Hiking, Mushroom Hunting, Rain

We've been out and about the past two or three days, so sorry I haven't been around! I actually wrote my Friday blog on Thursday and scheduled it to publish - first time I've ever done that on this blog. It was a good feeling, to have taken care of something that I wanted to do in advance, and still be gone.

We met up with Phil's other friend who visited us this summer for a big day. He and Phil are both so very incredibly energetic that it's always a big, tiring day. A wonderful hike in the foothills of the Cascades, in huge old trees

With probably 25 varieties of fungi that we stopped to look at

coral mushroom that looks like cauliflower and is apparently delicious... and many others... And a fantastic panorama at the end of the trail, where Bryan and Phil napped...

Then we hiked back fast fast fast (when Phil in in the lead, that's what happens). I was so proud of myself, so pleased, that I'm now in the condition that when the pace is too fast, I can push myself to keep up rather than just being unable to and falling far behind.

We drove 20 more miles to a secret chanterelle mushroom spot, and hunted for mushrooms. At that point, though, I was exhausted and didn't keep up quite so well

We were a little late for the mushrooms but did find some. Maple leaves were on the ground, which are exactly the same color as chanterelles, so there were many deceptive appearances.

They are so beautiful, and so shy, just buried in the duff. Often, you'll find a whole ring of them when you find one. Are they delicious? Yes indeed. We ate them sauteed - as far as I know they're not good to eat raw, but I would like to look into the possibility of marinading them or some other way of preparing them.

We ate out at a Thai restaurant that night - I had a coconut cream soup that was delicious. I didn't feel as good afterwards as if I'd eaten raw food or my own prepared food, but I didn't feel as bad as after the ghee-experience with the Indian food. It's good to see the ways in which I can push myself...

What was the best thing you ate this weekend?

Self Love in Writing and Food

Happy Friday, everyone! A whole week since the end of reflections on self-love - time is flying!

I have kept the concept in mind, and have been realizing that there are two especially tricky areas for me. One is doing what I know I need to do, despite being busy or having resistance. The other is finding the balance between taking care of my body's special needs and satisfying my curiosity to try out new things, retry old things, or just feel like I'm joining in some food-related pleasure. The last is maybe the most fraught for me, since I feel some guilt around it too.

not all treats are sweet...

So, I want to talk about these tricky areas today - to show some pitfalls that I've had since I've been away from home, and how to fix them.

Writing


I know, and have said many times, that I feel like I'm actually living my life when I'm regularly working on my poetry, and when I'm not, I feel like I'm just marking time. So, why has it been hard for me to make time here in Oregon? Well, there are reasons. I have a lot of work to do, then there's the work on the farm and all the visiting... I'm often exhausted at the end of the day, which isn't the best state in which to get good writing done.

But I am also lacking a lot of my familiar inspirations. At home, I have probably a dozen books of poetry on the go at any one time - my reading practice is important for my writing practice.

So, to help me, I'm going to share a few of the things that are on my shelf at home:

This is wonderfully sensuous and really is about the heart.

I adore McGrath's use and extension of forms, his humor, his use of incantation, his cynicism.

Limpidly exquisite as always - the latest book of poems by someone I'm honored to call a mentor, who is also the new Alaska Writer Laureate.

An amazing set of poems...

A wonderful anthology about writing poems.

There are many more too, but I don't want to lose anyone! Will share more later. And you'd better believe I'm taking some poetry from online home on this computer when I leave town...

Food


I have a couple of stories of things that didn't work, and some ideas for things that will work better for me.

A few nights ago, Phil and I went out to dinner. We went to an Indian restaurant. I love Indian food, especially the spices, and the ease of finding gluten free and meatless choices. But I was nervous about the fact that they tend to cook in ghee. Although this is clarified butter, it's still a dairy product, and dairy affects my mood in such horrid ways that I'm afraid to eat it. But I want to be able to be flexible enough for the occasional outing - we eat out extremely seldom.

I ordered utthappam, which is basically a sourdough pancake made of rice and lentils with onions and chilis, with some sambar - lentil soup. These are South Indian dishes, where coconut predominates over dairy, so I was hoping that they might not be made with ghee.

Well, it was deliciously spicy, but I could detect an element of dairy in the aftertaste. I only ate half of it, so had some to experiment with the next day. I woke up mucusy, headachy, and in a really bad mood, and tried a bite or two of the leftovers mid-morning for an immediate return of those symptoms. Told me what I needed to know. I think some Indian restaurants nowadays use olive oil or coconut oil, to cater to vegans, so I guess I should look out for those or make my own. Another one for the 'watch' list.

The other 'food' problem area is temptation. I'm away from home, can't make my own treats (although I brought some with me), am often working long hours in town. At the farm, everyone eats tons of sugar and ice cream. In town, there are a few raw bars available that aren't around where I live.

So, I gave into temptation twice over the past week and tried out these new larabar flavors I hadn't had before:

Chocolate chip brownie and peanut butter chocolate chip. First ingredient: dates. Possible milk contamination in the chips. But I love chocolate chip anything and have it so seldom (not supposed to have chocolate either, remember). I didn't eat either of them in one go - they took a couple days each. And the pb one gave me a good idea for an alternative energy bar to make for Phil, but they're really not a good food for me.

It's another piece of the discussion about 'natural' versus 'what works for you.' Dates are more 'natural' and whole than the white stevia powder I use in my home made bars and barks. But when I eat my stevia-sweetened goodies, I feel good and stable. When I ate the larabars with dates, I felt jittery, unsatisfied, with a big increase in appetite and cravings. That's the worst thing to me about eating high-glycemic things: they make me hungrier!

So, what is going to work?

Well, I've shown before the whole bunch of no-sugar cookies I brought with me -

these are disappearing fast.

There's one batch that is _very low_ sugar instead of 'no sugar:' I made a batch of these cinnamon maca bars from Sunfood to bring with me to Oregon. The recipe calls for dates and two tablespoons of honey. I subbed goji berries for the dates, but I did use the two tablespoons of honey: I used some hoarded precious Christmasberry honey from my Hawaii days. Christmasberry honey is supposedly as potent a healer as Manuka honey. (Christmasberry is a noxious weed that is also a potent herb. Also known as Brazilian peppertree.)

It boggles my mind that the recipe says 'makes six bars:' I think I got 18 out of it! So, two tablespoons of healing honey and two tablespoons of (low sugar anyway) goji berries in a batch of 18 is pretty low-sugar for now. And again, these don't send my blood sugar for a loop like the larabars.

I also brought some bark:

I've shared many recipes for bark in the past. Earlier this year, when I was 'very depleted' and not digesting anything, these really were my major source of calories. More recently, I've backed off a lot on them, since I have so many more options and they really are dense. But, since they're so similar in composition to chocolate, especially when I use my dark chocolate flavor extract, they make a pretty good substitute/treat when chocolate is making the rounds.

One more thing I did was to make a chia mix - chia seeds, coconut flour, goji berries, ginger, bee pollen. Mix a couple spoonfuls with some nutmilk and stevia - and, here, some blackberries I gathered a couple days ago:

This is something I hadn't been doing at home, but everything else smack of the familiar.

Finally, if I absolutely have to have chocolate, I will occasionally buy a Lindt 90% bar.
Being 90% cocoa, it's very low sugar obviously, and I find one square (which has 55 calories) to be very satisfying, so long as I am mindful. So a single bar will last for weeks. I try not to do this, because of chocolate's effect on my adrenals, but when we're away from home, and considering that I am generally so very strict, I consider it an slight indulgence that works if I'm careful. On the side of self-love, not self-abuse.

And, not all food treats are sweet! I pictured jicama up top, always a great treat for me. And avocado is another wonderful treat.

What are some non-sweet treats for you?
How do you take care of your muse?

A Delicious Flavor Combination, A Book Review, Some Thoughts on Blogging and Fiction

Happy Thursday! Whereas yesterday, I could work outside some of the time because the sun was so gorgeous, today it's overcast and gloomy. I'm so glad that people enjoyed the bean-harvesting post. It's really amazing how much work there always is to do on a farm.

I have a grab-bag of different things to share today.

First, something delicious that I connected with since having to swear off tomatoes:

You can't see it very well (it's really a better shot of my knees, lol) but in the tub is kraut, cucumbers, avocado and some nutritional yeast. With romaine lettuce and my favorite jicama on the side. 

I had the same for dinner, but kicked up a notch with the addition of spirulina. I've never been that great a fan of cucumber, but there's something about cucumber chopped up with avocado and lots of spirulina that just hits the delicious spot. I urge you to try it: if you're not a spirulina fan, it might work for you just like it works for this not-cucumber fan!

Next up: a Book Review:

I just finished reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez' Love in the Time of the Cholera. I read it when I was in the bathroom, when I was getting my pills together for the day, when I was picking through filberts, getting dressed, brushing my teeth - and sometimes, just laying in bed before going to sleep! That's how I get books read.

This is a 346-page evocation of a time and place that is so foreign to me - the Caribbean coast of South America at the turn of the 19th and 20th century. Marquez evokes so many characters, including many 'bit parts,' with such intimacy and detail, but never even names the city in which the story is set, presuming on the readers' knowledge, or showing that the precise location doesn't really matter, both. I believe it's set in Colombia, but I don't know the city. Many historic innovations are also canvassed - typing, the telegraph, hot air balloons, mailboxes - so that the story is an interesting piece of history at the same time.

It's a slow start, and often ponderously paced, but the development is so inexorably and carefully exposed that the result is fascinating. Reading it as a writer, it is fascinating to see the devices he employs. He uses the 'omniscient narrator's' perspective a lot more than most people do nowadays. He does amazing things with time and the timeline of the story. He focuses in with touchingly intimate, minute details on characters who are not obviously important for the story. For example, the book opens on the scene of the suicide of an otherwise insignificant character that takes place at a very late point in the storyline. The 'main characters' are not even encountered, certainly not in any way that would mark them as the main characters, until the end of the first chapter - and the chapters are long. 

This distancing from the main characters and focusing on others really places them in a strong and vivid setting, while the leaping around in the timeline help to build all kinds of anticipation and reflection. The other thing that this does is to underline the aptness of the title itself. The story is really all about 'love,' in its many forms and guises, at this specific time.

It's not a 'put your brain to sleep and ride along' read by any means: you have to do the work with it. And parts of it are not at all uplifting - to the contrary, in fact. But it is extremely well-written and worthwhile. I read it in the version I linked to above: it is clearly a good translation, because I was very seldom bothered by infelicities of translation. There were a very few times where the gender of a pronoun was clearly mistranslated, and a couple of superfluous definite articles, but otherwise, for a 'foreign language book,' it was quite a smooth read.

Some Thoughts on Blogging and Fiction

Having just finished reading a work of fiction, I found myself musing on the value of fiction as a way to experience the world. I have a lot of sympathy with those who say that they get to know more about the world and how they view the world from reading fiction than they do from reading the news or history. That's one of the reasons why I so admire good fiction: in the intimate, private setting in which you find yourself as the reader of a novel, you can try out all sorts of theories and ways to look at the world, and experience empathy or antipathy for all kinds of characters without having to act on it in the 'real world,' and so you have the test-ground to draw some important conclusions.

Phil, who worked as a librarian for years, has a t-shirt that says "Some of my best friends are fictional!"

And then I got to wondering: are friendships that are formed in the blogging world similar to our friendships with fictional characters? How similar is the world of blogging to the world of fiction? For sure, it's more interactive, or can be. And sometimes, you have a blogger meetup or win a giveaway, and a whiff of fairyland wafts into your 'real world.' But otherwise, through reading other people's blogs, you get to eavesdrop on their lives. You get to admire them, envy them, perhaps get your buttons pushed by them - wish you were or were not more like them... You get to identify or disidentify with them in many of the same ways that you do with fictional characters, i.e. without the pressure of immediate, instantaneous interaction. You can turn off the computer and walk away, or shut the book!

Perhaps it's also important that there's no way (short of the meetup context) to verify the truth about the character whose blog you are reading. We put up photos, we aim to be as transparent as we can be (or at least, I do, and I trust that people whose blogs I'm reading do too). So I'm not talking about the scenario where someone's posting a blog pretending to be something quite other than what they are. What I mean is that inevitably, we construct our own image of the person we're reading about and identifying with. And sometimes, they make it as easy for us as they can, with photos galore, and we can still end up with our internal version of the person that will only have a tangential connection to how that person perceives herself. 

I think the truth is, all relationships are like that. Some of my closest friends in real life are also fictional: my take on them is only the partial truth. I feel that it's one of the blessings of my relationship with Phil that we often touch base on just this subject and try to make sure that we are seeing each other aright.

So, perhaps it's not just blogging relationships that are like relationships with fictional characters. What do you think? Yes, I'm waxing philosophical... But I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Beans and Harvesting

Fall weather here today for sure! The sun was coming out during my late-morning filbert-picking, but Phil cleaned out the furnace and wood is being burned in the farmhouse today.

I'm enjoying the feeling of not-eating tomatoes, although there are lots of delectable split sungold cherry tomatoes that I'm sorry not to be able to help with.

This tricolor was particularly fun, I thought:

Thanks for your thoughts about natural or non-natural foods. I agree that mostly, we each just have to find what works for our bodies, and then to make that work within the constraints of time, seasonal availability, money, etc.

In addition to the garden, Phil's nephew and his girlfriend were experimenting with growing organic beans for market this year - they put in four acres on the farm and this weekend was their first attempt at combine harvesting! Phil (a lot) and I (a little bit) helped out.

The beans have been swathed (cut down from the vines) and raked up into windrows -

We were harvesting 'orca' beans - a beautiful bean that's lower in the two indigestible (gas-provoking) starches that beans have (raffinose and stacchyose, if you collect names).

A combine harvester is an amazing machine

It's supposed to pick up the harvested plants, shuck the seeds out of the pods, shoot the chaff out the back -

- separate the seeds from dirt and drop them into the hopper -

And then it can shoot the harvest out into a pickup truck, or barn, or whatever -

Considering that it has so many functions, and that it works on such a variety of seeds of very different sizes, from tiny alfalfa and clover through grains to big beans, it's not surprising that it is plenty glitchy and requires _lots_ of adjusting! We all got very dusty. There was lots of trying to shovel the vines into the conveyor belt to make it pick up more effectively -

We picked up lots of beans from behind the combine after it had passed -

- and generally got all tangled up in the machinery -

- and the first lot of beans harvested were mixed in with a great deal of dirt!

There was a lot of clunkiness and trial-and-error - but can you imagine hand-harvesting four acres of beans??? And in terms of the world food market, four acres is pretty small beans. Can you imagine how the big corporations do it?

Really, it's more amazing that stuff gets to market as clean as it does. I'm off to eat some dirt! Seriously, I think that the more we go into mass-production, the more freaked-out people get about dirt, when that's totally unnecessary (although it's also true that the more mass-produced something is, the more likely it is for contamination actually to be a problem.

Allergies are also far more common nowadays, since people have become more obsessed with sterilization. You have an immune system for a reason! Don't leave it with nothing to fight...

Do you eat a bit of dirt?

with love...

A New Week, Back to the Blog! - What is Natural Food? - Big Steep Hike -Tomatoes

After I said in my last post that I wasn't necessarily going to blog every day, I hadn't meant to be mia the whole weekend! I just didn't make it into town to get online at all - there was so much going on at the farm, both chores-wise and visitors-wise.

Today, I'm at the other branch of Corvallis' co-op, which is special, because Phil's sister's husband painted the murals on it. He depicted Phil's mom and dad -

- and Phil's sister with a friend of hers -

They're pretty good likenesses, and it just adds something to visiting this store.

Yesterday afternoon, we also visited with Phil's friend and his twins that visited us in AK in August -

and went on a very steep hike near their home. Phil and John at the top here - the two of them and I were the only ones who went all the way up. It was so steep!

I really wasn't sure I could do it, so I'm proud of myself :) And last time we hiked something that steep (well, even steeper than that, actually), when we went to harvest blueberries that weren't there,

... I was sore for a week afterwards! I was very sore going back down yesterday, but today I'm actually not that sore, and worked with Phil on his timberland all morning today before coming to town to work!

We're trying to protect the young cedars from the deer - trying to make it harder for them to remove the protective plastic tubes and just eat the cedars all the way down to the bark. C'mon deer, you're going to love a big cedar forest in just a few years time, and there's plenty of tender little baby douglas firs and chinquapins for you to eat!

We've also been working the harvest of the garden at the farm - here's the major action, mucho mucho corn and tomatoes but also tomatillos, basil, eggplants, peppers -

Phil's nephew and his girlfriend mostly planted the garden, and they came over and harvested with us, and we made a big batch of tomatillo salsa (tomatillos, onions, peppers, garlic, spices, lemon juice, cooked down quite a lot)

What a beautiful abundance! And here's a corny picture of Phil's mom -

(yes, that is a corn row in her apron)! Phil and I are happy harvesters...

And I have been feeling better since eating no tomatoes at all. I don't know if it's the acidity or what, since these tomatoes are super sweet. But on Saturday I ate no tomatoes until dinner time and was ok, and then had just a few cherry toms with dinner and was back to feeling sick. Same thing had happened Friday. Yesterday and today, no tomatoes and all is well.

This vexes me with the question of our natural foods. Eating local, homegrown food is so important to me. But the longer I've been involved in growing food, and the more I've learned about cultivation and breeding of edible plants, the more I feel that many edible plants are just as much artifacts of civilization as something more obviously 'packaged.' I was getting sick as a dog eating the abundance of tomatoes from the garden, but I already know not to eat any of the equally-abundant corn - does me no good at all. And making smoothies out of green and protein powders with a bit of raw tahini and stevia saved my guts but all of it came out of bottles and jars!                                                                          

I do know that when I get finished getting rid of mercury and lead, and yeast, my guts will be less likely to react adversely to all kinds of things and to develop allergies. But in the meantime, what is a 'natural food'? And is it even a relevant question? Humans are 'natural' too, which means that all the things that we produce are also productions of nature. But a modern tomato, even an heirloom, is so very different from the 'pomodori' (golden apples) that the Europeans were so skeptical of when they were first brought over from the New World. Like many cultivated fruiting plants, they have far more sugar in them now, but still contain the solanins, the nightshade compounds that cause joint distress in all kinds of people.

I'm starting to feel that 'natural' isn't the most important operative term, and am finding myself drawn more and more to the medicine of wild foods and weeds. I'm also having to forgive myself for the 'processed food' thing. Everyone knows that 'processed food is bad for you,' right? It's too easy to absorb, so it's fattening, and it's stripped of its nutrients because it's been so processed from its original, natural state.

Well, wait a minute! I was feeling so much better before we came to Oregon because I was having a Vita-Mix-made smoothie for every meal! When I was feeling sick a couple days ago, I made the closest thing I could with the little blender available to me here. Isn't that a processed food also? I guess the difference is that the smoothie is composed of whole foods, but it is definitely processed. My compromised digestion needs all the help it can get, and if I absorb more of my food, I'm actually less likely to put on weight because there will be fewer toxic byproducts from indigestion that need to get sequestered in fat cells.

So, I forgive myself for the natural foods obsession - acknowledge that it's a far more complex picture, not black and white, and also for eating 'processed' foods in the form of smoothies.

What do you think about natural and processed foods?

A beautiful day to everyone.

More Filbert-Processing, Taking a Step Back, Run Warm or Run Cold? Blogging Pace

Hi everyone - Happy October! First day that we're not in '30 days of self-love' - but let's keep it coming.

I showed the filbert (aka hazelnut) cracking setup yesterday - will share the next stage in the process today.

Today was the first since we've been here that the sun hasn't come out. I'm freezing! Disappointed. Meanwhile, Phil and his mom, who are too hot if it's over 60 degrees, are breathing sighs of relief. 

Do you run hot or cold? Do you have a partner who runs at a very different temperature? Leaving Alaska always reminds me of how uncomfortable Phil is when it's warm. 

I also have found myself sucked into the busy-ness of being on a farm at harvest-time. And still doing my regular work on the computer. Yesterday, I was feeling sick to my stomach all day too, and by the time I got home from doing my internet stuff, I was fried and barely coherent! Obviously, I'd forgotten to ask myself that important question, "What are you going to do to rest today?" This tells me that I need to slow down, take a step back, take more down time, and just let things go.

Here we are at the dining room table, with a bucket of nuts that have been through the cracker. We spread them out on the table...

Pick through them, discard wormy ones,

And end up with a beautiful bowl of nuts to dry, and a whole bunch of worms, shells, etc, that will be burned in the woodstove.

And yes, I am wearing my jacket in the house. Phil's mom likes it _cool_ and it really never gets warm in there. I'm very happy to be there, but I have to be warm!

I have blogged every day for over a month now, and it's time to re-evaluate. It was a great commitment for the 30 days of self love experience. But I think that in general, just for me, every day might be slightly to high a frequency. I am a writer, and it's so important to me to have time for my deep creative writing projects. I'm so busy with everything else, and sometimes I think that if I didn't blog every single day, but four or five times a week instead, I'd be more likely to make the time to do my own writing, which is essential to my sanity!

Plus, I've been pushing myself too hard and need to take a step back. So, I am not promising I _won't_ post tomorrow - still so many farm photos and stories to share - but I'm not going to insist to myself that I must do so. Once I'm working at the computer, it's so easy to multitask and fill up every second for too long until I'm fried, and I need to take a step back from that too. Any sound advice?

love to all.