Two crock pots simmer away through the night. Since I’m the one who gets up every two or three hours while Sarah lies curled in sweet oblivion, I’m the stirrer. Apple butter in the final stages.
Yesterday, a morning taken for apple picking in Kentucky – a natural orchard in a nature preserve, with low, gnarled trees, varieties of all kinds, and drunken wasps stumbling over the droppings.
Three sturdy shopping bags and about sixty pounds of fruit later, I get out a screwdriver and tighten up the works of our metal hand-cranked peeler and Sarah gets to work. Whirring the gadget, she makes peels curl like birthday present ribbons, saving them in a gallon jug for fermenting apple cider.
While I was gone caring for my mother all July, Sarah filled the empty time with canning the overflow of veggies from our garden and our CSA. Blackberry jam, pickled hot peppers, hot pepper jelly, bloody Mary mix, tomato sauce, tomato juice, tomato puree, salsa….but now that I’m home there’s less filling a gap and more joy to the obsession.
Insomnia comes with the territory…apnea, ADD, doubts and fears, bad dreams, insistent bladder. So it’s a blessing to wake up to the sweet potpourri of simmering apples and cinnamon, stir the thickening butter, and release more fragrance into the air.
When I was diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes I started using the cooking skills I had developed to create lower carb meals. There’s no reason low carb, reduced calorie food can’t be filling and fun. Here’s one that my son is crazy about, too.
Makes 1 serving of approx. 474 Calories and 38g carbs
Ingredients
2 oz square “White Castle” burger, prepared ahead of time (216C, 4.2g carb)
Spray oil (0C, 0g carb)
1 oz slice onion (16C, 3.8g carb)
1 egg (80C, 0g carb)
1 slice low fat American cheese (30C, 3g carb)
1 tbs salsa (approx. 7C, 2g carb depending on brand)
1 Thomas mini bagel (125C, 25g carb)
Directions
Step 1
Prepare ahead of time “Almost White Castle” burgers, using this recipe from allrecipes.com.
Step 2
Spray a saute pan with spray oil and place in pan: burger, onion slice, cracked egg. Turn each with spatula as needed to finish cooking.
Step 3
Place opened bagel on a plate. Add slice of American cheese and salsa.
Step 4
When cooked, add the egg, onion, and burger. Top bagel. Wait a moment for the cheese to melt. Enjoy!
Variations
Add a 1 oz slice of tomato for an additional 5C, 1.1g carb. Use mini burger buns instead of a mini bagel. Add a dash of your favorite hot sauce. If your diet can afford it, sub 1/2 tbs butter or non-dairy spread instead of spray oil for an additional 50C, 0g carb. If you need to, use a smaller “Almost White Castle” square of 1-1.5oz (108C, 2.1g carb/oz). You won’t notice the difference.
Note: Calories and carbs are calculated using raw ingredients. Eggs are usually listed as around 70-75C. The eggs I use are large or extra large and laid by our own chickens and tend to be richer, so I counted them as 80C.
A few years ago, Sarah and I decided that we didn’t need an entire acre of front lawn to mow. So we prepared a small meadow, a rectangle of roughly 50×120′, by clearing and rolling in seeds for Indiana native flowers and grasses we purchased from a supplier we researched online, American Meadows.
Every year we watch the colors emerge, diverse species of birds frolic, and monarch butterflies, carpenter bees, honeybees and other insects feast on bee balm, butterfly weed, cup flowers, cone flowers, milkweed, and so much more (here’s a great guide at Indianawildflowers.com).
Purple milkweed blooms. This gorgeous plant full of berrylike flowers hosts monarch butterfly eggs and caterpillars.
Being native, the meadow is resilient to weather (doesn’t need watering or mowing), shows off an ever changing palette of blue, purple, orange, yellow, and red petals, and needs minimum maintenance to avoid succession.
Before the meadow
The meadow one year later.
We find it amazing how small an area makes a viable and interesting habitat right in front of our house. Lately I’ve been able to track some of our night visitors using a Bushnell trail camera that takes nighttime images, like this little buck who wandered through the other yesterday.
A little buck wanders through our meadow at about 3:15 am, setting off the “Meadowcam.”
The buck is a great reminder of how, with a little sweat, it’s possible to make a beautiful, sustainable meadow, help the ecosystem, and bring nature close to home. Great for teaching the kid natural science, as well!
Monarch feeding on a cup plant flower.
Monarch warms in the sun.
(1) Our son releases a monarch he raised from a caterpillar.
(2) (1) Our son releases a monarch he raised from a caterpillar.
Six years ago this month, we closed the contract on our house and moved to our newly mortgaged homestead of about two acres of field and forest. Sarah quickly discovered thorny blackberry bushes growing on a rise behind the house. What a treat they’ve been.
This year, they’ve sprung up on the sides of the drainage ditch in our easement by the street. No doubt we can thank the propagation of wild fruit to the many birds that flock to the native wildflower meadow we planted in year three. So now we have two spots for daily picking handfuls of berries to sprinkle over cereal, yogurt, or to just eat plain.
A profusion of wild blackberries graces the drainage ditch by the road this summer.
The bushes in back of the house are becoming pretty choked out by a profusion of a weed or creeper we haven’t yet identified. So one of my self-appointed chores these summer days is to untangle and pull out the seemingly endless twining stems running up the bushes and along the ground. Though the reward for my labor includes frequent stings and bloody cuts from sharp thorns (whether gloved or not), it also includes biting into a sweet explosion of fruit whenever I need motivation.
We don’t know whether our blackberry bushes are a wild, native Indiana variety or started as a cultivar planted by a previous owner. Either way, fresh blackberries make up some of the magic of the slowly revolving seasons on our homestead.
I always wanted a typewriter table, but I never could find the right kind. So I made one. Out of pallet wood and 2x4s. Design is from The Pallet Book: DIY Projects for the Home, Garden, and Homesteadby Chris Peterson. It’s not quite finished, but it’s all assembled and some sanding done.
I love the rough “pioneer” look and feel of this project, and the sturdiness of the design.
Can’t wait to type letters to family and friends, and poems, on the new/old wood table, using my Olivetti Lettera 32 manual typewriter.
Here at the homestead we’re always wondering how to cut down on waste. We have a compost pile, and our egg-laying chickens eat a lot of leftovers. But lately my mind has been on plastic waste. Especially with news articles coming out about plastic in the human digestive system, beads of plastic in the ocean food chain, giant rafts of plastic floating on the seas. Plastic may not degrade for hundreds of years. Most plastic isn’t biodegradable, just breaking down into smaller and smaller pieces and potentially mucking up the food-chain from small animals all the way up to humans. I wondered, was there anything at all I could do to reduce its environmental impact?
My imagination served up an answer: a memory of the “old days,” ordering a lunchtime turkey sandwich at the deli near my office in mid-town Manhattan. How those bountiful sandwiches would be expertly and rapidly packaged in folded, delightfully crisp wax paper! So I “remembered” the solution, and I recommend it to you: biodegradable, eco-friendly wax paper and butcher paper.
And maybe in the grand scheme of things aesthetics isn’t that important, but still, I find the texture of wax paper more pleasing than glossy, floppy zip lock bags.
Now, instead of buying various locking sandwich bags, when I make our nine-year old’s lunch in the morning, I pack his sandwich in wax paper. When I buy ground beef or chicken thighs, I repackage smaller meal-portions in butcher paper instead of plastic freezer bags.
Turns out it’s economical as well as practical, an important consideration for those of us on a budget. Environmental solutions can be costly, but store-brand wax paper can be purchased for as little as two cents per square foot, comparable in price to bargain-brand sandwich bags. Butcher paper is also comparably priced to freezer bags. Some freezer tape, which is masking tape for low temperatures, makes packages easy to seal and to label. Or you can skip the tape altogether and just fold the seams under.
No more seals that break or fall open. And especially for childen’s little hands and senior’s fingers that might have gotten arthritic, no more struggling to grip tiny margins or pull open tight seals.
Here’s how to fold like a pro, according to Tipnut.com (and the 1961 instructions “How To Prepare Foods For Freezing“; from good old Sears, Roebuck & Co.).
It’s easy to fold wax paper like a pro of yesteryear.
Tips: Store wrapped items seam side down to protect seal. You can double wrap meat if the freezer paper you’re using isn’t the best quality.
The coated paper has additional benefits. No more seals that break or fall open. And especially for childen’s little hands and senior’s fingers that might have gotten arthritic, no more struggling to grip tiny margins or pull open tight seals. And maybe in the grand scheme of things aesthetics isn’t that important, but still, I find the texture of wax paper more pleasing than glossy, floppy zip lock bags.
Finally, for the homesteader, there’s an added bonus: wax paper burns. Next time you need help starting a fire because the tinder in your fire pit or burn box is a little damp, light some wadded-up non-toxic, biodegradable, eco-friendly wax paper.
Wax paper makes a good, eco-friendly fire starter.
We had a homestead emergency when a Great Horned Owl got into the chicken run.
This Great Horned Owl invaded our extended chicken run, resulting in our first fatality from a predator.
The three older chickens like to roost outside, right under the roof of deer netting, and the owl looks like it made a hole in one corner. It killed one of them, poor Sasha. I think her death was quick because Sasha’s head was right next to her body.
I discovered the owl and Sasha’s corpse while walking the dog at sunrise, which I do just before driving our nine year old to school. What a day! It was the kid’s first day back after winter break, Sarah was at work, I’d just told our boy I’d be back in five minutes, and then I see this.
I shooed the dog inside the side door and began the effort of getting the owl out of there. The five newer chickens were huddled in the coop. The two remaining older chickens were hiding under their roosting spot.
I opened the door to the extended run, gestured, poked the fence with a stick. The owl sat watching me with its huge eyes, head turning as I walked around the outside. Occasionally it would fly up, trying to get out, then back down.
I even went inside, grabbed both chickens one at a time and threw them into the covered run and locked the door behind them. The owl just watched me.
Next, I began ripping off the deer netting that was the roof of their “backyard.” It was an intense and silent effort, with me not wanting the boy to come out and see what had happened, nor did I want him to get excited, yell suggestions, and perhaps endanger himself or get in the way, as sometimes happens because children can’t control their reactions that well yet.
At last, the owl flew up out of the same hole, though now much wider, that it had entered, then settled itself on a post momentarily before flying magnificently away into the woods behind our house.
The Great Horned Owl, now free, prepares to fly back into our woods.
The remaining girls are now locked into their coop and covered run until Sarah and I can put a stronger roof made out of metal hardware cloth over their extended “back yard.”
This is our first fatality due to predators. We lost two others due to disease or fatal conditions, like a blocked egg. In a way, we were lucky it was an owl. We’ve heard owls will only kill one bird and are satisfied, unlike critters such as foxes or weevils that might have killed them all.
Sometimes bad news follows good. We had just gotten our first two little eggs of the year, laid by the new girls, yesterday. Now my first chore of the morning, after dropping the kid off at school, was to deal with poor Sasha’s body.
Our boy came out, looking for me, just after the owl flew majestically away into our woods, with a wingspan of at least four feet. Appearing at the side door, coat and backpack on, he said cheerfully, “That was a lot longer than five minutes!” On the drive to school, I explained what happened matter-of-factly, that a Great Horned Owl had gotten in the fence and killed Sasha. He seemed to take it in stride. In addition to chickens, he’s experienced the death of pet goldfish, a dog to cancer, his beloved hamster Albert Squirmy Nocats Hamsterdam (no cats allowed in his room!); I guess he’s become somewhat familiar with life and death on a small homestead. So he acknowledged what I said and turned the conversation to his upcoming science fair project. Still, I expect he’ll want to talk about it this evening. Like the rest of us, he feels sad when we lose one of our animals.
Theo made this tombstone for the grave of his beloved pet hamster, Albert Squirmy Nocats Hamsterdam.
I found myself feeling complicated about the owl and its kill. I am sad for the loss, relieved it wasn’t worse, and in some ways awe-struck: the owl was magnificent and beautiful, especially as it flew away on its powerful and graceful long wings, and I understand how it acted according to its place in nature.
