Rebuild from Depression Blog

Henny Penny is three years old and one of two hens left from our first batch since we moved to the mountains. She's taken to sleeping outside of her hen house lately which doesn't bode real well for her.

I love cats. I really do. When I was growing up, we were the family with "all the cats." We didn't have numbers worthy of a health department call, but we had a fairly sizable number particularly during the spring kitten season.

My love for cats and my motherly instinct made me want to invite this kitten inside the other day. He was purring and he looked like he needed a friend. When I opened the door for a picture, it looked like he would have come inside. I closed the door.

This, my friends, is a bob cat. It is a jumbo cat without a tail. It is not as big (and thus not as dangerous as a mountain lion), but I wouldn't want it living in my house or on my deck.

Frederick is learning to be very gentle with animals particularly after our new rule:

If you kill it, you eat it.

It is only a matter of time before this rule will be used against my mother who tries to control the local mouse population.

We have had some excellent babysitters in our day, but lately I have discovered the most economical. They will entertain and provide plenty of exercise to a youngster for about two hours. If only they could be trained to give the child a bath at the end of the session and do more than run away if the child gets hurt, these hens might just be perfect.

The grass is always greener and the winter cold seems that much more welcome in the middle of a blistering hot summer.

I was going through pictures and found one from this past winter during one of our snows.

The plums are ripe and their vitamins and antioxidants are waiting for me when I return from the La Leche League Conference. I've heard some discussion of a plum cobbler.

An old cattle fence in the Sequoia National Monument. Cattle still graze in this area.

Two boys in the mountains.

If you have a chance to see this every day, do it.

Note to self: start enjoying the sunset more often.

Not only do they have a great life while they are living, but when they are not, they are more nutritious for us. Their liver in particular is much higher in Omega 3 fatty acids when they are grazing on grass instead of finished on grain (beef liver and omega 3). Their meat is higher too, though they are still not quite in the same league as a fatty fish such as salmon (Omega 3 and beef). When they are milking, the milk has higher levels of a special beneficial fat called conjugated linoleic acid (CLA and milk). That fat helps with weight loss. :) These days, grass fed beef has become the gourmet choice and you can even get it in hotdog form (grass fed gourmet hot dog).

Rock on, grass fed beef.

We just submitted some photos to the California Farm Bureau Photo Contest. This photo is my favorite unsubmitted photo. :)

Sander and I both submitted three photos. I submitted my "I Met My Meat" photo, one of cattle grazing in the foothills, and one like this idyllic boyhood photo. Sander submitted a variant of the Frederick and chick photo above, a beautiful farm egg photo, and one like this old cattle fence in the forest.

It took Thanksgiving vacation for us to go through our mail and discover that one of my photos appeared in the newspaper for the Tulare County Farm Bureau. On September 21, we were instructed to take photos for a "Day in the Life of Tulare County." It was a bit of a dreary day, but started off with great fanfare. The sunrise is below.

I really love this "Day in the Life" concept. Of course, most of the day I sat in front of the computer, so perhaps I should have submitted a screen shot. :)

When I need air and am not under a big deadline, I bring my laptop and lunch here for the day. I start my work time with a hike on the Trail of a Hundred Giants, work until my battery is out, and take another hike. The road to the Trail will close any day now, so I took this photo on my last trip up there to have a nice memory of my favorite workspace. Though today it is so beautiful here that I may have to go one more time. Living in the middle of nowhere has its advantages. Of course, it's easy to forget the advantages when you want to go to a movie or order out for Thai food.

In light of the many inches of rain we have gotten here in the Sequoia National Forest (and spared from the winds and the feet of snow), here is an interesting drought picture I took in December before Christmas.

The picture shows snow in the high Sierras in the background, the first snow of the season. In the foreground, note the dry grass and struggling oak tree. Thank goodness for the recent five-plus inches of rain this week.

You never know when it's going to be a burn day and with ten burn piles on this property (most tarped in blue like you see below), we've been getting busy. ("We" is really "me" at the moment, but I am hoping that will change.)

A "before" shot:

After
tap..tap..tap..

If you were a judge and choosing the best "Farm to Fork" photo, which would you choose?

The judges' choice:

My entry:

Look at that license plate! You can't make this stuff up.

(Okay, I really didn't think this photo had a chance but couldn't help but submit it.)

You can read more about this steer in our freezer:
I Met My Meat
I Met My Meat II

“Frederick, would you like to play another game of Parcheesi or are you ready for a movie?”

“Another game, Bea. It’s not as much electricity,” Frederick said to my mother.

“Oh really?”

“Yes, I don’t want it to global warm. Bea, do you know that spring is getting warmer and I don’t want it to be that warm.”

~~~

“Bea” recounted the story and wondered if Al Gore had dropped by Frederick's charter school today.

“I don’t know, but if stories are true about Al Gore’s electric bill, he hasn’t missed many movies.”

~~~

Hey, we don't just yap about it, from the amount of electricity we've cut out of our lives, we could probably watch movies until the Earth burns up.

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. :)

Diane posted days ago asking for an update and, finally, I’ll pop out my head to say that I’m still here and actually doing fairly well. I work two to three hours each day on my data business. On occasion I work zero hours on data. The rest of the day I work on yard work, lie in a hammock, or watch the latest from Netflix. Most days in my pregnant state I do wonder how the human race has ever perpetuated itself.

My mental state is pretty good but I expect that is in large part due to my schedule. On the one time each month that I venture from my place here in the Sequoia National Forest to civilization, I do get a bit frazzled and overly tired. My solution: don’t go.

After months of “not going,” I have had a bit of cabin fever, a strange thing to have in the summer. I’ve been complaining over the last week about being a shut-in. I suppose we should all be careful what we wish for. We are actually packing the car now (I’m on a break) to find fresher air in the Los Angeles basin. That is a sentence that I would have never thought I would ever form, but here we are.

I’ve mentioned that forest fire is our biggest natural threat here and that the local rangers tell us “It’s not a matter of ‘if’ but ‘when.’” We a due west of the Clover fire burning in the Golden Trout Wilderness and further east to highway 395. Weather patterns are bringing us quite a bit of smoke and socking it in. The Clover fire is no threat to us now and it is unlikely it will become one. However, we did have some excitement early yesterday morning when a grass fire started about three miles away on Forest Service land. We could see the smoke plumes and the air got much worse. We had our evacuation list ready but luckily did not need to pack the cars. The fire was within a mile of a ranger station and half of the local population (all employed by the Forest Service) descended on the fire within minutes. The fire lasted for about three hours before it was put out completely. It did add a good bit of smoke to our smoky air.

My weather-watching uncle called us this morning and offered us refuge from the smoke. He says it may clear by Saturday and we considered waiting it out, but my lungs hurt a bit, my son has sudden allergy symptoms, and my husband has a mild case of asthma. I figure we can cure a few symptoms and cabin fever at the same time. My uncle and aunt live north of San Diego and should have great air tomorrow. Today we’ll seek refuge in the Los Angeles area. I hear they have places called "restaurants" and "stores." I'll have to check those out.

It strikes me that I should not neglect to post here for three weeks only to post about the looming beef Apocalypse and that I am running off to eat a burger at a cowboy restaurant without even the smallest of updates.

Since Easter weekend when we got the news, life has been centered around "the wedding" (and you thought I was going to say "the baby"). A good friend was married here this past Saturday and 185 guests and staff showed up to witness the event. We don't do events here so we were absolutely unprepared with the four-month notice. My mom and I have spent many hours on the landscape, she has painted herself silly, and two young men worked their tails off all summer long to make the property presentable. Now is the time to visit us, by the way.

The wedding was fantastic. As the bride was leaving, she said, "This really was my dream wedding." I expect actual dream weddings are fairly uncommon these days, so this was high praise. I was too busy to take pictures, but I will post some when they become available.

The days leading up to the wedding were so busy that we never did attend to all of the details we normally would. My swollen feet and ankles are some proof. On the day of the wedding in fact, I laid out a purple shirt and tan shorts for Frederick to wear. Purple was one of the wedding colors. It was a good outfit for a child who would spend his day playing with children in the designated children's area. Apparently he wasn't into tan, so he appeared in his two favorite colors -- a purple shirt and red shorts.

"Honey, let's find something that matches a little bit better."

"But Mama, these are my favorite shorts."

Far too many things needed our attention, so the shorts stayed and Frederick spent the better part of the day on his new obsession -- Pac-Man. (Pac-Man is a great babysitter in a pinch, by the way.)

The wedding dinner was outside under a structure of white lights on Saturday night. The ceremony itself was in our great room, a massive 36x36' room that opens up two stories. There is a balcony on three sides of the room with two sets of stairs descending on the fourth wall and meeting at the bottom. The bridal party entered the wedding down these stairs, men on one side, women on the other. Each pair met at the foot of the stairs and processed to a massive rock fireplace. (I should add now that the only reason normal people like us can afford this house is because it is in the middle of nowhere and needs a lot of work.)

Just before the procession began, my mom and I were outside ushering in last-minute guests when we realized we had not unplugged the phones. She and I each made a mad dash to different phones and then I joined my husband at the video camera that was streaming video to the folks outside who preferred shade and beer.

The procession began and I asked, "Where's Frederick?" I left to look for him but assumed he must be in the great room.

I returned in time to see the bride and groom meet at the bottom of the stair and process to the mantel.

Only later did I hear that just after the flower girls descended and just before the bride would begin her procession, the door behind the stairs opened and a little boy wearing red and purple made a big entry. It would appear that most people thought it was funny. Surely I will laugh about it someday. That laughter would probably come sooner if his clothing actually matched.

In any case, I have survived. This whole pregnancy thing doesn't seem like a big deal at all after having nearly 200 people come to visit.

This is a story that has little to do with depression. It happened long before my depression days but it certainly is one strategy we can all use to create a better environment for ourselves. My environment in the story was Indiana University in Bloomington in a Slavic language class. I could say which language but then I might as well use names as well and that is probably a bad idea.

I was entering my second year of this language, taught by the same teacher as the year before. In the first year, the students in the class bonded over teacher loathing. The teacher was generally despicable toward everyone in the class, but I had him pegged with "gender issues" as well. I actually got a C+ in the class one semester, likely because I did not show up in his office and cry. The last C+ I had gotten was in 1981. I'd rather have a string of Cs than show up in an office and cry to anyone so loathsome.

On the first day of class in that second year we were assigned to write an essay in the Slavic language about what we did over the summer. I wrote a story that went something like this:

The Rooster

This summer, I went home to California and tended my chickens. I discovered that the rooster was hurting them. He pecked them and pecked them until they bled. In my house, there is a consequence when men do not treat women with respect. The rooster continued to abuse the hens, so I got a gun and I murdered him. I threw his carcass down the canyon. He will not hurt the hens again.

On the day the essay was due, our classroom was not available. We met in a seminar room with a large rectangular table. He was seated at the head of the table in his position of authority. Other students sat at his side. I sat at the other end of the table, in a tall and confident manner. Predictably, he asked me to read my essay first. Most of the vocabulary in my essay was new so only one other student understood it -- one whom I translated it to before class. As I read the essay aloud in our Slavic language, the professor's eyes got wider and wider. When I read, "I murdered him," he gasped and said to the class, "Do you know what she just said?"

He asked my friend who was in the loop, but also the least likely person in the class to understand the vocabulary.

"Yeah, she killed a rooster," he answered.

"How did you know?" He asked excitedly. The teacher turned to me, "Really? Is that true?"

"Absolutely. We don't put up with that kind of behavior," I answered with a long, stern stare.

Of course, the truth was that my dad shot the rooster, but there is no need for truth to ruin a good story.

(Just to clarify, the verb "to murder" was the only one I could find in my little dictionary. I expect I would have chosen something a bit more subtle in English.)

Slavic writer Milan Kundera (perhaps in "The Unbearable Lightness of Being) says "Relationships are formed in the first week." His meaning is that we create a dynamic in that time between the two people that endures. His warning: be careful what dynamic you allow in that time. It is true of any relationship, including a teacher-student relationship. Students are always vulnerable to teachers who have a need to wield power unnecessarily. My relationship with my teacher was probably largely formed in that first week, but there was a notable change after "The Rooster." If memory serves, I got B+s that year with the same amount of work as the year before and no pleading tears.

***

And on a side note, Polit Tsk Tsk Tsk blog has created a Sarah Palin baby name generator. They write:

Sarah Palin has picked out an All-American set of names for her children. There's Track, Trig, Bristol, Willow, and Piper.
Ever wonder, What would your name would be if Sarah Palin was your mother? Well now you can find out!

I entered my husband's name in the generator and this was the response:

Sander, if you were born to Sarah Palin, your name would be:
Chase Rooster Palin
Who knows, Chase Rooster Palin you just might be president one day!

That's when I realized I probably should have been named "Sander." Apparently, Sarah Palin would have named me Rot Pipeline Palin. That would be a tough one growing up.

You too can find out your Palin baby name.

I'm working on "appreciating" and took a really cool hike last night to that end. Our house is on the top of a hill with a 360-degree view of the Sierra Nevada mountains. We're technically in the Sequoia National Forest on private land. We asked neighboring land owners if we could hike on their property to get pictures of our own. It was so exciting! Their property is gorgeous and it was pretty amazing to see our house from that perspective. I've posted pictures below and I am going to mention this because I am sensitive on this issue: we're not rich. This part of the Sierra has very low property values and the house has been in the family since 1982. That said, it is a mansion designed by Irving Gill and actually used to be a brothel. :)

I am so excited about these pictures. They aren't particularly good, but if we had an actual professional up there with us, we could really have something. That's our house on the hill in the background. The beautiful people in the picture are my people. :)

More pictures after the jump:

Technorati Tags: Irving Gill, Sequoia National Forest

October's baby chicks sent us an Easter gift: their first batch of tiny eggs came on Easter weekend. The eggs will get bigger as the hens develop, but they will continue to be either white, brown, or green. We will have our own source of omega-3 eggs, fortified not with flax or fish oil, but by garden bugs gobbled up by excited hens.

Technorati Tags: eggs, Omega 3

Alastair and I pose in front of the backside of one of the Vander Eyk heifers. This generation of heifers appears to get far more access to grass than their predecessors ever did. Hundreds of heifers are scattered between Ducor (the location of their heifer program) and California Hot Springs (the location of my house). The dairy lost its organic certification two years ago because its cows had no access to pasture. It did graze a small group of heifers back in the day, but it appears to me that they never grazed as many as have been grazed the last two springs. High feed prices apparently make it worth trucking those girls around and about.

Funny thing: I bought their milk for $7/gallon when it carried the Horizon Organic label. I bought their product for $10+/gallon when it was bottled raw at Organic Pastures Dairy Company. I wonder who bottles it now? Maybe I should try to find it at Costco for $2/gallon or maybe I should just get a couple of goats.

Regardless of politics, I hope they are doing well in these tough dairy times.

Technorati Tags: dairy

These are the famous feet, at about four weeks. A friend saw the feet at a gathering and, after everyone said, "Those aren't bad at all, they will straighten right up," one friend added lovingly, "We are a lot like monkeys, aren't we?" I laugh at this comment because I expect he wouldn't have said it if we had known they were club feet, a birth defect.

***
My other favorite conversation was with my husband:

"I think you may have had club feet, Sander."

"What?"

"The Frankenstein scars on your shins, from your 'pigeon toe' surgery. No one gets surgery like that for pigeon toes. Your feet were turned in. You had club feet."

"Do you think so? You dad's feet were funky too. Did he have club feet?"

"I don't think he had club feet, but they sure are strange. It obviously came from your side."

"But what about your father?"

"Like I said, Alastair got his feet from you guys. It's not about me at all."

"It's your argument that if Alastair inherited your father's feet, they did not come from you?" he asked.

"That's my argument exactly."

***

Seriously though, his chance of club feet were 1 in 1,000 and his chance of Down's for my age was about 1 in 150, based on population statistics and the feet are really not that bad. That helps me keep it in perspective. He has a minor surgery on his tendons in front of us and I am trying not to let it suck me down into a dark hole.

Technorati Tags: club feet

In the summer, I sit under them, without my sunglasses, take the daylight into my eyes to help my body produce melatonin.

In the fall, I rake them into piles and move them to our garden's compost bins.

In the winter, I watch them deteriorate and rejoin the soil.

In the spring, I enjoy the sun shining through the translucent green crop.

Technorati Tags: gardening, melatonin, sunshine

At the encouragement from my mother, Frederick plans to sell daffodils and narcissus at local farmers markets in a few years to help pay for college. She plans to help him develop the business. In the meantime, I'll spend free time in the summer and fall moving bulbs, digging, bending, and otherwise moving my body around. Good for me.

Many folks these days seek a "traditional diet" of whole foods, just like our ancestors ate. Ancestors were less concerned about raw food. They drank raw milk, for instance, poured right from the milk pail in many cases. Today we have to worry more about the plethora of food-borne pathogens, particularly if we are not regularly exposed to them. Frederick's exposure there in the picture -- chasing chickens, slithering through their muck to catch them -- is why I don't worry too much if he has one of their egg yolks in an egg nog-like drink. When not being chased by boys, the hens have access to weeds and bugs which makes their eggs high Omega 3 eggs. Omega 3 is good for depression and brain health in general.

On the raw egg, one brush of the hand across the mouth on days like this one is far worse than anything that might be in the related raw egg.

Technorati Tags: eggs, foods that fight depression, Omega 3, raw egg, raw milk

"Dad, get the yellow frisbee. Throw it up in the tree to try to get the pink frisbee down."

"Yes, do that Sander. I want to see it," she laughs.

"Frederick, what we need is a really long pole."

Usually found dispersed in grassy meadows, these blue dicks are hanging on a cliff (below) making quite a show. I wonder if it's because they have no grass for competition or if this is their last-ditch effort to show off before erosion thins them out again.

Technorati Tags: blue dicks, wildflowers

Only in a small rural community could we ever have such an Independence Day celebration as we had yesterday. We live in the Sequoia National Forest about fifteen minutes from the southern-most stand of Giant Sequoia trees, the largest trees on Earth. Our mountain community houses about 1,000 people, if you cast a wide net, and includes our little community of California Hot Springs. Nothing much happens here unless you are watching carefully and consider "quaint" to be a "happening."

We majored in "cowboy quaint" yesterday with the Third Annual Fourth of July Parade organized by the local 4-H club.

As we prepared for the big event by finding red and blue shirts I laughed to myself about the fact that there has not been a grand marshall in the parade. I described the parade to friends last year as a parade in which you could "enter anything you want and, better yet, be drunk at the time." Last year as the parade passed one guy's house, he handed out beer to the parade entrants. The Sheriff's Deputy was in the parade and my guess is that the cars before and after his missed this key benefit. We discussed entering the parade this year with our trailer hitched to our station wagon, filled it with drunk cowboys. While I looked for a blue shirt, I wondered who would ever be the Grand Marshall in such a small-town cowboy event. I thought about the local cowboy bar, "They could keep tabs on who has consumed the most beer at the Rabbit Foot during the year and make that person the Grand Marshall." On that thought, we headed to the parade.

Technorati Tags: B vitamins, Facebook, Fourth of July, giveaway, magnesium, Omega 3, parade, Sequoia National Forest

We haven't had a craft phase in this house in well over a year, but Frederick is making up for lost time. In his last big phase, he made the "Pollan Paintings." While I was in Seattle, he crafted this paper mache cow. My favorite part is the water balloon udder (pictured below).

Technorati Tags: cow, Michael Pollan, photo, craft

Frederick's first choice of birthday cakes is those half-sheet cakes from Costco with huge frosting balloons on them. Knowing his preference ordering, we didn't actually ask him what we wanted this year. I said, "Frederick, how about I make a Kentucky Butter Cake, my favorite cake from when I was a girl, and we have it with whipped cream and strawberries." "Mmmm. That sounds good, Mama."

Check.

As we prepared to bake two of these cakes, I said to my mother, "I'll get out the grinder. Let's use half whole spelt and half white flour."

"Do you want him to ask for the Costco cake next year?" mom responded. (I once made this cake that was not at all a hit...)

In the picture is a 100% refined white flour cake with no frosting. As children were arriving I realized that no frosting means no decoration. You can't have a plain cake! I found a white milk glass vase and filled it with flowers left from a bouquet. It all felt like a little mix of Martha Stewart and Ma Ingalls.

Technorati Tags: birthday, cake, flour

I may start carrying a pistol around here though for yesterday's purpose, a rifle may be a better bet. How do these guys shoot the head of a snake with a pistol? I have no idea, but I was impressed. I was two feet from the snake when I discovered him. We rounded up some mountain men and the snake soon had a hole in its head. I bloody well may have saved a life yesterday (my own?) or perhaps just saved someone a couple of days in the hospital by discovering this snake and aiding in his demise.

When the snake was dead and the head was removed, I asked to get one of those trophy pictures that guys take when they have actually killed the animal. The men handed me the headless snake, still throbbing, and dripping in blood. The campers took pictures.

We had live rattle snake excitement last week, we had a guy who parked on top of a rock, and Sunday we evacuated because of a fire. To be accurate, the boys evacuated and I stayed to take pictures. By the time we had the car packed with children and computers, and I managed one little tweet as I was shutting down my computer ("Packing. Forest fire one mile."), I could tell that the fire would not be big. I sent Sander and his asthmatic lungs with the children, put the keys on the front seat of the other car, and ran around taking pictures. You will find a picture diary below the jump.

The fire never did turn into a "forest fire," but forest fires are at the top of our minds this time of year. Smoke means "forest fire" until you prove otherwise. As it turns out, some gray matter-challenged driver was pulling a van with his own van. The disabled van was riding on its rims and making sparks. I expect he was dealt with rather severely.

A couple of weeks ago Park Seed had a "My Bell Pepper Looks Like Elvis! Photo Contest" seeking entries for strange-looking produce. With one day before the deadline, Frederick and I headed out to the garden to harvest. He found peppers that look like snakes (one "sleeping" and one "moving, pictured below) and one that looks like a hummingbird. We entered the hummingbird.

After a business trip this summer, we returned home to a basket of this Frederick-grown produce. Many of the produce items are heirlooms -- like the "Cherrybelle radish" in the front right. Heirlooms tend to have higher nutrient content than hybridized vegetables (as I wrote previously).

Frederick is excited about his creation and announced that he wrote the names neatly on each item so that he could teach his baby brother about garden produce. Good idea!

For the craft oriented, these are just thin pieces of cardboard, glued together in two layers, painted, cut to shape, and otherwise decorated. Some have pipe cleaner stems inserted and glued between the layers.

Technorati Tags: heirloom vegetables, vegetables

In late September I discovered a road on our five acre mountain property that I suspect has not had human traffic in 75 years. The property has been in my family since 1982 and has been unknown to us all those years. I have been "tweeting" on Twitter about my hikes but 140 characters are limiting. I decided to chronicle the road here.

The summer garden has been slowly growing the final tastes of summer. We harvested the last of the peppers, summer squash, cucumbers, and tomatoes. The tomatoes are lined up in a sunny window ripening. I miss summer already as we dig in the autumn weeds and get ready to set the next crop.

Walnuts are a great food. They are filled with minerals and are high in the Omega 3 fatty acid ALA found in plants that our bodies convert into the depression-fighting Omega 3 EPA. I use them for salad toppers and snacks liberally. (Read more about food and depression.)

Back in the day, my dad owned ten acres of these bad boys. That meant not only did my little girl hands crack too many walnuts (my lifetime quota in fact as I claim quite regularly), but we got to be that house on Halloween. You know what I mean.

We were the guys who filled your Trick-or-Treat bags with walnuts.

I remember a woman who lived down the street who closed her blinds and hid in her kitchen with the lights low to keep kids from knocking on her door. We would knock anyway. She would answer grumpily and scream, "Don't you see the lights are off?! Stop knocking at my door!"

I don't know why she went to all that trouble. All she needed to do was post a sign in her front yard, "I give walnuts for Halloween." That would have saved everyone some time.

~~~~~

Sidebar on Halloween news: Halloween week has gotten creepy here at Hilltop House as we explore the "lost road" on our property -- a road that has not been trafficked for about 70 years. Read "Mama, I think this was a mistake..." You may also want to sign up for the raw milk e-mail list to hear tomorrow all about my raw milk Halloween costume.

~~~~~

How to use walnuts besides putting them in Halloween bags

Mom offers a couple of suggestions on using walnuts (or visit the Walnut Marketing Board site for recipes):

Walnuts make fine topping for salads, creamed vegetables, stir fry, open-faced sandwiches, cooked cereals, some creamed soups, casseroles. The possibilities are endless. Once you begin using them this way, your creativity will kick in.

Instructions for roasted toppers
1. Heat the oven to 300 degrees.
2. Lightly oil a cookie sheet.
3. Sprinkle four cups of walnuts on the sheet and roast for 30 minutes.
4. Pour the walnuts into a bowl, sprinkle with 3 tablespoons of tamari and toss well.
5. Return walnut to the cookie sheet and roast for another 15 minutes. Note: If you put the tamari on at the beginning of the roasting time, it will burn before the nuts are roasted. Stir the nuts as soon as you remove the pan from the oven. If you wait, they may stir rather stubbornly.
6. Allow to cool before using. Store in a airtight container in a cool place.
7. These will keep for about two weeks in the pantry, for a few months in the frig…as if they would stay around that long! These flavored walnuts are a great snack to set out with cheese and fruit.

Raw roasted toppers (drying walnuts)
For a more nutrient-dense walnut, take another preparation step or two.
1. Soak raw walnuts in warm water solution. Soak for 12-24 hours.
2. Drain water.
3. Dry out nuts in warm spot – in oven with pilot light on, in a food dehydrator, or near a woodstove. Keep the temperature under 120° Fahrenheit and your nuts will maintain their enzymes. It will take at least 24 hours for the nuts to dry. Sometimes ours take two to three days.
4. When nuts are nearly dry, add the tamari or other spices as described above.

Experiment! Look around for recipes. You can flavor up any sort of nut or seed. As you develop your arsenal of roasted nuts, you’ll find yourself using them as travel food, lunch bag additions, the afternoon lift you need.

This Halloween post is part of Fight Back Friday.

Though Halloween has come and gone for most of us, those of us who lost a week on a root canal remodel gone bad have some catching up to do. In the hours before my tooth became infected, I had the best Halloween I have ever had.

We started the day with great anticipation -- friends were coming to visit to explore "the lost road" with us. (You must read about it here because we are having huge amounts of fun with our discovery.) We enjoyed a breakfast of sourdough pancakes cooked and what might be best described as eggs poached in bacon grease, all cooked on our new/old 1940s Wedgewood. I can't vouch for the eggs though I heard they were out-of-this-world. I love eggs and I love bacon, but daaamn. We hit the lost road with bellies full of bacon grease and explored the lost road, likely the first humans to do so in 70 years or so. I expect the highlight for most of us were the lost road portraits -- "scary lone hiker portraits." All friends now receive a personal photo shoot on our discovery.

By evening, we dressed children in costumes and headed to a trick-or-treating hay ride, the sort that can only happen in a tiny little mountain village.

Alastair appeared as a depression-fighting chili pepper for the thirty minutes he was able to stay awake. I should also mention that there were no walnuts involved this year, but I did manage to score a large bag of sunflower seeds as my sole trick-or-treating treat. The night ended at a camp fire with hot dogs.

Chili pepper??

If this blog has a focus at all (and between the homesteading blog issues, bees stuck in my wall, and obsessions over dairy foods it very likely doesn't), I would have to say the focus is on foods and nutrients that fight depression. In the book Rebuild from Depression: A Nutrient Guide, I review the nutrients most likely to cause depression if we are deficient. From that nutrient guide, I develop a list of foods highest in those nutrients using the USDA nutrient database of over 5,000 foods. In the book I call the foods "depression buster foods." Red chili peppers make the list. (Read more about the Rebuild philosophy on foods that fight depression.)

Hot peppers are one of the most memorable foods on the list to me because I strongly considered removing them. With each food I looked at how much of the item you would have to eat to get a reasonable level of depression-fighting nutrients and found that you would need to eat seven hot peppers. Seven. Does that seem reasonable? A couple of years ago I described on this blog why I kept peppers on the list and yet removed spirulina:

Frankly, eating peppers like that seems a bit crazy but the men in my family seem to “get it.” My Uncle Fred and cousin Andy, for instance, have been known to grow their own peppers in a window box to ensure a source of good, hot peppers. Andy is way over the top with his pepper-eating. He’s one of those guys who eats them whole like they are any other sort of snack. When we have had a really hot, inedible batch, someone always says “Mail those to Andy.”

The topic came up again as I was working on the book. When I made the list of depression buster foods, I did a little reality check on each of the foods. Spirulina, for instance, made the list. But the measure was 100 grams – a mountain of green powder. The amount of spirulina that would have made the list was really unreasonable for anyone to eat, even though it has some really good health properties.

Red chili peppers are actually on the list as well. I considered cutting the peppers from the list. Who would eat seven peppers after all? “Andy would,” I said to myself.

I asked him about eating seven peppers and he said “No problem. Just make sure they are not habaneros.”

Andy recounted a story of eating about seven habaneros one night alone and feeling like he was going to have a heart attack. That is one of those experiments you do not try twice, apparently.

His wife Stephanie then recounted a cruise trip in which Andy ate a mountain of peppers as an appetizer before the formal cruise dinner. After drinking only one beer with dinner, Andy wasn't himself.

“There I was in ‘my prom dress,’” said Stephanie, “and he was as drunk as a college student. I couldn’t believe it.”

“It was something about those peppers,” added Andy.

So it’s no problem eating a mountain of peppers reports Andy, just watch the habaneros and pass on the beer.

There you are folks, go crazy but not too crazy. Habaneros are probably best saved for a little extra heat in some salsa. They also make an excellent Halloween costume.

This stove is powered up and cooking our food -- an antique Wedgewood. The burners put out an impressive amount of heat. Who needs a $5K Wolf stove? (Who has $5K or even a nickel these days?) We have had this mid-40s stove for a couple of years, just waiting for a few adjustments and to be hooked up. If you think I'm slow with email, now you know that more than email moves at a snail's pace around here.

We cooked sourdough pancakes on this bad boy last weekend. They were great except that I put the starter on the stove the evening before, on the pilot. The starter probably rose in an hour and was totally pooped by breakfast. The pancakes were still tasty, just not as fluffy as usual. The pancakes were part of our Halloween fun exploring "the lost road" and taking "scary lone hiker" portraits. We had a great time. (Follow the "lost road" excitement, which could end up being an excellent weight loss strategy -- the hike is a tough one.)

If you are interested in the Rebuild kitchen, check out some old posts on my long-neglected house blog. We planned a kitchen remodel a few years ago but we never did get to it. The pictures there aren't far off, but perhaps I'll take some new ones soon.

Sometime last week, all hell was breaking loose in my house, I was recovering from a root canal remodel that ended up infected, so for survival sake, I grabbed baby Alastair and the camera and headed to one of my favorite places -- the Trail of 100 Giants, a Giant Sequoia redwood grove just 25 minutes from my house.

The leaves on the quaking aspen had turned yellow, most had fallen off, but the oak trees still had quite a show for us.

I find that if I take the camera and try to get pictures of interesting or beautiful things, just the process of looking for pictures helps readjust my brain in a positive direction. About two years ago I described a similar strategy when I was expecting a hard day. We set off to some stressful meetings and to offset the stress, I set a goal of taking a "picture of something spectacular." I got one. :)

If you like this picture, take a look at the photo albums I set up with photos from around our house. Now that we have more blogs than we can keep track of in our household, I have compiled them all in one place, along with the photo albums: Gill on the Hill.