Monthly Archives: October 2008

Ode to a Canning Jar

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Ode to a Canning Jar I was washing dishes the other day and this jar came to the top of the pile. It’s a jar I bought honey in when we lived in California — seven or eight years ago now. This is what I love about mason jars — that they last forever.

About a year ago I got rid of all the plastic containers in my house. I bought a bunch of old pyrex refrigerator storage containers on eBay, and I’ve been using canning jars for everything else. It works perfectly. For braised things like the pork with New Mexico chile (thanks Deb for the chile — it’s SO delicious) I use one of those flat yellow pyrex dishes with the lid. For soups and anything else semi-liquid, I use canning jars. I also have all my dry goods stored in canning jars in the pantry — beans, rices, dried mushrooms, salted black beans.

The thing about canning jars — they’re cheap. You can find them in secondhand stores for almost nothing, or you can buy a dozen brand new jars with lids and screw tops for 8-12 bucks. While you can only use a lid once for proper canning, for just everyday storage, you can use them over and over. Just wash them. And glass is inert. There’s no weird chemicals leaking into my food. And I think they’re very attractive — I love my pantry with all the jars lined up, where you can see all the different beans and peas and other stuff.
As anyone knows who has been reading my little site for any time now, I’m really interested in older technologies that still work well. I like new technologies too — don’t get me wrong, I’m having a ball with all the Web 2.0 stuff we’re doing at work, and if it wasn’t for new technology I wouldn’t be able to live here in Montana. But I’m also really interested in the older stuff that suddenly a lot of us seem to be rediscovering. Canning. Knitting. Growing veggies in your backyard. Maybe this financial crisis will inspire some more of this kind of rediscovery. Ways of living with less waste, more reuse — consuming less quantity but perhaps a little more quality? A tiny silver lining perhaps?

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Trumpeter Swans!

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Although setting out on morning dog walks in the dark (at 7:30) is sort of a drag, the reward is that by the time we get to the dog park at Mayor’s Landing, which is a bluff overlooking the Yellowstone, we get to watch the sunrise over the Crazy Mountains to the northeast. It’s just lovely. It’s so lovely that I stop and look and feel very grateful that I live here. Every morning. The exercise is good, but the gratitude is even better.

So this morning as we turned to head home, I heard what I thought was geese, but when I looked up, they weren’t geese, they were trumpeter swans! Three of them, great big necks stretched out, flying into the southwest.

Things might be a little scary all around — the financial news is bad again this morning, a dear one just got some alarming medical tests back, and the election is making us all very nervous. But on the other hand, the sun is still rising, the river is flowing as it has for centuries, the leaves have turned yellow, and there were three trumpeter swans flying overhead. A good thing.

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Worth all those Saturdays

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Tonigh night I was fried. I went out the last two nights, and while it was so much fun last night carving pumpkins with the kids (thanks Dad for that perennially-scary pumpkin face you taught me when I was little) well, the grownups overindulged just a tiny bit, and then today was crazy at work. By seven, I was rattling around trying to figure out what to eat for dinner. I wasn’t that hungry, but I wanted something other than cheese and crackers.

And that’s when the antelope bolongese that I put up with the terrifying pressure canner came in — sauce, meet noodles. Ten minutes and it was dinner. I did have to take a flashlight to find the parsley in the garden, but pasta, sauce, parmesan, parsely. Dinner. Everything from someplace I understand. Good clean food at the end of a long day. Who could ask for more?

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Winter Herbarium

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Winter Herbarium I managed to get my herbs in before the big snow which was a relief, especially as it took months for the shiso to germinate and I’m curious about using it. I put the herbs on this table in my mud room last winter, and while they didn’t die, they didn’t exactly thrive either. There’s a window directly opposite the table, and it is the south-facing side of the house, but it doesn’t get a whole lot of sunlight, especially on those gloomy days.

So I bought a couple of brackets and a timer, and rigged up one of the grow lights from my basement seed-starting setup. So far, after a week they seem to be doing pretty well. I’ve got the lights set up for 12 hours a day, and because there’s a light out there I seem to be remembering to water more regularly. I’m not good with houseplants — I forget they’re there and kill them. Or they get whiteflies and die. Or something. But I’m hoping this winter to keep growing basil and marjoram and shiso and thyme and rosemary and mint and chives (the chives are in a post-transplant swoon at the moment. I’m hoping they recover.)

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The Most Radical Thing You Can Do …

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… is stay home. Rebecca Solnit, one of my favorite writers, has a lovely piece over at Orion in which she quotes Gary Snyder: “The most radical thing you can do is stay home.”

Like everyone else, I’ve been thinking a lot about the economic situation — as much as I’d like to be economically independent here at LivingSmall, I’m still a good ten years away from that, and my Corporate Job depends on the world economy not collapsing entirely. And while I don’t want to see a world recession or depression, it also seems to me that perhaps we need some new metrics for calculating success. Does it really have to be geometric growth or nothing? Isn’t there some middle way? Some saner measurement of growth that would allow the indigenous peoples Solnit discusses to stay home, not be forced to migrate to hostile foreign places where menial jobs pay money they cannot make at home? Some saner measurement in which frantic activity — working long hours, going to the gym, shopping for entertainment, driving driving driving — are looked at with a more critical eye?

One of my goals when I moved here was to find a place and root in it. Snyder was, in many ways my model. I studied with him a little bit in grad school, and the freedom he’d earned by buying a place he could afford, and staying there, was something I envied. He didn’t have to go teach in places where he didn’t want to live. He lived very close to the ground — off the grid, homesteading in the most elegant way imaginable (he had one of the earliest solar power setups for his computers for example).

Although I adore summer here — it’s so short, and everyone comes out of their hidey-holes and plays hard — it’s in winter that we all really settle into our selves and get the real work done. This is a town full of writers, after all, and it’s in winter that we get back into the rhythm of it all. For me, that means being up early enough to check the news, eat breakfast, walk the dog, and get some writing in before logging on to the Corporate Job. It also means weekends of retreat. I’ll go out on a Friday, but when I can, I try to get two uninterrupted days of quiet over the weekend in order to get back to the novel I’m still working on. I find it takes until Saturday afternoon or evening for that part of my brain to open up again, for the busy-ness of the week to subside, and as the days grow shorter, and as I mourn the death of the garden, I also welcome the silence of snowfall, and the cozy home that is my basement writing office.

I only hope that as we’re all forced to think a little bit more about our consumption levels, that perhaps the quieter joys of staying home will what, catch on a little bit? What’s wrong with talking to one another? Hanging out? Playing a board game or going for a walk or making a craft together? Will the world economy really collapse if we all just dial it back a little bit? Or can we maybe invent a saner economy? That’s my little hope at any rate …

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