This post started as thoughts mostly related to motherhood, but I think it applies to us all – mothers/fathers, wives/husbands, employees/employers, etc . . . I found this post of Nicola’s on A Step Toward Balance last month, signed up to join, and then forgot about it (you can laugh now – the irony is not lost on me!) Here, belatedly, is a first step – remembering the blessings of imperfection.

Mostly, here is a note to my future self – may you find some grain of truth here, too.

(myself and Ella, 2007 – photo by Ben)

Note to self:

Imperfection is a blessing. After weeks of feeling a sort of mounting panic – too many jobs to do, never enough time to do them, which important work must be left undone?, this gentle reminder from Ben – I am the one pushing myself.  No one else.

I have had this thought before, but I seem to need to constantly remind myself, that imperfection is a blessing.  It’s said that the Shakers, who were incredible craftspeople, purposefully flawed each item they made, because only God is perfect.  It is so easy to feel that we must do everything, and if not perfectly, at least really really well.  But: if we were perfect, what would be left to learn?  But: if I was perfect, what would be left for my child to create for herself, and her children?  Along with my “perfection,” I would be giving her the need to live up to my perfection, and a life of unattainable goals.

So.  A reminder of the blessing of imperfections.

My house – not perfectly clean, and it never will be.  Welcoming, hopefully.

Our farm – far from perfect, ever-evolving, sometimes blissful, sometimes out of control.

Our businesses – still young, still bumpy, still chaotic at times.  Run with heart.

My wardrobe – not chic, not perfectly pressed.  In various states of toddler, farm, and bakery wear and tear.  Well lived in.

My self – learning, striving for kindness (often failing), trying for gratitude (often forgetting).  Hoping to do good in the world, but not at the expense of my family’s sanity.  Here.  Alive.  Imperfectly blessed.

(winter 2010)

Here at our house, Ben has been maniacally starting flats of seeds.  He decided that this would be the year to kick the plastic seed-flat habit (gross, breakable, disposable, ugly, totally un-environmental, and completely ubiquitous in the farming world).

So Ben has starting using soil blocks, a la Eliot Coleman (check out his books for instructions – we bought ours here).  We tried putting the soil blocks inside plastic flats int he past, but the flats always bend when they’re moved, and break the soil blocks, destroying the fragile seedlings.  So Ben has been constructing these simple boxes – beautiful, and of course, longer-lasting.  He’s also making our first Dutch Lights (aka cold frame), which we’re super excited about!

We have a small, kooky glass porch off the north side of our house that we put seedlings in as the weather allows.  The Dutch Lights will start off in there (with supplemental heat from seed mats), and then I think we’ll try moving it out to the garden for our first hot bed with some manure from Cole.  Exciting . . .

(In case you’re wondering, we’ve started onions, kale, beets, cabbage, arugula, and lettuces.)  One of my favorite things about starting seeds is the reminder of each tiny spark of life.  How we can choose to experience that miracle, again and again.  How the seeds first come up with their “seed leaves,” which all look similar, and then begin to grow their “true” leaves.

On an unrelated note, my package from the Vintage Swap arrived this week from the lovely Julia at Adirondack Mama.  Thank you Julia!  Beautiful fabrics, and Ella immediately dove into the rickrack, as you can see above.

See you soon for Monday’s menus.

I’m going to do Gratitude Friday with a little twist today, as part of Heather’s call for Ten Simple Things that make us happy.  So here’s ten simple things I’m grateful for, this week and every week.

Good books – the wisdom, humor, compassion, and joy they bring.

The sound of my husband and my daughter, playing and laughing together.

This farm we have created from a dream together – our land, our animals, our incredible blessings.

Friends of all ages.

Good food.

Making something by hand.

A cat on my lap, purring.

Holding hands with my husband and partner of eight years.

Yoga, when I remember to let go of my mental to do-list, and be.

The smells of the changing seasons – musty fall leaves, icy snow, thawing soil and green grass, the flowers and heat of summer.

What makes you happy?  What are you grateful for?

Now that you have your delicious leftovers from yesterday’s Mucho Gusto Black Beans and Corn, you can make this simple, hearty Tamale Pie.  This idea is from Whole Grains Every Day, Every Way by Lorna Sass (her Masa-Harina Beef Casserole), but you’ll see that I have changed it quite a bit.  At our house, we call it Tamale Pie.  This recipe can easily be made larger or smaller, and is great to assemble partially ahead.  Like most casseroles, it only gets better as it sits, so eat remember to reheat some for lunch!

Tamale Pie

Filling:

1 tbsp olive oil, butter, or cooking fat

1 medium onion, coarsely chopped

1 medium bell pepper, seeded and coarsely chopped (optional – we don’t have any bell peppers right now, but it’s just fine without!  You could also use an ancho chile pepper, or add 2 tsp of chipotle or paprika powder.)

2 cups cooked black beans (leftover from Mucho Gusto Black Beans and Corn)

1 cup salsa or 2 cloves minced garlic and 1 cup diced tomatoes

1 cup ground beef or sliced crimini mushrooms (optional)

Topping:

1 cup cornmeal

1/2 cup cooked dent corn or fresh/frozen sweet corn kernels

1 1/2 tsp salt

2 tsp baking powder

1 egg

3/4 cup buttermilk

1/2 cup cheddar cheese (optional)

Preheat oven to 350 degrees F.  Get out a 11×7 baking dish.  To prepare the filling, heat the oil in a large cast iron pan.  Saute the onion and pepper until softened, about 5 minutes.  Add the black beans to the pan.  If using, add the beef or mushrooms, garlic, and salt and pepper to taste.  Cook until the meat is browned, add your salsa/tomatoes and simmer while you prepare your topping (about 5 minutes).

For the topping, stir together the dry ingredients.  In a separate bowl, beat the egg lightly, and stir in the buttermilk.  Add the egg mixture to the cornmeal mixture, add the dent corn, and stir just until combined.

Pour the tomato-bean mixture into the baking dish, and smooth it out.  Pour the cornmeal mixture on top, smoothing it as you go. Sprinkle the top with cheddar cheese if desired.

Place in the oven, with a baking sheet underneath to catch any bubble-overs.  Bake until the top is golden brown, 40-45 minutes.  Let sit 10 minutes before serving.  Bon Appetit!

And now . . . a giveaway!  A friend of ours over at Storey Publishing sent this exciting book to us, and now I want to pass it on to you!  Hand Dyeing Yarn and Fleece by Gail Callahan looks really, really fun.  If you’ve been interested to learn how to use dyes, this looks like a great place to start.  To enter the giveaway, leave a comment in this post by Thursday at 11 pm, and I’ll announce the winner on Friday!  Good luck everyone!

The winner, picked by Random Number Generator, is:

Maria I would love to learn the techniques of hand dying. I have always been interested and have yet to try. This book looks great… I’m up for some new dyeing projects!

Congratulations Maria, and thank you everyone who entered.

Introducing a brand new instant classic in our house – Mucho Gusto Black Beans and Corn.  This was easy to make, delicious to eat, and as you’ll see, the leftovers can be transformed into another delicious meal really easily.  Many of my favorite things are here – delicious whole grain and beans, foods I can start the night before, and easy to use leftovers.

We had never cooked or eaten whole dried (dent) corn before, but were excited to try it since it’s part of our share.  We were delighted by it, and I think you will be too.  The nettles and astragalus are herbs we add to all our winter soups/stews.  Nettles are great for your immune and adrenal systems, and astragalus is a very warming, immune-building herb.  I learned this tip from the wonderful Tony (check out her current post on good herb books!) at the NOFA conference last summer.  The astragalus also gives a very pleasant, slightly sweet flavor to the beans.  The kombu is thought to help with the digestibility of dried beans and grains, as described in Feeding the Whole Family by Cythnia Lair.

Mucho Gusto Black Beans and Corn

1 cup dried black beans

2 tbsp dried nettles (optional)

1 piece astragalus root (optional)

2 bay leaves

2 thumb-sized pieces of kombu (optional)

1 cup whole dent corn

(note: for non-CSA members, this is not dried sweet corn, but dent corn, and may be tricky to find.  You could substitute frozen or fresh corn kernels, and just warm them up)

salsa

yogurt or sour cream

cheddar cheese

The night before, soak the beans and corn in separate bowls, in a quart of water each.  The next day, pour off any remaining water.  Place in separate pots, add 3 cups water to each pot, and bring both to a simmer.  Add nettles, astragalus, one piece of kombu, and one bay leaf to black beans; add one piece of kombu, and onebay leaf to the corn.  Skim off any foam that rises up.  Maintaining a gentle simmer, cook both uncovered until tender but not mushy.  Depending on your beans and corn this can take from 30 minutes to 2 hours.  (Note: you can cook both of these hours or even days in advance, and then re-warm them when you’re ready to use.)

When ready to serve, warm the beans and corn, and serve with salsa and yogurt or sour cream on the side (pictured above is home-canned salsa, Chase Hill Farm cheese, and homemade yogurt).   Works very well with ground beef and onions, also.

Save your leftovers!  Because tomorrow, we’re going to make . . . Tamale Pie!  Bon Appetit.

And I want to add, also, that you should feel free to contact me if you ever have any questions about the recipes.  See you tomorrow.

Here’s the menu this week, folks, and a recipe soon to come!

In no particular order . . .

* Roasted Beet Salad with Hazelnuts

* Rye Grits with Bacon and Potatoes (*if* our meat share has any bacon in it!  from Whole Grains Every Way, Every Day by Lorna Sass)

* Farmer’s Cabbage Mushroom Pie (from The Farmer John’s Cookbook by Farmer John Peterson – our most-thumbed cookbook)

* Buttermilk Mashed Potatoes (from The Zuni Cafe Cookbook by Judy Rogers)

* Corn Spoonbread (from Whole Grains Every Way, Every Day by Lorna Sass)

* Caramelized-Onion Tart with Dijon Mustard

* Onion Soup with Tomato and Poached Egg (from The Zuni Cafe Cookbook by Judy Rogers)

* Kale Farinata (from The Zuni Cafe Cookbook by Judy Rogers)

* Oven-Crisped Kale with Balsamic Vinegar (similar to this recipe we shared last spring, topped with balsamic)

* Pot au Feu ( from Lulu’s Provencal Table by Richard Olney)

* Shepherd’s Pie (made with the leftover pot au feu, using the recipe from The Best Make-Ahead Recipe by Cook’s Illustrated Magazine)

* Sausage with Potatoes and Cabbage (from Full Moon Feast by Jessica Prentice)

* Oat Pilaf with Carrots and Thyme (from Whole Grains Every Way, Every Day by Lorna Sass)

From last week, the Oat and Beet Salad was amazing, and so were the Potatoes and Mushrooms Baked in Cream (I used dried mushrooms, since I seem to be plumb out of fresh chanterelles, haha).  No surprise there!  And you?  Whatcha got cookin?

It must be . . . maple syrup time!  One of my favorite seasonal rites of passage happened today – tapping our maple trees.

Some dear friends, big and small, came to help us today – first you drill your hole a little smaller than the diameter of your spout, and about 1 1/2 inches deep.  Then tap in your spout with a hammer.

Hang your bucket, cover it (keeps out the rain), and listen to the beautiful drip drip.

Next, do a celebration dance.  Costumes required.

Exciting!  I have a vivid memory of being 6 months pregnant with Ella, standing in the farmer’s supply store picking out our spouts and buckets for the first time.  A woman watching us tried very hard to convince us not to buy them, since once the baby came, we would never do it again.  Ha!  We did buy them, and we’re still here, tapping away.  (We only get a small amount of syrup from our few trees, but we love doing it anyway).  I have grand visions of tapping all the unused sugar maples in our little town, and driving Cole around the streets collecting the sap . . . Ok, so that probably won’t happen anytime soon, but for now, we have six buckets hung, and that will do just fine.

(whoops – I wrote this and then realized I had skipped Step Six!  I’ll do that one next, but in the meantime . . .)

I really wish that this step read something like this:

I am thrilled to announce that eating seafood is super sustainable, and we can all go stuff our bellies with shrimp and oysters while toasting the beautiful bountiful ocean!

Wouldn’t that be awesome?

Sadly, that’s not the truth.  This is really hard for me – I grew up on the Atlantic coast my whole life.  I breathed salt air, ate seafood like it would never end, and loved it.  When I came home from being away at school, the dish I asked my mom to make was shrimp.

But.

To say it briefly, I’ll paraphrase from the November 2006 issue of Science – If current trends continue, the oceans will be essentially barren, with no chance of recovery, by 2048.  (That’s only 38 years folks!)

I’ve known, in a vague way, that things were not going well in the ocean for years.  As a teenage, I volunteered with my dad to spend a week on a tiny island off the coast off Georgia, walking the beach all night long to monitor and protect the endangered sea turtles who came there to lay their eggs.  I knew about mercury in tuna, and as much as I love tuna sushi, I cut back, and haven’t touched it since I got pregnant over three years ago.  Since moving to the inland Pioneer Valley, seafood has not been a big part of my diet, but it was still an occasional treat.  Sushi, smoked salmon, oysters on the half shell.

Then, I started learning more about what it really meant to eat seafood today.  I learned that a lot of “fishing” in the deep ocean is done with underwater bulldozers, that crush coral reefs, grab a bunch of sealife in their maws, and use only a fraction of what they catch.  Last February (while visiting family in Louisiana and chowing down on seafood, ironically), I read the article “All You Can Eat” by Jim Carrier in Orion (one of my favorite reads).  A few disturbing tidbits from that article:

“In the gold-rush days . . . shrimpers killed ten pounds of sea life for every pound of harvested shrimp—waste that reached one billion pounds a year in the Gulf. Once called “trash,” now called “by-catch,” this sea life included sea turtles driven to the brink of extinction, and juvenile red snapper, a good eating fish. Under environmental regulations requiring escape hatches in nets, the by-catch-to-shrimp ratio has been reduced to four-to-one . . .”

Most of the seafood, particularly shrimp, now sold in the US is imported, and comes from seafood “farms.”

“A shrimp farm is a saltwater feedlot. There can be as many as 170,000 shrimp larvae in a 1-acre pond that is 1 to 2 meters deep. So-called intensive ponds can yield 6,000 to 18,000 pounds of shrimp in that acre in 3 to 6 months. . .Because of this density, the waste they swim in, and their susceptibility to disease, most farmed shrimp are treated with antibiotics, only some of them legal in the U.S. A wide array of poisons is used to kill unwanted sea life and cleanse ponds for reuse, creating what Public Citizen calls a “chemical cocktail.” In random sampling of imported shrimp, health officials in the U.S., Japan, and the European Union have found chloramphenicol, a dangerous antibiotic banned in food.”

Out of all that imported seafood, “The Food and Drug Administration, responsible for imported food safety, samples less than 1 percent of the 1 billion pounds.”

What I’m saying here is that not only is our seafood addiction destroying the oceans (which are critical for healthy life of the entire planet), but the seafood we’re eating so much of is toxic. It’s a little hard to really wrap our minds around this, when we’re constantly being told about all those good omega-3s in salmon, and how lean and great fish is for us.  Fish 50 years ago that wasn’t drenched in heavy metals and raised in chemical soup, maybe.  Fish now?  No thank you.  Hence, Step 7: Eat Less Seafood.

Edited on Feb 22 to add: A reader sent in a link to this documentary, coming out in June: http://endoftheline.com/

This week, I’m grateful for the restorative powers of a calm day at home.

I’m grateful for this yoga sequence, which rescued me from serious back pain.

Grateful for this quote from Ella, as we were on our way to a grain meeting: “. . . and I’m going to talk about emmer!”

Grateful for this reminder from Kyce, on letting go of guilt and starting anew.

Grateful for my kind, sweet family.

Grateful for this family, too – these animals we steward, who remind us of the important rhythms of the day – the movement of the warming winter sun, hay, water, and more hay.  Grateful for these sweet sheep who love Ella, come to her to sniff and nuzzle her, while she giggles in delight.

Wishing you moments of gratitude in your days.

the cat came back!

Today, I was grumpy.  Sometimes, I see myself as if from far away, making myself grumpier but somehow unable to stop.  Today was like that.  Ella couldn’t sleep, so I found myself up with her too late, grouchy, trying not to think about all the things I “need” to do.

One of these items was, “Tell friends and family that the cat disappeared, and figure out how to explain it to Ella when she notices.”  We live in an area with a lot of predators, and with many cats in the past, as soon as they’re out for a single night, they never come back.  We do our best to keep them in, but with two dogs going in and out, it’s tricky.  Our current cat, Little Boy, has been absolutely determined to go out at night.  He will sit by the door and howl like a wolf, even though he’s come back a few times all scratched up.  He has even opened the front door somehow and escaped!

So, when he didn’t come back two days ago, we thought the worst.  Gone.  Hopeless.

Grace is talking this week about finding awe in our days, which is such a wonderful reminder.  Tonight, this was my moment of feeling suddenly, utterly blessed – I was up too late with my daughter, cranky, and then I heard a familiar meowing at the front door.  I practically leapt up out of my chair, opened the door, and there was Little Boy, hungry but healthy!  Alive! Returned from his “cadventure” as Ella says.

Everyone’s asleep now but me, and I am trying to remember to be grateful, to keep my eyes (and ears) open for what is here in front of me.