Secret Ingredients

I have some odd ideas about nutrition, even if I don't think they are quite so odd. Like, I don't like dead water -- my water (or anyone else's water) that comes from a spring that a frog can live (and pee) in is infinitely preferable to me than dead, chlorinated or irradiated water without stuff living in it. When we have cucumbers, we leave them on the counter and eat and eat and eat them -- I call that cucumber chemotherapy. We do that sort of thing with a lot of seasonal foods, and only preserve some of each as treats.

Today we picked gooseberries to make fried pies as a Father's Day treat. We "clean" them which is mostly try to de-stem them so there isn't something in the filling that can't be chewed. But the little black flower is still on the other end, and I'm quite sure some stems make it in too. And who knows what the heck is in there so good for you that will never ever be identified by science. Who knows what cancer is eradicated by the eating of those delicious fried pies?

We got some broccoli the other day from a local truck farmer. It hadn't been cooled well and some flowered. We ate it and put it up anyway. Who knows what those flowers offer you? I was quite pleased with that broccoli, actually -- it had plenty of worms in it! Corn and broccoli and cabbage and the like that doesn't have worms? Something is wrong with it!

and then the stars align and the dam breaks

it being about movement

So in living on and “managing” a farm one knows, that is one is aware for the longest time before one takes any action at all, that the goat herd sire needs to be traded off, a new one procured, the cows need to be bred, and all the rest. And things accumulate – you get a phone number for someone who owns a Jersey bull locally and post it on your refrigerator, the person who you usually get the new herd sires from has one ready for you, things like that.

Then suddenly something totally unrelated happens. In this case it was the death of a friend. Now, remember, I said this death was totally unrelated, and it was. Totally. This guy was not a part of any of this, but the new herd sire came to his funeral with his old mom and came home with his new dad. At the same time the Jersey guy contacted us. Turns out he has some goats too and is interested in our old herd sire. Old billy exchanged for transportation and exposure to bull for three+ months for old cow. Also updated vaccinations on all bovines since old cow will be visiting that bull and his herd.

At the same time, the peaches are ripe and the very last of the blackberries are fermenting in the back of the fridge (alcoholic jelly is some of the best) and, well, more stuff that I can even think about in the garden that all needs to be eaten first and preserved second.

Which, one of the huge lessons of homesteading is never preserve first and eat second. Always eat first. Always always always. If you do not eat it fresh, it will not be valuable to you preserved. Plus there is that if you grew it, you deserve it at its very best, which is fresh. Eat first.

Another lesson is this: the monoculture agribusiness model is always inferior. The cow guy was amazed at how good our cows look, much better than his he said, and ours are just out there, cowing around. The baby goat (new herd sire) got here in pretty pitiful shape (pot bellied, shaggy coated, bad feet, small). The strongest, most direct evidence, however, is the paddocks of newly planted grass at the work barn. Plowed, disked, fertilized and seeded following exactly the agribusiness model, every speck of that planted grass is now dead and the only things growing there are spiny amaranth and jimson weed. The field next to it, however, is green. It doesn’t have much food value, true, but it does have some, and at least the ground is covered. I know why people plant agribusiness fescue but I pretty much never think it is a good idea. Meanwhile, on this farm, the baby goat is already looking better in less than a week, and he hasn’t even been turned loose yet which is when he will really thrive.

When new cow came here, she came from a small dairy where she had access to plenty of grass and was fed while being milked. And she was skinny. When we picked her up, my boss asked if she wasn’t thin but the truth is, that’s how dairy animals often look. And when she got here, she looked so much smaller than old cow. She doesn’t look smaller anymore. I think it has to do with the fact that here she has a broader choice of what to eat, and a less stressful, more cowful life. In other words, a real homestead, free, life is flat out better for animals, pastures, mankind. We look better, are healthier, happier, last longer.

Now, concerning movement. I follow, for years at a time, people who I find to be good examples as well as horrible warnings. The guy who died, for example, was a horrible warning of how not to turn out to be. The difference between the good examples and the horrible warnings is movement. The horrible warnings do the same things over and over. Oh, most times they think they are doing different things, but when you look at their lives it is like they burn supper on the stove one day and burn it in the oven the next day. It is the same thing with a different color hair. They have the same epiphanies over and over, essentially go around the same circle again and again.

The good examples have a direction. They move not randomly but with purpose. The movement may be somewhat butterfly-ish in that the purposefulness may not be immediately evident but monarchs do wind up on milkweed and cabbage moths do inevitably find some plant in the cole-ish family. People will say of the good examples, they are exactly the same people they were when I met them years ago and yet, a look at their lives reveals that they have moved, have refined, have advanced, are flat out further along. They don’t flounder a whole lot. They build. Good examples don’t hide, don’t bully, don’t perform for the audience.

They do, however, fry fresh peach pies, which is what I’m going off to do right now.

Just Because

Because she is beautiful

Because they are cute.

And just because.

And a note about the baby goats because of the earlier post against intervention. They are two of triplets. Their mom is eleven years old, rather ancient for a goat. And at the beginning of December, she looked to be near her due date -- she was HUGE, basketball bag, the works. You know our goats are rather au naturel and so the billy just runs with them and we have an idea of when they were bred but not an exact date. Which is real good as far as not making unnecessary inventions is concerned.

Far more than just her hugeness though, she started acting different. Uncomfortable. I'd never really seen her act like that before. She sat a lot -- sat like a dog. One day it seemed as though she couldn't really walk and I was truly afraid a kid was stuck sideways in her pelvis. One day she sat in one spot for 12 hours. I actually worried and fretted some. A lot. I considered what interventions could be made.

BUT she wasn't sick and so I just made sure she was eating and drinking and peeing and pooping and left her alone. And sure enough, the day after Christmas, she popped out three beautiful babies who are all doing well and being very capricious.

Sterile is the Opposite of Fertile

It probably doesn’t surprise you that I’m not much for conventional medicine. It might surprise you that I’m not much for unconventional medicine/intervention either. I am appalled by how many drugs everyone is on for everything but I don’t figure my thoughts matter all that much.

I do believe in creating health. Which I think requires some sideways thinking.

And I have a lot of sideways thoughts about all things medical. At the barn, two horses recently tested positive for parasites. The vets told us at the last big horse vet meeting they’d been to, all the talk had been about built up resistance to wormers. Because I’ve tried to stay current, I know that the most common strategy is to worm every two months rotating wormers each time. But another line of thought is to use the same wormer every two months and do fecal tests a time or two a year and switch only when one type stops working. And then there are the fringe herbal wormer people who mostly want to sell you something just exactly like the drug companies want to sell you something.

So where do my thoughts come down on it? I think the basic mistake has been to try to eliminate worms entirely. I don’t know that my strategy works the best but the health of my herd seems ok. I worm once per year, in the early winter . . . unless I see evidence/reason to do more. When I have it available, I let them free choice wormwood which mostly applies to the goats.

On that same sort of reasoning level, I was reading an article about MRSA. My mom had MRSA before she died. This article said Norway had found a solution. A SOLUTION. Wow. What is that? To not prescribe antibiotics, particularly two classes of antibiotics known to provoke MRSA. However the article was very careful NOT to name what those two classes are (they are fluoroquinolones and cephalosporins if you are like me and have to know). They also tested and treated for MRSA (commonly harmless on skin, and easy to treat then too), and used isolation, in Norway and in Britain and in the US -- and it not only cut MRSA infections but all hospital acquired infections.

So I don’t know if my using radically less worming drugs works, but using radically less antibiotics does. And penicillin based antibiotics are the only ones that aren’t toxic too -- all the more reason to keep them effective. Think of all other antibiotics as insecticides. Antibiotics are great things -- used exceedingly sparingly.

I think the same is true of wormers. Some time ago (so I don’t have the link) I read an article that said having a few intestinal worms increased the efficacy of the immune system. Bet it works for horses too!

Offer Up Your Best Defense

I think it helps that I think of myself as a healthy person. And that I like being strong, physically and in every way.

I am a healthy person. I value health. I have a lot of thoughts about and approaches to being healthy.

But I believe in healing.

Healing is getting better. Not masking symptoms. Healing is physical and mental and emotional and spiritual. I had a green-stick fracture of my collar bone once (broken when a horse fell with me when jumping a ditch in the rain when I was 14). There was nothing to be done except to wear a brace to hold my shoulders back to stretch the bone out as straight as possible for it to heal. The doctor said, “Well, when this heals, it will never break there again.” That is healing.

And that is why I don’t particularly believe in allopathic medicine -- too often it doesn’t heal. Here, allopathic medicine says, take this pill for the rest of your life. Never mind the side effects; we have more pills for that. I’ll use allopathic medicine when it’s approach is healing . . . or as a stopgap when I haven’t figured out a healing approach yet.

For the past several years, I’ve had horrid allergy problems. The problems came and went and coincided with a lot of different things and I tried this and that and the other thing to no avail. I tried convincing my body that pollen really didn’t want to kill it. When that didn’t work, I’d resort to allergy pills. When that didn’t work, I’d go back again, trying to figure it out. It was really this chronic thing that I sort of got used to and sort of thought was just my normal. Hell, I deserved it anyway since I smoked for fifteen years and was raised in a pill family with antibiotics and antihistamines as the norm.

For Christmas, husband got me a neti pot. I have to say, it has been a miracle. Am I healed? Well, time will tell on that one, but I’m so much better that I have to put it in the miraculous healing department. I sleep. I don’t snork. I’m even coughing less. I don’t have to buy tissues every single time I find myself in a grocery store (because as we all know, toilet paper is never soft enough, and hankies are just too gross). I honestly expect it will continue to improve for months to come.

Most of what makes us sick, or makes us better, is in our minds. Or maybe we’re possessed by an incubus but that’s the same thing, just a different viewpoint. Maybe the neti pot just washes out my nose and sinuses. Or maybe it purifies me spiritually. Or both. Or something else.

I’ve been healed before, and in various and sundry ways. I broke my little finger and it healed crooked. So I thought it straight. I just used the idea that we replace every single cell in our bodies and thus, with intention, I should be able to talk my body into replacing those cells in a more orderly fashion. And it worked after a fashion in that my finger is not perfectly straight but it has full range of motion and is no longer so crooked that anyone would notice if I didn’t put my hand flat on a table and point it out to them.

The worst thing I ever had, probably worse than the sinus/allergy thing, was TMJD. And it was bad. I was in pain a lot, my jaw locked closed rather regularly, and I often quit eating in the middle of a meal because my jaw hurt too much to chew even soft food. The dentist I had at the time recommended an oral surgeon and said I’d have to have my jaw broken. That was not an answer I took kindly to, so every time I had my teeth cleaned, I went to a different dentist and had a TMJ consultation. They all said different things, mostly horribly interventive things, like get braces again, reset the jaw, put teflon in the joint. I would just pay them then go to a different dentist next time.

I do not know why I thought there was some other answer. Probably because I continued to hurt but I wasn’t about to let them do something, yet again, that they couldn’t undo if it didn’t work. Finally I went to a dentist who I really did not like. I mean, from the start, she and I took a dislike to one another. But when I described my problem and the solutions suggested, she said she knew a physical therapist I should go to, then she just showed me the one single exercise I should do, relaxing and opening my jaw without thrusting it. She told me to never ever pop it (why didn’t I know that already? and why hadn’t any other dentist mentioned that every time I did that I was injuring it?) and to pay attention when it hurt and to stop doing what I was doing to hurt it.

I never went back to her but she healed me. I’ve never again had a serious issue with TMJ, and I've never met another dentist who knew that exercise much less who thought it would work (most of them insist I never had TMJ since I got better).

Healing requires to keep asking the question, to never take no for an answer, and to be open to what you never even considered a possibility (which honestly most often means changing what your question is because you rarely if ever start out with the question that will lead to healing).

Without being stupidly gullible about it.

The Importance of Foodways

I wanted to take a desert to the dressage clinician who comes every so often to the barn I work at. He’d asked for a flan but it is not spring, the time of abundant eggs, so what he got was an apple pie since it is the time of abundant apples.

I wasn’t going to be in town the days he would be at the barn so I took the pie by the barn the day before his clinic began and left it with my boss. He would be staying with her anyway, and the pie was as much for her as for him. Arriving at the barn, the children piled out of the car to speak to each and every horse. The vet was there and with my boss but they were just waiting for sedation to take effect on one horse, so while the children made rounds through the barn, I spoke with them.

“Hey! I brought you and Pierre an apple pie!” I said as I uncovered it so they could admire the lattice crust. When it was duly admired I added, “Now, be sure you let Pierre know that this is really home made. I mean, there is lard in that crust and I raised the pig, slaughtered the pig, rendered the lard, then made the crust.”

The vet smiled a little smile and said, “Next you are going to tell us that you ground the wheat!”

“She did!” my boss said.

“Well, actually the blond child you see running around here ground the wheat, but yes, we did grind the wheat in there, and it is whole wheat.”

He was a bit flabbergasted, much to my delight, and my boss actually said, “She’s amazing,” which was also pretty nice to hear.

But I guess I really wish that people were less flabbergasted and less amazed too. I just feel like everybody has to eat -- we might as well be passionate about food.

I come from a culture in which food is extremely important. Southern culture in general, and Appalachian culture in particular, has specific foodways. Now, my boss who is from one or the other of those tiny New England states and Pierre who is from the Seychelles Islands may or may not know the Southern or the Appalachian significance of pie, but I’m pretty sure they can both feel the vibrations in its goodness. (and whoever said we weren’t cosmopolitan hillbillies?)

What I want to say is, it is important to have a food culture. It doesn’t matter what it is, but it is important to have. For us hillbillies, it begins with a bowl of beans and a pone of cornbread. That is the bottom line basic. It can be grown here, it is nutritious, it fulfills pretty much everything, and it is delicious to boot. To that, all else is added. A slice of onion. A dollop of chowchow. A piece of backbone. Pork is the next layer of staple, adding meat and most importantly fat to the diet. And potatoes, another great grower and good keeper. Then you can get to the greens, a lot of wild ones but also cabbage (good keeper, easy preserver) and the fruits (apples and pears and berries). And it goes on and on, each adding to and complimenting all the others.

With a food culture, you always have something to eat, something that is satisfying, something that can grow where you are, something that you can preserve and that can thus preserve you through the winter. It is lack of a food culture that seduces people to think it is ok to transport food (and especially food that is primarily water) all across the globe. A food culture knows how to eat seasonally. It is lack of a revered food culture that permits the insertion of industrial food substitutes.

It isn’t that we don’t enjoy other food cultures: on the contrary, we very much enjoy many cultural foods. I’m good with the baba ganouch and the tabouli (although I severely wonder about the people who buy tabouli mix) and the falafel. Our culture gets along great with Mexican food since it is basically the same staples as hillbilly food, just variations on the preparations. Stir-fries are always on our list of potential meals. I lovelovelove seafood, mountain girl though I am. Every single place around the globe has a legitimate food culture, and there are parts from each that we can incorporate into our own food culture. But to make baba ganouch, then you are going to have to figure out how to grow the eggplants. When Gary Nabhan (in Coming Home to Eat) brought some squash seeds from his ancestral home Turkey to his current desert home and tried to grow them, he found that variety was susceptible to squash bugs and thus a native, hairy, variety grew better . . . and that he could adapt his ancestral foodways to his desert home foodways. On those rare occasions when I travel, what I most want to do is eat the local food, not the haute food, not some chef’s version of the food, but the real food -- what keeps the people native of that place alive and happy.

But when it comes down to it, a bowl of beans with a little fat back in them, a side of steamed greens, and a pone of cornbread (with lots of butter), and I am a happy hillbilly woman.

(of course, then I can vary the beans into “cowboy beans” -- basically a sort of barbeque chili bean thing -- or the beans can be pintos or Octobers or limas or little navies or great northerns or Jacob’s cattle beans or green beans, and the meat can be fatback or backbone or jowl or salt or fresh or lots or just flavoring or some green herbs instead, and the greens might be coleslaw or steamed cabbage or wild nettles or kale or chard or beet greens, and I can add a little garlic, or fry potatoes, or stew some apples, or just about anything at all -- and the leftovers I can make into bean cakes or burrito filling or add to a pot of soup or just heat up and eat and any meal becomes a celebration when it ends with a pie or a cobbler or a cake, and pretty much all of it can be home grown or bought in dry bulk or wild crafted and there you go)

below is one recent, highly enjoyed, entirely off the farm meal. Only the salt and the shoyu were not our own. Baked potato with butter, cheese, onions, garlic, grilled pork, topped with a dollop of sour cream. And we could make the shoyu!


By the way, it was reported that Pierre, while eating his second piece of pie, said, "This is healthy AND it is desert!"

a few photos

The eggs have slowed down from their spring high production, but blueberry waffles (blueberry oatmeal, blueberry pancakes, etc.) are a welcome addition to the breakfast choices.

A pile of cucumbers. I love the summer glut of these, and that they simply don't exist at other times of the year.

The first ripe tomato. Sorry about the focus but the tomato was gone and I couldn't take another photo!

The first mess of green beans. These are white half runners. We pressured them (5 min.) with the rest of the pot filled with new potatoes. A side of corn bread, maybe a side of slaw and that's a zero-miles meal.

My First Time

So Alecto talked about making this no knead fermented (or something close to it) bread. Came from the NYT -- no wonder I didn't see it. By way of Kitt's, where the actual directions came from.

I changed everything of course. I changed everything because I see no reason to eat anything but whole grains. Why bother? It doesn't taste as good not whole, and it isn't as good for you, and just why bother? I mean, it is one thing to eat junk but quite another to eat it at home -- and another thing entirely to bother cooking it.

I changed it because I've made a LOT of bread in my time, and a lot of fermented bread, and I knew I didn't have enough water in it when I mixed it up. I'm sure that was because I'd changed from white bread flour to freshly ground hard red whole wheat flour with some gluten added.

I changed it because the pot I had to cook it in, as well as the number of people in my family and their enthusiasm for bread, was a lot bigger than the original recipe's proportions.

So here's my version, here at the beginning (this will change over time, no doubt):

*Big old flat bottom cast iron cauldron with lid pot to cook it in.

*6 cups freshly ground hard red wheat flour, 4 tsp gluten flour, 3 tsp salt (not iodized), heaping 1/2 tsp yeast (not fast acting)

*Mix dry ingredients together.

*Add 3 1/2 to 4 cups of cold water

(note: I really should try weighing the ingredients because with flour and water, measurements are sometimes surprisingly variable)

I mix this in a stock pot and with a wooden spoon. Then cover and keep somewhere around 60 to 70 degrees for somewhere between 15 and 24 hours. It won't matter that much. The above loaf was kept at about 70 (in the oven with the light on in our rather cool house but on a relatively warm night) for about 18 hours.

*Deflate, leaving in stock pot, but don't bother to knead. Let rise again for two hours.

*Get your oven hot at some point within this last two hour rise. If you have a wood cook stove like I do, it takes a little longer than turning a knob and waiting a half hour like the recipe says for it to get to 450. After the oven is hot, let the pot and lid heat in the oven for at least a half hour so you better be thinking ahead here.

*I put the "toppings" on the board and just dumped the dough onto it, and from there shaped it by folding it into thirds both ways. I used flour and rolled cereal grains as my topping.

I was somewhat concerned that my cauldron might not be all that well seasoned, and then it was in a hot oven burning off what seasoning it had anyway, so I generously floured the bottom of the pot before I flopped the loaf into it. I shook the pot a bit to settle the dough and put the lid on making the seal (so the vent was covered). I was amazed this didn't rise as a loaf and went online to make sure this went in the oven this way. Yes it did. Ok. I am familiar with oven spring and with the chemistry of crust and understand what that lid is doing but it was still a leap of faith even more than "no knead" was. Ok. So here I was, making a recipe I had never made and changing it all to pieces and I was a tad bit nervous.

As you can tell, it came out wonderfully. Magnificently! Bake for 1/2 hour at 450 with the lid on, then remove lid and bake another 15 minutes or until done. Always measure bread for done-ness by internal temperature -- 190 is perfect, 210 is overdone, anything under 180 is underdone. This single step has made more difference in my bread baking than anything. The above loaf cooked about an hour total.

Turn out of pan and let cool a bit before digging in. It isn't as flavorful as bread you've used a starter that has developed its bacteria for flavor. I may get another sour starter because I really like a sour fermented bread. It does have an absolutely magnificent crust -- hard to cut and chewy and oh so flavorful.

And you know that photo of Alecto all pleased as punch getting her pizzas out of the oven? I kept looking at this loaf of bread sitting on my bar and laughing with delight at it. You can't see it in this photo but this loaf broke on top and curled just like the fancy bread books talk about. A no knead whole wheat loaf, not risen, not slashed, perfect. Tickled the absolute sh*t out of me. I do not see how a person can NOT be passionate about food. And especially about bread.

daring to be the control group

Scratching
Originally uploaded by Contrary Goddess.

My horse had a major injury. Not something like a broken leg or anything, but something that anywhere else anyone else would have called the vet and the vet would have sutured it, at least, and probably started systemic antibiotics and likely analgesics and put on stall rest and who knows what else.

When I saw it, it scared me. If this became infected, it could become life threatening. And it was in a bad place, just under the flank, in such a place that there was air under the wound. The hole, scratched in there by a horse in love with scratching himself after he’d managed to break off the top of the tree, was about the size of a quarter. There was already a small edema under his belly.

The wound was draining serus and blood, mostly serus. It was not infected. I disinfected it but with some caution too because I didn’t want to introduce infectious agents where there had been none and I didn’t want whatever I used to disinfect it to then inhibit the healing of the wound. For example, do you know to always rinse off hydrogen peroxide because the same oxidation that disinfects the wound also inhibits healing. Of course, you have to rinse with something sterile. Boiled water works. That’s what I used, H2O2 and then boiled H2O. I wondered whether I should even have done that. Then I applied black salve (ichthamol ointment) generously. Then I watched and waited and took his temperature (to check for infection) and his pulse (to check for pain) twice a day and watched some more.

He never moved any differently because of the injury, never showed any sign of pain or infection. He was outside in his field the whole time. The wound wept for several days. The edema grew. His temperature and pulse and attitude and appetite never changed. Then the wound started filling in, just a little bit. And the edema didn’t change. Then, one morning, about a week into the injury, the edema was smaller. The horse had been laying down and I thought maybe that was why it was smaller. But it never increased again so maybe that pressure is one way that edemas under the belly are reduced.

In two weeks the edema was gone. The wound had been closed for several days at two weeks and at three except for a slight star of scar tissue you couldn’t tell it had ever been.

Here is the thing -- people in general, and doctors/veterinarians in particular, don’t know what the natural course of an event, a pregnancy, a wound, whatever, is anymore. I came right up against that with my pregnancies, where an OB insisted that just about every woman he attended would have died without his intervention but when quizzed it became painfully obvious that he’d never seen a natural labor. To him natural labor meant induction, pitocin, epidural, episiotomy, traction, hemorrhage and everything else. Intervention is so common that it is the norm and there isn’t a control group of natural healing to compare it with.

What I did to the horse was intervention and honestly might not have been helpful intervention. I tried to use my judgment and do my best at the time but it might have been that I interfered as much as a veterinarian would have. And it might have been that a veterinarian’s care would have sped the wound’s healing by . . . a couple days maybe. Stitches would have meant it was closed sooner, but perhaps it being open wasn’t a bad thing. Do you see the assumptions that get made when we take over the role of the body? We don’t really know any of it.

There is a place for alopathic medicine. There is a place for holistic medicine. But there ought to be an even bigger place for allowing what will happen to happen. Including, eventually, death.

Where the line is is always the question. And it becomes a question of where we put our trust -- outside or inside?

Like so many of my posts, this one is really a question, not an answer. But my bias is always for the inside job.


My creation
Originally uploaded by Contrary Goddess.

These are wound photos at about 2 days, about a week, and about 2 weeks from date of injury.