Blessing the Hands that Feed Us (12 page)

Try These Recipes

Since you've just read about my hunt for 10-mile food, I thought you might like to try a local wild food recipe. Because of the search for local dairy products, Vicky Brown's cheese seems a good piece of knowledge. You'll meet Vicky soon enough; her story of shifting from being a corporate executive to being a milkmaid has many lessons.

Jess Dowdell's Nettle Soup

2 cauliflower heads

3 carrots

3 celery ribs

2 onions

6 Ozette potatoes

¹
/
₂
to 1 gallon stock

¹
/
₂
brown grocery bag full of sweet spring nettle tops (the top 6 inches of the plant)

1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger

Salt and pepper

Crushed red pepper flakes or Mike's hot sauce (optional)

Roughly chop the cauliflower, carrots, celery, onions, and potatoes.

In a large stock pot, sauté the vegetables in local butter or canola oil for about 5 to 8 minutes. Add the nettles and continue sautéing until they are wilted. Add any kind of stock you wish (I like vegetable or turkey the best) just to cover all the ingredients. Cook on medium heat until the potatoes are soft. Transfer to a food processor or blender, add the ginger, puree, and add salt and pepper to taste. To “heat” it up, add some crushed red pepper or Mike's local hot sauce.

Vicky Brown's Recipe for the Most Simple Dessert of Cheese Makers

The easiest cheese to make goes by many names. It seems that nearly every culture has a version with a different name. It is basic and easy to make with ingredients you have in your home; no ordering cultures from France or enzymes from New England.

This cheese can be made with milk or even whey left from other cheese-making projects. If you're using whey, your yield will be quite small; you might want to add some more milk for a better yield.

For cheese making, never use aluminum. Only use nonreactive pots and utensils (stainless steel, enamel-coated, silicon, and wood are all good options). Heat your milk to about 195°F, stirring constantly to keep it from scalding. Once the heat goes above 192°F add vinegar. I use white vinegar but you could use any type of vinegar. The flavor does not stay with the cheese; you're just using the acidity to coagulate the milk. I've tried it with raspberry vinegar and was very disappointed that the very expensive vinegar did nothing but leave a little pink wash in the curd.

You need to use about
¹
/
₄
cup of 5 percent acidity vinegar for every gallon of milk or whey. Depending on the starting acidity of your milk or whey you may need more or less. Often people fail at this simple cheese because they stop adding vinegar at the measured amount; just another capful or two might be enough to coagulate your milk.

As you add the vinegar your milk will immediately begin to separate into curds and whey. Once you see the separation make sure your pot is off the heat and let it set for 5 to 10 minutes. The calcium in the curd will cause it to knit together.

You may be able to scoop your curd out of the pot, or you could strain your cheese to separate the curds from the whey and mold it using a colander or basket. Be careful, it is still very hot!

Let the cheese sit about 20 minutes to let more whey drain out, then put it on a plate, sprinkle some cinnamon and nutmeg over it, and drizzle some of your favorite local honey over it. Eat it while it's still warm!

If you prefer savory to sweet you can use it to stuff pasta or mix with herbs or just on a cracker. Once cool enough this cheese could be pressed by hand and refrigerated to make a firm grating cheese. This cheese is also made with any type of milk. Even though I'm partial to my goats and make it often with cow milk, I find that it's heavenly when made with sheep milk!

Week One: Grounded!

Friends and Neighbors

D-Day (10-Mile Diet Day) Minus 1

On August 31, I arrived home dog-tired after a long day in Seattle hauling trash to the dump from my old community house—now on the market. I wanted to eat, which is my basic response to hunger, yes, but also to stress, exhaustion, frustration, and distraction. As well as celebration and excitement. I'd picked up a TJ wrap on the way north, probably the chicken, avocado, blue cheese, lettuce, and mayo one. I had my last bites of industrial food dribbling down my chin as I surveyed the first box of veggies on my counter that Tricia had left, along with a dozen eggs. As of the next morning my life depended on her, and she wanted me to be ready. Beside the box she left this note:

We did it! After all this talk since July 4 the 10-Mile Diet will start. Yahoo! Here's the first box of veggies and stuff. We can tweak the amount (more or less) as the weeks progress. This should give you a good start. Some things like three turnips and overgrown green beans I threw in hoping you could put them to use. Comments and suggestions will be helpful. My new mantra is freedom and abundance and may we all have it.

The bounty stunned me, like waking up to a mountain of gifts on Christmas morning. Yes, I was a “human subject” for her experiment. But she was volunteering for my experiment as well.

Sure, as Tricia's husband, Kent, later pointed out, from a purely pragmatic perspective, this experiment worked great for frugal me—I was getting free food. But something beyond just “cheap” had started: the bond of love and vulnerability between feeder and eater began with that box of food. Later I came to realize how this experiment was as much about the love as about the food, the knitting together of producer and consumer into the fabric of community. Indeed, one of the oddities, once you think of it, of our modern industrial system is this lack of relationship. I was headed, unknowingly, into relational eating.

Morgan Spurlock's month of McDonald's “super-size me” resulted in a pasty complexion and a bulge over the belt. What would happen during this month of eating Tricia's food, I wondered, as I unpacked that box of turnips, potatoes, onions, green beans, half a head of cabbage, bunches of kale and chard, apples, a big bag of lettuce, pints of cherry tomatoes and strawberries, three Asian pears, three small cukes, and a dozen eggs. Would I become the picture of health? Would I end up hollow-cheeked and as thin as a rail? Would I be able to feel my ribs again? Would I love or hate Tricia for that? I was about to find out.

Nuts!

The first thing that came out of my mouth the first morning of our experiment was “Nuts!” As I shuffled into my kitchen on the first day of this challenge I came face-to-face with the fact that a very cornerstone of my daily well-being—milk for my tea—was missing.

I might even have said something more R-rated, but saying “nuts” here reminds us right off the bat of something else off the menu. Nuts. Normally nuts are a major Vicki food group. They are oily, crunchy, tasty bite-sized packages of perfect pleasure. They go on salads, in stir-fries, in yogurt—and into my mouth morning, noon, and night. Or they did until this morning. Grrr.

Believe me, I tried to find nuts within my 10-mile limits. Walnuts are possible to grow on Whidbey, but I couldn't find any trees. Hazelnuts were a better bet. There was a grove less than a mile from my home that I'd passed through many times on my way to the beach. At least I thought they were hazelnuts, but I'd never really looked closely because before this summer, the natural world was merely backdrop and my food was found not on trees but on shelves.

This grove, however, seemed to have lost the knack of bearing fruit. I remembered that a neighbor had a nut tree—but when I sidled up to him to inquire, I discovered it was for the birds. Literally. He gave up the fight with local wildlife that always picked the tree clean before a single nut could mature. He was quite relaxed about that choice. I wasn't—but it wasn't my tree so I went back to scheming. I asked around and heard about other hazelnut groves, but these were now all squirrel all-you-can-eat restaurants too. To say “nuts” was to remind myself of the great divide that now lay between a favorite food and me.

So, okay, no nuts. But also no milk. Wednesday was my raw milk pickup day—and this was Wednesday—but my milk was still in Elsie's udders. I couldn't get it until seven
P.M.

Finding the Treasure in My Own Front Yard

So there I stood, a ratty robe over my cotton nightgown, barely awake yet already bereft. I had hit the twin barriers of food preference and food habit within a half hour of my feet hitting the floor and tucking into fluffy slippers.

The purpose of a chosen constraint like a 10-mile diet is to put awareness above habit and preference. Fasts—be they from overeating, gossip, or chocolate—are essentially reset buttons. They give us a chance to see our inner slob—that creature of lazy routine who prefers never to be upset, challenged, thwarted, or disturbed. The one who sees himself in a magic mirror that takes pounds and years off his body. Who has dozens of excuses about why anything happens (or doesn't), usually starting with “They . . . ,” and who can say “I'm awake” quite convincingly in his sleep. Through fasting we poke our sleepy heads up out of the well-worn grooves of our daily lives. We free ourselves one tiny degree further from pride and delusion. But probably not until we've grumbled for a while about it, just as I was doing about the lack of milk for my tea.

I felt like the king in the A. A. Milne poem who wanted “butter for his Royal slice of bread” and was not placated when offered marmalade by the queen instead.

But then I remembered—because creativity blooms when habits and preferences are thwarted—that one day I saw my neighbor Tanya carrying a gallon glass jar of milk into her house. “Bet that was her own bovine contraband!” I called her and, yes, indeed, that had been nectar from Elsie's neighbor Buttercup.

I explained quickly my desperate situation. “Can I borrow a pint of Buttercup's milk? I'll pay you back tonight with Elsie's.”

“Sure,” she said, and I threw on a coat long enough to hide my bathrobe and nightgown (but still in slippers) and trotted across the cul-de-sac with a clean jar in hand.

I returned home with a satisfying sense of accomplishment. Aaaah! Finally. I had my morning elixir—10,000-mile tea brought to a rolling boil in water from the town well 500 feet away by 100-mile electricity from the Skagit River, sweetened with 10-mile milk and honey. I felt just like the king when he got his butter.

I went out on my deck—journal in one hand, tea in the other—to sit as I did every day, rain, fog, or shine. Today the crystal-white wedge of Mt. Baker shimmered against the blue sky and the waters of Saratoga Passage between Whidbey and Camano Island rested unruffled. Closer in were the village of Langley and Tanya's house across the way. I'd just borrowed the proverbial cup of sugar from her, and by that act I'd crossed the divide between living in a neighborhood and being a neighbor.

A Neighbor in Need . . .

What just happened? I wondered. Yes, I got my milk, clever me, but this warmth in my belly isn't just from the tea. My pen hovered over the page, waiting for this feeling of well-being to translate into thoughts and sentences.

I'm so damned independent. I'm a creature of my country, that's for sure. Live free or die. Well, I guess I almost did. Die, that is.

I crawled onto Whidbey six years ago cut loose by my own choice from all the moorings of my life—a long-standing group household, a home I co-owned, several organizations I was leading. A sane person with stage 3 colon cancer would have stayed where help was always at hand, the rent was free, the food was cooked by others, the meals were convivial, the work was worthwhile and well established, and the networks were strong. But no, I had to go it alone. I thought I did it to face myself, but maybe I was really withdrawing from the pulls and tugs of community. Why else the loneliness?

Moving my weakened body first to Vashon Island, then to Whidbey, brought welcome solitude but unwelcome loneliness—and loneliness revealed a vulnerability I'd never faced before. Activists act. Leaders lead. Now I wasn't the actor in my own movie. I was being “acted upon” by the cancer and by this surprising instinct to encounter myself by myself rather than merely cure myself in the midst of a supportive community.

South Whidbey attracts people in need of quiet, healing, and transition. Its curves are feminine—arcing bays, nubs of hills, round towers of gray clouds that all give the feeling of being swaddled, able to rest. Even back in the wild days when loggers came to turn the island's blanket of cedars and firs into lumber to build the mainland cities, back when Jacob Anthes, Langley's founder, grew tons of vegetables and potatoes for loggers, back when the streets of Langley were muck and mud, women literally ruled the roost. Local historians say that Langley was the first town in the country to elect an all-woman council, shortly after Congress passed the Nineteenth Amendment, giving women the right to vote. Immediately the new mayor, Miss Helen Coe, and her “clean sweep” of councilwomen began civilizing the town.

Just over fifty years later, the town of Langley officially became a city, now inhabited by an influx of hippies as well as conservative Christians, all attracted by the cheap land and mellow way of life. One couple who met and married back then were now my landlords in my small over-the-garage apartment with views of the ragged North Cascades.

Between the time I arrived, paltry possessions in tow, to this “quiet refuge” and the moment I asked for that pint of milk I'd only sipped support from my friends. In my first postdiagnosis year on Vashon I needed them to drive me to doctors' appointments in Seattle. They sat with me during those two rounds of chemo, but once I was dropped off at the Vashon ferry, I was back on my own. New friends on Whidbey, when I had a second surgery, brought me meals for two weeks until I could descend the stairs of my apartment to fend for myself again. Once mobile, I did just that. Fend for myself.

Even after my energy was back and knowledge of peak oil inspired me to start Transition Whidbey with some friends, even after joining a choir and volunteering for a couple of good causes, I was still thinking of myself as a loner.

Until this moment of cul-de-sac neighborliness, though, I didn't recognize the degree to which I still held myself apart here on Whidbey. I engaged in acts of community but not the fact of community. Tanya's easy generosity pierced that protective film of separation. There was no rationale about global conditions or philosophy or morality behind the exchange. I wasn't making something happen self-consciously or courageously. Tanya wasn't bestowing something upon me with beneficence. We were acting as community simply because we were neighbors.

My First Score

At 6.30
P.M.
, though, you can be sure that I mounted my trusty Europa electric-assist bicycle and pedaled over the highway and through the woods to Belinda and Koren's worn front porch, skirting their pug-faced, super-big, super-friendly dog to get my half-gallon jar of milk from the little fridge by the door. We'd made this agreement only by phone, so making this milk pickup seemed even more furtive. Rich yellow cream floated on the top, a sticky ring clinging to the jar. I hadn't seen top cream like that since the milkman delivered to our back door when I was a child. In those days the glass bottles had a bulb on top where the cream floated so you could pour it off easily. It had been only fifty years or so between that local milkman and these milkers. Less than two generations. In that time there had been a near-tragic disassembly of our local dairies due to rising feed costs even as the price of milk was held steady. My first jug of Elsie's milk gave a glimmer of hope that it might not be too late to restore a more local, low-tech option for dairy.

My young friends Eric and Britt lived not far from Belinda's, and I wanted to see how their gardens were growing. It was late and I'd be riding my bike in the dark if I didn't crank up the throttle on my Europa and speed down the road.

After all of our—okay, my—harebrained schemes of mortgaging ourselves to the hilt to buy a ten-acre ramshackle farm or a hundred-year-old rural church, we'd each settled into more modest and affordable places. They now shared their three-acre Maxwelton Valley property with a flower grower. I wanted to see how their garden was evolving.

By Contrast—Eric's Garden

Eric's permaculture method could not have been more different from my gardening methods carried forward from Rhinelander days. Over tough, established grass he'd laid down manure, then large sheets of cardboard, covering both with straw, and then dug evenly spaced fist-sized holes into the bed, which he filled with compost and vegetable starts. The compost let the plants get established, and by the time the roots reached the manure, it was rotted enough to feed the plant. This was not what we'd figured out in gardening kindergarten, so I wanted to see how it was working. In a word, fantastic.