Key Lime Pie - A Real Food Recipe

A few weeks ago, my dad took Mirin, along with a fellow entomologist enthusiast, for one of their crazy bug-hunting trips to Cedar Key.  Along the way they discovered a key lime tree, covered in limes and entirely ignored/unappreciated/forgotten at the edge of a school yard.  The limes were falling all over the ground, and Mirin, my best forager, insisted they pick up a huge bag full to bring home.  I didn't think we would ever use them all, but between squeezing them into bubbly water and key lime popsicles, we did.  There were only about eight left to make just one key lime pie.

If you look at key lime pie recipes online, you would think no one made key lime pie before the invention of Eagle brand sweetened condensed milk.  One no-bake recipe called for lime-flavored gelatin and cool whip.  I came up with this recipe with a date-sweetened coconut crust, real cream, and honey.

I hope you enjoy this recipe!


Real-Food Key Lime Pie

 Crust:

2 cups of dried, shredded coconut

10 pitted dates (I used the smaller deglet dates, but if you are using the larger mejool dates, you probably only need 7-8)

3/4 cup of butter, melted and allowed to brown just the tiniest bit for flavor

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1.  Place coconut in a food processor with dates and vanilla and process until dates are incorporated into the coconut.

2.  With the motor running, drizzle in the melted butter.

3.  Press into a pie pan and set aside.

Filling:

3 tablespoons of arrowroot flour

3 egg yolks (save the whites for the meringue!)

2 cups of cream

1/2 - 3/4 cup honey (I use raw honey, but it gets cooked)

1/2 cup key lime juice

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1.  In a sauce pan, mix the arrowroot flour with the egg yolks and vanilla into a yellow paste.  Slowly add the cream, whisking while you do.  Stir in the honey and lime juice.

2.  Cook over medium heat, stirring constantly with a whisk to avoid lumps.  Cook until the mixture boils.  Boil about 1 minute, or until thickened.

3.  Pour into coconut crust.

Meringue:

3 reserved egg whites


a pinch of salt

2 T of honey

 1.  Put egg whites in a bowl with a pinch of salt.

2.  Beat egg whites until they make soft peaks.  Drizzle honey in slowly, while you still have the beaters running.

3.  Pour on top of pie, and using the back of a spoon, make peaks all over.

4.  Bake pie at 350F for 10-15 minutes, until the peaks of the meringue are golden.  Chill pie for a few hours before serving.

Goats is Bad

Clothilde said the funniest thing to me the other day.  She said it right after she had handed me the tiny cob of stunted dent corn that she found in the garden, so she could bear-hug our great pyrenees farm dog, Belle.  Belle rolls in stinky stuff, loves frolicking in the rain, and usually smells bad, but Clothilde loves to rub herself all over her white fur.  Belle stands very quietly and still while Clothilde is around her, even when she is lifting up her ears to look inside them, or is petting her whiskers the wrong way.  So as she was petting Belle, Clothilde said, in a sing-song voice, like a chant, "Belle is nice, cows is mean.  Night Hawk good, goats is bad." 

We dug some more yuca in the garden.  It's huge.  I need to get it out of the way, because it's shading out my poor winter garden.  There were also some huge plants that just came up along the edge of where I planted radishes.  They are huge, maybe 12 feet tall.  We were wondering what they were, and then when they fruited we could tell - it's the millet from Mali I had planted two years ago.  It didn't grow that year, but somehow it grew now.

We've been eating so much sausage since we got the two pigs in the freezer.  My big kids, who would easily eat a whole package of store sausage at my mom's house every day if they could, are "sick" of sausage apparently.  They get sick of anything we have a lot of - we just have to figure out how to grow grilled cheese sandwiches.  Since I've been recovering, they have lived almost three meals a day on grilled cheese (Not that they haven't been offered other food - but they scorn it).  It can't be home made soft cheese, either.  Only cheddar is acceptable. 

Just the other day I was eating yet another sausage and wondered if maybe this was bad for me.  There's the cultural prejudice of a "balanced" diet.  I have hardly eaten any vegetables other than pumpkin, lacto-fermented roselle soda, cucumber pickles from the summer garden, and kimchee Ethan got me from the Chun Ching market for weeks.

But then I realized that's silly.  I was just talking with my mom about an anthropologist who was studying the diet of a very isolated, primitive group of people.  For some time during the year, they ate almost nothing but meat.  And during another time of the year, they ate almost nothing but honey.  I know exactly what that's like!  And really eating a lot of pork right now is just compensating for the summer, when we mostly eat vegetables and not much else (there isn't room for much else when they are piling up).

It's that kind of "gift from the earth" diet that I think is very good for us.  Everyone gets so confused now about what to eat.  Do we eat only raw vegan, lacto-vegetarian, Macrobiotic, gluten-free, WAPF, Primal?  What about food combinations, or blood type.  If I'm type B positive and I eat cashews, will I eventually get heart disease or something?  We have no reference point other than diet books because there's just too much choice in front of us all the time - the same choices mostly, all year long.  And the choices are geared towards what kind of advertising focus group you fit into, rather than what the earth is offering.

Take, for example, the "Paleolithic" diet.  At the only WAPF conference I've been to (years ago), I met a fellow with a name tag that said "Hunter-gatherer" and had New York under it.  I was impressed.  "Are you a hunter-gatherer IN New York City?" I asked him.  He looked embarrassed.  No, he admitted.  He just wrote about what he thought was a hunter-gatherer diet on a blog.  For breakfast he had an avocado, a pomegranate, and a boiled chicken egg.  Not that it wasn't a nice breakfast, but it wasn't exactly "Paleolithic."  All those things came from different continents, and were nicely selected cultivars or breeds for production and shipping.  While it's a nice idea - it's just that - a modern diet fantasy.  It might be great for some people, but there are all kinds of earth-based nuances of human diets from wild humans that we can't copy with the grocery store.

Ever since I discovered Masanuobu Fukuoka's book One Straw Revolution, I've loved his idea about how the foods that support your health during a particular season are the ones that are naturally available.  It's so true.  In the winter we get the nourishing roots and citrus.  It's the best time to slaughter animals in the cool weather, so you have broth on hand through the flu season.  In the spring there are fresh, wonderful greens, lots of them.  As the weather heats up and the greens get tough and bitter, the watery, cooling fruit vegetables of summer are ready.  The late summer (the season of Earth in Chinese medicine - associated with sweet and starchy foods), the pumpkins, the yuca, the sweet potatoes, and the corn are ready.  It's a beautiful dance that brings so much meaning to the cycle of the year, and to the table.

Chestnut's New Calf

 
 We've been expecting Chestnut to have her baby any day for about a month at least.  She had the "heavily pregnant lady waddle" and every day looked about to have her baby within the next few hours, but somehow managed to look even more pregnant and ready to calve the next day.

On Friday when we went out for the chores (I came along this time - luckily!), I was getting ready to work in my garden when I noticed her in the little woodland area at the top.  She was making the soft, low little mooing sounds they talk to their babies with (it's so sweet - just like we coo to our babies in certain voices, they also have a special tone of voice to talk to their babies).  I walked a little closer and saw she had the afterbirth hanging out.  I went back and told Mirin and Rose, who were helping in the garden.

Mirin's first response was to leap around and shout at the top of his lungs excitedly that we should all go see, until I shushed him.  It's not a sports match, it's a birth.  She was off by herself to be alone, not be shouted and jumped at.  I went ahead, and they followed (kind of) quietly.  I brought her a flake of hay, which she really appreciated, but it eventually brought the rest of the herd over to investigate, which was annoying to both her and us.

The calf was already on his feet and licked clean and dry.  He looks to be extra fluffy - against the cold weather, I suppose.  We got a cold front through the other day, and it's been (relatively) cool.  That same evening, as we piled into the truck to go home, Rose and Mirin were huddling up together and saying it was "freezing."  The thermometer on the truck said 64F, so it's not really that cold, just chilly if you are used to temperatures in the 80's.

The special thing about the calf was that he turned out with a white tip on his tail, and one white foot - the Jersey influence, I suppose.  Otherwise he has the Devon face, but the Jersey legs.  I guess we're getting weird hybrid types at this point.  But he's big and healthy, and seems to be finding his way around Chestnut's huge udder.

Clothilde was very impressed by the afterbirth, which came out finally when we were there.  It can take a while, and it hangs out and drags around while the mama cow is busy getting her baby licked off and helping it nurse.  "Mama's meat coming out," she said about it.  We pointed out the baby's cord hanging down, and told her all about the placenta.  I thought it was funny she would call it "meat," because it is mostly membrane, with chunks of placenta hanging off of it.  But she is used to seeing animals field-dressed, with lots of membrane and organs.  Very different from what I thought of as "meat" when I was a little girl!

Some Days

My neighbor came over yesterday to check on us after Rose spent about half an hour screaming at the top of her lungs and drumming her feet on the floor.  I reassured her that we were mostly okay - we had been trying to finish the writing part of home school for the day, and Mirin would keep singing the first few verses of "Yellow Submarine" until it finally drove Rose insane.  I wonder how many other home schooling parents have that happen?

Mirin came out while I was explaining, his shoulders shrugged up sheepisly, and an unmistakable look of mischievous glee on his face.

The home schooling has been hard lately.  They had a two-week break while I was very, very sick, and it has been hard for us to get back into the rhythm.  I also have realized that it seems to be the factor that makes me so exhausted every day (well, that and nursing Clothilde at night - it is so much easier to put her to bed, but then she wakes me up....I just can't decide if I'm ready to wean or not.  There are serious draw-backs and benefits either way).  It is unbelievably draining to sit over Mirin while it takes him five and a half hours to finish about twenty math problems.

It's not that he isn't smart - he can figure out incredible mechanical things that I would never even hope to be able to do.  He can carve amazing things out of a block of wood.  I remember in second grade we read a story about the Eskimos, and as an activity we got to carve cakes of soap.  I decided to make a whale.  It turned out to look like a demented tadpole before the tail broke off. 

So I really respect how good he is at that.  Just about a month ago he almost blew his fingers off making "ammunition," which involved hand-sawing off pieces of metal bar, shaping it with files, drilling a hole in the back, and then (unbeknownst to us) filled with a few grains of gun powder he found rattling around in an antique powder horn someone had kindly given him for Christmas last year.  He hammered the back on, and added a cap from his cap gun, thus almost blowing his fingers off. 

As soon as Ethan found out about it, they were taken away and soaked in a bucket of water.  (Geez, I expect the crazy 3-year old to be the one to almost blow her fingers off...I thought by the time they were 11 they would be old enough to know better.  Of course I was right there while he was working on this, but I had no idea he had any gun powder.  He just seemed very busy on some project that involved sawing, a vice, and lots of hammering.  I hoped he would have better judgement.  Apparently not.  [sigh].  Only four and a half more years until he can get behind the wheel of a car.  It's terrifying.).

The problem is really his constitutional laziness, and I'm not sure how to deal effectively with that.  Since the problem at the Waldorf lecture, I've been torn between finishing what I've already planned, or scrapping it and doing something different.

The Day Arrived....

For months now we had been planning a hoof-to-table pig processing class with our friend PJ.  This weekend we put the last of Star's first piglets in the freezer.  They were huge, but we had been saving them for November, when we thought it would be cold.  It wasn't.  It was downright hot (actually record temperatures for November).  We usually get the first frost in the beginning of November.

There were lots of things that went this way - we thought it would be a certain way, and it just wasn't.

We had a decent number of students.  They mostly stood around and watched us work, exclaiming about what hard work it was.  We thought they would want to dive in and help out.  Some of them did, but most of them didn't.

Slaughter days are a lot of work.  Everyone has to help out.  Clothilde quite put them to shame.

On Sunday we did the cooking.  LOTS of sausage was made.  French-style pork-liver pate.  Scrapple.  Mmmmmm....We didn't use the stomach and intestines (one of these days we will figure it out!), but everything else was salvaged.  Trotters for the stock pot.  Head cheese.  Fat for lard.

Bratwurst, polish sausage, sage breakfast sausage, fresh chorizo, Italian, blood sausage.  The blood sausage was the best yet.  After all these months of trying out different ways to make black pudding with the beef blood we saved, I've finally got the seasonings and meat/blood ration down right.

We even made liverwurst (it turned out so good!)

One thing I've heard from two people that really annoys me is this idea of "secret sausage recipes."  I think it's stupid.  Maybe a long time ago in Europe when there were entire families who supported their existence on a certain tasty sausage, I can understand the secrecy....but for a hobbyist sausage-maker?  It's idiotic.

I have a bunch of books on sausage making, but none of them seem very practical.  They are all for the leisurely hobbyist sausage-maker, not "we've got two entire hogs we've got to get in the freezer as fast as possible" type of sausage-maker, which is what we are.  I found this lovely site for inspiration.

It was five LONG days, between getting ready, the actual days of the class, and the clean-up.

As I said, there were lots of things that didn't go quite right, the biggest thing was my illness and recovery.  I still have four more weeks until I am supposed to feel okay again, so I was not 100%.  And Ethan needed me.  I'm kind of the boss of things.  I get things done.  We needed a task master with that particular hands-in-their-pockets class.

The pigs were not very cooperative, and because I had been so sick, I couldn't help Ethan move them to the pens where they would have been easier to manage.  Ethan was very nervous, and the first pig he didn't get a good shot on.  It squealed horribly, and took forever to finally die.  The next pig, he got a good shot on, but it was, as PJ said, "just plain stubborn."  The class was totally traumatized, and even though I tried telling them it usually isn't like that, I could tell no one believed me.

Another thing that was really the most upsetting part, was that a guy we had recently met was there.  He is a leisurely hobbyist sausage-maker with secret recipes.  He has his own sausage classes he teaches.  We had met with him beforehand, and he seemed very nice.  But at our class he talked incessantly about how we were doing everything wrong (in his opinion), and promoted his class and his friend's mobile slaughter business, and his friend's pigs to our students.  He did not speak to us about it.  He talked behind our backs to the other people.  And he really didn't get what we were doing.  He thought we should just take a huge gun and blow the things up (because Ethan didn't get a good shot.)  He even made the comment to me, "You'll do anything to get that head cheese."  He sat and went on and on about how gross organ meats are, and blood sausage is, while we were right in the middle of saving the precious organs.

I tried to counteract this by explaining why we do things the way we do.  We put a lot into our pigs.  A lot of time, a lot of skimmed milk, expensive non-GMO feed, a lot of garden and table scraps.  These pigs are precious to us.  They represent an enormous investment.  And we like to honor the life of the animal by using as much as possible, and not letting anything go to waste.  I really believe that thriftiness, and fully using and enjoying all the gifts from the earth, is the secret to a happy and satisfying life.  Not only that, but most of the nutrition from the animal is in the organs, the fat, and the bones.  Just eating muscle meat is like eating iceberg lettuce and feeling like you're eating well because you're consuming a lot of vegetables, while turning your nose up at the beets and carrots.

I only got halfway through before he interrupted me to tell everyone how much he hates eating organ meats and how disgusting they taste. It was extremely rude, and certainly colored us as extremist farmer/eater types to the class.  However, I know that energy like that brings it's own karma.  We might have been made to look bad, but it never pays to go and bad-mouth someone else to promote yourself.

Success isn't about everything going perfectly well always.  It's about learning from your mistakes.  We had some serious flaws about this first class.  One of them was to not charge a deposit to register.  Because money was not immediately involved, people didn't respect us, and cancelled very inconsiderately at the last minute.  Another thing was we needed to make it clear that this was a hands-on class, not a hands-in-your-pockets class.  And we really needed to explain our philosophy and why we do things the way we do.

Birthdays, All Around

 
 

We've had so much going on.... and all my children had birthdays in the past two months.

Clothilde, the "baby" is now 3!  She's talking so much now.  She helps out with everything.  She says she wants to be called Cinderella.  I think someone read her the story, or maybe Rose brought it up in a game.  It's fairly appropriate - the big kids do their best to be ugly step sisters every day with violent fights and bickering, and whining if they have to do the least little thing.  Clothilde, on the other hand, jumps right in and gets things done.

Her birthday was first.  She curled up and hid when everyone sang Happy Birthday.  It was too intense for her.  There were only a few presents, but all ones I knew she would love.

Rose is now 8 - really a big girl.  Girls grow up so fast.  By 12 it's hard to tell how old they actually are.  I had just gotten out of the hospital a couple of days before, but I still managed to wrap her presents and make her a birthday cake.  The cake didn't turn out as beautiful as I had hoped, but it tasted wonderful.  I know it seems silly to put in all that effort for a birthday cake, but my children talk about their birthday cakes ALL YEAR.  It's a big deal.

Mirin is 11.  I can't believe that!  He's huge.  He could be 13 or 14, because the boys tend to be short and immature.  It worries me a little, because he IS immature, he just doesn't look it.  He got scolded by some tree trimmers when he was trying to scavenge wood for carving because they thought he was skipping school to meet a girlfriend.  They wouldn't believe him that he is home schooled.  And he has no interest in girlfriends at all, just carving!

His birthday cake was really fun.  He let me make it a surprise.  Months ago he was lamenting that they had worms-in-dirt at a cub scout meeting, and he couldn't have any.  He said he wished he could eat junk food just so he could eat things like that.  So I made a healthy version of worms-in-dirt for him for his birthday.  I looked up some recipes - they were absolutely revolting as far as ingredients - and ended up using the Carob Bavarian Cream recipe from Nourishing Traditions and making the chocolate cookie crumbs with melted cocoa butter, almond flour, honey, vanilla and carob (it was tossed together in the moment, so I don't have the recipe to share without a lot of guesswork).  The worms were lemon juice, honey and gelatin.  I couldn't find a gummy worm mold anywhere, so I just poured it into a pan and sliced it into strips.  Mirin loved it.  I was pleased to be able to make a version without instant chocolate pudding, cool whip, Oreos, and candy for him.  Gods, I don't know how people can even eat that stuff!  Just reading the recipes made me feel nauseous.  

Nature Finds: Autumn Bugs

A mama green lynx spider....

And on the other side you can see all her babies.

Furious fire ants.

A centipede...I see lots of milipedes of different sizes, but hardly ever a centipede.

Mating wheel bugs.  You can see the wheel on their backs.  These are predatory insects, so I am very happy to see them around.  Go eat some army worms! 

Some Growing Things

It is a bumper year for the roselle.  Yes, this basket is entirely full of it.  I didn't show the gallon milking pail, also full-to-the-top.  And we only managed to pick half the bushes.  The ones we didn't get to were so laden, they were falling over.  Beats me what went right this year.  They were as neglected as always, but I had a less-than-usual mortality rate on the transplanted seedlings.  This means LOTS of lacto-fermented roselle soda (hmmm...perhaps I will post a recipe?), as well as the freezer stocked with it for mock-cranberry sauce for the holidays.

When I cleaned and dried the seeds in the malabar spinach berries, they left the most beautiful watercoloresque magenta swirls on the plate.  I think I might freeze some of the berries for coloring Easter eggs in the spring.  I wonder how the color might work on wool or fiber...

Ethan leaping over garden beds to avoid the sprinklers...

Part of garden in progress....can you even believe how tall the cassava is?  I've never had it get quite so big before.

My radishes are growing!  This was kind of a surprise, because Clothilde "helped" me plant them.

I went out to the farm with Ethan again yesterday (I'm feeling better and better.  Every morning when I wake up something is different and has healed.).  I finally got to work in my garden.  I planted my miserable, stunted pak choy, tatsoi, gunsho, and komatsuna starts.  I don't know what will become of them, but it was nice to put them in the ground finally, even if I had to fight hoards of fire ants to do it.

I've felt very sabotaged over the garden this year.  I worked SO HARD on the summer garden, and most of it died while we were travelling.  It's amazing how much can die in two weeks!  And the winter garden was one problem after another - violent thunderstorms every day, no cardboard, no manure, compost/manure/hay too far away, illness, near-death, Ethan got the wrong starting soil, insect cloth too wimpy to keep army worms out...not to kvetch, but it's been frustrating!  The garden is a major source of food for us, and not having a steady stream of vegetables seriously hurts our budget.

But they say that it is best to be thankful for what you have, and don't worry about what you don't have. And we have a LOT of roselle.

Healing

I have been healing well.  I am feeling more and more like myself.  A few days ago, I found myself able to read again.  I don't know why I couldn't before.  I couldn't focus my eyes right or something.  Now I am feeling bored and restless when everyone leaves to go to the farm, so I know I am getting much better!

Yesterday I went to the farm with Ethan.  I milked the goats (I think they missed me.   April even let me scratch her back).  I drank several cups of fresh-from-the-goat milk.  It is supposed to have healing properties.  Old folk tradition says you have to drink it within 15 minutes of it leaving the udder - there is an "essence of the goat" that leaves it after that.  The milk does change when it cools down.  It felt like drinking a powerfully good medicine.


It wasn't a really lovely day to be out there - misty and drizzling - but it was nice to be there.  I watched the cows for awhile, and they watched me.  Chestnut is still pregnant, but her udder is filling up. Explorer looked so masculine and powerful standing watching over his cows as they were eating hay.  Every line of him was "dominant bull."  I think he has to be on top of things with all his male progeny always hanging around him and pissing him off.  I tried to refill their kelp and minerals, but Ethan didn't tell me he had left the fences on, so I got an awful electric shock stumbling over the fence. It's not a very friendly place to be sick.

We have so much yuca and sweet potatoes, but I am doing a strict, no-yeast diet after all the antibiotics I had, so I can't eat them yet.  I've been eating a lot of yogurt and pumpkin and lacto-fermented roselle soda.  When I first got home from the hospital and thought about doing the GAPS diet, I looked at the whole bin of pumpkins I have - pumpkins I didn't even plant - they all came up in the pig pen, I felt so grateful.  Like the earth knew, I was going to need all these pumpkins, even if the ones I planted didn't survive.  It was such a gift.

I should mention that this year, desperate for something different, I tried eating the yuca greens.  I had heard you can eat them, so I looked it up.  They have lots of cyanide, so you really have to cook them for a long time (like 45 minutes to an hour!).  But they turned out delicious.  They hold up well to the cooking.  I also tried sweet potato greens for the first time, and they were also really good.  They cook down like spinach, but they are much more substantial when you eat them.  I can see these two vegetables becoming late-summer favorites.  That's always when I crave anything green and leafy.

Today is our 9th anniversary.  I wish I felt better, but I am so glad I am still here to celebrate it!

Return from the Underworld

Last week I suddenly became very, very sick.  I have never been so sick before in my life.  For days it felt like I was wandering on my way to the Underworld - darkness, visions, pain, and somehow, strange and beautiful music ringing constantly in my ears.

I finally went to the hospital and had emergency, life-saving surgery (actually, I suspect I would have been ok - just not very comforable for a long time, but that is what they told me).  It was the first time I was ever in surgery where I had to have a breathing tube and be unconscious.  It was terrifying.  I almost died.  I had to bear the consequences of submitting myself to the barber-surgeons and their physical brutality....and the chemicals.  When I woke up my body stank of poison.

Some of the nurses there were very, very nice and wonderful.  Some of them were not so nice, and they did things like tied me to the bed for hours so they could leave the breathing tube in for seven hours too long (the person in the room next to me kept almost dying, so they didn't have time to take it out).

Even so, somehow, beautiful visions came to me, of rocks and sunshine, and strange and wonderful things.  They couldn't believe how fast I recovered.

I am doing better now, out of their hands, away from all the chemicals and tubes and the barber-surgeons.  I am recovering quickly.  Today I woke up and felt life in me again.  I am so glad to be here still, in this beautiful world, with the people I love.  I can't wait until I have my strength back to go to the farm and see Matilda and my goats.  Ethan showed me pictures of how much my garden has grown.  And Chestnut is due to have her calf any day now.

Nature Finds: Insect Life Autumn Jambore

Giant millipedes mating in the path.  Get a room, you guys!

A daddy-long-legs orygy?  Where are the mama-long-legs?

This little guy looks up to no good....

This past week I did a presentation on Sustainable Agriculture for my mom's college class.  Just like last time, it made me lose hope for humanity a little bit.

It's unnerving to speak in front of a lot of people, but especially if those people are asleep or staring at their phone/laptop screen.  You get the sense of not being listened to.  My mom assured me they were the most animated and interested that she had ever seen them during the lecture - so that means they usually show the interest/animation of a pet rock.

I also pissed off the Arcadian Watermelon Queen - who happened to be in the class - because I offended her with talking about how bad conventional agriculture is.  Yes, I'm sorry, it's ruining/poisoning the world.  But we can do it differently - and even grow more watermelons, and not have to apply toxic and expensive chemicals!  And the watermelons will be healthier for people and the world!  She didn't want to hear about it, and spent most of the lecture looking at her phone. 

It's funny how close-minded people are about what is so bad....and it's interesting that "conventional" agriculture is now what is "traditional," because it's all so new, and has been SO bad (and actually really, really decreased the productivity of the land).  Now it's something that's clung to, not out of good sense, or knowledge, but out of a dogmatic, stuck-in-the-mud attitude of tradition and doing what's "normal."  Maybe it's the neurological affects of pesticide exposure or something.  In any case, even though it sounds horrible, I can't help thinking - we just deserve this all, don't we?  The cancer, the birthdefects, the illnesses, death, the being robbed of our world - we're complicit in this...like pet rocks, going about our days, staring at our phones or our screens.  Duhhhh!  The Zombie Apocalypse is here!  We are the Zombies, and if you think clearly, they try to eat your brains and turn you into one of them....

But then I think of the woman I met at the last Florida Folk Festival, whose whole family had been sickened from pesticide exposure at Lake Apopka.  Her sister had died.  Her daughter was dying.  She was dying, and using her last energy to go around and TALK to people about this.  Maybe we will wake up from our beautiful dream-land of amusing TV shows, War-filled news reports, catty Facebook posts, and stupid movies, because somehow, we are personally affected (we will be, we already are).  And maybe we won't believe the doctors and experts who tell us this is all our fault because of our genetics, and just take this expensive medicine that actually kills you, or we can cut out whatever is bothering you (unless your problem is diagnosed as "all in your head" because they can't figure it out) perhaps we will look into it ourselves...and we will find that yes, we CAN solve this problem....or is it too late?

Roselle, Early Cassava, and Eggplants

I am feeling a little overwhelmed by the roselle this year.  Despite the serious neglect this year, there wasn't the usual mortality rate on the transplants, and we ended up with six enormous bushes.  They are all flowering at once.  I picked the whole gallon pail full off of only one side of the row.  There are two and a half gallons of roselle soda fermenting on the dining room table - exciting, because it's so good and everyone guzzles it as soon as it's ready, but I would also like to use my table again.  There are still Ethan's pickled hot peppers, two gallons of brine he made a week ago, and several pumpkins that are hogging a whtreatole half of it.  We barely can squeeze in to eat a meal together.

I am starting to harvest the cassava already.  I had previously waited until November, but I am needing to pull them early because they are shading the fall/winter garden.  I've never it grow so tall.  It really likes the compost beds and the sandy soil.  It's nearly 12 feet this year.  The roots seem more tender and better quality being pulled earlier, even the very large root was tender.

The eggplants and peppers are feeling the same way I do - they are coming back to life and flowering again.  I was surprised to find so many eggplants on them (I picked the yellow ones for seed - I don't think they would be edible at that point).  I also found several Alma paprika peppers ripe (not pictured because I ate them - unwisely, as it turned out.  I didn't realize they could get that spicy!  My face was numb for quite awhile afterwards.)

This seems to be the last of our summer garden!  Looking forward to fall greens!

Spontaneous Sack Race

A spontaneous feed-sack race was going on yesterday afternoon.  These things are surprisingly fun to play with.  There's so much you can do with it.  Stuff like this gets so many more play-miles on it than anything you can buy.

Clothilde realized you can go WAY faster if the sack goes on the other half of you.  (She caused a few accidents on account of not being able to see where she was going)

We are in our dry fall spell right now - it is bliss.  The air is cool, we have the windows open, and I feel like someone snapped their fingers and brought me out of the damp and drowsy enchantment I was under all summer.  I feel alive again.

We spent almost all weekend out at the farm - Ethan mowed the pastures and I worked in the garden.  Clothilde helped plant carrots, turnips and parsnips.  It's been needing to be done for a month now, but it was just too hot to move, or it was pouring rain when we were there.  It was so nice to be working the ground.

It's funny how it doesn't feel lonely out there - probably because of all the animals.  Twilight Sparkle had her head stuck in the fence for a couple of hours while we were there, and I didn't realize because I thought all the bleating was Night Hawk  She didn't learn from it, of course, and got her head stuck again on Monday.  She'll probably do it again today, too.

We have been talking about how hard it is to work in the summer.  The high heat, the thunderstorms, the humidity, the bugs...it's brutal during those months.  But the rest of the year is dreamy and lovely.  I think we need to think of July through September like the sort of deep winter that happens up North.  We just never treat it like that.  We work extra hard instead.

This past week I've thought a lot about what happened at the Waldorf lecture, and I feel like something clicked for me somehow.  I feel like the incident was a little push in a better direction.

Quote #2

In the wake of speaking out at the Waldorf lecture, I was very sick.  Already on that Friday evening I knew I was about to be ill.  On Sunday I could hardly get out of bed.  Ethan got out From My Experience by Louis Bromfield, and read me parts he knew I needed to hear.  Louis Bromfield was a kindred spirit.  (the end of this quote irresistably brings to mind the way, when cornered, the lecturer threw out "It's the Etheric!" as an answer, i.e. something you are not "evolved" enough to sense):

"If at times in this book the tone of writing appears to be unduly controversial I attribute this to long contact with many of the closed minds and the unimaginative mentalities with which agriculture, like any other science, is afflicted.  The writer is by nature an amiable and kindly person, very gregarious and fond of people and of conversation, of argument and even of controversy, and the exploration of other minds where there is anything to explore.  But he has had some startling experiences with the closed mind which will not accept what it sees and knows but takes refuge sometimes in wild and fantastic speculation and sometimes feeble diversions to find reasons to deny or discredit a fact that may prove unwelcome or embarassing."

He also writes out so perfectly my recent sentiments about Anthroposophy:


"One of the great errors of our time, and one which has brought us in our time much misery, is the attribution of an overweening and disproportionate importance to man and his mind.  Man himself, as a physical machine, as a mechanistic functional and living organism, is indeed marvelous as is every part of the universe; but his ego and self-importance, in our time, are given a distorted, decadent, and tragi-comic importance.

"Man is merely a part of the universe, and not a very great part, which happens to be fortunate principally in having evolved such traits and powers as consciousness, reflection, logic and thought.  The wise and happy man is the one who finds himself in adjustment to this truth, who never needs, in moments of disillusionment and despair, to cut himself down to size because it has never occured to him, in the beginning or at any time, to inflate his own importance whether through ignorance, morbidity, egotism or undergoing psychoanalysis (which is merely another name for one of the age-old manifestations of brooding impotence and frustration of the incomplete man).

"It is only later in life, in the midst of what is still a somewhat turbulent and certainly a varied existence, that any full understanding and satisfaction of this sense of belonging, of being a small and relatively unimportant part of something vast but infinitely friendly, has come to me.  It is only now that I have come to understand that from earliest childhood, this passion to belong, to lose one's self in the whole pattern of life, was the strong and overwhelming force that unconsciously has directed every thought, every act, every motive of my existance."

One thing that I very strongly recognize (and understand) about strict life philosophies or religions is that people are brought to them by the same deep longing that Bromfield describes - the desire to belong, to have a place here, to do what is right.  The questions around this have been things that for me, too, have directed my entire existance.  In many instances I have been drawn towards something that looks beautiful, but always turns out to be a lovely illusion of rightness disguising an ugly, petrified dogma.

It was this that inspired me to be vegan when I was a teenager.  It was this that led me to spent several very unhappy years in a psycotic attachment parenting mom's group.  It was what brought me to choose Waldorf-style education for my children, and to look deeper into Anthroposophy.  I wanted to belong somewhere.  I wanted to be around other people who were comfortable with me, who I felt in common with.

Turning 30 was a big mix-up for me.  I felt like at this point, I should have accomplished something.  I desperately tried to think back on my life and find something I had done that had lasting meaning, and couldn't come up with anything.  In fact, in looking back, I find I have never properly fit in any where.  Not in my family, not in public school, not in groups of friends, not at work, not at the crunchy, Waldorf-inspired preschool, not with the local "cool" crowd, and certainly not in that mom's group.  Not even with the vegans, who tend to be notorious weirdos, because it made me sick to deny myself animal foods and eat soy.  I did realize that a lot of this was because I have a natural intolerance for pretentiousness and bullshit, and for some reason I insist on making myself unpopular by not keeping my mouth shut, but it didn't make me feel any better.  Bottom line:  I don't fit in.  I don't belong here.

I spent a lot of time considering this world where I don't fit in, don't belong.  The more I considered other people, the more I was glad to NOT fit in.  There were some insights - a friend of  mine married (and divorced) a Hare Krishna man who tried to control her life.  She suddenly had to be strict vegetarian, although this was obviously not good for her health.  But she was suddenly surrounded by people who liked her simply for joining them in their belief system.  They did not really like or care about her.  Many of them no longer speak to her, because she isn't "one of them" anymore.  Seeing this made some things clear to me.  I saw myself in that situation.  Over and over again.  And I never learned from it.

I realized why strict, domineering religions are so popular.  They give you a very clear, extremely rigid format to live your life within, and promise that you will be "good"  if you follow directions and will be rewarded at the end.  With Anthroposophy, you become "evolved."  You don't have to think, just follow the rules.  You will know what's right because someone will tell you it is.  There is no scary uncertainty of trying to figure things out yourself and eventually finding that you have changed your mind.  And to top it all, there's a whole community of other people who will like you simply because you are seen as being similar to them!

So far I have yet to see anyone who has really actually benefited from this, and I certainly have seen the negative effects, not just from people who are spiritually crippled by the judgments of their fellow church members, but also in social groups.  Usually the parts of the religion/belief system that do have benefits are not the nasty, punishing, dogmatic ones, but the lovely illusion that the belief system flags on the outside to get people to join.  We do know what's right, if we would only follow our hearts, and veer away from the damaging things.  But that's the catch - it's usually all or none with this kind of thing.


Clearly, there is no sense in turning to other people for this sense of belonging. Real meaning is found here, in reality, in nature, in taking up our small part in this huge, beautiful universe.  In response, I turn to the earth.  It's high time I got my garden in this fall.

"In writing this book I have thought many times of Margaret Fuller's grandiloquent assertion, "I accept the Universe," and of Carlyle's quick response, "Gad, she'd better!"  There are no short-cuts, economic or medical or scientific, where laws of the universe are involved.  One works with Nature, whether in terms of soil or of human character, or one is destroyed....It would be well for man to contemplate daily the principal fact of his brief existence - the fact of his colossal physical insignificance.

The Tower

Mrs. Gophy, our neighbor Gopher Tortoise, had a little one hatch out this year.  Last year there were three, this year there was only one that we saw.  Newborn tortoises are so unbelievably small!  Clothilde named it Sandy before it crawled away.

An interesting thing happened to me last week.  It all started Thursday evening when I was doing a tarot reading for myself.  I was trying to tempt Clothilde back to bed.  Usually the spread of delicate cards and my focus and concentration gets her radar beeping like crazy, even mid-romp with the big kids.  This time I actually did a whole reading, and got to spend some time afterwards thinking about it.

It was one of the worst readings I'd ever drawn.  Nearly every card was upside-down, except the center card, which was Queen of Cups (a card about creativity).  As I considered the Tower card, I thought (unwisely) that it must not have been a good reading.  The Tower card is a card about complete and sudden change, usually shocking or traumatic.  "What could possibly go wrong?" I wondered.  The next day was going to be a good day.  An out-of-town friend was coming to visit, and we were going together to a lecture on Waldorf education.  It sounded wonderful.

My friend and I drove together to the lecture.  There was a husband-and-wife team to be the speakers that night, and my friend knew them quite well.  She thought they were super cool, and was eager for me to meet them.

The lecture began boring enough with the husband lecturing that we actually live in a static universe, contrary to what most scientists have come up with (Rudolf Steiner says so).  There was a strong critique of what he called the "Mechanistic View," or that our minds are simply a reactive force, reacting the world through biochemistry. Then the wife spoke about the importance of handwork.  Then the husband took over again.  The first part had been a warm-up.  Now he launched himself blissfully into a diatribe about Anthroposophy.  He began talking about how plants are different from us because they are not intelligent at all, and therefore are less evolved.

My hand instantly went up.  "That's not true!" I said.  Heads turned.  I have just been reading Stephen Harrod Buhner's book Plant Intelligence.  The speaker was floored.  He couldn't belive he was being contradicted at his own lecture.  I quickly gave a brief statement that plants have been found, by modern science no less, to behave extremely intelligently.  They perform complex mathematic calculations on a regular basis.  They create infinite combinations of chemistry.  Even slime molds can complete mazes, which is a basic measure of intelligence.  Their roots contain the exact same neural pathways as our brains.  In fact, I argued, plants DO even have free will (or the ability to choose), because a plant being munched on by a predator will send off volitile compounds that alert the surrounding plants, who then make a concious choice from an array of different choices about their own chemical response.  Sounds pretty intelligent to me.  I didn't even get to mention anything about viruses or bacteria, which are still out-smarting us.

The response was that no, all of that is just reactionary.  They are simply bits of dead matter chemically reacting to the enviornment.  "Then what's the difference with us!" was my exasperated reply.

"The Etheric!" was the enthusiastic answer.  "Plants have no spirit."

"That's not what Stephen Harrod Buhner says!" I told everyone.  "You should read his work about the subject."

At this point, a woman turned to me and said pointedly, "We aren't here to listen to what that person or you have to say.  We're here to learn about what Rudolf Steiner said!"

A man in the back said, "I'm about ready to issue a gag order!"  (yes, he really said those words).

I retired to the parking lot for the rest of the lecture.  I went in afterwards to pick my friend up.  She still wanted to introduce me to the speakers.  The man appeared to hate my guts, but he tried to shake my hand and tell me how wrong I was.  I told him it was new stuff.  Rudolf Steiner lived a long time ago, and there have been advances since then.  Then he liked me even less, because if that part of his lecture was wrong, then everything that came from it was, too.  I went ahead and told him he should read Buhner.  I told him that Steiner said in Knowledge of Higher Worlds that you should practice being flexible and that it's healthy to listen to something you don't agree with.  He gave a vicious, forced sort of smile at that and went off to talk to someone who could stroke his ego. My friend was very upset, and really thought I should have kept quiet.  I don't think she is my friend anymore now.

 Yesterday I tried to think why I liked Waldorf stuff to begin with, and I realized I never have.  I like the artistic approach to things.  I think the handwork is cool, but I have always found Anthroposophy to be very wrong.  It was not even exclusively a mental response.  I realized I have always had a deep down, gut-sense that it is not right.  While some interesting things are brought up by Steiner, there are always many other, much clearer and deeper sources of the same information.

People say that the philosophy and the education do not overlap, but this is not at all true.  The Zoology block in the 4th grade Christopherous curriculum was abhorrent.  There was nothing real about it, and children are to come away with the idea that humans are a tri-partite being who is evolutionarily superior to any other creature on earth.  This is not how evolution works.  This is just NOT true.  And the fact is, many of their ideas just do not work out to be real.  Like the way they base human beginnings on Adam and Eve.  Right after I heard that lecture I picked up Elaine Morgan's Descent of Woman and was blown away, not only with the information, but just how ridiculous Anthroposophy is.

Likewise, their view of plants is entirely dependant on a heiarchial version of evolution, a view point that Darwin expressly argued against.  They have a similar (and very offensive) view of human beings, with the idea that black people are more primitive and less evolved than white people.  All these things are not only completely false, they are also a deep misinterpretation of how evolution actually works.

The problem is - if they update or change their information, then that means Rudolf Steiner was WRONG.  (doom doom da-doom!)  If he is wrong there, then people start to question the dogma.  After nearly every lecture I've gone to, I have spoken briefly with the speakers and asked them if they have read such-and-such popular material on the same subject they were lecturing about.  No one has heard of anything.  This surprised and confused me until I realized they exclusively study Rudolf Steiner.  I think this accounds for a lot of the problem of their extraordinary ignorance.  One of the speakers, a very imminent person in the Waldorf society, lumped together ALL native cultures of North and South America into one extremely wrong stereotype.  It would seem that Rudolf Steiner proclaimed that any cultures that did not have a direct influence on the evolution of European culture are not worth learning about at all.

And the truth is that I came to Waldorf, not because it really spoke to me, but because I needed a guide for home school after Clothilde was born.  So many people I know think it's really cool.  I thought I should think it's cool, too.  At least I tried to learn enough about it to make a decision - and that has only just now happened for me.  When we just started out, I didn't have the mental space with a tiny new baby to create a home school, so I turned to the Christopherous curriculum.  I'd heard such good things about it.  We've used it for years now.  In second grade, I was still just getting familiar with it.  In third grade, I tried harder to really stick by the curriculum and philosophy.  By the end of Mirin's fourth grade, I realized that even with both of our best efforts, something wasn't working.  He is still not reading well, and struggles to write. 

This opened my mind some.  I realized that the whole-word reading method was just not working for us.  I've started using Khan academy to catch us up on math.  We've begun taking an entirely different reading approach that any good Waldorf teacher would freak out about, but actually makes a lot of practical sense and seems to be working very well.

All of this was so much the Tower card, it makes me laugh.  All pretense and illusion stripped away.  A totally new take.  Not being able to go back to what it was like before, even if you want to.  Thank you, Tower card!  I feel so freed.

 Any philosphy/religion in which the speakers (or High Priests, if you will) are chosen, not because of their intelligent, independant ideas, but rather on how well they have ingested and memorized the dogma should ALWAYS be questioned!

Mabon/Michaelmas

This week is Michaelmas, the equinox, the start of autumn.

It's still hot, but not like some years.  In the evenings, the wind sweeps over the east hill at the farm, and blows cool.  It blows colored, dying leaves down, too, and twists the yellowing bramble bushes.

Some years we really celebrated this holy time, sometimes in the Waldorf way, with hand-sewn felt dragons and little dragon breads with raisin eyes, stories of St. George and the dragon, and songs about it.

This year we didn't really celebrate....but we did, in a way.  We went to our friend Karen's farm.  Three years ago, her husband was tragically killed in a car accident.  They had a working farm, and although many people helped out, she had three large hogs that were just ready for the freezer that she has not been able to do anything with all this time.

The hogs were very wild, and difficult to approach, and knowing how much work it was going to be, she had a hard time asking people to come help with it.  Finally she let us.  We met our friend PJ there, and another friend Miranda, who has two daughters.  Another friend of Karen's, Michael, also helped.

The pigs were big, and old, and we knew it would be lots of work.  PJ and Michael had set up a trap in their paddock, hoping it would at least catch one of them, and make everything so much easier and calmer.  But these pigs were too wild or too smart, and they absolutely refused to go in.  That made things complicated.

Miranda, Karen and I stayed with the children and waited for the pigs to be felled.  PJ, Michael and Ethan went in to get them.  It seemed to take a long, long time, but finally we heard a shot.  Then many more shots followed.  Michael was the first to get back.  He said the pigs were so old and hardened his bullets couldn't stun them.  We had a simliar experience a while ago, so Ethan hadn't even bothered with the .22, and just brought the .30-40 Krag.  It was a good thing, too.

Understandably, the pigs got very angry when they were in the pen trying to get them.  They were charging fiercely.  PJ was almost bowled over by a wounded sow, who simply bruised her leg when she jumped clear, staining her jeans with blood.  Ethan was charged by the massive barrow with enormous tusks, but felled it point-blank as it was charging at him.  It landed on his foot.

Once all three were killed, the work began.  The children mostly played blissfully around.  Karen's pond was brimming with all the rain we've gotten, and the children found a boat and polled around in the shallows.  Karen said they looked like children in a storybook.  They played in PJ's hammock.  They played in the dirt, made fires to cook some tenderloin on.  They loved it, and we worked.  It was SO MUCH work.  I am so exhausted - we are all so exhausted.  Dragging a 400+lb animal onto a trailer.  Dragging the huge sow out of the brushy trees.  Then hanging them, skinning them, pulling the organs out, cutting the meat.  We barely got that done, and only some wrapped up and in the freezer before we had to rush home and do the chores in the dark.

Matilda was NOT pleased.  I had made her wait, so she made me wait while she grazed all the way down the brain-cage to the milking shed.  I didn't mind - she was so slow I milked all the goats first.  And all the goats except Firefly decided to develop a haunting fear of the milking stand that night.  May had to be half tempted with barley/half dragged in, and was a real pain.

There was still so much to be done, we went back the next day, picking up PJ and Miranda's two daughters (at the chorusing request of our children) for moral support.  I couldn't believe how much more work there still was.  We bagged up organs, chopped sausage meat.  I was plugging away at the sausage meat for a long time - it seemed like forever, and everyone kept piling more scraps into the cooler.  It felt never-ending.  The children were tired, and squabbled, although not as much as I expected.

Ethan had a stroke of inspiration on an alternative fairytale to Rumplestiltskin, called "Grumplestiltskin."  It's where you have an impossible, never-ending task to accomplish, and Grumplestiltskin shows up - but instead of doing the work for you in exchange for your first born child (an easy bargain, Ethan added, especially if the first born is being extremely surly that morning), Grumplestiltskin instead whines for ridiculous things that he could easily do himself.


But it was done at last, and everything cleaned and scrubbed and taken back to Karen's house.  We set off with just enough time to do the chores in the dark again.  I had to milk May by the gate, because it was impossible to convince her that there were no predators lurking by the shadowy milking shed.  Night Hawk managed to make himself a nuisance, too.  He has been in disgrace since he shocked Mirin in the crotch last week, leaning his head through the electric fence.

We will be taking the rest of the week very easy.  Today we did very minimal lessons, and the kids spent a lot of time drawing on the road with sidewalk chalk.   There will be no cute dragon breads, or complicated hand sewing, or art projects, or dragon songs.  The harvesting of the three pigs will have to do for our observance - and rather poignantly, too.  In ancient British lore Mabon, whose name was the old name for Michaelmas, was the only one who could steal the magical razor, scissors, and comb from between the ears of a monstrous boar who ravaged the countryside.

Fall begins with Leaves

I used to laugh sarcastically when anyone mentioned September being autumn here in Florida.  It always seemed to me that we never quite had anything but autumn, starting in November, and ending in February.  Some years there are a few weeks of actual "winter" in January, but autumn certainly didn't start in September.  I remember my first grade teacher - dear Ms. Frisco, the one with the long, red fake nails who jabbed you in the shoulder with them if you annoyed her for some reason...it was easy to annoy her....she told us that the months that ended with -ber were cold, like brrrr!  Even then, I knew she was wrong.  Autumn here doesn't begin with cold.  It begins with leaves, and a different quality of air.  The high, long, feathery clouds that come before storm fronts strew the sky, pushing back the big, billowy summer-storm clouds that have faces on all their corners.


The garden is as tall and intimidating as ever.  We are using chickens to push it back some.  The yuca is enormous.  I pulled some last week.  It wasn't at it's full massive-root-glory yet, but it was very tender and delicious.  We're mired in pumpkins at the moment, but the wild sumac berries and roselle make wonderful sour drinks to help along our monotonous meals.


My fall greens are still just little nubs.  I needed to plant things two weeks ago, but didn't have time, or energy, or it was pouring on me.  I can't remember which now.  But the last few days have been dry, blessedly dry, amazingly dry.  I never would have believed dryness feels so nice and free.  I've been working like a horse, inside and out.


I'm longing for fall greens.  It's amazing how having a garden can make you long for things.  I never longed for squash, or yearned for collard greens the way I do now.  I nearly broke down and bought some inferior store-bought kale, but was detered by the terrible condition of the vegetables.  It looked like someone had hit them with a flame-weeder.  I know I am spoiled, but this was really bad.  So I am having to be content with just longing right now, and meanwhile sipping some sumac-berry-ade and honey-fermented roselle soda.