourselves out into the snowy day to get Ronni, then dragged ourselves back. Ronni and Sammi sat at a small table in the kitchen, snacking and working on homework and coloring, while I began the process of making the empanada filling. There was that squash again -- and then I added black beans, oil, seasoning, lemon, maple syrup...almost done...time to roll out the dough again.

Sammi, in all her glory, rolled thin the squares I cut from our dough, spooning the filling into the middle of each while Ronni grumbled over another set of math problems. Oh my. That sure didn't look like much food. What to add?

I keep my laptop on the kitchen counter, so I quickly looked through my fridge and freezer for a complementary vegetable to serve with the empanadas. Finding corn, I quickly located a good recipe on Vegweb.com: Spiced corn. It was easy to make, and easily doubled. Done.

What was I forgetting? I have an hour before dinner, the empanadas are ready to go into the oven. What else?

Oh.

Cake.

Not enough time to make and frost a birthday cake. Not enough time to make and frost a birthday cookie either. Dessert in our house can't have any chocolate -- Sammi has GERD, so the acidic foods stop appearing after mid-afternoon -- so I quickly located a recipe for white chocolate and dried cranberry dessert bars (with some substitutions -- I used margarine and vanilla almond bark), and goaded Ronni into finishing her homework quickly enough to help me mix the ingredients. Flash - into the oven just as the empanadas came out, and as our neighbors arrived, and just minutes after the phone call from my husband that he wouldn't be coming home from work in time for dinner, after all.

Ronni, Sammi, and I sat around the table with our neighbors -- a dear married couple who we've adopted as our extra brother- and sister-in-law, though they are no relation -- and enjoyed the fruits of a day's labor. As the oven beeped to tell us the dessert was ready, C (the husband half of the couple) came into the kitchen to help me McGyver our 5 and 6 birthday candles into a 2 and 9 for B's 29th birthday. My flour-spattered, pink-cheeked daughters sang enthusiastically, and their daddy arrived in time to eat the last 3 empanadas.

So, there's the ambitious dinner we tried last week. The verdict? Too much "patshken zikh mit," for a recipe with no leftovers. However, there was just enough love and fun for a winter's day in the city.

Back inside!

2010-01-12T09:32:00.003-09:00

Dare we slink back onto our blog and try to pretend it hasn't been six months since we wrote?

We are both sorry. We want to try again. We got distracted by being outside, by our hobbies and our families and the things that brought us together as friends in the first place: the beauty we both find in the every-day, our attempts to make the mundane meaningful, and our occasional struggles to find inspiration in what looks quiet and unassuming. Does anyone want to read about what they already know and do every day?

The answer to that, we both realize, is yes. Otherwise dooce.com and Erma Bombeck and Mothering Magazine and the Roseanne show would never have made it. So, here's our plan:

Twice a week, each of us will attempt to write a post about the most mundane of all motherly pursuits, the one that is the ubiquitous task of housewifery all over the world: dinner. We'll tell you what we're making, and why, and how it went, and what our home was like while we were making it. Sometimes it will be a recipe and a nice dinner. In my case, sometimes it will be what I call "subsistence food" on the way to or from some sort of activity. Either way, it will give you a taste (pun intended!) of life at home, here in the city or there in the country.

Wish us luck.

Stori ~ just checking in....

2009-07-21T18:42:00.006-08:00

So once again, the frantic Alaskan summer has over ran my blogging. I figure I would do a little multi-tasking and jot down some updates while I eat a quick (read pathetic and easy) supper.

My mare Heidi is coming along quite nicely this summer. Although not completely dog broke, she still gives the occasional buck, she is catching on to her lessons beautifully. At the beginning of the year, I had grandiose plans of shooting off of her in competition by now, reality took over and I'm able to be happy with what we have so far. This past weekend, my son Colt rode her in his first gymkhana. He rode in the lead line class of course, but that was also perfect for her. She's at her best when she has me on the ground leading her way. She did have a little episode of excitement in the second game of clover leaf barrels. She gave a small buck which did end up causing Colt to fall off. It was her first competition and his first buck off. Although it scared him a little bit, he was a little cowboy and climbed right back on (after a juice box of course). This picture caught her buck in action.

A couple weeks ago we had the opportunity to visit an old -and still running- gold mine up in Livengood Alaska. We have a friend who used to mine up there with her then husband who has since passed away. There was

very old buildings that were falling down that she allowed us to dig around in. One of the buildings was an old blacksmith shop that had collapsed and filled with treasures for Marc. It was a really neat trip up there. My dad also came along with Marc and I as well as the kids. Such stories surround places like that.

Twice a week we have been going to mounted shooting practice. It's a great experience for Heidi and my oldest daughter Paige has started riding and competing again. Since she is just 11, she rides in the wrangler division which does not allow her to use guns. She runs the course on her horse for time and pattern accuracy only. A friend of ours has offered Paige the use of their retired shooting horse, Baron. Baron and Paige are a great match. He's 25 years old and such an old hand at most all things. Apart from being afraid of cows (only in Alaska would a horse have the chance of being afraid of the scary unknown cow!) he is an amazing babysitter. He's been helping Paige gain time in the saddle and her confidence back. I have rode a friend's horse, Ace, in the competitions that last couple times and am having a blast at it! The only horse I had the chance to ever shoot off of was my appy Jake, and he fought me the whole way. It sure is a lot funner to shoot off a horse that isn't trying to kill you along the way. I have been riding Heidi at the practices.

We have had an absolute beautiful summer so far. Very dry and extremely hot! Last summer we were plagued by heavy rains all summer and a couple years prior, heavy smoke from large wild fires. Although Alaska has several big fires going on now, we have only had a couple days of smoke bad enough to keep us inside. With temperatures in the mid to upper 80's, the heat has been pretty extreme for us. I don't know if I could handle the real heat in the lower 48 anymore.

Debi: Local Produce

2009-07-06T13:51:00.007-08:00

Last summer, our family (well, ok, since I do all the grocery shopping, it was mostly me) decided to limit our produce purchases to local produce during the natural growing season in the midwest. I start this adventure for us in June, when we start receiving weekly boxes of produce from our CSA, Angelic Organics, and I end it after we've used up most of the produce from the last box, usually sometime in November. It's a short chunk of the year, relatively speaking, and we don't have the setup Stori does to preserve food during the winter, but I feel good about doing at least what we do.

Our commitment is very simple: if we can get local produce, we don't buy produce from, say, California. That means summer is a time without bananas and mangoes, and that asparagus, which grows in the spring, doesn't grace our grill in August. Our sources are abundant: the CSA box arrives on Wednesday, with vegetables only, usually enough to last the week and some items into the next; there is a small farmers' market on Wednesday evenings, two blocks from our house, where we buy fruit; and there is a HUGE farmers' market on Saturday mornings in downtown Evanston, another place to buy fruit and things like honey, preserves, fresh bread, flowers, etc. Most of the time, we don't need to buy any produce in between.

Until, of course, the berry monsters invade the house and eat up all the berries in one day.

My daughters are fruit FREAKS. They can eat more fruit than anything else, will absolutely gorge themselves on it. I've seen them polish off half a canteloup in one sitting. Berries are no exception, but I was sure that four pints would get us through the week. No such luck. On Wednesday, we bought a pint of blueberries and a pint of cherries. The blueberries were gone by mid-morning on Thursday. On Saturday, we bought a pint of blueberries and a pint of raspberries. The raspberries were gone by nightfall and the blueberries were gone by mid-day on Sunday. We currently have six cherries in a sad bowl in the fridge. Today's harvest from our one raspberry bush and four little strawberry plants can be seen in the picture to the right.

No farmers' markets until Wednesday.

In dismay, I ran into the local Dominicks grocery store (a Safeway chain here in the Chicago area), hoping they might have berries from Michigan (which is where our local farmers' markets get their berries anyway -- it's only a couple of hours away). I was thrilled to see a huge sign that said "LOCALLY GROWN!" In fact, that sign was on half a dozen large displays of produce. However, when I grabbed for the beautiful carton of strawberries, I recognized the Driscoll's Farm label. Driscoll's is a California company.

I urgently reached for another product under the "LOCALLY GROWN!!!" signage. Blueberries -- also grown in California. Same with watermelon, raspberries, blackberries, and cherries. I found a store employee and asked him about it, and he pointed to a sign with a map of the country, explaining to me that the "LOCALLY GEOWN!!!" signs were only meant to alert customers to the fact that the produce department did sell some items that were locally grown. It was not meant to indicate that the items underneath the sign were locally grown. This week, according to the map, the locally grown products were the blueberries and the scallions.

Except, of course, I noticed that the blueberries were from California. I pointed this out to the employee, and he offered to get his manager. I agreed. The manager came out and explained to me that the corporate headquarters of Safeway requires him to put the "LOCALLY GROWN!!!" signs up, and that the real test of whether something is actually locally grown is to look for the white and green signs above the produce that say, in small letters, "local." He pointed this out on the sign above the scallions. I looked, and it did indeed say "local," except right below it, it also said, "a product of Mexico."

I said, "Define local, please."

The manager stammered, apologized, said it was mislabeled, and that he agreed that the signs were perhaps misleading. He suggested I fill out a comment card that could be sent to corporate HQ in California.

I thought I'd do him one better. Does anyone else out there shop at Safeway stores that label their produce this way? Does anyone else find this demeaning, misleading, annoying, and just plain wrong? I understand that, in economies of scale, produce currently has to be shipped around the country. I just don't want to shop that way when I have an alternative, and being misled by the store about this makes me wonder if I am being misled about other things. Is the "ORGANIC" produce really organic? Is the "LOWFAT" muffin really lowfat? Is the "LETTUCE" really lettuce?

Please visit your local Safeway store and check your produce (unless you live in California, in which case everything is probably local -- though if you see Michigan blueberries, don't tell me; I might scream). If it says "LOCAL" but it isn't -- talk to the manager. Ask about it. Let it become an issue. Let other people overhear you. Hey, Safeway, don't sell local produce; that's your right -- but don't lie about it to your customers. That's your wrong.

Stori ~ baby ducks and tear jerking reunions

2009-07-01T17:48:00.006-08:00

I cried over a duck family on Sunday. If you ask my husband if I'm generally a bawl baby, he would tell you I (usually but there are exceptions) only cry over two things. 1. If I'm really really mad. 2. stupid sappy movies. I found an exception this weekend.

On Saturday evening my sister in law brought us over a baby wild duck in a bucket. The duckling was maybe a couple days old and we're pretty sure her cat snatched it either off the slough bank, or on while the duck family was grazing on grass. Heather wasn't sure what to do with the duck and she knew we had several duck families in our neck of the slough as well as a chick box. We have 6 baby turkeys and 1 baby chick in a heated chick box in the barn. With a chick feeder and waterer and a warm light bulb, it's baby bird heaven. Hoping, but with no luck, that the momma duck was in the slough, we decided to just put the duckling in the chick box. We could keep it there till we found an adopted duck family or just raise it to adult hood and figure out what after then.

That weekend just happened to be the same day as our big hog roast/bbq we were holding on Sunday. Since we were roasting a whole hog in a rotisserie roaster Marc made, we were both up and busy at 3 a.m. since it takes a long time to cook an entire pig. Well there I was getting ready checking on the progress of the pork, when I look over and see not one, but two duck mommas and babies! One group was a mallard momma, but the other lady was a Wigeon. Wigeons are tiny little birds that sound like barking dogs when they quack. Wigeon momma's babies looked just like our little sleep over guest in the barn. Not really sure what to do, I asked my Dad his opinion on the matter. I was afraid it would be the wrong mother and after I tossed the baby in the water, she would reject him and the baby would ultimately die. Dad told me he thought it would be fine and go ahead.

Off I go running across the yard with a newborn wild duck tucked firmly in my underarm to keep him warm, hoping to catch up with the mother but not to scare her off. I go about 80 feet up stream from her and quietly plop the baby into the water hoping for the best, but expecting the worst. That momma had seen me and had her little brood heading away from me at top baby duck speed. As soon as baby hit the water, he started peeping his little head off. At the first peep, momma duck hit her webbed brakes and spun around. I could almost see the little disbelief on her beaked face. That baby started peeping and swimming towards her and ol momma duck started hauling water towards that baby as fast as she could, gwaaking the whole time. It was a scene from a classic movie. I could almost hear them saying words as they swam to each other. Each baby peep was "Momma!" and each momma gwaak was "Baby!" It was the right mother after all. Once they reached eachother they rushed up and touched beaks, still peeping and gwaaking to one another. The mother frantically checking her baby and all his little body inventory. Baby excitingly telling his tale of an over night sleep over with some strange little yellow turkeys in a warm cave. About this time, all the little brothers and sisters caught up with their mother in this reunion. All in a little group, they surround Lost Baby and all start their own peeping questions. Softly touching beaks and bumping fuzzy chests together in greeting. After a little while, momma gwaaked a calm order and all babies lined up in a row. Momma in the lead and babies following along, off the newly reunited happy family go down the slough. Back on schedule for the day with the eating of bugs and the learning of little duck lessons. It was perfect.

After everything calmed down, I was able to run to the house and get my camera to snap some pics of the happy Wigeon family getting on with their lives after such a horrific event.

Debi: Big City Blessings

2009-06-24T10:33:00.004-08:00

Along with the many other things I appreciate about living near a big city like Chicago (the city border is five blocks from my house), I have come to be deeply, deeply grateful for the availability of unparalleled medical care. If you have insurance (and of course, this is a whole other political discussion that makes my blood boil, but we're not writing a political blog here...), you can get excellent care in any number of hospitals. If you are a child, Children's Memorial Hospital, here in Chicago, is one of the best in the country.

We discovered just how specialized the care at that hospital is when our younger daughter was diagnosed at a year old with a serious congenital heart defect. It turned out, after we got the diagnosis and began furiously searching for information, that the two doctors who have done the most research on the condition -- and who perform most of the corrective surgeries for it nationwide -- are here, at Children's Memorial. They did the surgery for our Sammi, and while I have nothing to compare it to, I found the care at the hospital to be just wonderful.

Now, our older daughter, Ronni, has been diagnosed with another congenital defect, this time of the bladder and ureters. She'll require surgery to correct it, and so we had no hesitation in choosing the pediatric urology faculty at the same hospital to guide us through the process. Earlier this week, she had to undergo a scan that we knew would take a long time, involve a lot of waiting and remaining very still, and might, in other circumstances, be quite frightening. The people at Children's Memorial, however, know exactly how to handle this -- and I had some good ideas, too.

That picture above is of Ronni undergoing a DMSA scan. Sitting next to her, holding her hand, is her best friend. That best friend, along with her mom who is one of my best friends, came with us and was allowed to stay in the room during the procedure. The radiology techs have rigged a DVD player to their machinery so that children undergoing their scans can watch a movie while they lie still and wait. Since the scan takes 90 minutes or more, this is a lifesaver. Ronni's best friend was set up in some chairs with some pillows and allowed to lie there with Ronni, watching the movie, holding her hand, keeping her company, the entire time.

The kind of population density around here can be daunting to those who are used to living in the suburbs or, like Stori, in the country...but it is a great comfort to me to know that there is unlimited personal opportunity surrounding me at all times. Meeting friends as dear and as kind as the ones who came with us to the hospital this week, having a hospital this excellent nearby, having the infrastructure to support our easy movement through our days here -- all these things make me feel safe, loved, supported, and cared for in an environment that probably looks like none of those things from the outside. Isn't it glorious how we look at the lives we've built for ourselves? I feel lucky, every day, to live here.

(And, by the way, the test went well. There is no damage to her kidneys, and so, while she'll still need bladder surgery, it is likely to be the last step in our journey. Thank goodness!)

Stori - a day in the life of

2009-06-17T22:43:00.002-08:00

My two oldest kids are not sleeping at home tonight. Well, to be honest, they are not sleeping inside the home tonight. They have (with the help of their dad) pitched a tent and are camping out in the yard. I have a couple mixed feelings about this whole scenario. For the most part, I'm very happy they are doing this. What fun! A little bit of independence and a whole lot of freedom. Although I can see the tent from my living room window, to them, it must feel out in the wild. Paige just turned 11 last week and Colt is not quite 4 years old. They have their footy pajamas and a couple of sleeping bags, as far as they are concerned they are good to go. I had the tent set up in the play yard, which is fenced. Although it is only sheep fencing, I think it is enough to discourage any wandering moose from tripping in the guide lines of the tent. My major concern comes from some of our more un friendly Alaskan neighbors. We have had a pretty big issue of wolves in our area this spring. Although we have seen several sets of prints that came right through our yard/driveway, we think there is too much activity to allow them to come too close to the house. Wolves do not appreciate this much humanity for the most, but have been known to get a little too close for comfort in the past. Last winter a pack realized that pet dogs on chains make very handy ready to eat meals right inside the North Pole city limits. Several people lost their pets to this pack. Why go hunting when there is prey right there unable to escape? Would our little fence around a play yard stop a pack of wolves? No, not if they really wanted in, but it may be just enough to make them nervous about the situation and decide to move on. The second nasty neighbor is bear. We have no shortage of black bear or grizzly in our area. We have never seen one in our yard, but that doesn't count for much. I'm sure they would be more interested in the pen of trapped young pigs we have, or even last year's calf before tearing down a wimpy fence to go poking around in a tent. But that doesn't guarantee that they wouldn't. Needless to say, we will be sleeping with our bedroom window open tonight. I'm sure my two giggled out, mosquito bitten, grown up feeling kids will be getting a lot more sleep than I will tonight.

As I am sitting here typing this, my husband is watching " Ice Road Truckers" on Discovery and commentating the entire time about the haul road they are filming on. This season is all about the road between Fairbanks and the north slope. My husband has traveled this road hundreds of times while running his old trap line. As the show portrays a certain section of road, Marc interjects with " That's right where I got that black bear hanging up stairs" or "That hill is pretty nasty." or my favorite, "Why do they keep saying ice road? There's no damn ice on that road, it's all gravel and pavement." Starting to feel the Discovery Channel is becoming a bit Alaskan Voyeuristic with all the Alaska shows here lately. Geez, until they told us how tough we were for "surviving" here, we just thought we were living our day to day life. Either we are really tough ( read stupid) or the rest of the world is a bunch of weenies. Who will ever really know the truth?

We had to go into town (Fairbanks) today for some supplies. I needed to look for a particular piece of tack for my horse Rusty, we had to go to the commissary for groceries, and of course our regular stop of Home Depot. On the way to town, we seen a cow moose on the side of the road here on the farm road, and on the highway all traffic was stopped to let a moose momma and her brand spanking new baby cross the road heading towards water. I have yet to see a new calf quite that young yet in the time I have lived here. It was so tiny, all legs and joints. Maybe born yesterday, maybe even today. Bouncing along after it's momma, a little bitty red piece of miracle. If only they stayed that cute and harmless! All in all, we seen a total of 6 moose today on our trip to and from town. We haven't seen a single one in the last 2 weeks due to calving season. The cows had all tucked them selves away in their own little chosen nurseries to have their babies. It's funny how nature sets even moose on a timeline. Within a very small 1 to 2 week period, all the baby moose will be born in the entire state. With so many babies, there is no way that the bear and wolves can possibly kill them all. Pretty neat how that all works itself out.

Debi: Herbal Malady

2009-06-16T05:43:00.007-08:00

I have a little bit of a mint problem.

This house, like many houses in my part of town, has a small, fenced in back yard that includes a garden. The former owners were impeccable gardeners and clearly did a lot of planning so that perennials continued to flower throughout the growing season. They also must have really, REALLY liked mint, and all things mint-like, and all of mint's cousins and uncles and step-brothers. All the pictures above are mint-family-members growing in my garden. There are two more varieties not pictured above, including my favorite, a spearmint which actually grows in the alley outside my yard and, because of a crack under the fence, along the perimeter of my backyard patio.

Two of the mint family members above are actually oregano, which -- who knew? -- is actually a type of mint. One of the oregano brothers here is delicious and makes for great pizza sauce and soup, and the other is bitter and probably should be dug up and treated like a weed. One of the mint varieties above is also a little bitter, but, paired with that purple feathery-looking mint dame in the last picture, makes a wonderful tea. That purple gal is called Anise Hyssop (also a mint! will they never stop?!), a licorice mint that makes that whole area of the garden smell like a candy store.

When I was a kid growing up in the suburbs of Milwaukee, my mother had an absolutely spectacular garden that she loved dearly, protected from area deer by a tall chicken-wire fence. I remember the wonder of eating sugar snap peas right off the vine, warm from the sun. I remember wrinkling my nose in disgust at the spinach she insisted was wonderful, too. That said, I hated the work of that garden and, when I bought my first home, never planned to do more than plant a pot of tomatoes, maybe. Now that I'm here, and there is mint as far as the eye can see, I can't bear to throw it out. I take care of it, harvest it, dry it, share it with friends, leave bouquets of it on front porches, beg friends to dig up plants for their own gardens. I am my mints' pimp!

Oh, yeah, and did I mention? I've added more to the herbal insanity:

Stori - beginnings and happy endings

2009-06-09T13:36:00.004-08:00

Today, June 9th, was my daughter Paige's due date to be born. Although she did not actually get here till the 12th of June, I was in moderate labor starting from the 9th. I would suspect that most mothers are like me in the respect of traveling down memory lane with their children's' birth date. Before I had kids, I always thought birthdays were for the person having them. Boy was I wrong! Now I realize my kids' birthdays are special days where I get to relive every minute of that special miracle. A mother can look at the clock on the day (or night before) of a baby's birthday and think to herself, "It was now that I felt the first pain" or "Right now I knew today was the day" "Here's when my water broke" "This is when they laid my own true love on my chest to meet for the first time". All these small moments may seem irrelevant to others, but are so incredibly dear to me. With Colt and Sunni Sue, I get about a 24 hour period of this. Paigee gives me over 4 days of day dreaming. I had one day of happy thoughts with Colt, till he actually got here and threw me into 9 days of hell reliving our nightmare. But Paigee's arrival was for the most part a warm and fuzzy one. The 9th is when I called my parents and told them to get down to Texas NOW!! The 9th was the day the Doc sent me home to pack my things because it was only going to be hours before I was back to deliver her. Although all 3 of my babies were c-section deliveries, I do not feel like I missed out on the whole "real" labor part. I would have cherished having them natural, but nature had other plans for me. So today marks the start of my tender moments with Paigee week. She gets annoyed with me, but has no other choice then to just deal with my emotional over load.

I had a friend mention to me the other day that most of my animal stories on the blog are sad. She was happy to see it all turned out well with Moose coming home. I had to think about this for a minute. I guess the tragedies are just more memorable to me than the sunshiny moments. I know lots of folks that just have hit after hit of bad luck with animals. Since we very rarely experience hard knocks with our furry friends, it may just impact me more than others. So I thought I just might mention a couple success stories on this here old fat farm for my friend. Not all is dark and sad in my world, very little is in fact. So here we go......

~Rusty~

This is the second time we have owned this particular horse. The first time was about three years ago. A man held a farm and livestock auction here locally. It has only happened twice and we were pretty deeply involved both times. We bought Rusty from a guy who owns a big trucking company here in town. He had traveled to Missouri and cleaned out the stock on a Quarter Horse ranch that the owner had passed away. Since the man's death, the ranch nor the animals were taken care of. My dad has a very good eye with animals with potential that other people don't always see. We bought Rusty that day with the horse being almost 300 lbs underweight, his feet were overgrown and deformed, and he was completely covered in mange (body lice). I got him home, fed him, bathed him, wormed and deloused him ( this taking several treatments and a lot of elbow grease and used motor oil!) Within a couple months, he was absolutely beautiful. A perfect example of what an athlete should look like. Although his medical issues were fixed, he still had a lot of personality...um....problems. He bit. He kicked. He would not allow you to touch his head. We had Rusty for a full year and that following May, due to my dad's knee problems, we sold him at the next year's auction. He was broke, he was well mannered, he was physically perfect. We sold him for over 3 times what we bought him for. Rusty and I hated each other.

2 years pass. Circumstances lend me looking for another horse to buy. We ran into the guy that bought him from us (who incidentally, we man we bought him from originally) and asked after Rusty. They man told us he had too many horses that weren't getting rode and he would sell him back to us at way below the cost we sold him for. Why not right? Rusty gets delivered back to us, 200 pounds again underweight. Completely dehydrated, feet are once again trashed. He does nothing but eat and drink for the first 2 weeks. If I would try to approach him while he was eating, he would strike out at me with teeth or hooves, a common behavior with horses that don't get enough food. With time and patience and food, and more time and still more patience, and almost 2 months later, Rusty has come into his own. He has come to trust me as a leader and enjoy me as a friend. When I could not catch him at first, he now seeks my attention and affection. He's kind and funny. My family jokes around about him being my big red dog. He follows me around the barn yard like a faithful pet. We do not tie him up when picketing the horses in the pasture, he would not dare leave Heidi who he is so fully bonded to, he can't stand being separated from her. He knickers me at when he sees me approach. He rubs his head on me when we are close enough to touch. He now follows verbal commands as well as Heidi and is really coming along with his riding training. He has gained most all his weight back and shines like a copper penny. He is more comfortable in his little shed than I have ever seen a horse attached to a place. He is home now. Even if he does not work out for the best as far as a saddle horse goes, I don't believe I could sell him for the simple fact that he is happy here. I know how to take care of him in a way he desperately needs and the poor guy needs a break. He is safe here. It's the least I can do for a fellow creature.

~Yellow hen~

The last time we travelled down to Dry Creek was to pick up Sister, my filly that died. While we were down there that day, we also got a new rooster for our flock since our old guy had finally lived out his life. While sacking up the rooster, the chicken guy brings out a hen. Asks if we wanted her for a butcher chicken since she was probably not going to live anyway. She had frostbitten her leg badly enough for the tissue to die and for everything from the knee down to fall off. Chickens are ruthless things. If they catch any sign of weakness in another chicken, they will attack and kill it, and sad to say, eat it if allowed. If a hen gets pecked and bleeds even the tiniest bit, the other hens will kill it if it's not removed and all signs of blood taken care of. So we take her not expecting her live out the night in the hen house. We were pleasantly surprised to find her alive the next morning, and the next, and the next! She may have been crippled but our hen house is set up a bit differently from her previous home in the way that she had places to hide from the rest of the hens here. Not only did this little yellow hen survive, but she thrives! She is able to get around just as good on her gimp foot as all the other chickens. She can hop, one legged, up on the roosts at night and is able to get all the way up into the nest boxes to lay her daily egg. These nest boxes are about 3 foot off the ground! She's a nice little hen, very reliable with her laying, and never aggressive. She'll have a home with us for the rest of her days as comfortable as we can make her.

Here at The Fat Farm, we open our arms to all those that aren't deemed acceptable to others. We accept the skinny, the crippled, the short, and the funny looking. Don't judge us, and we won't judge back.

Debi: Other Things I Shouldn't Take for Granted

2009-06-06T04:35:00.005-08:00

Well, I'll be! Stori is writing again! Hooray!

It's been a few years now that we've been friends, and I've come to recognize that, come about May, she disappears into the outdoors for the few glorious months of nice weather in her neck of the woods. The first summer of our friendship, I thought she'd just gotten tired of me, but then when the weather turned, I suddenly started getting instant messages from her again. Now, I'm used to the pattern but wasn't sure how it would bode for our blog. I've been meaning to write to her for the last couple of weeks to ask if we ought to just put a "WENT FISHING" sign up for the summer. I guess she's able to squeeze in a post here and there after all! Glad to see you back, sis!

Things around here have been a bit low for me, I'll admit. That freelance work that had started dropping off a couple of months ago still hasn't picked up, and I've had to start really hustling. While we can pay the bills comfortably on my husband's salary, little luxuries definitely disappear if I'm not bringing in any money. I'm so spoiled; I miss my mochas from the coffeeshop! I think it's less about the mocha itself and more about getting out, seeing people and chatting and feeling like I have some purpose each day. I love our house, but staying in it all day drives me, as my now-seven-year-old-daughter would put it, "cuckoo banana head."

I feel like I've been sitting around waiting for something to happen. Last week I decided to redesign my freelance website, order some new business cards, and start "networking." That means going to meetings of local businesspeople and figuring out how this town fits itself together, like a puzzle, with everyone knowing everyone else and connecting pieces that need each other to be complete. The meeting I attended yesterday included an Equal Opportunity Employment consultant, an accountant, a business coach, the marketing manager for a local coffee roaster, and me. The discussion was interesting -- more interesting than I had expected -- and made me more hopeful that I could use my own business to make a difference for other people, someday. It's hard to explain...but if I am patient, and cultivate more relationships, I think there is hope.

It occurred to me, at one point, that we were all trying to figure out a way to share the pool of money in Evanston -- I know someone who needs an accountant, and the accountant has a client whose brother-in-law is starting a business and could use a coach, and the coach has a friend who needs help with a database, etc. I had this thought in the middle of the meeting that this was a little bit ridiculous; if we all just grew our own food and shared our basic life-sustaining knowledge, we would not need to swap money for first-world-skills all the time. And then I giggled, called myself a pinko, and passed out some more business cards.

thankful

2009-06-05T22:20:00.004-08:00

I had a couple of eye opening moments today that made me really thankful for my life. These weren't huge life changing things, just small instances that made me reflect on what I'm truly thankful for. In no particular order of importance......and only a very short few in a long list.

~I'm thankful my little dog, Moose, was not killed by wolves two weeks ago like we thought. Marc ran into a guy we know downtown today and they were discussing the wolf problem we have been having out in our area. The guy is trying to be a farmer out here. Marc mentioned how we even lost our little wiener dog to the pack. The man stopped and said, "Do you mean the little red dachshund that has been riding around in my son in law's truck for the last two weeks?" !!!! It was great! Moose had a really bad reaction to some fox tail seeds in his eyes, ended up in the wrong place, and the kid thought he was a lost dog. I guess he put up fliers around town, which we don't go to very often, and an ad in the paper, which we don't get. So Moose came home tonight after living 2 weeks as "Oscar", had surgery on his eyes and head, but was glad to come home to his family.

~I'm thankful for my beautiful home that my husband built with his own hands for us. I take for granted sometimes exactly how amazing our cabin really is. I get to live an experience every day that lots of folks only dream of. Alaska has toughened me in a way I could never imagine. Today I had the chance to view another way of life so different from my own. After the visit, I came home to wrap my home around me like an old soft sweater.

~I'm thankful for my friends- old and new. In the last couple years I am truly lucky to have met some wonderful, beautiful, courageous, crazy women. My strong German friend, Sylvia, who I've come to realize is one of the most down to earth women I have ever known. Caroline, one of the most brilliant people I've ever met, but I suspect dumbs herself down for others' sake. Last, but NEVER least, my Debi. She has opened my eyes to another world that I may never see in person, who has forced me to see the world in a slightly skewed way different from my norm. Because of her, I weigh my preconceived prejudices before I dare speak them. Just because I enjoy my world small, does not mean my children will and it is my responsibility to send them out in the world with an un muddied mind.
I have also had the huge pleasure of getting to fall in love all over again with some friends from another life. Flee, her strength helped carry me through the ugliest time of my life and is still there, a sturdy little rock. Cody Dawn. I never imagined I could ever enjoy her as a person this much. We were kids together, young and stupid. Making snap decisions that we never understood could affect others. Now we have grown up, having kids of our own. I'm glad to have these women back in my life, and will try to work very hard to keep them there this time.
And my constants. My mom. More than a mother, she is my closest confidant. I find I accidentally reveal too much information sometimes. She is the strongest woman I will ever know. Jeanie, such a funny, kind, brave woman who has been kicked in the teeth by life more than any person ever deserves, yet does not allow her personal tragedies to define her. I hope one day, she discovers how highly others think of her.

~I'm thankful for my husband. I would be completely lost without him. Such an amazing, kind, gentle man. So many big ideas in one person. I would love to walk the hallways of his mind opening doors just to see all the things he thinks. My love.

~I'm thankful for my babies. They made me old, but keep my young. Such different personalities in 3 little people, yet they all know their own mind. I just hope I can do them justice as a mother.

~I'm thankful I have been deemed worthy of trust and friendship from a broken and beaten horse that just needed a little luck in life to find some peace. On the same note, every day I am blessed to have the chance to know my mare Heidi. Although I am charge of her training, it is she that has taught me.

~I'm thankful for the battles I have fought and won in my life. Each leaving their own scar, but also making me stronger and turning me into the person I am today. I am also thankful for the battles I have fought and lost. Each one a learning experience. And If I wasn't able to learn from them, they allow me to appreciate the life I get to live now.

~ I'm thankful for the new family I acquired when I married Marc. Although I only got to meet them one time, they each have left a impact on my life.

What are you thankful for?

where does it all go?

2009-05-29T09:38:00.002-08:00

It's been over a month since I posted last here. All winter long, I have excess time to fill. My house is clean, laundry is caught up, full elaborate meals are cooked. I go to the gym, I create new recipes, I chat on the computer with my long distance friends. It all gets turned upside down once summer shows it's sunshiny face. My family can barely finish breakfast before we are running outside to enjoy the world!

I have immersed myself into bird watching field guides. Marc cleared several trees from the banks of the slough this last winter, opening up the view. All the years I have lived on this property, I had no idea what kind of vast bird activity we really do have on the slough! Come to found out, we have ducks living in my front yard I have never seen before. I can sit for hours on my front porch with my bird books watching the ducks.

I sold my big Appy horse Jake this spring. He went to a wonderful little new horse family with a horse crazy mom, an adventurous dad, and two teenage boys. I knew he was going to the right home when she asked if it was possible to brush him TOO much. From what I hear, he's very fat and happy and living the high life. Since Jake found a new job, I ended up with a new old project horse, Rusty. We owned Rusty a couple years ago and used him as a my dad's trail horse. He was being horribly neglected at the last place, so back he came to the fat farm. 200 pounds underweight, kicked, cut, dehydrated, and ignored, after only 3 weeks he's looking like a new horse. Ol' Rusty and I have a tentative relationship. He doesn't like me, and I prefer my Heidi. We have some issues to work through, but I have high hopes for this little horse.

We lost our little weenie dog, Moose, to wolves last week. Out of the 3 dachshunds, he was far and above my favorite. He was my little chore buddy. He was always out and about, sniffing around or hunting. The other two dogs spend their days sleeping and finding different places to sleep. Moose just wandered a little too far from the yard one night. We have had a bit of a wolf problem in the neighborhood recently and I guess his adventurous ways finally caught up with him. He will be missed.

Debi: Puddle Wonderful

2009-04-21T06:16:00.003-08:00

It was supposed to snow here today, but it didn't. We're on our second day of rain, and it's ok...because my hyacinths are blooming.

Stori and I discovered a while back that we both love the poetry of e.e. cummings, and so I present my dramatic interpretation of e.e. cummings' serenade to April showers.

Stori: like the old saying goes...

2009-04-18T10:26:00.003-08:00

The only constant in life is change. This is the truest sentence that has have been spoken.
My little family had ourselves a pretty busy day and it's only 10 am.

The decision has been finalized that my oldest daughter, Paige, is going to be home schooled starting 6th grade. She will finish her 5th grade year in public school since there is only a month left in the year. We are none too pleased with the way society and kids' views on the world has come about. It's time to bring her back to the right path and hopefully get her pointed back in the right direction.

My youngest daughter, 18 month old Sunni Sue, sat on the potty for the first time this morning. Right after I put her in the bath, she decided she needed to start making business faces at me. Although nothing productive came from it, atop the big potty she went. This is the first step in the long walk of toilet training. My last one in diapers is on her way out of them. I have some mixed feelings about this one.

In the hog farrowing house, the black sow is having her babies right this minute. She is up to 9, and as a first year gilt, we doubt she'll do too many more than that. We have just the last white sow to go for babies this year. This litter is also pretty fun colored, quite a few little black pigs with white feet. I wonder how many my kids will try to name "Socks"?

In the pen next door to the farrowing house, 2 sows will be reaching the end of their lives this morning. My Dad and husband are over there setting up the killing pen as I type this. We will slaughter today, and butcher and process tomorrow. One half of a hog will stay ours, one half is going to a friend for a hog roast being held this summer, and a whole hog will be going to some friends of ours for their yearly supply. After the deed is done, we'll be going over to my brother's place to pick up the weaner pigs we have been holding over there till we had a pen free up. Tomorrow will largely be spent in the shop cutting and wrapping meat. Paige's school teacher requested the hearts to be dissected in class so we'll put storing them in rubbing alcohol till Monday. The hide, heads, and guts will be put into buckets to be saved for Marc's friend to use for bear baiting.

I just have to wonder what the rest of the day will bring us.

Stori: the world through his eyes

2009-04-16T06:53:00.003-08:00

My son Colt is a little over 3 1/2 years old. He's a big, strapping, strong kid, which is completely surprising considering his slow start in life. With a stubborn personality and a quick wit, he is NEVER boring to be around. The other day we were snuggling in my chair watching cartoons and visiting when I started really listening to what he was saying. His little deep thoughts and big ideas crack me up and make me proud everyday. I thought I would share a few of his philosophies.

Toddler Life Science:

Poodles vs. Puddles~ Poodles are big huge dogs that live in the city with their fancy city hair. Puddles are gross and fun and tadpoles live in them.

"What do tadpoles turn into?"

Tadpoles are little fish that live in puddles. They get bigger and turn into grasshoppers. When they are all growed up, they turn into frogs. That's why frogs are such big jumpers, because they learned how when they were grasshoppers.

~(When I was picking up a dead squirrel I had just shot) "Mom, why are squirrels so stupid?"

"Why do you think squirrels are stupid Colt?" "Well cuz when they are dead, they just lay there and let you pick them up!"

~(Overheard when feeding some carrots and apples to the horses by himself like a big boy) "You guys are really good eaters! Your gonna be really strong eating so many foods! You guys are a guy's best friend."

~(After me telling him to be careful feeding the horse and don't let himself get bit) "I won't Mom! I throw the apple on the ground cuz their teeth are bigger than their eyes and my hand is really small"

~(After riding his trike too far for the 1st time) "Mom, I need to take a break. My shoulders are too hungry to keep going."

Toddler Philosophies:

~(After being told no for something) "Mom, I'm gonna be the mom today and boss you around!"

"Are you gonna cook supper tonight too Colt?"

"No, I"m not tall nuff, you can do that and I'll just tell you your wrong."

~"Colt, keep your hands off the window."

"But Mom! My fingers want to look outside too!"

Stori: No lambs here!

2009-04-14T10:18:00.003-08:00

Spring does not creep into Alaska on padded cat feet. It's arrival is about as delicate as a fat man doing a cannon ball into a public pool. This is a land of extremes. There are few smooth transitions from one season into the next. We can have a week of -20 below temperatures turn into 40 above in a day, and only get warmer from there. The subtle pale pinks and blues of winter change first into the completely welcome browns of beautiful dirt and mud, then explode into green the day the trees leaf out. This short one to two weeks of Spring is called Breakup. Folks place bets on what day the ice will leave the rivers. You can wake up to bare trees in the morning, and that evening go to bed with the trees in full leaf, that day is called Green up. Snow slides off the roof with the sound of thunder. My little feeder fed birds have gone. The squirrels show up in force, breeding season in full swing. The livestock shed their winter coats in sheets. By the looks of my horse pen, a person would think I have a completely naked pony hidden somewhere.

Out of all these small signs pointing to better days, there are 2 that are my absolute favorite. I got one of this morning. Geese. Alaska is the summer nesting grounds of the Canada Goose. These smart birds only show up when snow is for sure on it's way out. They are our absolute guarantee that Winter is done with for a while. They are the first summer tourist to get here. They are quickly followed by Sand hill Cranes, which are amazing, beautiful birds, but not first in line. I caught site of a thieving squirrel running out of my front lawn this morning. While I was outside "disposing" of the little insulation snatcher, I heard them. Flying overhead was a small flock of geese, honking their arrival. It put me in such a good mood, it would be hard to spoil my day afterwards. The second spring time flag is pussy willows. Those soft furry buds of the willow. Willows are more than abundant. They are the favorite food for moose and snowshoe hares love the bark. They make the best hot dog roasting sticks for open fires, and are the 1st tree to show it's leaf buds. I have already seen a patch along the highway heading into Fairbanks, but none yet on my road. I'll have to take the little ones on an expedition this afternoon. See if we can't pick me a pussy willow bouquet for my kitchen table.

Haul out those sexy rubber boots ladies, Breakup is on the way!

Debi: Rebirth in the City

2009-04-14T07:52:00.012-08:00

Spring comes slowly everywhere, I think. Depending on how frustrated you've been with the weather -- and probably none this year more so than Stori! -- the baby steps that bring in spring weather can be excruciating. Here in Evanston, we've had several days over sixty degrees that were then followed with snow, or a week of sub-freezing weather. The slow striptease of green here is enough to fill my back foyer with mountains of clothes. A week's weather can require rain gear one day, light jackets another, then winter coats and mittens, and then back to the light jackets for another day. Never do we check the weather report more often than in March and April.

The nice thing about it is that our walk to school is now conducted at least partially with our heads down, searching for those first signs of flowers. That photo on top is of some fiesty tulips pushing their way through the dead grasses and leaves from last fall. I'm a fits-and-starts gardener, and while I was diligent about raking and pruning for some of the fall, eventually I got so far behind that I just decided to call the fruits of my laziness "compost." The tulips clearly didn't suffer. Our back yard is a beautiful garden left to me by the former owners of our house, who lovingly shaped it, only to leave it to someone who fought yardwork her whole childhood, only grudgingly raking or digging when absolutely ordered to do so.

Now the garden belongs to me, and I feel more inspired by it. I've managed to discover some wonderful herbs growing there -- peppermint, spearmint, anise hyssop, oregano, and chives -- and last summer added basil, thyme, dill, and two ill-fated rosemary plants. I've asked my family to dedicate a day on Mother's Day weekend to planting our annuals, which I mostly put in pots that hang around the fences and porch railings. For now, we're enjoying all the buds, including these that we lovingly admired this weekend as I raked what I ignored last fall:
Our neighbors have beautiful things happening too, but they come and go with the cold. These flowers were glorious on our walk to school one day, but closed up and huddled against the cold on our way home:

It's going to get spectacular around here any day now...I can feel it!

Stori: little girl lost

2009-04-07T06:43:00.010-08:00

When Marc and I were in the planning stages of building our cabin, we went to go look at a logging and milling operation at a place called Drycreek. It's a small faith based community about 40 miles south of Delta Junction which is about 70 miles south of us. Talk about self sufficient! It's a group of around 84 people that made the choice to live off the grid, they farm and log their land, raise livestock, gardens, hay, and horses. The use all draft horse teams for chores and are a wonderful group of people. While being faith based, they are NOT pushy about religion at all. In fact you wouldn't even know what the community was about unless you directly asked them. So we take our first trip down to meet with them so Marc could work up plans for house logs, I was barely pregnant with my son and Paige was around 6 years old. I got out of the truck that day and stepped into Stori heaven. All the animals and horses that I could handle. Paige and were walking down the alley way toward a stallion pen, and passing little pens full of new horsey mommas and their babies when I heard Paige giggling. I turned around to see this 5 month old foal just licking the grump right off of Paige's face. She was scraggly, and knobby, and had all this crazy unruly hair sticking out, but I was totally and completely head over heels in love. Marc knew at that point that he was about to spend some money he wasn't planning on. That little ugly filly ended up being my Heidi. One of the best friends I have ever had. We brought her home when she was two weeks shy of her 1st birthday, I was 6 months pregnant with Colt and had no business messing with an unruly yearling. But there we were. I have always believed you can't choose who you fall in love with and she proved it. That was 4 years ago. Heidi will be turning 5 on May 12th and it the epitome of the ugly duckling story. People will stop and stare as we walk by. She is quite possibly one of the most beautiful horses I have ever laid eyes on, and I would say that even if I didn't love her so.

About 2 years into Heidi's and my relationship, I knew I wanted another one just like her. I spoke to Tony, the horse guy at Drycreek and told him my idea. He was planning on breeding Heidi's mom, Sadie, again to Heidi's sire, Rocky. Before conception I laid my money on the table. I told him I didn't care what it was, girl or boy, ugly or dumb, that baby was MINE. Horses are pregnant anywhere from 9 to 11 months. I waited and waited, but no word from Tony. Finally one day we were in Delta Junction picking up grain when I couldn't stand the suspense anymore. I had Marc drive us the additional 40 miles to Drycreek so I could see for myself if Sadie had foaled. Down the maternity aisle I go just to run smack dab into the next love of my life. There she was at Sadie's side. A tiny Heidi replica. She looked just like Heidi did, same markings, same knobby knees, just a little lighter in color. She was a total brat. I tried to touch her and she gives me a little squeal and a kick. I love her. She had been born on June 2nd and was only 2 weeks old. That was June of 08'. I had another year to wait before I could bring her home. I thought about her, planned for her, showed anybody that would stand still the little picture of her I had snapped with my cell phone.

March comes this year and I call Tony again, is she ready yet?? He tells me she has been ready and weaned for several weeks. We were in the middle of a cold snap though and it would be unsafe to try to haul her, had to wait some more. Finally the weather breaks, it's in the 20's - 30's during the day. We make our plans to go down on April 4th. We get down there and I pick her out in the yearling pen immediately. I would know her anywhere. 10 months old, gangly, messy hair, crooked blaze across her face. I have referred to her as "Sister" for so long, it ends up being her name. We load her into the trailer and she is a little bit nervous. Has never been in a horse trailer before. We get going but have to stop for a second, she panics, starts wrestling around, slips and falls. We can't get her back up. She's just a baby, she's a little tiny bit sore, but totally scared and confused. Never fights us. Lays her head in my lap at one point for comfort. We decide to haul her laying down. Very unconventional, but our only choice. We get her home and have to drag her out of the trailer, she won't stand up. Have to end up using a come along to hoist her into a standing position. She can stand and walk! It must just hurt to get from the ground to standing. We walk her into the pen we have ready for her, under the canopy shed. She walks around, slips and falls down again. Can't get up on her own. We rig up a sling that will semi-suspend her from the ceiling of the shed. A front sling behind her front legs and a back one in front of her back legs. The sling doesn't hold her up, it's slack, but is there in case she falls. A horse after a certain size cannot lay down for too long or they end up suffocating themselves with their own body weight. Since she is a very big girl for her age, it would be too dangerous to just let her recuperate laying on the ground. We set her feed, water, and grain up in front of her. She's happy. She's eating, which with a horse, if they are eating, they are fine. She's a totally trusting friendly little fart. Never fights us, or struggles againest the ropes. Let's us do what we need to help her. This is about 7 in the evening. We figure she has just pulled a muscle somewhere and the Vet confirms this diagnosis later. Nobody dies of a pulled muscle. We go out at least every 2 hours and check on her. She whinnies at us when she sees us walk towards her, she whinnies again when we leave. She loves people. Hard to work around her because she forces her head into your arms and lays it there for you to cradle. A snugly little regular baby that just happens to be 500 pounds. The calmness in her is the draft part of her heritage. Her momma, Sadie was Quarter Horse/ Thoroughbred cross. Her daddy, Rocky was Clydesdale/Percheron cross which is all draft horse breed. They Clydesdale is the breed of horse that Budweiser beer uses to pull their wagons in the commercials. Drafts are very calm and kind. We check on her the last time at about 3 am, my Mom checks on her again at 5 am and finds her laying on the ground. The hooks holding her slings slipped and she's on the ground. Not fighting, but very cold. The temperature is only -5 below zero. Dad doesn't think she's going to make it, we cover her in layers of blankets and pillow her head on some rugs to try to bring her body temp up. I sit on the ground beside her and she scrunches over to lay her head in my lap. We stay that way for a couple hours, I stroke her face and talk to her, saying my goodbyes. Dad comes in and tells me to go relieve Marc with the kids so Marc could come help him winch her back. We gotta to see if she past the point of saving in case we have to put her out of her misery. Several hours later, Marc comes in to tell me she's fine! They have her back up on her feet in the sling, she's eating, drinking, pooping....all the things a horse needs to do. We can't believe it! I spend the day with her mostly, making sure she is comfortable, keeping her calm. If I'm not there, she starts shaking. I go in that evening and check with the Vet on his ideas. Yes, a pulled muscle he says. Let's get her on some steroidal anti-inflammatory and some pain meds. Get the swelling down and she'll be just fine. He sees no reason at all she won't pull through this in just a couple days with no lasting effects. Marc races into town to the Vet's office on the other side of Fairbanks, about 50 miles away. We get the meds into her. She seems stronger immediately. Finally starts showing some signs of fight in her. She's walks side to side, strains againest the slings, this is a great sign. She's not weak at all! My dad checks her at about 2 am, my Mom checks her again at around 5 am. I go out at 5:30 to give her her pain meds before Marc has to go to work and I have no one to watch the kids. I find her fighting, covered in frost from sweating. She had fallen asleep at some point and her feet went out from under her. She couldn't get herself to a standing position, her little hooves are turned under. She is stressed and scared and hurting. Has a bloody nose from smacking her face into the hay manger trying to stand up. She's shaking like a leaf. I holler for Marc to come help and luckily he was standing on the porch so he hears me. I go to her head and try to start winching her up higher to lift her up so she can get her feet under her. She's knocking me around trying to put her head in my arms. I grab her face and hug it to my chest to comfort her. She stops fighting the ropes, takes a deep breath and dies in my arms. She was gone by the time Marc gets there.

Horses are very delicate when it comes to stress and pain. They can die from non life threatening injuries because they give in to the stress. She had a pulled muscle and it killed her. I'm so sad, I can't stop crying. How did this happen? What could I have done differently? Such a waste of a beautiful life. So many could have beens gone. My hands are blistered and stiff from straining againest ropes holding her up, my muscles ache from the strain of maneuvering a 500 pound filly around, my feet are sore from the hundred trips back and forth to the barn, my heart is broke from losing this amazing creature. I grieve for this little lost girl in a way that I can't even understand.

Debi: Baby Steps

2009-04-06T14:30:00.004-08:00

I have a long, long, LONG way to go before I could even approach Stori's family's ability to be self-sustaining, but among the people around me, I'm definitely on the more hippy-dippy end of things. That photo over there is of my little crock-pot, which I didn't even know was little until I saw someone else's giant slow cooker and they told me theirs was standard size. This one holds about a gallon of liquid, which is just perfect for making vegetable broth.

And vegetable broth, if you didn't know this already, is just perfect for making a house smell amazing.

Backing up a few steps here, I've been a vegetarian for twenty years now. I was a teenager when I decided to stop eating meat, and while there are a whole ton of reasons why I think it's a good idea to stop eating meat, I am NOT an evangelical vegetarian. If you want to know all my reasons, please feel free to ask me when we are not at the table with you and your burger, or my husband and his chicken sandwich, or my in-laws and their ribs. We can talk for hours about it. In the end, it's a choice I defend as strongly as I defend someone's right to think I'm nuts while they eat bacon-wrapped bacon. Eat meat or don't eat meat, it's not my business.

That said, because we are a vegetarian family (David eats meat outside the house), we eat a lot of vegetables. Now don't go saying "duh" to me; lots of vegetarians live on bread and cheese. We, however, eat lots of broccoli and green beans and greens and peas and corn and celery and leeks and potatoes and yams and cook with tons of onions and garlic. And we use lots of fresh and dried herbs from our summer garden or from the farm box we get from Angelic Organics for 20 weeks of the year.

Have you ever looked at a kitchen at the end of preparing a vegetable-based meal? It's a mess. Nubs of things here, skins of things there, shavings and ends and shnibbles and pieces all over the place. If I didn't live on an alley with rodent issues, maybe I'd compost all that stuff, but I can't do that and let my kids play in the yard. For years and years, I threw it all away...until the last year. I read a post on one of my favorite bulletin boards about making your own vegetable broth. Apparently, all I needed to do was save all those shnibbles from my chopping, store them in a bag in my freezer, and when I had enough, dump them in the crock-pot with a bunch of water. Simmer them for a good 24 hours, and you have a wonderful, flavorful broth!

I was skeptical. Onion skins? Potato peels? Broccoli stalks? Eyew. But I was spending lots of money and using lots of fossil fuels on buying canned vegetable broth for our soups, and thought it couldn't hurt to try. After one batch, I was hooked. The broth was delicious -- rich and lovely and dark golden in color, and it freezes perfectly to use later. The house smelled like my mom had been there for a week of someone's cold, making the chicken soup I remembered from my childhood. It turns out that what I loved about chicken soup was the vegetables...the earthy smells of celery, onion, potato.

In fact, the house smells so good that, weeks after our first batch when I was making my second batch, I did have a cold, and the smell that crept through the house as I slept peppered my dreams with memories of soups past. Deep in my sinuses, the feelings of WARM and LOVE and HEALING penetrated, and I smiled in my half-sleep. We may not be able to milk our own cow or plant enough food for a year, but right now my basement freezer has about 4 gallons of broth in it...just enough for a few serious viruses. And that shnibbles bag in the freezer is getting full again!

Stori: things I learned yesterday, bread has feelings too

2009-03-31T06:37:00.004-08:00

I come from a long line of cooks and bakers. My Dad would never accept it if someone told him they could not cook. His philosophy was if you can read, you can cook. So since Dad was one of the major people that taught me how to cook, but mostly how to bake, I was never afraid of trying out a new recipe. If I could read it, I could do it. That ideal is basically true except for a few foods that reading has nothing to do with.

Yesterday I got to learn the lesson that you cannot teach someone how to bake a beautiful loaf of bread over the phone.

There is so much more to the art of baking than reading a recipe and following a set grid of guidelines. How much flour do you use? Depends. How humid is it in your house? Is it a rainy day? Do you have a wood stove burning? How hot does the water need to be? Oh, about that hot, maybe finger tingle. What the heck is finger tingle? It's when the water is hot enough that when you stick your finger in it, it makes your skin tingle. Is that an exact temperature? Not really, how cold is your finger to start with?

My Dad taught me how to make my first loaf of bread about 11 years ago. He handed me the recipe, did it once and let me watch, then let me loose. He was there if I had questions, but his answer was usually, "just see what it feels like". "Dad, is this enough flour?" his answer would be, " I don't know, what does it feel like?". I don't know how to teach people how to get the feel for baking. So since my first batch, I have made around 6 loaves about every week or so for the last decade. I have had beautiful bread, I have had the ugliest dough hunks you could imagine. I have played with water temperatures and oven temperatures. I have tried storing my bulk yeast in different ways. I have discovered that yes, different types of flours do matter! I have played with the olive vs. vegetable vs. butter argument. I have battled the using water over milk theory. Sugar over honey. My voyage into the world of traditional hand made bread has evolved to the point that I am now inventing my own recipes. Since white bread destroys my Mom's blood sugar, I needed to come up with a bread that she could eat without sending her into the shakes. Debi has mentioned that recipe before, we call it Mimi bread since that is what the grand kids call my Mom.

Over several years, I have developed the FEEL for bread and any baked goods I have tackled. My friend calls me yesterday with a cooking question. It surprises me every time someone calls for my cooking/baking advice. I'm honored that they may value my opinion, but still surprises every time. So she asks me if it would be ok if she used the lactose free milk in a bread recipe. Her youngest daughter is just about the same age as my Sunni Sue and her baby is lactose intolerant. I tell her I have no idea. We have a milk cow, why would I know how to cook with fake milk? I told her that I use water in my bread, not milk. I had mentioned to her in the past that I do all the family's baking every week, but I don't think she quite believed me till she came by last week to buy some eggs just as I was pulling the last 3 loaves from the oven. She still questioned me then. Asked if those started out as the frozen dough balls you can buy at the store, since they were too pretty to be home made. I tried really hard not to be insulted by this. So me telling her water over milk started the next 5 hours of phone call after phone call. I gave her the recipe and a short list of how to's and do's and don't's and thought that was it. I had forgotten how intimidating a loaf of bread could be when you don't have the feel yet. I walked her through each step, trying to describe the texture of the dough when you have enough flour added, to how foamy the yeast needed to be before adding the flour. We measured bread pans, and discussed oven temperature differences when using glass or metal pans. The final call was what level should her oven racks be? I haven't heard from her yet this morning, I'll probably end up calling to see how it turned out. It would not surprise me that if like my first batch, her's was total crap too. Next time I think it would be simple and fun to tell someone how to make my bread, I hope I remember to invite them to my house first, so they can see feel first hand what it's supposed to feel like. So for those of you with the touch and the grit to bake, here is my bread recipe. I'm going to keep it simple, because if you know how to do it, you will know how to do it, and for those who don't, please feel free to drop by the place here. I'll make us a cuppa coffee and we can talk about our feelings.

Country white bread
(also great for rolls, cinnamon/sticky buns, and bread bowls!)
makes 6 loaves

4 cups hot water
1/3 cup olive oil
1 cup sugar
4 tsp salt
2 eggs
4 TBLS yeast
10 to 14 cups bread flour (depends on how much is needed!)

In large bowl, combine first 4 ingredients. Whisk in eggs till foamy. Need water temp to be about 110* or finger tingle, add in yeast. Blend very gently and let dissolve and rest for about 5 minutes. Start stirring in flour. When dough is too hard to stir, dump out on to floured service and start kneading. Keep adding small amounts of flour as needed while kneading. When nice bouncy skin has developed, put back into lightly oiled big bowl. Cover and let rise in a warm, and preferably moist, place till doubled. About an hour. Once doubled dump dough back out and divide into loaf sized chunks, about 1 1/2 lbs each. Shape into loaves working out all the air bubbles and place in lightly oiled loaf pans. Let rise again till doubled. Bake in preheated 380* oven, middle-ish rack, for about 24 minutes. Till tops are golden, pretty, and sounds hollow when thumped. Remove from pans and place on racks to cool. While still warm, brush with melted butter or margarine.

That's about as simple as I can make it, but don't give up if it doesn't work right. It takes time to learn how to be a good baker.

Stori: didja eat yet?

2009-03-30T06:46:00.005-08:00

It's only 6:30 in the morning and it's already daylight. It was only a few weeks ago that it wasn't light until 11 in the a.m. Once a season decides to change in Alaska, it doesn't mess around. By this time next month, darkness will no longer be an issue, it will be light 22 hours a day, with the other two hours merely being dusky. From one extreme to another with this place.

So one of the goals of my family is to be as self sufficient as possible. There are many reasons for that goal. A big reason is the fun of it. The thrill in the challenge of knowing we are more than capable of taking care of ourselves. How richly satisfying it is know we have provided almost every part of our food supply our selves. To live as closely as possible to the earth, to leave as small a footprint as possible.
If Alaska is some how cut off from the rest of the US for some horrifying reason, will we be able to sustain ourselves? A lot of people here live like the rest of the lower 48 does. Grocery shopping weekly or daily, relying on outside resources to provide services and products. What if we have another 911? Air travel is cut off, what if they decide to also cut off ocean traffic? There goes our two main modes of transportation in which we get the majority of our food. There is now only once existing dairy farm in Alaska, hard to get enough milk for a state over twice the size of Texas from one small family dairy. When folks are scrambling for canned goods and emptying grocery store shelves, we will be calmly continuing our lives as we have always lived. We are able to survive without grocery stores, or electricity. The fact is, we could become cut off from civilization and although we would experience some small discomforts, we could live quite comfortably and safely for quite some time.
Another reason is health and safety. We know there is no chemicals, hormones, or medicines in the food we produce ourselves. We drink our milk raw, which means it is not pasteurized. We know we do not give Molly, our cow, antibiotics or hormones to increase milk production. We know exactly what food we put into her, therefore we know what food we will get out of her. We are able to produce our own milk, butter, cream products, and cheeses. Our chickens are fed whole foods, and in the summer are free ranged which makes for a much better tasting and healthier egg. Our pork and beef is raised in the same way. Our animals are treated with kindness and respect. Their safety and comfort is a huge priority. They are pastured on our fields with only organic fertilizer used for the best crop of grass. The produce we grow is not treated with chemicals or pesticides. We naturally cure our potatoes before putting them in cold storage to lessen sprouting. Mass produced potatoes are normally treated with a chemical that prevents sprouting. My Dad and I built a cold storage room in the crawl space of his cabin several years. By controlling the temperature and humidity, we are able to keep enough potatoes fresh and usable for a full year. By the time we run out of last years' crop, this season's harvest is ready to dig. We keep any carrots and parsnips fresh for several months by packing them in leaves inside and storing them inside of coolers. This keeps the temperature cool and the humidity and light down. We freeze the wild berries we pick and are able to use them year round also. Besides the beef and pork we raise, we also use moose and sometimes caribou as a huge staple in our diet. Harvesting wild game is a good way to keep costs down and health options up. If a choice is made to eat meat, wild game is a wonderful option. Since we also butcher and process all of our own meat, the cost is kept way down. We cut, wrap, and freeze all we harvest. One moose will feed our family of 7 for more than a year.

With temperatures as extreme as they are in Alaska, it seems as if the summer is used to primary prepare for winter. Summer is when we maintain and improve our homes for warmth. Oil the house logs, insulate, and gather firewood. It is when we plan and grow our gardens not only to eat fresh but to can or freeze for winter food. Early spring is also the time our family butchers the years' supply of pork. Our sow pigs farrow out in January. After raising the piglets for 6 to 8 weeks, they are ready to be weaned and sold. The people that buy these weaner pigs raise them to butcher this fall as butcher hogs. My family learned a long time ago, that if we must eat pork, the best meat is not the butcher hog but the sow. After only having one litter and allowing their milk to dry up and pass one heat cycle, we butcher the sow for our supply. The quantity of meat is way more than what would be taken from a butcher hog. A butcher hog is finished out at around 230 pounds, a first litter sow can weigh around 300 to 500 pounds. So now that our piglets are weaned are being sold off, it's time to start preparing for butcher season. This is my most unfavorite part of our lifestyle but it is what it is.

As spring rushes towards us and with all the excitement and fun it brings, it's the reality that it is really just the season to prepare for the hard stuff that reminds me of where I live.

Debi: City Nudnik

2009-03-26T09:52:00.006-08:00

The scene: Sammi is playing with a handful of little dolls. One is the "mommy" and one is the "daughter."

Sammi as Mommy doll: Oh, daughter, you have a lovely dress.

Sammi as Daughter doll: Thank you, Mommy. Who is holding you?

Sammi as Mommy doll: That's Sammi.

Sammi as Daughter doll: Who is Sammi, Mommy?

Sammi as Mommy doll: Oh, Sammi? She's my boss.

Debi: How We Move On

2009-03-23T08:36:00.002-08:00

It's interesting that Stori wrote about death in her last blog post, because I've been thinking for a week now about how to explain my strange experience with death last week.

My sister-in-law (David's sister) is married to one of the gentlest people I've ever met. His grandfather passed away just over a week ago, and though David and I had only ever met him once or twice, we went to the funeral just to be supportive of his sister and brother-in-law. This grandfather was well into his 90s, and it was a merciful end to what seemed to be a full life. In our years together, David and I have attended several funerals for people of similar age -- his grandfather, his grandmothers, and other extended family -- and so I thought I was prepared for the experience of celebrating a long life, comforting the grieving family, and looking to the future.

I forgot, however, that I've really only ever been to Jewish funerals.

We are Jewish, and the funeral and mourning experience is fairly proscribed for us. In Jewish tradition, the dead are buried quickly after death, since we don't use any preservative materials. While the immediate family is offered the opportunity to view the body, the casket is never open at the funeral. There is usually a short service in a funeral parlor chapel, and then the graveside service includes giving all attendees the opportunity to watch the casket lowered and then throw several shovels full of dirt into the grave. This is considered to be a great good deed -- known as a "mitzvah" -- and forces those who participate a true moment of closure. After this service, there are several other rituals that take place at the home of the immediate mourning family. There is hand washing outside the house, and the covering of mirrors in the house, and seven official days of mourning, where the family is cared for by the community. The focus for the mourners is on remembering the life of the departed loved one, being inspired by his or her gifts, and settling in to be loved and comforted by others while reality sets in.

Well, that's not how it went down for my brother-in-law's grandfather's funeral.

The service at the funeral parlor was largely the same as others I've attended; a family friend who is a practicing pastor talked about the departed, offered a prayer, and instructed those attending on how to get to the cemetary. That's when things became quite foreign for me. At the graveside service, the pastor began talking about what I can only imagine is what I hear referred to as the "end times." He talked about what would happen when Christ comes back, and how he would bring my brother-in-law's grandfather with him, and that only those who had accepted Christ into their hearts would see Grandpa again. Then the pastor asked all those in attendance to close their eyes and repeat the vow he recited (out loud or in their heads), a vow that he accepted Christ as his savior, that he believed in everything the Bible said, that the only truth in the world was written in the Bible, and that his heart was full of belief that Christ would rise again and bring the dearly departed believers with him. At the end of his vow, he told everyone that if they had said that vow, they would see Grandpa again. If they didn't, then this was truly goodbye forever.

David and I raised our eyebrows at each other from our place at the far back of the crowd. My sister-in-law is Jewish too, and loved her husband's grandfather very much. I was hurt on her behalf, but of course, there's nothing to be gained from saying anything about it to anyone involved. It would be horrible timing anyway, not to mention useless. After the service, everyone went their own way; some family went back to his grandmother's house, but we went out to lunch at a restaurant with my sister-in-law and brother-in-law, my mother-in-law, and some friends.

It was such an enlightening day for me, to realize this key difference between the way my tradition views the end of life on earth and the way that -- according to a friend of mine who is a pastor -- the majority Christians perceive it. We say goodbye, throwing the dirt on the grave and giving ourselves a week to really think about it. It's over and done with, then, since we don't have any truly conclusive set of religious beliefs about an afterlife. My brother-in-law's family, if they are believers as their pastors hope, are not really saying goodbye. They have hope that they will be reunited, and I imagine that is deeply comforting as well.

What does this have to do with being a City Mouse? I got to see something totally outside my personal experience last week. My sister-in-law married someone from a family completely different from hers and mine, bringing a new set of traditions and outlooks into the lives of the people around her. In a city/suburb/exurb so diverse and vast, this kind of thing happens a lot. For that, I am grateful.

Stori: well at least nobody is dead

2009-03-22T21:57:00.005-08:00

Then there's Jake. Meet Big Jake, he is a coming 15 year old Appaloosa gelding horse. He is one of the prettiest appys I have seen, he's called a bay blanket appaloosa which means he has a reddish brown (bay) colored body, black mane and tail with a white patch with brown spots on his rump. Jake is the world's best babysitter with small kids. He taught my oldest daughter Paige how to ride. He'll teach my son Colt how to ride in the next couple years. He has perfected the art of looking completely grouchy at all times, except for when he has his tongue hanging out like a big ol dog after he has eaten a horse cookie. Although he likes folks to think he is a grumpy old man, all it takes to prove otherwise is to hold out your hand for him to lick. As a total package, Big Jake is one heck of a good horse, but nobody is perfect. Like most appys, Jake sees bogeymen behind every bush, he's very spooky. Jake is petrified of blue tarps, earplugs, pig noises, and gunfire. The fear of gunfire is what makes him a pretty pathetic mounted shooting horse. He's very patient with me when it comes to my short comings. He's allowed me to use him to learn how to ride side saddle, and he loves to swim in ponds. There's very few family events that have happened in the last 5 years that Jake hasn't been a big part of. He's not a tool to me, or a piece of equipment, not even a mode of transportation. Jake is my friend. He and Heidi accept me more so than any human has. I love that stupid horse.

Big Jake is a total character, and he almost died tonight. Although they are amazingly beautiful, graceful, intelligent animals, horses have the crappiest plumbing of any creature. Their gut is flawed in a way that allows it to twist itself, impact easily, and are prone to colic. Colic, simplified, is a gas bubble in the intestines. Or as my mom would put it, a fart turned sideways. Some horses never colic their whole lives, others colic at the drop of a hat. I have owned and have been around horses all my life and have never had a horse colic, Jake has done it twice. Colic can kill a horse pretty easy, but it's not the gas that gets em, they die from stress and pain.

We were just sitting down to supper tonight at about 6 when I first noticed him hurting. The majority of the windows in our cabin face out at the barnyard, and this was done on purpose. I find myself watching the animals most the day. I know when they nap, or play. When they move from this patch of sunshine to that part of the pen where the wind can't hit. I know how long Heidi sleeps for and in what position. Jake never lays down. He's a stand up and nap kinda guy, very business like. He was laying down at supper time. I watched him get up, paw at the ground, move aways, lay down again and roll. I thought, uh oh. When he started biting at his side I knew he was starting to colic. That's a sure sign of pain. I called the vet, let him know what was going on, agreed to call back in an hour if it hadn't cleared up. Got some winter gear and prepared myself for a long walk. Walking, or leading, a horse is one of the ways to rid colic, or at least distract the horse from the pain long enough for the gas bubble to pass. If he isn't able to get over it within an hour or so, it's a good idea to get some meds in him. So ol Jake and I got to walking. After a solid hour of trudging through snow past my boots, leading a 1,300 pound horse that only wants to lay down, in 10 degree weather, without any progress getting rid of his pain, it was time to call the vet in. Since we live about 45 miles from the vet clinic, it took the Doc about an hour to get out to us, which made another hour of Jake and I dragging through the snow. Within 15 minutes, 3 injections, and $450 later, Jake is back to his old self. He's better, but tired, I'm exhausted and closer to broke, it was just another day living with animals as an extended part of my family. Although stressful and extremely expensive, I wouldn't miss it for the world.

Debi: A Very Citified Weekend!

2009-03-15T11:29:00.002-08:00

I thought it would be fun to contrast the weather and activity in Stori's world with what was happening in our world this weekend!

My husband is in the middle of studying for a test that will add another set of initials after his name. He's an investment analyst, and need I say more about the need for him to stay as current as possible? The test is this coming Friday, so I needed to keep the kids out of his hair for the weekend. Around here, we don't turn our kids out into the outdoors until it's probably warm enough for Stori's family to go swimming -- in the 40s here, which was yesterday's ambient temperature, we still spend most of the day inside. What to do?

Well, the morning is taken care of. Every Saturday, our girls take swimming lessons at the YMCA. They're in two different classes, but they meet simultaneously at 9:30am. (A note: since my daughters wake up at what I not-so-affectionately refer to as "Dark-thirty," this is no problem for us. By 9:30, we've eaten, dressed, watched an hour of cartoons, folded a load of laundry, and possibly set dinner into a crock pot or started a loaf of bread rising or made homemade muffins.) I watch their classes from a perch in the balcony above the pool, alternating between reading a book (right now, it's Lisa See's Dragon Bones) and admiring their flailing progress.

After a quick shower involving more strawberry-scented pink shampoo than is really necessary for a half-dozen girls, I take them to the drop-in childcare center and get a chance for a workout. I've been running regularly for about 8 months now, and had made some pretty good progress, but recently I've started noticing that the big toe on my right foot, and the top of that foot, feel like someone is pounding on them with a small hammer that's been left sitting on an open flame. This week, my run became much shorter than I'd like and turned into a short run and a short ride on the recumbent bike. A blissfully solitary shower later, I picked up the kids from their frenetic running around in the drop-in center, and we hopped in the car to meet their grandmother for lunch and adventure.

I try not to drive too much around Evanston, but with such sprawling city and suburban friends and family, when I do drive, it's often pretty far. I drove about 30 minutes away to a ridiculous planned community and fake city center called "The Glen," halfway between my mother-in-law's house and ours. It's home to lots of overpriced retail and restaurants, but on a day when it's just too muddy and chilly to play on metal playground equipment or go to the beach, its proximity to the Kohl Children's Museum is perfect. After lunch at a noodle shop, all five of us spent the rest of the afternoon there. The kids enjoyed the babydoll daycare center, the stuffed animal veternary clinic, the fake grocery store, the toy mechanic shop, and several indescribable exhibits involving inflating things, shooting balls at each other, and the moving of beanbags from one place to another. My mother-in-law and I had a few yuks making molds of our various body parts on a six foot tall, three foot wide pinhead toy. Yes, just what you're thinking.

After a stop at the candy store, we drove the 30 minutes back home for a dinner of leftovers with Daddy, who gave up studying for the night.

Today, we've had a lazy day at home, with the kids bouncing off the walls and finding new ways to make messes everywhere. In a few minutes, some friends will be calling us to meet at the park, since today's high is 50 -- just warm enough for we midwesterners to put on thin gloves and have a shot at the monkey bars. We'll ride our bikes -- Ronni on her own bike, and Sammi in a seat on the back of mine. It's about 8 blocks away, and I bet we'll stay until dinner time. Dinner is destined to be a joint affair with our friends, and just peeking at the contents of my fridge, I think I'll make something with white beans. I haven't quite gotten that far, and I don't have to -- these are fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants friends, and it's a relief to have that in our future today.

No ice sculptures or sled dogs here -- but would anyone like to thank me for not taking a picture of my tush in that pinhead toy?

Stori: a very Alaskany week

2009-03-14T20:15:00.004-08:00

For as long as I have lived in Alaska, I've not paid too much attention to the dog sled races. I, myself, don't approve much of the whole sled dog sport. If taken care of properly, I have no issues, but like most things, there is some bad apples willing to ruin the whole bushel. My brother had a team for quite a few years here so I had the chance to be around the sport a little bit. Now my brother's dogs weren't like the majority of sled dogs that are used, his were pretty big, 60 plus pounds. The average sized racing dog is only about 40 to 50 lbs. They are called Alaskan Huskies which is code for rangy mutt. They aren't of any particular breed, or color. Some look like labs while others range from border collie to greyhound. My brother's team was not meant for speed, nor distance, they were made for pulling weight. Those who know my brother understand the reasoning behind this. These dogs really are not the pet type. They are hyperactive, and as close to wild as a dog can get while still being domestic. They still pack howl, like wolves, still run in packs, like wolves, still have pack mentality, like wolves. This is, in fact, what makes them amazing at their sport. They love to run. And run. And run.

So in the years past, I haven't been into the races much, except for this one. This year I have started hanging around someone actually competing in the Iditarod. Her name is Jessie Royer and she is, by far, the MOST competitive person I have ever met. Jessie and I both belong to the same Cowboy Mounted Shooting club. My family has been in involved in mounted shooting for the last several years. At first, Paige was riding Jake in the wrangler (kids) division while I was pregnant with Sunni Sue. Last summer was my first year competing, and Jake's (my horse) first year being shot off of. We had an absolute blast, came in dead last for the most part, but had fun doing it. Jessie on the other hand has been riding in the mounted shoots for several years and is damn good at what she does. Last season she was the top cowgirl in Alaska. This all said, it's a heck of interesting race when you actually know someone trying not to get them selves killed racing it! The race itself is over 1,100 miles long, across totally remote Alaskan wilderness. Jessie was in 11th place for awhile but has since dropped back to 16th, but the race isn't over yet. The top 20 finishers of the Iditarod finish in the money, so she's not doing too bad at all. So says the lady sittin on her butt at her kitchen table NOT freezing behind a team of crazy dogs.

Also this month, the World Ice Art Championships are being held over in Fairbanks. This is when a large collection of ice sculptors get together and compete for the world title. These temporary pieces of art are AMAZING. They have several different divisions to compete in, single block/ multi block. The ice is harvested from a nearby pond and hauled to the ice park. The ice on the pond is close to 4 foot thick this time of year. This common thickness of ice is the reason that the rivers are used for roadways during the winter. Now although the sculptures are incredible, the honest real reason we go is for the the kids park. We took the kids on Friday afternoon. They have small ice slides, houses, tunnels, mazes, spinning cups. Almost like a miniature amusement park made entirely out of ice. The kids have a total blast at this thing. They get to play and blow some steam off, I get to haul all the gear, pull the 3 sleds we bring along for the sled hill, work the camera, wipe noses, police Sunni Sue, and make sure all cold weather gear stays where it should be. After we make our way through the kids park, and hopefully get a quick glimpse at the art, we head over to the sled hill.

This is not just a hill, the folks there have built these huge hill long slides made totally of really slick ice! The kids can shoot themselves down the runs on their bodies, or cardboard, or their sleds. What a time we had! Even little Sunni Sue found her self being luged down the hill on her folks' laps or at one point, even on her own little back, giggling like a fool the whole way. By the time we get the kids gathered up and herded back to the car, they are tired, and sweaty, and hungry, and happy. Sometimes it's a pretty cool thing to live in the cold.

Stori: when it's time to say "when"

2009-03-11T11:41:00.002-08:00

I have had enough.

We pride ourselves on our simple living, but it's not really that simple. I don't understand as a human why I more resemble a pack rat? Every trip to town has to include a stop at Walmart, or Lowe's, or the BX just to pick a few things up that we may need, and it always ends up with buying a cartload of crap we don't. Why do we do this? Do we over buy in order to prove to ourselves that we are financially stable? That we can afford it? Do I buy unnecessary items because of some primal need to stock pile in case of some unknown disaster?

I AM DONE.

I spent the greater part of this morning going through all of our flotsam just to find I don't NEED any of it. My kids have too much. They appreciate nothing. An over flowing toy box does nothing except promote carelessness with their toys because there is always more. What's wrong with a 16 count box of crayons? Why do I insist on buying the 64? Does it make me a better Mom to provide my kids with boundless gifts? I think I might have this whole concept backwards. Starting today, I'm committing myself to the "Less is More" philosophy. I think if maybe my kids only had a handful of playthings, they might truly appreciate those belongings. We don't need to get a new shirt for Paige every time we step foot into Walmart. She has nice, un -tattered clothes, we don't NEED more of them. Will having enough shirts to wear a different one every day for a month make her a better person? Or will it just pass on this horrible affliction of always wanting more. Of never being truly satisfied with the simple beauties in life.

I AM CLEANING HOUSE.

I am going to get rid of the unnecessary things in my life. Get back to the basics. I am going to start with myself. Charity options here we come! Out go the clothes I don't wear, the shoes that are collecting dust. The unused items will find a new home with someone who will be able to actually use them, not just collect them. I need to write a shopping list of the absolute necessities we require, and stick to it! I will sit down with myself and have a good long talk. Does this thing make me happier? Does it benefit mine or my family's life? Will I miss it if it's gone? I think the answers will surprise me. I have to find a way to resolve this urge in my life. Less is more. Maybe, just maybe, if I start with myself, my children will follow. Let's hope I'm strong enough.

Debi: Soup's On

2009-03-11T05:03:00.001-08:00

My older daughter -- 6 year old Ronni -- and I were having a discussion this morning about bragging. She said that one of her friends scolded her yesterday for musing about whether or not she was the smartest kid in her class. Ronni explained that she had asked her teacher for help with something yesterday, and after getting it, had mused aloud that it was the first time all year that she had asked for help. Ronni said -- supposedly, just to herself -- "I never have to ask for help usually. I wonder if I am the smartest kid in the class?"

Her friend, who is quite competitive, said "Ronni, you think you're the smartest kid in our class just because you read the fastest. That doesn't make you the smartest!!!"

I told Ronni that I agreed with her friend, that reading the fastest simply makes you the fastest reader, not the smartest. I told her that probably there is no "smartest kid" in her class -- there was a fastest reader, and a speediest math problem-solver, and a most prolific artist, and a strongest ball kicker, etc. I said I knew she wasn't bragging when she asked herself that question about being the smartest, but her friend probably thought she was. Then Ronni asked me what bragging was.

I said, "Well, it would be like if I went up to all the moms on the playground and said 'I make the best soup of all the parents at our school. My soup is better than yours!' I might be right, but it wouldn't be nice for me to say it."

And Ronni said, "Yeah, you would be right."

After reiterating that second bit -- but it wouldn't be nice for me to say it -- I turned away and grinned. Yeah, I make pretty darned good soup. This year, for the silent auction at Ronni's school that benefits their artist-in-residence program, I donated "one month of homemade soup and bread" -- a delivery of a pot of soup and a loaf of bread, once a week, for for weeks, to the winning bidder. There were four separate people who bid on it -- all had either tasted or heard about my love of soup.

In the winter, we eat a lot of soup in this house. When my younger daughter, Sammi, was a baby with health problems that kept her from swallowing easily, I discovered a chickpea soup that she ate with gusto. This was nothing short of a miracle, since, at the time, we were measuring what she ate in terms of single goldfish crackers and teaspoons of yogurt. I made that chickpea soup at least twice a week for several months. We all got tired of it, and when she started eating other things, we stopped making it for a good year.

Now we're all ready again, and I have been making it regularly this winter. My family and close friends refer to it as "THE chickpea soup." The person who won my soup-and-bread auction is getting a nice steaming pot of it tomorrow. Without any bragging, here is THE chickpea soup recipe...which might be the best soup for several surrounding blocks, but it wouldn't be nice to say so.

Chickpea Soup for All That Ails You

Ingredients:
1 tbsp olive oil
1 medium onion, diced
4 cloves garlic, minced
2 15oz cans of chickpeas, drained & rinsed
1 bay leaf
½ cup roughly chopped flat-leaf parsley or any other green – chard, kale, spinach, etc.
4 cups broth (or 2 broth & 2 water, to taste)
1 ½ tsp salt

Preparation:
In a medium saucepan, heat oil over medium heat. Add onion & garlic and cook until onion has softened, about 10 minutes.

Add chickpeas, bay leaf, parsley, and broth. Stir well, cover & bring to a boil. Reduce heat, partially cover, and simmer about 15 minutes. Stir in salt.

Remove bay leaf and, working in batches, puree soup in food processor or blender (or using an immersion blender right in the pot!) until very creamy. Return soup to pot and serve!

Stori: spring break

2009-03-10T09:37:00.004-08:00

Spring break in March in interior Alaska is neither springish nor a break. I have never been able to understand exactly why we have spring break here. Why not just have the kids go straight through and let them out earlier in May or go back later in the fall? School starts around the 2nd week of August which is dumb. August is some of the prettiest weather we have. Not too warm, the temps hover around the 60's, the colors are changing, the weather is just beautiful. I think they need to start school after September, but that's just me.

Paige's break started on Monday, March 9th. We had just got dumped on with about 8 inches of new snow. The temps aren't too bad, the highs are around 20 degrees during the warmest part of the day. We had such a busy first day yesterday! When Marc plowed the yard the last time, he pushed up a huge burm of snow on the edge of the parking yard. Paige and Colt have now claimed this pile. They have dragged slabs of wood over to it, confiscated a older tarp, stolen a piece of OSB plywood from their Dad's shop stash, gathered up several shovels and they got to work! Their construction job is pretty involved. They dug out a huge cave out of the middle of the pile, added tunnels, two doors, and a skylight. They pulled the tarp over the top, propped it up in the middle with a pole and held the ends down with more snow. They used the slabs for retaining walls on the inside and gateway posts for the front door, and the plywood is the front door. It amazes me how creative kids can be when left to their own vices. I left them alone to play, supervising from my kitchen window. With only a couple of tattle tales of "she did, he did" they had completed an impressive snow fort that will last till probably the first week in May.

While they were outside playing, Sunni Sue and I made a batch of my famous Cowboy Cookies. The kids came in from outside to have a handful of cookies and big glass of fresh milk for snack.

Cowboy Cookies
(this recipe was handed down to me from my Grandma who used to make these for the hunters' sack lunches when she and my Grandpa had the guiding business in Colorado)

1 cup shortening (can sub 1/2 cup peanut butter and 1/2 cup shortening)
1 cup sugar
1 cup brown sugar
2 eggs
1 tsp vanilla
2 cups oatmeal
1 1/2 cups flour
1 tsp salt
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp baking powder
1 cup chocolate chips
1/2 cup chopped walnuts (optional)

Cream together shortening, sugar, brown sugar. Add in eggs and vanilla and stir together. In separate bowl sift together flour, salt, b. soda, and b. powder. Add oats into creamed mixture, then add in flour mix. Once combined, can add in chocolate chips and walnuts. Drop by spoonfuls onto cookie sheet, pressing the mounds down with fingers to flatten just a bit. Bake in preheated oven at 380 degrees for 10 minutes. These cookies are wonderful to take camping or packed in a lunch. They last forever and are hard to kill. If they get too hard, they are perfect for dunking in milk or coffee!

Marc and I usually meet at the gym on base 3 times a week. We go in the afternoons when Paige is still in school and my folks watch the 2 little ones. Since Paige was home yesterday and she loves athletics, I took her and Colt with me. Gram and Papa stayed with Sunni Sue. We are very lucky to have access to the gym. It's on an Air Force Base and the AF doesn't skimp on much. It has an indoor pool, two weight rooms, a cardio room, basket ball court, racquetball court, climbing wall, indoor track, and indoor football/soccer field. We all had a complete blast! It was the first time Paige and I had the chance to play basketball together. We ran on the track, which is no easy feat for me, I'm not really made for speed. Marc was goalie in our little game of soccer. Little Colt, who constantly gets told not to run in the house, got to run all he wanted. His little sturdy 3 1/2 year old legs pumped till he was sweaty. At one point the boy that has never run out of energy had to sit down for a rest. It was fantastic.

At the beginning, I was dreading having all 3 kids trapped in the house for a week. I could just imagine all the fights, yelling, teasing, and tattle telling. I love the fact I was pleasantly surprised by the outcome. I need to remember to slow down more and really enjoy my babies. They are such amazing little people, I need to take off my "Mommy's the boss" hat every once and a while and re discover how lucky I really am to be blessed with my little family.

Debi: Time to Get Serious

2009-03-09T06:42:00.003-08:00

Today, I'm going on my first job interview in at least four years.

When I got out of graduate school in 1996, I got my first web geek job. It was during dotcom mania, and while the company had hired me to write "web content," between my interview and start date, it had completely changed business plans. I got there, and within a few days, someone had handed me a book on HTML and asked me to start building the web site. During the heady ten years that followed, I switched jobs every time something bothered me even a little. Raises capped at 15%? I'm outta here! New boss not as fun as old boss? Buh-bye! Between 1996 and 2005, I had at least five jobs. Some made it onto my resume and some didn't.

I always left on my own terms, usually with friends and good references. I saw one company get closed by the government for tax and regulatory issues and one company close up shop completely, but the majority of the places I've worked in the Chicago area are still running, at least somewhat. I've been working freelance now for three years, though, and I'm slowly watching my work dry up. Some of my clients are former employers, and they're just not investing in new web projects right now. In the space of ten years, I've gone from a hot commodity (along with everyone else who wasn't frightened of computers in the late 90s) to one of a gazillion out-of-work programmers.

So, off I go this morning, in my five-year-old black business suit, to interview at a creative staffing agency. I am good at what I do, and I genuinely like helping clients achieve what they want, so I hope that I can get some work through this company. It's for 1/3 of what I normally charge, and I will be lucky and happy to get it.

Welcome to the "economic crisis" in the Chicago area. It's not so much about meeting my basic needs; we can pay the mortgage and eat and all of that, no problem. It's more about, as my husband describes the investment world, the landscape having changed completely. I used to look out my window and see a city full of possibility. I still see that city, but the line to get in is a lot longer than it used to be.

Wish me luck.

Stori: more of the white stuff

2009-03-06T21:17:00.004-09:00

I think most folks figure that just because Alaska is cold, that we also get insane amounts of snow. Not true for most of the state. Down along the coast, they get unbelievable snowfall, but in the interior, not nearly as much as you would think. The big difference about our snow is that once it's here, it doesn't go away till breakup in the Spring. In the lower 48, snow comes then melts away, comes again, melts. Here, it comes, it stays, it annoys. These last couple weeks are trying to change the normal. We have had more snowfall than most years, and especially this last week. In the last 2 days, we have gotten about 8 inches dumped on us.

Another pattern we are breaking out of is our normal lack of wind. The wind hardly ever blows. In April, we'll have two weeks of some blowing, but that's a good thing since it dries up the mud. In the winter, if the wind blows, that means it's a Chinook, and that's even better! A Chinook is a warm southerly wind that has the ability to raise the temps 40 to 50 degrees in less than an hour. Once the downpour of snow stopped yesterday evening, the wind kicked up. This was no small cold breeze, or a friendly warm Chinook, this was northwestern Colorado winter wind. It was hard, it was fast, it came in every direction. This wind came along and gave us the gift of snow drifts over 4 foot deep.

All of this rude weather this week caused nothing but more work for my family. My dad had double duty with the farm chores. With 3 sows in the farrowing connex he had to dig out a couple times a day, to unloading loads of snow off of his hay tarp to feed the cows. It did nothing to make his duties easier. The snow doubles the drive time for my Mom to get back and forth to work. Our road was so snowed in that on Thursday, Paige's school bus went off the road and got stuck for over an hour. My brother had to go pick up the kids on a snow machine. The fierce wind has caused drifts to fill up our porches to the point we have to sweep and/or shovel a couple times an hour so we can open our doors without filling the house with snow. It also caused hours and hours of plowing my husband. Marc is the plow guy. We have a winch driven plow hooked up to one of our 4-wheelers that he uses to dig us out after a storm. He clears all the driveways, both at our house and up to my folks' place. He clears out the walking path between the houses and barn, and also cleans up around the yards and barns. He has had to be on the plow every day this week just trying to keep up with the storm. Today I was watching him trying to clear out the walking path between our house and the barn when I noticed that the snow was deeper the height of his 4 wheeler in some areas. All in all, Marc spent over 7 hours today alone just trying to plow us all out. He didn't even get to finish my folks' yard before it got too dark to see. He even worn a hole threw his wool gloves that my Mom knitted him, just working the winch lever. Now this is the picture of Alaska that I'm sure most people have.

Stori: a new book of ideas

2009-03-05T06:45:00.002-09:00

Speaking of cooking, ok, so nobody was actually talking about cooking, but it is a subject that I think about a lot. I received my new cook book last night at about 8:30. Any special mail that is delivered to our home is delivered to us by a contractor. He does this after his normal job, so we get late evening deliveries for the most part.
So let me begin by saying Hooray for PBS! Ever since PBS went digital, we are able to pick up 4 different versions of the station. One of them is called Create, and it is nothing but do it your self, arsty fartsy, crafts, cooking, and building. I love it! I am a cooking show junkie. A lot of evenings find Marc and I watching food network after the kids go to bed. Not that I need the cooking instructions, but it seems I always find some idea that inspires me to try something new. One night we were watching Create when we come across the show "America's Test Kitchen". There was this nerdy little gentleman with a bow tie and a billion ideas on how to improve everyday dishes and techniques. From how to peel boiled eggs easier to making the perfect meringue that won't weep. I was hooked.
A couple weeks ago, Marc and I were at our monthly Interior Alaska Trail Riders Association meeting when I was introduced to a lovely pork roast with orange marmalade glaze. Surprise, the recipe came from a recipe book from my America's Test Kitchen! I ordered it pretty soon after that night. 500 recipes, along with histories, backgrounds, tips, test kitchen ratings on everyday kitchen items. It is a beautiful thing. From complex dishes to the most basic of stuffed mushrooms and how to clean a portebello. For my friends who do not cook very much and are just getting started to my other friends that submerge themselves in the beauty of food everyday. I highly recommend this book. The Cook's Country Cookbook
http://www.cooksillustrated.com/bookstore/detail.asp?PID=386
also some other great related sites:
http://www.cookscountry.com
http://www.cookscountrytv.com
http://www.americastestkitchen.com

Stori: the story of us

2009-03-03T06:28:00.006-09:00

It was 5 years ago this month that my husband and I had our first official date. It was 2 years prior to that the first time he asked me out. My husband is brilliant, but fast he is not.

It all started at a wolf trapping school put on by the Alaska Trapper's Association. Every year, the club holds a general trapping school held in October, and most years a wolf trapping school held in January. I was working in the pharmacy at that time with my friend/pharmacist/boss Jeanie. Jeanie is an amazing cook from Louisiana, very cajun style of cooking. Her husband was a member of ATA and the club asked her to cook for the 3 day school. She in turn asked me to come up and help, it was my 2ND helping out at the schools. The school is held at Twin Bears Campground, about 30 miles outside of Fairbanks up Chena Hot Springs Road. Marc's trapping partner Jim Walters was putting on the school, and with Marc also a member, he was at the school to volunteer. It was one cold weekend! The first day, Friday, the temps were hovering right around -50 below zero. I was very glad I had drove up with Jeanie and her family. I had Paige with me who was only 4 at the time. The next day, we were in the cookhouse. Jeanie, our friend Charlie, and I were cooking. Paige and Jeanie's daughter, Amie, were playing cards. A couple guys were sitting around the barrel stove lieing to each other, the rest of the students and helpers were outside setting trail, or in the classroom for a lesson. I was standing at the cooking range stirring a big pot of Jambalaya when this horrible smell hit me like a punch in the face. I turned around to see what was so offensive and there he was.

Standing in the door way like some giant mountain man. Wolf hat and face mask, bunny boots, refridgerwear outer clothes, holding out a string of 6 frozen martin (weasel type fur bearers), and all 6 foot 2 inch, 250 lbs. of him reeking of wolf urine. He was the horrible smell. He had accidentally spilled some wolf scent on him and it was potent!! He asked me if I minded if he thawed out the martin over the cook stove. Definitely not a homey kitchen smell I would imagine.

Later that night after supper, we were all sitting around having a drink and visiting. Some folks, Jeanie's husband Jimbo mostly, were playing some bluegrass music. There was only 3 females at the school that year, and I was the only single one. Marc had sat there the whole evening watching me turn guys down when I guess he started feeling brave. He asked me out for supper sometime, I said yes, I just didn't know it was going to be 2 years later. The day of the school was Sunday and we woke up to -62 below zero. Our cooking range ran off of propane and it was cold enough to freeze the propane in the bottles. We had no lights, the generator's battery and exploded during the night after it had froze solid, no way to cook, and only a barrel wood stove for heat in the cook shack. That morning when Paige and I woke up in our little cabin, our hair was frozen to the wall. It was the coldest I had ever seen it. Jeanie and I were sitting there having a cuppa when Marc and Jim walked in with torches. They were on their way outside to hold open flames on the propane tanks to thaw out the liquid enough to turn it back into gas, so we could cook breakfast. The only thought I had was that crazy bastard was going to kill us all in a fiery explosion, but at least we'd be warm.

After the school, Marc would drop by the pharmacy at least once a week to visit. For the next two years, we would run into each other at various events. Trapping schools, ATA end of the year Spring Flings. It was at one of the Spring Flings when it all really started going. My family and I had decided to quit Alaska and were planning on a move down to Montana. My parents had already accepted an offer on their cabin and I had given a tentative notice to the pharmacy. My friends were throwing a semi going away party for me at a local bar the week following the Spring Fling. On a complete whim, I invited Marc to drop by. We had a great time at the party, the house sale fell through, my family decided not to move, and the wheels of fate had started to turn. We followed up with an actual date to a comedy show the next week, which Marc stopped at the dump on the way, should have been a sign for me. We have been inseparable ever since.

We dated only 6 months before we were married. But were engaged 4 months in. In life, some things just work out the way they are supposed to and it fits just right. We were married September 25Th, 2004 in my parents back yard. Jeanie was my matron of honor. We had a potluck, and a bonfire. We had just finished building the barn, so we gave many new barn tours. It was a perfect evening.

Debi: The Old Town School of Folk Music = The Coolest Place in all of Chicagoland!

2009-03-02T16:02:00.005-09:00

These are short videos about my favorite place in the City of Chicago: The Old Town School of Folk Music. This is where I learned to play the fiddle, where I just finished taking a 'Ukulele class, where David and I learned to swing dance, where Ronni takes fiddle lessons, where Sammi and I went when she was a baby to take a baby-music class, where I meet people to play together, where I see concerts, where a good portion of my heart is. It makes me sad to think that this is not a national institution, with branches in EVERY major city. It is AMAZING!

Debi: Out and About, Perpetually

2009-02-27T10:42:00.007-09:00

I've been meaning to respond to Stori's post about her rhythm being shaken by outings lately, but ironically, I've been out of the house too much!

I've said before that I did not set out to be home full time with my kids. I am a very, very social creature -- just spend ten minutes with me and you'll notice that I am highly engaged in whatever conversation I enter, and at least partially engaged in any conversation I can hear in the surrounding area. I just love being with people. Even if I am not with friends, I'd rather be alone in a crowd than in my house. For that reason, freelancing has been a mixed bag for me. On the one hand, it gives me exactly the freedom I need -- I can take the kids to school in the morning and pick them up in the afternoon, and I never have to worry about school holidays or sick days -- but on the other hand, I have no colleagues, no coworkers, no peers, and no structure at all. (Right now, on top of it all, I also have basically no work. Darn economy.) It can be lonely. It is lonely.

This is why the community I live in is so important to me. My average day requires me to leave the house at least twice -- on the way to and from school -- but I usually do a lot more than that. When I have work to do, I love to do it while I sit at a locally-owned coffeeshop called The Brothers K. I have my standard order (large soy mocha and a cranberry-pecan scone), which I milk for several hours, sitting in my favorite seat by the window, in the upper left of the photo here. This cafe is less than a mile from my house, so as long as it's not raining and the streets aren't covered in snow, I ride my bike, my laptop in a backpack.

These days, though, I can't justify the expense of the treats at Bros. K, so I've been staying home. It's driving me completely crazy. We belong to the Evanston YMCA, and so I've been trying to go there and run on the track or the treadmill most days. I'm the last person I'd have thought would do that, but my youngest child is three-and-a-half now, and I'm starting to lose the excuse for not having the energy for exercise! The YMCA is also one of my employers, since I became a toddler swim instructor this past August (mostly for the half-price family membership that comes with it!). I teach two hours of classes on Friday mornings -- more fun than you'd think.

By mid-afternoon, I have to start thinking about getting the kids from school. Waiting outside Ronni's school for her is a social scene all in itself. I've usually retrieved Sammi by then, so I stand there with her in the stroller munching a snack, and I gab with the other parents. Notice that I didn't say "I gab with the other mothers." This is a liberal town, folks! There are many, many fathers at school pick-up. That, and nannies, grandparents, aunts, uncles, family friends, and those of us that absorb a revolving cast of extra kids for after-school play, emergency child-care, or just because another parent's younger one is still napping at home. In all weather, we stand there and wait for the doors to open and our progeny to stream out. In nice weather, impromptu snack picnics form on the playground, and we all sprawl on the grass to let the kids blow off steam and to put off getting dinner started.

On Tuesdays, one of my best friends (and the mother of Ronni's absolute best friend) teaches a "Creative Movement" class at the local park district building. I've enrolled both my kids, though Sammi is too young for it, really, and spends much of the class doing her own thing. More than a dozen kids from Ronni's school are in this class, and so I often help walk all of them over to the park district with my friend after school. There we are -- two adults, sometimes three -- with a gaggle of children making our way three blocks down a busy street in the late afternoon, backpacks and lunchboxes flying. No time for chit-chat during that scene; it brings out the sheepdog in all parents! The class, held in the beautiful sunny studio at our often-neglected historic park district building, is a wonder of free energy and happy wiggling. Boys and girls alike find amazing ways to move and stretch, thanks to the thoughtful teaching my friend provides.

After class, it's getting late. We've stayed until our friends are locking the door of the building, chatting and running around the studio. If I've thought of it, there's something waiting for us in the crock pot at home. If I've lazed too long, the walk home consists of me musing on the contents of the refrigerator, deciding between leftovers and scrambled eggs. The kids are still wound up from their dancing, and this week, Sammi refused to get back in the stroller. "I want to run, Mama!" And so she did...the whole three blocks home.

Sometimes that's the end of my forays outside. Some weeks, once my husband David is home and we've eaten dinner, I'll kiss the girls goodbye and drive into the city with my fiddle on the seat next to me, ready to meet my musical partner for a night of practice in a room at the local folk music school. As I think of this very typical Tuesday for us, I imagine Stori in my place, and then I imagine her domestic homebody head exploding, just as mine would staying in my house all day, alone with my girls. I think she and I are exactly the people about whom someone said, once, "opposites attract!"

Stori: I don't think we are in Kansas anymore

2009-02-26T06:53:00.004-09:00

This state has to be the most backward place to live in. I don't mean backwards in the sense of my husband's home state of Kentucky and it's "hill folk". It's backwards in the sense that if you took a normal daily Alaskan conversation and had it in the lower 48, you would get looked at kinda funny. For example, getting Paige ready in the morning to catch the bus. "Paige, you had better put a hat on honey, it's kinda chilly out there. It's -20 below." Or in the case of this morning, "Paige, don't worry about wearing your winter gear today, just take it with you. It's plenty warm outside." The temperature this morning at 6:25 a.m. when this conversation was taking place was 13 degrees Fahrenheit. Now how nuts does some one have to be to consider 13 degrees "plenty warm"?

These past couple weeks my husband has been busting butt to clear trees and get firewood in. We have two oil burning Toyo monitor stoves in the house, but with the cost of heating fuel, we heat our house with a wood stove. We usually have about 4 fires a day when it's colder. Since it's so warm out right now, we'll probably only burn one and the cabin logs will hold enough residual heat to keep us cozy. We had a really ugly cold spell last month and it used up more of our wood reserve than we had budgeted for. 3 weeks of -40 to -60 below weather tends to make you burn a couple extra fires, go figure.

We built our house right next to a slow moving slough, which is a like a wide slow shallow creek in the lower 48. Our slough, except in a couple hot spots, freezes solid in the winter. Marc runs his snow machine up and down it to collect dead standing spruce. When you drop a tree for firewood, you cut off all the branches and buck up the pole (cut into stove length sections). After the log is bucked up, once a week we split logs with a splitting maul. This is usually Marc's and Paige's Sunday chore. Marc splits and Paige hauls and stacks the firewood on our big porch. Marc has cleared some serious trees this past couple weeks and had all the boughs as trash to dispose of. So here's the backwards part, I have a spruce bough fire burning outside my house, on the ice. These bonfires are hot and huge and we still don't have to worry about it melting enough of the slough ice to be dangerous. Most sane people would never stand on a frozen creek and start a huge bonfire without worry of falling in. But then again, most people aren't standing on 3 solid feet of ice either.

Stori: busy little week

2009-02-25T06:50:00.004-09:00

It's not uncommon for me to not leave the property but once or twice a week. Usually on Saturdays Marc and the kids and I will make our way into Fairbanks for our weekly shopping trip. We'll maybe hit Walmart, Sam's Club, get some fuel, drop by the chainsaw shop, sell our eggs to the feed store, and pickup some grain for the cows and chickens. For a while there I was getting the chance to meet Marc 3 times a week at the gym on the Air Force base where he works, but that's not really town, just a base. This week is altogether different.

I have had some back pain and finally got the chance to get into see a doctor. Marc is retired Air Force so we still have all of our military benefits. They seem to think I may have a herniated disk, so they signed me up for P/T on Thursday on base. Friday, I'll have to drive all the way to town for an eye exam to renew my contacts, that's end up taking several hours there and back. Saturday is the big day though! My daughter Paige is brilliant. She's a 5th grade student and at the top of her class. Several months ago, they had a class spelling bee, she took 1st. That moved her on to the school wide bee which had 4th, 5th, and 6th graders. She took 1st again! I knew she was smart, but she hadn't studied AT ALL, so we didn't figure she had much of a chance. Boy were we wrong. Since she was first in her school, she now moves on to districts. That bee will be held in Fairbanks on Saturday. We'll have to be there by 8 a.m. and it'll last at least 4 hours. Before I had kids, 4 hours in a spelling bee sounded like a boring version of hell, funny how everything changes when it's your little spawn up there spelling "Animosity". When we get home from town that day, we get the pleasure of castrating, immunizing, and clipping the tusks of 26 angry squealing baby pigs.

It's amazing to me how much little trips like these stress out my family. If my youngest two aren't with us, they stay with Gram and Papa. I never could imagine how much I would come to enjoy our little daily schedules. When you throw a monkey wrench into the spokes via a (gasp!) eye exam, it messes up my whole day. I never feel as content and as just right as when I am at home with all my little chicks around me. I do know how lucky I am to have the opportunity to live this way. My kids have never known day care and I doubt they ever will. The only time they are away from me is school, in Paige's case, or when they are hanging out with their grandparents who they adore. My son Colt is constantly begging me to send him over to Papa's house during the day. He and Pop just hang out, watch cartoons, swing, eat suckers, whatever it is they do. So hopefully by Sunday, my life will be back to normal and I won't be forced to go out in the public eye again for another week. Free to stay at home with my cooking, baking, cleaning, and kid herding.

Stori: Moose n Squirrel

2009-02-24T08:42:00.005-09:00

I was sitting here this morning visiting with Debi, online of course, about her neighborhood squirrel. As we were discussing his obvious bravery, I notice my horses are bucking up a fit in their pen. Now I believe I have one of the best views in the world right outside my great room and dining room windows, the barnyard. I sit here for hours a day watching the livestock live their lives. I learn so much about them and their personalities just by observing them be themselves. Their private little rodeo action out there made me jump up to see exactly what had them in such an uproar. Outside of their pen, walking along the driveway was a set of yearling twin moose. The horses must have been feeling extra springy this morning to kick up such a fit over simple moose. Usually the horses and cows will just stand along the fence and watch the offending trespassers waltz through their territory. It got me to laughing about the differences of Debi's wildlife and my own version.

I also have a small squirrel problem, but it deals with actual small squirrels. They are a little bigger than chipmunks but very persistent. Living in a cabin does have it's down side. Squirrels love to try to climb in the roof and steal insulation. When the insulation gets disturbed, it causes a cold spot where condensation can form, which can turn into mold when the weather warms up. The squirrels also eat my bird food, which is kinda expensive, therefore not tolerated. Debi feeds her vagrant neighbor popcorn and peanut butter. We shoot ours. We try to prevent the problem by removing trees close to the house. The little terrorists don't like crossing open spaces. There is a man up here that will pay a dollar a spruce squirrel tail. But he only takes them in bundles of 100. Luckily, I have had only two squirrels this entire winter giving me trouble. Needless to say, they trouble me no more. I am, by nature, not a hunter. I do not enjoy killing anything myself, and truth be told, don't really like anybody else killing either. However, I can understand the necessity of hunting. I had never hunted before, until two winters ago when I had finally had enough with the squirrels. The first time I shot one, it made my stomach upset. I was shaking and dizzy. I did not like it, but my home was a bit more secure after that. I figured the only thing I would ever shoot would be squirrels, and if I'm going to be totally honest here, going after squirrels really is fun.

Last year was the first year I really got into gardening. I had a very small garden with lettuce, parsnips, and some herbs. My dad is the one who raises the huge garden over at his place. We put in a flower bed along side my big porch where I tried my hand at flowers for the first time on any large scale. One of my family's favorite flowers had always been sweet peas. Boy howdy did I kick some butt in the sweet pea department for a first timer! They grew up my porch railing and were way over 10 foot tall by the end of the season. Then the sweet pea eating moose showed up in the neighborhood. They hit my sister in laws house first. Then they hit my folks' house, right next door! It was a cow and a small bull. It's funny how an animal gets a taste for something and learns to search it out. Marc left for hunting camp and left me with a moose license and a rifle. In the end, the flowers were saved till first frost, my family has more than enough in the freezer to last us the winter, and that particular flower loving little bull is no longer a neighborhood menace.

So, Debi, I'll see you one obnoxious peanut butter eating porch squirrel, and raise you a flower eating bull moose giving my BBQ the stink eye.

Debi: Scrat the Aloof Squirrel

2009-02-22T10:47:00.005-09:00

This is the city version of wildlife. Scrat lives in a garbage can in our alley, enjoys sunning himself on our back porch, and has shameful table manners. Seems like an excellent candidate for reality television.

Stori - what a long day

2009-02-21T22:12:00.003-09:00

There are some mornings when you wake up you realize, this is gonna be a pretty easy day. Today was not one of those days. It all started with a pig named Eugene.

Our third sow had her litter of 9 yesterday. Everything seemed pretty uneventful. As of yesterday afternoon when Dad and I checked her, all babies were good, all mommas were fine. Today being Saturday means Marc is home to stay in with the youngest two kids so I can go do the horses' morning feed. Usually when Marc is at work, my Dad throws them their hay in the morning on his way to do the milking. I love Saturdays. No real alarm clocks besides my kids hollering for us to wake up. Marc is home, which I love. We get to sit together in piece, drinking coffee until 9 am when I have to go do the chores. Feeding time is one of the highlights of my day.

So off I go this morning to visit my horses. I stop inside my folks' house to let Paige know we are going to go into town to get her that haircut she has been asking for. Paige sleeps over at my parents house every Friday night. Not because she has to, but because it's all their special time together. I poke my head into the barn to say good morning to my Dad. He informs me that we had a little pig that was stepped on, looked hurt, pretty weak, could hardly walk. Time to take him into the house and patch him up. We got a 24 hour old pig for breakfast, but not in bacon fashion. Meet Eugene. My kids name him Eugene after Mr. Krabs on Spongebob since he is the crabbiest pig I have ever met! He squeals, and barks, and grunts, and growls. Never settles down to snuggle, fights us the entire time. After a physical check I find a tiny little tear in his skin in front of his left leg along his belly. It didn't bleed, was barely puffy. I sprayed some pain relieving antibacterial on it. I was starting to lose the excitement over a house pig. I feed him a bottle, put him down for a nap and Gram and Paige and I head to town for her haircut. Since town is over 30 miles away, it takes us several hours before we get back. I feed Eugene several more times during which he yells at me, fights me, and bites my thumb with this tiny tusks. What a difficult little brat!

After I feed him his 5 pm bottle, I'm getting ready to put him back in his sickbed when I unwrap his towel (he has a horrible case of the scours and I didn't need any pig poop on me) and find his intestines poking out of his little wound. He had fought me so hard and was so mad, he had pushed his little guts right out of his sore in his side. When Dad gets to my house for supper, we proceed with surgery. For the record, guts come out a lot easier than they go back into little holes. Luckily, both of my parents had EMT training at one point and both were pretty good with stitches. It's amazing how quickly my laundry room counter can turn into an operating room. Out come the sutures, the betodine solution, cotton balls, alcohol, q-tips, towels, and paper towels. My husband holds the light, my Mom holds the baby's head, I'm the officiating "Gofer" nurse, and my Dad is the surgeon. Even after over an hour of surgery, that pig, barely a day old, never passes out and never stops fighting. My Dad would get all his little guts stuffed back in, the pig would scream and push them right back out again. We had to increase the size of the hole in order to not pinch the bowels when shoveling them back in to the body cavity. At one point, Mom goes out to referee supper time for the kids, they were eating moose stew at this point, while Marc, Dad and I kept at the pig. After a lot cussing and cajoling and cramming, we got Eugene the Grouch sewed back up. All his parts close to the places they originated from and him none the friendlier. So far so good. As of 10:30 tonight Eugene is still well enough to keep on complaining. We will have to see what the morning will bring us. Will it be a miracle or a finally quiet pig?

Debi: Urban winter

2009-02-19T10:23:00.008-09:00

Winter in the city is a lot different from winter in the country or even the sprawling suburbs. I grew up in a suburb of Milwaukee, a place with no sidewalks or public transportation, where even the kids who lived across the street from the elementary school took the bus. Winter meant going everywhere in something powered by gasoline.

Here in Evanston, which may as well be Chicago for its dense population and pedestrian focus, the weather takes on entirely new meaning. Ronni's school has no buses for neighborhood children, and the parking lot has room for perhaps twenty cars. The streets surrounding the school have little parking available during school hours, and everyone lives within less than a mile radius of the school itself. As a result, the vast majority of the students there get to school on foot.

This is something I love about it, but also something that requires a whole set of gear I never anticipated. Sammi is still too small to make that six block trek through the snow at anything approaching a reasonable speed, and so it is crucial that we have a way of transporting her on our journey. With clear sidewalks, a stroller works beautifully -- and becomes like a rolling luggage rack too, holding backpacks and extra shoes and lunchboxes and random necessities.

With snowy sidewalks, all bets are off.

Sidewalks are cleared by the residents of the houses that face them, and not all of those residents are imagining a stroller passing through. Handicap ramps from the sidewalk to the street at each corner often only reveal a shoveled path wide enough for the narrowest feet. Hoisting a stroller -- and its 30-plus-pounds of cargo -- over the snowbank there is not an option. When it snows, I am left without the ability to push Sammi to school in the stroller. What's a city mom to do?

Thank heavens for the soft carrier made by CatBirdBaby. I have about five pounds of leeway before Sammi gets too big for it, and I hope by then she'll be able to walk. When the snow is too deep for the stroller but not deep enough yet for option #2 (below), I strap Sammi to my back in this carrier, and we stomp off to school. That's her in there on a hike last summer -- imagine this but with both of us in heavy winter coats, hats, mittens, and her in snowpants and boots.

Remember that sled you pulled up the hill hundreds of times as a kid, only to throw yourself onto it on your belly and slide down again? The big plastic one with the rope tied to the front? That's Sammi's chariot when the snow is so deep that I can't bear to trudge through it with 30 pounds on my back. She has learned to grip the sides tightly as I drag her over unshoveled sidewalks, across snowy yards and even -- scraping the bottom as we go -- across one busy intersection, depending on the mercy of motorists seeing a five-foot-tall woman in snow gear pulling a very overstuffed preschooler in a red sled.

All this is so that I can get my kids to school on foot. I could drive, but it's six blocks. SIX! Driving is just too ridiculous for me to bear. As a result, we've invested in good boots, long underwear, a decent carrier, and no small order of cojones. Be kind to your pedestrian parents everywhere!!!

Stori- furry and fuzzy friends

2009-02-18T07:28:00.003-09:00

There was only a very short period of time in my life that I was not surrounded by animals. It was the loneliest I had ever been. My family had a small farm when I was growing up, and a good portion of my folks' income was made from selling weaner pigs, milk, cream, and eggs. We would have anywhere from 1 to 6 milk cows, about 50 or so laying hens, a handful of sheep, and quite a few brood sows. And of course, horses. Always my horses. Along with having milk cows comes having barn cats, and what's a childhood on a farm without a dog? Needless to say, I had lots of friends to play with, just very few of them walked upright.

It was not uncommon to have a baby pig living in the house on a bottle. My family never took to the philosophy of getting rid of runts, we just gave them a little extra TLC and they made it fine. Having very little in the extra money department, but a whole lot extra in the "we can do this ourselves" section, I can only remember one time having a vet on the place. We did all our own castrating, calf pulling, butchering, and even surgery when the need arose. We had one little pig get her front leg almost ripped right off when her momma accidentally stepped on her when she was only a couple hours old. My dad brought her up to the house and proceeded to stitch her up from the inside out, bandaged her up tight, popped a bottle in her mouth and called her good. We named her Dottie and she was forever the grouchiest pig I had ever met. She lived to adulthood and we sold her as a sow to someone else. I don't know how many hundreds of animals I have watched being born. Every time it's a miracle. It was also a fantastic sex ed lesson for us kids. There was no question to us about the birds and bees. We witnessed it, from beginning to end, a hundred times. We knew what sex caused and that nature was messy.

I wanted the same education and lifestyle for my kids, and thanks to my parents living next door, they're getting it. Last May, on Mother's Day, our milk cow Molly had her baby at 8:30 in the morning. I was right there helping, along with my dad, with my husband and kids front row center. What a wonderful Mother's Day gift to be able to help create another Mother? My kids got the chance to watch a live birth of a baby calf. It was bloody, and slippery, and looked horribly painful, but they watched. I was glad my oldest daughter, Paige, was right there witnessing the end product of sex, especially since we are entering the ever painful puberty stage of her life. There will be no questions from her on where do babies come from. She was able to watch that particular door open. The baby was healthy, the momma was natural, the day was perfect.

On February 15Th, my youngest girl, Sunni Sue, and I went out to give the horses their afternoon feeding. Paige and Colt, my two oldest, were over hanging out with my folks. We had 3 sow pigs that were due about this time and we had been keeping a careful eye on them. Pigs are like alarm clocks when it comes to babies. If you are able to watch the boar cover them, it will be exactly to the hour of the day they were bred, 3 months, 3 weeks, and 3 days that they will have their babies. But, since we hadn't been able to catch the love birds in the act, it was a guess of a couple days. So Sunni Sue and I were going to poke our heads in to the farrowing barn for a quick look to see if any of the ladies had built their nests yet. Momma pigs are pretty smart, they will gather any little bit of building material they can to get ready for babies. Straw, sawdust, dirt, anything. They gather it all up and build a mound and lay on top of it for labor. They are so big and the babies so tiny that this way, the babies roll right off the hill and don't get squashed by the momma. So...in Sunni Sue and I peeked just in time to see out come a baby! Our white sow already had 6 nursing and we watched another. Little Sunni Sue was so excited, she recognized right away that those were different pigs. She's only 16 months old, so that was a pretty big observation in itself. All in all, 2 of our 3 sows had their babies that day. Each sow had 12 and each lost 2. Those are both huge litters for first year gilts, a usual litter size is only 8 for a first timer. Losing two isn't uncommon for pigs either. We still have 1 sow due any minute, plus 2 others that aren't ready for another month or so. Spring is in the air!

Pigs are the cutest of any babies I have seen. Within minutes of hitting the ground they are fighting. Vicious little newborn fights, little barks and squeals. They are the toughest things going, just ask them, they would be happy to tell you. They are so clean and so shiny. Their little noses so tough skinned. They put up such a fight when first picked up, but are completely tame within minutes. They are happy to curl up in your neck for a little nap. Nothing cuter than a baby pig. The baby that Sunni Sue and I watched being born was, unfortunately, a runt. Barely half the size of her siblings. Baby pigs will immediately after birth pick a teat. This is theirs, they do not share, and once picked, stick with it. The closer to the head of the momma the more milk a teat will produce, farther back, less milk. My guess is this is where the saying "sucking hind tit" comes from. When we notice a runt, we try to get him a front teat as soon as possible. This will give the runt the best possible chance at survival, but of course, since they are smaller and weaker, they are usually pushed to the back. Dad noticed on the second day that the little runt wasn't doing so good. Weaker than the rest and getting thin, Dad decided to bring him in to the house and bottle feed it to make sure it was getting all it needed. I was so excited, how fun it would be for my kids to have a bottle baby of their own. To really know how much work a baby is. I was fully prepared to take over the care of this little guy. The first night, Mom and Dad were able to get it to eat two good sized feedings. By the next morning, it was too weak to feed and died shortly after. Sometimes the babies just don't make it, no matter the good intentions. This is life, and death, on a family farm.

Debi: Yummy in a crowd

2009-02-12T06:32:00.002-09:00

I made these "carrot cupcakes" for Ronni's sixth birthday last year, at her request.
Stori is right; we are both passionate cooks and love experimenting with new recipes and food ideas. I don't know if she'll get around to bragging about this, but Stori has invented the most delicious bread I've ever had. She calls it Mimi Bread, named after her mother, who was seeking a bread low on the glycemic index. Stori's Mimi Bread (aka "million grain bread," since the number of different grains and seeds in it is astounding) has been in regular rotation around my house for a while now, and is now a request of some of my friends and family when I ask "what can I bring?"

And right there is a very key difference in Stori's and my food-lives: we city mice eat with lots of different people, all the time.

Stori mentioned in his blog that, living remote from town as they do, her parents and her brother's family make up their little community. For me, living in a densely-populated urban area, and with large numbers of extended family members living all within an hour radius of my house, my "community" is quite a different thing. In a given week, I'll sit down to a meal (or at least a cup of coffee at a cafe) with half a dozen different friends or family members. Impromptu gatherings after school sometimes turn into "just stay for dinner," with someone running home for an improvised side dish while their kids play in my basement. It's not uncommon to have dinner consist of whatever soup I've made, homemade bread, someone's quickly procured batch of hard-boiled eggs, and a big bowl of fruit.

In the summers, my family gets a weekly box of organic produce from a farm about 90 minutes away, delivered with dozens of other boxes to someone's garage nearby. It's called a "CSA share," (CSA is Community Supported Agriculture), and we pay a premium to get these delicious, fresh, locally grown vegetables for 20 weeks of the year. We pick up our box on the same day as our neighborhood farmer's market, and so our routine last summer was to go home, make a quick picnic dinner, and eat it at the park adjacent to the farmer's market, where we'd supplement our picnic with fresh fruit from the local farmers who sell there. Lots of neighborhood families meet there to picnic together and watch our kids play.

If I make that Mimi Bread, I almost always end up with an extra loaf to give to someone -- a neighbor with a new baby, or a friend of Ronni's with a sick parent, or someone who has stopped over here to say hello on their way home from school. When I bake cookies, I'll often stick a baggie of them in the lunch box of Ronni's best friend, or leave a plate of them at the front desk at Sammi's preschool. A particularly good batch of soup might find its way into a single-serving container and handed to a friend with a cold.

This is all to say that for me, food is part of the way I communicate with the people around me. I love to cook, but mostly for an audience!

Stori: yummy

2009-02-11T08:54:00.001-09:00

One of the major things Debi and I have in common is our love of food and our passion for making it! Although our styles are INCREDIBLY different, we both truly enjoy making fun healthy food for our families. It is not uncommon for the majority of the ingredients in any given dish I make for my family to have come directly from our hand. We garden, we harvest, we farm, we collect. One of the most common meals we eat is chicken fried moose steak, mashed potatoes and gravy, and corn. The moose is one we would have harvested, we grew the potatoes, the milk for the gravy comes from our milk cow. The corn, of course, is bought. I would like to see the guy who can grow corn in interior Alaska!

My 10 year old daughter, Paige, wanted to make some special Valentine's cookies for her friends. My husband always talked about the sugar cookies his Mama used to make and after his dad died this past February, we found her recipe book and her special sugar cookie recipe! After baking these the first time for Marc shortly after we got home from the funeral, I also realize these were some dang good cookies! So of course, this is the cookie that I'm making for Paige and her friends and since I had the book out, I thought I would share it. I think there are better way to show love than boughten greeting cards and dead cut flowers. In my life, food equals love.

Sugar Cookies

2/3 cup shortening
3/4 cup sugar
1/2 tsp grated orange peel
1/2 tsp vanilla
1 egg
4 tsp milk
2 cups sifted flour
1 1/2 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp salt

Throughly cream shortening, sugar, orange peel, and vanilla. Add egg; beat till light and fluffy. Stir in milk. Sift together dry ingredients; blend into creamed mixture. Divide dough in half. Chill dough 1 hour. On lightly floured surface, roll to 1/8 inch. Cut into desired shapes with cutters. Bake on greased cookie sheet at 375 about 6 to 8 minutes. Cool slightly; remove from pan. Cool on rack. Decorate. Makes a little under 2 dozen.

Stori: Love is in the air

2009-02-10T15:27:00.001-09:00

I love the sounds this time of year brings. After supper last night, I was walking back to the barn with my Dad to finish evening chores. We stopped for a moment to listen to the owls. There must have been 4 or 5 of them calling to each other. I'm not sure which kind were being so talkative, there are several types that live around us. They are one of my favorite bird calls, hauntingly spooky. Lonely sounding, yet comforting. We have several Great Horned Owls that hunt our fields, they are so regal looking, perched atop the very tip of a spruce tree. Dad casually mentioned mating season and how vocal they get. I had to stop and think about what he said. The huge increase of bird activity this time of year has always just been a given to me. I guess I never really thought about why everybody was so excited all of sudden. The woodpeckers have also gotten into the raucous act. Drumming on trees constantly trying their hardest to call in a potential partner. We have two kinds of woodpecker that are very common around the place. The Hairy, which is the smaller of the two, and the Downy which is a fierce looking fellow. They are the acrobats of the place, dangling upside down as they look for their treasures. Living in a cabin can get pretty noisy when a couple woodpeckers decide to look for their next dinner in your logs.

This afternoon I was walking to the barn to give the horses their afternoon feeding. I feed 3 times a day to stoke their body furnace and to help them with the winter boredom we all experience, even the livestock. It was a beautiful afternoon. We are finally getting some radiant heat from the sun, so the light was warm on my face, it was nice crisp -10 below. Not uncomfortable at all. I stopped to listen to all the courting songs around me of the neighborhood. The blue jays were having air born dogfights, trying to impress the ladies. The chickadees and red polled finches chattering away, interrupting each other the whole time. I guess it's not just colors that are impressive, but the ability to brag about them. I heard Molly the milk cow give a grunt and a sigh as she lay down to chew her cud. Heidi, my favorite lady horse's hooves squeaking on the snow with impatience. She knew what my job was out there, and all I was doing was standing there looking into the trees like an idiot. That's when I heard it. A song I didn't recognize. A shrill sweet song repeating over and over. I searched the trees for quite a while before I spotted the culprit and seen a female Pine Grossbeak at the top of a birch. Her man flew to her and they squabbled in the air for a time then flew themselves away. Grossbeaks are one of my favorites. Very shy, and very rarely come to my feeders. The males are so brilliant red, they catch your eye as they fly past the window. Mating for life, you always see pairs. Such a treat when they do visit. I guess today, they were feeling the promise of spring too.

Debi & Stori: Mouse Chat

2009-02-10T09:54:00.003-09:00

We were chatting about our last two posts, and it was so interesting, we decided to just post our chat transcript. It IS a small world, but it sure does have a lot of tiny hidden corners.

Debi:
I would not last two hours on your farm.

I AM sorry that you've had such sad and difficult experiences with city life.

Stori:

i guess that was a public apology to you about my 1st reaction with the school news

i did exactly what you were fighting against

Debi:

You didn't owe me one. I wasn't angry with you. You are like someone from another country in that regard -- you don't understand what it's like. That reporter knew exactly what he was doing.

Stori:

ok.

i just wanted to make sure

Debi:

I think it comes down to a very simple question, for me:

Are people generally good, with some bad apples, or are people generally bad, with a few nice exceptions?

Naively, perhaps, I think they're generally good.

Stori:

i just can't trust the general public. but i would hope it would be the good way

Debi:

This is going to sound really dumb...

Stori:

i doubt it

Debi:

...but I actually believe that putting out positive, trusting energy into the world can make it manifest.

I send out love. Love reaches people. People return it.

Stori:

that is a wonderful thought

wouldn't that be a great world to live in?

Debi:

Stori, I am going to say this with no attitude at all, but that's hard to hear over text on the internet...

...but...

...we DO live in that world.

Think of you and I.

You and I do live in that world. You and I trusted each other and it worked out well. How many chances to have that same experience with other people have we BOTH missed out on because we sent out scared, mistrustful vibes instead of loving ones?

Stori:

i'll have to think about this

Debi:

I promise that I am not saying that in any kind of angry tone.

But perhaps it answers any question you might have about how I can live in a city.

Stori:

i don't take it that way at all.

Debi:

I look around me and see all these people, all the time, people everywhere...

...and I think about all the friendships I could have with them. Any of them. All of them, if I had the time.

I have been so surprised by who I can connect to, given the chance.

Stori:

ok, think about this

this is another small example of how different our worlds are

Debi:

Exactly

It's funny -- I was thinking about the types of things that would worry me in your world.

#1 among them would be letting my kids so near to animals all the time.

And me too -- a horse could kick someone! bite someone! cows are huge -- what if one fell on Sammi?!

What if one of the dogs didn't trust these new people around him/her and just attacked?

Stori:

LOL, they only fall if you push it over

Debi:

All of this, I realize, sounds ridiculous to you.

Stori:

and my fears of the city sound just as ridiculous to you

Debi:

Exactly

I can see why you'd be afraid, given the experiences (or lack of them) you've had.

And the same for me.

So if I came to visit you, I'd just have to ask a lot of questions, follow your lead, and trust you.

Stori:

the same as i would you

but i'm afraid after a while you feel like you were leading a short bus version of tour chicago

Debi:

Hell no

I'd get a kick out of watching your eyes widen and your mouth droop open. :D

Stori:

this is EXACTLY why i love the idea of our blog

Debi:

Yep, me too.

Stori: the other side

2009-02-10T06:41:00.002-09:00

When Debi first told me about this horrible thing that had happened in Ronni's school, I admit, I immediately became one of the people that made Debi feel like she had to play defense against. My first reaction was "Are you going to pull Ronni out of school?" I think Debi was a little surprised with my question. Of course not she said, why would she? In my way of thinking, there were a hundred reasons that she should of. I'm not sure any of them were valid, but they all were gut reaction. How did it happen? Why did it happen? Who did this? I was sure, it was a who, not an accident. Now I do hope I am completely wrong and it was just a horrible senseless accident, but it goes against my better judgement.

We can blame it on the media, or on the way I was brought up. We can even blame it on my total ignorance of how things really are, but I cannot help but picture cities as these dark, crowded, uncaring places that are totally filled with people out to get you. Bad things happen to people in cities. They are populated by killers, druggies, and people who work in small cubicles. I love to watch TV shows based on city life in the same way as I enjoy watching animal planet. It's hard for me to find anything to identify with.

I was raised on an acreage in northwest Colorado. The town only had about a 1000 people in it, and it was where my Mom was born and raised. My family lived about 12 miles outside of town. The road we lived on was a small two lane highway that led out of Colorado to Wyoming. Now our house sat way up top a hill surrounded by hundreds of acres of empty land. From a very young age, my Dad put such a fear in me of that road, that I would only dare to go down there if I was on a horse. Never would I have dreamt of riding my bike alone on that small highway. It was such an empty place that hours could go by without a car driving by at all. Now my Dad always said that I was safer on a horse because I could escape pretty easy across country. He always told me that someone was going to snatch me up and drive right out of the state and they would never find me. I had red hair you know....for some reason that was supposed to put me at higher risk for kidnap? So I think that is where it all started, the deep mistrust of other people outside my family. Every car coming up behind you was a potential murderer/kidnapper/bad guy. My father was a Sheriff's Deputy before I was born and I think when you work a career surrounded by criminals, you see bogeymen behind every bush. Assume the worst, prepare yourself for all. After we moved from Meeker after the oil shale bust, we moved to the front range to Canon City. My Dad got a job with the prison system in Canon that at the time I think had 13 prisons in the area. This did not improve my Dad's outlook on the world, nor lessen his fear for his daughter. Canon was a larger town than Meeker, but still not a city by any means. To me, it was huge! It had two grocery stores and restaurants, and even a McDonald's! We still lived outside of town, still had our farm animals. I was never led to believe that I was in too much danger when I was in the town of Meeker, we knew everyone, literally. Nor was it too dangerous in Canon, it was still a small town. People talk too much in small towns, a person can't get away with too much. Mess up enough and eventually you will be found out. If I was smart, I would stay safe. That was the mantra I grew up with, Stay Together. Be Careful. Don't Wander Off! I had never lived with a locked door, or a closed curtain. I don't think we even had keys for our doors.

Then I moved to Texas. I lived in an apartment building. I was scared to death. We lived in a really poor part of town and the city we lived in had over 100,000 people in it. I heard gunshots, but it wasn't from pheasant hunting. Every time a car drove by I ran to the window to see who was coming to my house. My entire life I lived with the knowledge that if you heard a car, someone was in your driveway. For the first time I had curtains on my windows, I tried not to, but people would walk by AND LOOK IN. Our car was broke into and someone stole the quarters out of the console. The majority of people were black. There was one partial black family in Meeker, we were actually related. And only a small handful of blacks in Canon. This racial diversity was something so foreign to me, it was hard to deal with. I had no racist feelings, just total ignorance. There was man named "K' that lived in the apartment above me. He would try to trade cigarettes for opened packages of food he had. Like if I gave him 2 cigarettes he would give me a half a can of Nestle Quik chocolate milk powder. Living there confirmed everything that my Dad had unknowingly taught me growing up about cities and city people. I had a customer jump over the counter of a convenience store I was working in one night and punch me in the face because I was enforcing the prepay for gas after dark rule.

After my family moved to Alaska, it was much better. People were too busy trying not to get themselves killed from the land to bother each other too much. When I lived in Grand Junction for a short time, I had a small break down on the freeway. No one stopped. Not one person stopped to help me. When I slid off the road in North Pole on the way to work several years ago, my car had barely slid to a stop before 3 vehicles had pulled over to help me. Yet, as I send my daughter off every day to go to the 5Th grade, I'm scared. She goes to school on the Air Force Base since that is the closest school to us. It is filled with people that had come from cities and were only forced to live this type of lifestyle. They bring with them their city ideas. Once again, we live way outside of town. I pass on to her the gift of social fear. Be Careful! Don't Talk To Anyone! Just because someone is in the military does not mean they are not psychotic! While other kids in her class go to the youth center, I won't allow it. The only reason those kids go is because they have no parents at home waiting for them. She asks if she can have a sleepover at a friend's house. No, we don't know those people. I can't be sure they would keep her safe. She is teased by kids in her class because she lives on a farm. They say she stinks and we must be poor because we have pigs and milk cows. What kind of people are these?

Even as an adult, the fear of the city and the people that live there still exists. My husband and I were discussing a possible trip for me to go to visit and meet Debi in Chicago a while back. His greatest issue was my safety. Will she be able to keep me safe? Would I find myself the victim of one the million crimes that exist in those places? Bad things happen in the city. There is not safety in numbers.

Now that this short explanation has turned into a long novel. I hope it might explain a small bit why my first question to Debi was if she was going to take Ronni out of school. It was the most logical step to me. See,"I told ya", my psyche said, people with get you in the city, even kids in school are not safe. If this horrible thing happened to that 10 year old boy, obviously Ronni is at danger. I know this does not make sense to most. Now I only wonder what kind of fears a city person would have walking in my world?

Debi: Playing defense

2009-02-09T17:31:00.002-09:00

Almost as I typed the last of my blog post last week, a tragedy occurred within the very school community I was praising.

Last Tuesday, just before the end of the school day, a fifth grader at my daughter's elementary school was discovered hanging from a coat hook in the bathroom. He was unresponsive, and he died the next morning. Early autopsy reports label it a suicide. The community is shaken to its core -- this boy was ten years old.

The school, like any school in this litigious society, is unable to comment on whatever speculation the administration may have about what really happened. Our school principal is a man I deeply, deeply trust. He invited the school's horrified parents to meet with him, hear his story of what happened, and ask questions. The story he told of discovering this poor child reduced him -- and many of the rest of us -- to tears. I was moved beyond description watching this strong, competent, intelligent, and able leader break down under the enormity of what had happened, and then pick himself up, straighten his tie, and begin the process of helping his students and staff to grieve and heal. I imagine he will never be the same man again, in his heart, and I ache for him in the same way that I ache for the parents of the boy who died.

Our community is doing what good people should: raising money for the boy's funeral costs, arranging meals for the family, bringing in homemade lunches for the teachers and staff, and standing strong against the unconscionable media attention that has focused on the lack of details provided by the school to the tv and newspapers. I approached a camera man perched on the corner of the school grounds on Friday and asked him if they would please be sensitive to the children when they left school. His response? "We can't talk to the kids without their parents' permission anyway."

After a few moments, the anchorman agreed to interview me. His first question was "Are you considering pulling your child out of Oakton School?"

You can imagine where it went from there. I have no intention of pulling Ronni out of this wonderful school -- and it IS a wonderful school, a wonderful school that was the scene of a terrible, terrible accident. Either the boy did indeed hang himself, or someone put him there as a joke, or he got himself stuck by mistake -- but no matter how it happened, I cannot imagine a way to turn it into a systemic problem. This reporter needed to have answers fast; in the absence of fact, he was desperate to find an enemy, any enemy, the most convenient enemy. He chose the school administration. He promised to air my supportive views of the school, but the report on the ten o'clock news was an angry, accusatory one-sided rant. He told me in passing, as I left, that the good things we were doing were "not news."

This is a world where terrible things happen, sometimes. We should work to reduce the terror when we can determine its source. We should not run from it with closed eyes, frightened to recognize it, but face it with questions, ask it to show itself, and discover its weaknesses. Blame is a popular way to face what we fear; name the perpetrator and you may solve the crime, but discovering why it was wrought may bring us closer to eliminating it. As the families of Oakton School -- and especially the family of the boy whose life was cut short -- wait for these answers, I am sending my most fervent wishes for gentleness and patience to surround us all.

Debi: City Mouse

2009-02-03T09:54:00.001-09:00

Stori's done a great job introducing herself, and so now it's my turn.

My husband and I have two daughters: Ronni is 6 and Sammi is 3. We live in a wonderful midwestern suburb called Evanston, literally four blocks from the northern border of the city of Chicago. We chose Evanston for several reasons that really get to the heart of who we are as a family. Explaining it requires me to backtrack a little into our history.

I never intended to be a stay-at-home mother. My hope, years ago when Ronni was born, was that I would be able to work outside the home a few days a week, and work from my home the rest of the time. That worked beautifully until Sammi was born, and her chronic illness (which was later diagnosed as a congenital heart defect) made it necessary for me to quit working outright.

It was a terrible shock to me, to go from managing a department of web developers to sitting home, all day, with a preschooler and her very sick and very needy baby sister. We lived in a townhouse complex in the city of Chicago, and while I knew a few people with small children, most days were excruciatingly isolating. I felt trapped, terribly lonely, and desperately in need of a community around me. My parents lived far away; my brother was single, young, and working; my in-laws, while only about an hour away, were busy with their own lives on a daily basis. I was parenting in a vacuum most days. It was, in a word, miserable, especially since I hadn't expected ever to do it.

So, when Ronni was nearing kindergarten age, and we knew the city school would not meet our standards, we began looking for a place to move. Our neighborhood in Evanston met the most important standards we'd set, namely:

It had a good elementary school.
I could walk to coffeeshops, the library, parks, preschool for Sammi ( who, by then, was healthier), and the elementary school.

Evanston also had several other benefits, less crucial but definite advantages over more distant suburbs. One was that it was very diverse; the school Ronni attends is 58% African-American, and perhaps 30% Caucasian, with the rest a jumble of all sorts of other ethnic groups. The income level also varies widely in Evanston, so we knew that moving here would introduce our children to a range of different people of different heritage, means, and cultures. That opens its own share of issues, of course, but these seemed preferable to us.

We love living here. After my husband goes to work, our day starts with a walk, every day: to drop Ronni off at her elementary school, then Sammi at her preschool, all within a four-block radius of our house. I come home and begin working; I've been able to pick up several freelance contracts that keep me busy enough to cover the costs of our "extras." In the afternoon, I head back out to do the walking commute in reverse -- pick up Sammi, then pick up Ronni. When the weather is nice, we all stay at the elementary school for an hour or two for the kids to play outside and for me to visit with the other parents who do the same. In the winter -- which I admit is nothing like Stori's winter, not even close -- we all scurry home. Sammi is in a stroller when the sidewalks are shoveled clean enough, and when they're not, she's on my back in a backpark or pulled behind me in a sled.

We go home. We play. We read. We cook. We eat. We read some more. We put on pajamas, brush teeth, snuggle and love each other, and sleep. The rhythm of life when you have children largely varies in the details, between families. This is our City Mouse rhythm.

Stori: frozen mouse

2009-02-03T07:46:00.001-09:00

The very first thing we do every morning is go look what the temperature is. While most people may go to the bathroom, let the dog out, or pour the coffee, we thermometer watch. My house has 4 inside thermometers, and 3 outside the house. We have 3 because the heat coming from the house changes the temp, only by maybe 4 to 5 degrees, but enough. This morning we woke to -30F. That's below zero. The temperature dictates what we will do during that day. I find myself looking at the temp probably 10 to 20 times a day. My husband and I talk about whether or not folks in the lower 48 really understand what cold is. My sister in law emails me from Minnesota the other day saying how it was horribly cold, almost -10 below! I'm thinking to myself, -10 barely dictates a coat, I don't even wear a hat at -10. The borough school district has a recess policy for the schools, any temp down to -20 below, the kids still go outside for recess. The weekend my husband and I met for the first time, it was -62 below. That has been the coldest I have seen it so far, and it was absolutely terrifying. We were camping and I had my 4 year old daughter with me. Now I don't say this to prove how tough we are, or to make it sound worse than it is, the cold is just a fact of life.

In order to exist this far north, there are certain things one has to put up with on a daily basis. My husband refers to this as your acceptable level of discomfort. We, obviously, have to deal with extreme cold. Then we also have to deal with the darkness. Never before I lived here was I so aware of Winter and Summer Solstice. Summer Solstice, June 21st, is near depressing since that is the day we start losing minutes of daylight a day. That is the day that it doesn't get dark at all. Winter Solstice almost feels like the halfway mark in a marathon. That is the day we start to gain minutes of daylight once again. It is the darkest and shortest day of the year. But once you have hit December 21st, it's almost a sigh of relief, that's the worst of the darkness..whew. It the deepest of winter, we are lucky if we even see the sun itself, it does get light, but almost dusky. In the height of summer, the darkest it ever gets is the same level of dusky. The sun never rises overhead, just circles around you along the horizon. There is no such thing as high noon in the interior. We also have 2 to 3 months, twice a year, when our light to dark ratio is almost normal.

Now there is more to dealing with the oddities of the arctic than just brrr, it's cold, or wearing sunglasses at 2 a.m. Driving a car during the winter requires either a heated garage, or 3 separate heating pads on your engine. You must have your vehicle plugged in at least 2 hours prior to actually driving or the fluid in your engine is frozen. If you didn't plug in early enough, you can always resort to a blast furnace pointed to the undercarriage of your car. You must be very careful though, or you can end up melting the plastic and rubber parts of your engine.
Every other time you gas up, you need to put in a fuel additive called Heat. This prevents condensation in your gas tank which causes water in your fuel in the winter. There is also "square tires". When a car is parked in the cold for any period of time, the rubber in the tires hardens which causes a flat spot where the tires touch the ground. Once you start driving, for a couple miles, it feels as if you have square tires since that flat spot stays there till the air can heat up inside the tire. A person must also ALWAYS carry a cold weather pack for each person in the car. Inside this pack you must have enough cold weather gear, water, food, and light to allow you to survive walking 1 mile. Now that may not seem like very far, but a mile at -40 is not as leisurely a stroll as you would like.

This may all sound like a horror story, and granted, it can get pretty miserable. But I cannot let myself forget all the beauty and advantages to living here. The clouds here are the most breathtaking I have ever seen. The amount and level of green-ness in the summer. Falling asleep at night watching the northern lights put on a brilliant show, or falling asleep listening to the birds putting on their own version of a great show. Never knowing what you may run into around the next corner, or who is behind those trees. Moose are almost a guarantee, but wolf and bear are also a very real possibility. This is a place of hardship, beauty, struggle, and adventure.l

Stori: Country mouse

2009-01-30T13:17:00.001-09:00

Hello, my name is Stori and I live in the Alaska interior. It seems that I get the opportunity to meet people in very different ways, my friend Debi is a perfect example.

Like Debi, my life revolves around my family. My husband and I have 3 children, aged 15 months to 10 years. We live in a log cabin that we built ourselves. Right next door to us, on the other side of the barn yard, lives my folks, and just up the road a bit lives my brother, his wife, and their 3 children. All of us have built the homes we live in, and all of us have helped each other with the building of each home.

Between my parents and my little family, we have a small farm operation. We raise a small herd of Dexter milk cows for milk and beef, we farrow out several sow hogs each year for extra income from the weaner pigs and also meat for our family, and we have a small flock of about 40 laying hens for which we sell the eggs we are not able to use ourselves. I also have a couple horses (draft mix) that we use for riding, packing, driving, and general companionship. We pasture out our larger livestock on our land during the summer and free range our chickens when the weather permits.

We try to live as close to the earth as possible, which is hard sometimes since most of our ground is usually frozen solid. We grow potatoes enough to last us an entire year, till next season's crop is done. My Mom and I can and freeze all the food we are able from our garden and from nature. If berry picking was a sport, my Mom would be professional. We also hunt, but we use what we hunt, and only harvest what we can use. My husband is the mechanic of the family as well as a blacksmith.

Since we have no other neighbors besides each other, my family has become a community in itself. We each have our own jobs and responsibilities to our community. We each create and provide in our own way, even the kids. My community is not covered with concrete, but with snow and ice most of the year, and tundra the rest. I fear no robber or break in, but moose, wolves, and bear are very real dangers.

With all of this said, it is amazing how similar mine and Debi's lives really are at the base line, yet so incredibly different in so many ways.

Debi: Welcome to Our Small World

2009-01-30T10:53:00.001-09:00

My name is Debi, and I met my friend Stori on the Internet about two years ago.

We are both deeply feeling women, both mothers, both intensely engaged in our families and the lives we want to build for them. We met online because each of us had a child diagnosed with a birth defect that, while destined to be outgrown, left us scared and searching for answers. We found that this tiny thing, a small detail in lives that would long outlast the problem that brought us together, was only one of many surprises we would have in common.

To me, that is one of the great benefits of the internet: that two people who would never, ever have met in the days before it, could share a moment in time where they'd have otherwise felt terribly alone. As Stori and I shared our fears, commiserated about what was happening to our babies and ourselves, we discovered that there were other things we had in common, things that still surprise us every day as we chat on messaging programs and occasionally on the phone.

Why should we be surprised? Because, on the surface, Stori and I lead completely different lives. I live in an urban center just north of Chicago, Illinois. Stori lives in rural Alaska. The rhythm of our days -- indeed, the rhythm of the very seasons in our parts of the world -- dictate tremendously different challenges, joys, and even basic patterns of daily living. It's easy to get caught up in what we've come to call the "City Mouse, Country Mouse" game: enumerating our differences and teasing each other for our tendencies to fall into stereotypes of the country hick and the soft city slicker.

In the end, though, common humanity unites us. Both of us love our children, love our spouses, have an alliance with decency and respectful consensual living, and are curious about what happens outside our own comfort zones. And we both believe that there are a lot of other people out there like us. So, here is our contribution to mutual understanding in the world: Country Blog, City Blog. Welcome!