Rebuild from Depression Blog

In our part of California we enjoy all four seasons but of course none really start when the calendar says they will. Winter starts in October when I start the first fire in the woodstove. (Someone suggested on this blog that I cannot hunt bear in winter since they are hibernating. “If a fire is in the woodstove, it’s winter.”) Spring begins when we have just about had our last fire of the season.

Here are some key signs that spring has begun:

• Someone mistakenly leaves a window or door open over night and it doesn’t really matter.
  
• I lose my sweater regularly because I keep taking it off.
  
• Mom is ready to move seedlings from the greenhouse to the garden.

But the key for me is that the road to the High Sierra is open and I can return to my redwood office. It’s been passable for a couple of weeks but the Sheriff promised me a ticket if he found me up there. Today Frederick and I will take the 30-minute drive to the Giant Sequoia grove, the Trail of a Hundred Giants. I’ll pack lunches, a computer for me, and a project for him. We’ll work for the better part of an hour (just to say we did) and spend the rest of the time exploring. My husband will be home trying to figure out how to sell a book from this website. It sounds like a great deal to me. :)

Excited that the road was open to the High Sierra, I packed sandwiches, salad, a six year old, and a sixty-eight year old into my car and headed to the Trail of a Hundred Giants. We got within two miles of the trail when we were stopped by “Road Closed” signs. A sign of spring here is the lack of these "Road Closed" signs, so we've got another week or two of "winter."

With cold sandwiches and few options, we drove about fifteen minutes down the only open road to Johnsondale and happened upon their privately-owned, timeshare-like ranch. For the cost of interest in buying into the ranch, we were able to picnic on the grounds.

It is a cowboy ranch with a shooting range, archery range, horseback riding, fishing, boating, tennis, and volleyball for members. On Saturday nights you can two-step in the saloon to the live country music. The security guard tells me that the saloon does not come complete with drunken brawls.

As we picnicked, I said, “Dad, you really need to buy into this place. Surely you could bring guests.” I discussed how reasonable the buy-in cost would be for him.

As we packed the car, we ran into the general manager: Dennis, my dad’s good friend from a whole other time in his life. Dennis gave us the skinny on the property, along with a cabin tour.

We missed the Trail and must wait longer for spring to begin officially around here, but as a nice tradeoff, I could be on horseback sooner than expected.

Happy belated Mother's Day all you mothers! Here's a Mother's Day card for you.

I spent the weekend in the garden and on the hammock. It doesn't get much better than that. :)

Mom has been gardening up a storm and wrote the following about tomatoes:

Some heirlooms show up in nurseries this time of year, but not many varieties. After several discouraging years of hunting, I decided to mail-order several varieties. Being able to order one of each variety allows us to taste-test and determine our short-list.

From past garden adventures we know that green zebra, pineapple and purple Russian are sure winners. We also know that IF we can find these tomatoes at the farmers’ market, they are selling for about $4 a pound. Shoot, we eat a couple of pounds in one meal!

Heirlooms still have great flavor and interesting colors. The hybrids are developed to be heavy producing, easy handling money-makers. I go for flavor and looks! You will, too, when you find the varieties that fit you palate.

With heirlooms we also have the opportunity to collect seed. Most heirlooms remain true, even when planted near other varieties. That is probably the only reason we still have heirlooms!

Now these tiny mail-order plants have arrived about a month too early, in the middle of April. Spring is late in stabilizing here in the Sierra Nevada foothills, witnessed by last week’s brief snow.

Our solution:
We put the plants into 4-inch pots with good soil and placed the pots under a small greenhouse cover. The plants joined some seedlings of tomatoes from our own saved seed of last season. This is so much fun…almost addictive.
The greenhouse cover was a gift from my brother when he moved to a home that had a full greenhouse set up. Before his gift, I used simple solutions like rigging up some temporary sides to the tomato shelter, then covering it with 4mil plastic. Both solutions work well.

Temperatures are finally becoming more stable and the soil is warming, so we will move the tomato guests into the orchard to grow beneath some young fruit trees. Lots of sun there. And, tomatoes are sun-lovers.

I’m already thinking about some of the dishes I’ll put together with those tomato treasures. Nothing is more beautiful than chunks of Green Zebra, Red Mortgage Lifter, and Yellow Pineapple tossed together with crushed garlic, olive oil, a bit of vinegar, ribbons of basil, and crushed sea salt. Oh my!

I am remembering a line from the movie “Armageddon” where the oil drillers are being shuttled into space to break up the asteroid threatening the Earth. As they belt up and prepare to be launched into space, one driller asks the other

“How are you feeling?”

“95% excitement and 5% fear. Or is it 95% fear and 5% excitement? I don’t know and that’s part of what makes it so exciting!”

I don’t know if I am feeling more fear or excitement, but it’s definitely a combination of the two.

It looks like we may well be having a baby in December.

When I shared our news with my dad (“I’m having a baby, Dad.”), he said, “Oh really? What kind of baby?”

“I am hoping for a humanoid baby.”

The conversation meandered in a strange sort of way and I finally said,

“Dad, I’m pregnant.”

The look of shock on his face was priceless.

When your only pregnancy resulted in psychosis, when that child reaches grade school, and when you are pressing the boundaries of human fertility, this sort of news can catch people off guard.

We are a baby-deficient family, however, with only two children now on my mom’s side, one of which was born just two weeks ago. My husband’s parents have a total of three grandchildren. My own parents have one grandchild and no others in sight until now. They share the 95% excitement.

Estate planning

I just couldn't resist, sitting here responding comments on my big announcement post, drinking seltzer and thinking about ice cream: On May 21 Baskin Robbins is giving away soft serve ice cream to pregnant women so I hear from Slashfood. They are calling it "Bump Day," a play on the phrase "Hump Day." It is a Wednesday after all and I assume you need to show your "bump" to qualify.

But before you run out for the free treat, soft serve ice cream is actually on the list of foods to avoid when you are pregnant which makes this campaign seem a bit nutty. The soft serve machines aren't always squeaky clean and apparently there is some chance of getting zapped by listeria. Perhaps this is just one of the many pregnancy myths and the Baskin Robbins machines will be squeaky-clean next week. Perhaps Barf Blog or some food safety watchdog will let us know if we should just put out a couple bucks for the scoops of ice cream instead or make our own. It would sure be ashame to risk listeriosis over soft serve ice cream, but that may be because I am a scoop gal.

Another gardening post from mom:

I got my love for gardening from my grandmother who planted pansies and lettuce together every spring. By the time the pansies were full and spreading, we had eaten up lettuce.

For my 9th birthday I planted my first garden. Too bad Nanna lived three states away. She would have given me some great advice to ensure a great garden.

Oh well!

In my enthusiasm, I pulled up the carrots every couple of days to see how they were doing. Fortunately, I spent the better part of the summer with my grandmother, so the over-inspected carrots had a chance to do their thing. My parents ate them before my return. They assured me the carrots were terrific.

To do my part in contributing to bacteria-phobia, I asked Doug Powell at BarfBlog whether we pregnant folks should be eating Baskin-Robbins soft serve ice cream (see my post). The company gave away soft serve cones yesterday (“Bump Day”) to pregnant customers.

Powell recommends avoiding the soft serve treat. He mentioned soft serve as being on the “avoid” list in Australia and describes the “dirty machine” problem I speculated about. He also poked Baskin-Robbins' celebrity spokesperson:

I have no idea why they targeted expectant moms, or why they recruited a pregnant Tori Spelling as spokesthingy.

After making the celebrity news rounds today because of Powell’s post, Baskin Robbins says the only risk of listeria is from improper pasteurization. Of course, that assumes the employees know how to clean out the machines.

I asked a food safety expert here in California if I faced a greater risk from soft serve ice cream than from outsourced raw milk. He declined to comment.

For my own part, I did not partake of the Baskin Robbins deal yesterday. With a population of a few hundred people here in the Sequoia National Forest, we have to stick with the scoop sort of ice cream when the General Store happens to be open. We also have the option of making our own.

I will admit that I did eat something on the obsessively-avoid list and was somewhat pleased that food obsession does not yet rule my pregnancy. For some of us, I expect the obsession holds a greater risk than the potential for bacteria. (But yes, I am still pretty obsessive.)

This time of year in California’s cattle country in the Sierra Nevada, we don’t see a lot of cattle. Ranchers have either sold their younger feeder cattle or have moved their herd to higher elevations in the Sequoia National Forest where they will summer on grassy ranges. Every summer I look for the perfect picture of cattle grazing in the Sequoias and I continue my hunt this season.

We buy a steer every couple of years from one of the local ranchers and typically have him finished on grain for a few weeks. The grain finishing reduces the Omega 3 fatty acids in the meat, but the steer never had a whole lot of Omega 3s to begin with (see Omega 3 fatty acid levels in grass fed beef). You can read here about a steer we bought last winter when “I met my meat.”

So while I’d like to claim that I buy the steer grass finished and buy it for the Omega 3 fatty acids, we actually have grained them a bit before slaughter and I also recognize that if I am really after Omega 3s, I should look to an animal that swims a little better than a steer (see fish and Omega 3 fatty acids).

We buy the beef like we do to avoid that whole feedlot stage with the food we are eating. It just seems like a crummy place to live if you’re a steer and it makes more sense to put the money directly in the hands of the rancher. Of course, he will only sell me a live steer which gives me the excitement of hiring people like Ted and taking pictures like the one below.

I’m rounding out my first trimester and I am ready to eat burger. It’s great that my food needs and Memorial Day weekend have coincided. The grill is ready for the season and the burger is thawing. The biggest question is whether we'll have to fight the rain to get to the grill. There is always the stove top.

The burgers for the weekend will not only be good, but they will also be local. This beef was brought to us by a steer raised about two miles from here, on land with year-round pasture.

Since the steer was finished on grain for only a couple of weeks, it tends to be very lean and a little more tough than the burger you would find at SaveMart. We add a lot of onion to the beef and call it good. My mom has experimented with a bunch of different hamburger approaches with this beef, but I find that many taste more like meatloaf. I like a more pure burger taste myself even if (or even because) the grease doesn’t drip down my cheek.

I think I’ll have about five burgers today, one for me and about four for the baby of course.

More on beef:
Vitamin and mineral content of beef
Omega 3 fatty acids in beef
Moroccan beef recipe

Mom and Frederick planted seeds back in April which are now ready to burst out of their pots and garden beds if only they had some sunshine. The heat wave in mid-May that caused them to leap out of their six packs was replaced by an unseasonal cold spell.

When the sun does hit, we are set to be over-run with produce. We planned a small garden for the season because we were "too busy" for anything bigger. We just don't seem to do much around here that is small. The garden plans have mushroomed. I do not know exactly how many tomato plants we will have but I did overhear a conversation between my mom and husband,

"Sander, could you please pick up seventeen tomato cages when you're in town?"

I expect we had quite a few tomato cages already and now we have seventeen more.

My mom has been collecting seed for a "perfect tomato" for our area and has quite an assortment of heirlooms. What is great about the tomatoes is that we can plant them in our orchard under the young trees and water both at the same time. It really gets better because a hen house sits in the middle of the orchard. Then hens fertilize the crops and do not bother the tomatoes. It doesn't get much better than that (except that we move the tomatoes around so this tomato nirvana only comes around every few years).

With a wedding at this house in a short two months from now, we have another garden area planted with summer vegetables and wedding flowers. We could probably serve fresh garden produce to the 180 people coming to visit, though I do have plans to eat most of it myself.

Technorati Tags: gardening, heirloom tomatoes, Rebuild from Depression

Back in March I retold the first "annual" celebration of Mercury's birthday. (Yes, that's Mercury the planet and, no, this is not a pagan ritual as far as I know.) My son Frederick, always in search of birthdays since they tend to come with cake and ice cream, decided to celebrate Mercury's birthday. Conveniently, Mercury orbits the sun every 88 days and, thus, requires more birthday celebrations than the rest of us.

Our first celebration of Mercury's birthday found us secretly ribbing Postmaster Dean using the community's "Burma Shave signs," signs usually dedicated to announcing events such as a community dinner. We flew remote control airplanes at the local school and ended our day at a cowboy bar eating dollar tacos and telling the cowboys about our birthday celebration. It may have been the first time I have seen my father embarrassed.

On the schedule for the second annual celebration is an ice cream give-away at the post office at about 11:30 tomorrow (Friday). Everyone in the community picks up their mail and loiters around at that time. It is the perfect opportunity to spread the word about the birthday celebration. Word spreads pretty easily up here, by the way. To let everyone know you're pregnant, you can either post something on the Burma Shave signs (which frankly I hadn't considered and now I find myself a bit disappointed that I missed an opportunity) or just tell someone at a local bar.

All of this is to say that if you don't do something fun and quirky this week in honor of Mercury's birthday, you are missing out.