More on Reviving Lost Skills

Posted on February 27, 2008 by cmf

Funny the way synchronicity works — I’ve been thinking a lot about how skills like learning to knit, or sew, or garden, or cook — skills some of our mothers (or in my case, my grandmother) discounted as being the kinds of skills that keep a girl tied to a domestic existence that stifles other opportunity — are for me a fulfilling way of refusing to cede control of my basic lifeskills to the corporate behemoths that seem to have taken over our lives. If I can sew a skirt, I’m not entirely beholden to clothes made in factories. If I can knit a sweater, I am not entirely beholden to some corporate entity for personal warmth. If I can put up my own pickles, I’m not relying on Clausen any more … none of this negates my existence as a cyber-worker, as a person who bought a new car a couple of years ago, as a person who still shops in stores and is in no way living off the grid. I just like knowing that if I have to, I can take care of some of my basic needs myself.

So this morning I pull up the SF Chronicle (another wonder of technology — I can read five newspapers a day) and Georgeanne Brennan has a really fabulous piece about how traditional pig-butchering celebrations are becoming, if not common, at least less of an anomaly than they once were:

The “day of the pig” also has renewed meaning now, when many people are concerned with the source of their food and with humane treatment of animals. Yes, there would be a slaughter, but it would be done with respect for the animal and the food it provides. Using every part of the animal – or as much as possible – would also show our respect for the life given. We would try not to waste a thing.

There’s a real value to keeping all these older skills alive, and in the case of the DIY crafts movement, to re-inventing them and making them hip and alive again. Skills like these brign us into contact with one another — there’s a reason knitting shops have become centers of community for many women (and some men) around the country. Keeping a garden gives me something to discuss with the folks at the farmer’s market in the summer, and because I produce more than I can eat, sharing food brings me into my community in ways I might not experience if I was simply buying all my food at the supermarket. Industrialized food production has been so successful at divorcing most of us from the animal and vegetable nature of our food that it’s no surprise to me that in much the same manner as the absolute conquest of wild nature caused Americans to go back and re-evaluate their relationship to and how they valued wilderness, that the success of industrial agriculture has spurred many of us to go back and re-evaluate our relationship to our food sources.

My First Sweater

Posted on February 26, 2008 by cmf

Here it is — my first sweater. It only took me four years — well, it really only took about a month of actual knitting — I started it a couple of times and had to pull it out a couple of times but finally, it’s done. I’m wearing it now. It’s cozy and heavy and although the sleeves are a little long, it actually fits and the proportions are right –

I’m going to do another one in this same pattern but using Becky Weed’s gorgeous wool she mills over at 13 Mile Ranch. This will be my locavore sweater — the wool was grown and processed just over north of Bozeman — I’ve written before about buying Becky’s lamb and I’ve been wanting to knit something from her yarn for a while now (but I told myself I had to finish the sweater I’d started first). I love that she converted an old barn on her place to a mill, and that she’s working so hard to develop multiple revenue streams for local sheep ranchers. Plus, the wool is gorgeous …

I think I’m going to do this one in a different stitch — seed stitch maybe? With a dark mohair trim and wooden buttons? This is one of those things like learning to sew a skirt, or make jam and pickles, that makes me feel good. I like being able to make something myself, something that doesn’t look like what everyone else is wearing, and that I can tweak so it’s exactly the way I want it. I also take great comfort in not being entirely reliant on the consumerist corporate world for basic things like feeding and clothing myself — there’s some real bottom-line security in knowing that I can take care of my basic needs, that I haven’t entirely lost those skills.

Knitting as Antidote for Frantic Busy-ness

Posted on January 22, 2008 by cmf

I’m about to go log in to my job at the Big Corporation, the job that I’m hoping will see me through whatever impending financial doom is rising on the horizon, the job that isn’t my dream job, but which I like nonetheless. As much as I’d love to be able to write full time, it’s good to have a real job, especially for a writer — it keeps me engaged with the world outside my little circle of writers and artists and handymen and hunters and ranchers trying to make a go of it selling milk and eggs and wool. There was a piece in the NY Times a couple of weeks ago about telecommuters fighting off loneliness that I found interesting because it’s not really a problem I run into — for one thing, I’m weirdly happy to spend enormous amounts of time alone, and for another, I work with a group of people spread out between San Jose, Miami, Galway Ireland, Seattle and here in Montana. We’re all so electronically connected to one another at my job, that I don’t really feel like I’m alone all day. Between our group instant messaging program, email, and web-based meetings it’s hard to feel disconnected. In fact, when it gets as busy as it’s been the past few weeks, it’s amazing how fried and frazzled and pecked-at a girl can wind up feeling after another 10 hour day in her own front room.

And so, I’ve taken up my long-neglected knitting project again. Knitting and Netflix — a couple of hours working on the sweater that I’ve knit, pulled out, and knit again so many times now (it’s taken me a long time to figure out how to count stitches and rows, what I really like is knitting the big swatches of body parts, not the v-neck or sleeves where you have to pay attention). After a long day of emails and fires that need to be put out and very long technical documents that need to be edited in too little time there’s something essentially calming about putting in a movie, something that’s going to run continuously for an hour and a half or two hours without the interruption of commercials, and knitting. It gives you something to do with your hands. It keeps a girl from surfing the internet aimlessly. It makes you concentrate a little — not as much as working, but just enough to smooth out those jangly places that are left from the day’s work.

And who knows? This time, I might actually get this sweater finished. Considering it’s been ten below for days now, a nice, warm, raspberry-colored sweater would be a good thing.

Cheesemaking Kit

Posted on October 2, 2007 by cmf

I have another gallon of real milk coming today, and because a gallon of milk a week is really more than I can use, I ordered this nifty cheesemaking kit from the New England Cheesemaking Supply Company.

Last week I made yogurt from the fabulous unpasteurized milk and I was shocked at how fabulous it came out. I followed these terrific instructions and they worked like a dream. In three hours, as the instructions claimed, I had really great, thick yogurt. I’ve been eating it all week. A quart and a pint of milk, plus a cup of yogurt as starter, made a two nice thick pints of yogurt once I drained off the considerable amount of whey.

The MH called from Michigan last night where he’s hunting woodcock with his main client, the Famous Author. I told him I had another gallon of milk coming and because it was too much for me that I was planning to learn to make cheese. “Cheese? You’re going to make cheese?” he asked, laughing really hard. “Why are you laughing at me?” I said. “You’re the one with a dead moose hanging in your garage.” “I know,” he said. “But cheese?”

As a society we’re so used to endless choice, to just buying whatever we want, that the very idea of learning a new skill because you don’t really have a choice about how much milk to buy seems totally weird. I mean, it’s milk! A basic commodity, something we’re so used to buying as we need it, so used to choosing between fourteen different kinds and brands. But if I had a cow, as my Milk Lady does, I’d have a steady and finite amount of milk to deal with every day. If I had a cow, which would have been completely normal up until about what, fifty years ago, then I’d be selling milk or learning how to do exactly what I plan to do now — learn to make cheese. My Milk Lady, the cheesemaking website, and Barbara Kingsolver all tell me it’s easy. So I’m going to make some mozzerella. I like mozzerella. And I have a lot of tomato sauce I’ve just put up. And some homemade pizza dough in the freezer that should be used up. And the basil is hanging in there out in the garden under the plastic. So yeah, I’m going to make cheese.

Harvest craziness …

Posted on September 17, 2007 by cmf

I’ve been in a frenzy of food preservation here at LivingSmall. Saturday I pulled and washed and cut and blanched and drained two six-gallon trash cans full of endive. I then wrapped the blanched endive in towels to squeeze out the water and sealed it in bags using my vaccuum sealer and froze them for later this winter.

I also shredded the outer leaves that looked okay but not really nice enough to put up for winter and I’m experimenting with making sauerkraut from them — we’ll see how it works out. Right now, it looks like wet salty leaves in the bottom of a pot. But it seemed a waste to compost them when there’s a chance they might be good — and somehow, along with my frenzy of food preservation I’ve become Enamored of Fermentation.

Maybe it was Ruhlman’s Charcuterie, which I bought with the proceeds of a huge box of books I sold to Powells using their fabulous online book-buying service. I gave this to the Mighty Hunter last year for Christmas, and while I’m sure I could have borrowed it, I wanted a copy for my own. I’m currently overcome with the desire to make a pancetta — I need to call my local butcher tomorrow and order a pork belly.

Order a pork belly? What has come over me? Sauerkraut? Home-cured meats? I may also call my local source of raw milk and order some — she only sells it by the gallon but I figure I could make some yogurt that would be delicious, and Barbara Kingsolver has a whole section in Animal Vegetable Miracle about how easy it is to make one’s own mozzarella.

Make my own cheese? Again, something has come over me — one of my periodic Little House on the Prairie phases — but I love the idea of knowing how to make basic food stuffs. I love the idea of knowing how to put things by, and I’m always convinced that home made is better than what you can buy in the store.

Of course it could also be plain old writerly procrastination. I’m up against some difficult material in the book I’m writing — so what better solution than to cure my own pancetta! make my own cheese!

Cooking Small

Posted on September 12, 2007 by cmf

Somehow we’ve managed to live a little too large here at LivingSmall, the debt-to-savings ratio has gotten itself upside down, and so we’re trying to cut back wherever we can.

I’m the kind of person who buys pantry staples when I’m feeling existentially anxious, and so, in the spirit of economizing, I’ve found myself looking in the pantry and remembering that I can feed myself a whole week’s worth of lunches, for example, off a nice pot of pea soup. Pea soup costs almost nothing. Today I made a batch — I pulled a couple of carrots and a late onion from the garden — sautéed them up, added a cup of mixed dried yellow and green peas, a generous splash of wine, chicken stock to cover, and the leaves off two or three sprigs of thyme from the garden. Really, a soup that I put maybe 50 cents worth of ingredients into (okay a buck if you take the wine into account). A couple of hours later, the house smelled good, and I had a pot of soup that was welcome on an evening where the weather had turned cold and blustery.

My friend Nina’s been in the same boat lately — things were tight this summer and she drew on her childhood in the hippie commune — she found herself doing a lot of brown rice and vegetables with cheese, soups, pastas with veggies, egg frittattas. We were discussing how easy it had been when times were flush to just not pay attention at all — to go to the grocery store with no list and buy stuff. Or in my case, get stuck in that idea that dinner has to include a piece of protein, a starch and a green veggie when there are so many other possibilities. We got talking about how we were both sort of enjoying paying attention to our food budgets again, and not only economizing, but remembering how good really simple cheap food can be. My pea soup was delicious. Nina’s brown rice with veggies and cheese was yummy. We were both sort of ashamed at how far we’d strayed during the flush times, and although neither of us is thrilled that things are kind of tight at the moment, it’s been good to remember that we’re perfectly capable of feeding ourselves and our loved ones very well without spending much.

Canning — Everybody’s Learning How

Posted on September 6, 2007 by cmf

Somehow the subject of canning is everywhere on the interenets, and it’s spawned a bastardized version of “Surfin Safari” inside my head. You’ve got a lot of time to think of things like this while waiting for water to boil.

On the home front — I put up a couple of jars of marinated eggplant last night. Our local truck farm had these gorgeous mottled purple eggplants, and since the eggplants in my garden are not going to win the annual race with frost, I snapped up a bunch. I bought that big Silver Spoon cookbook when it was all the rage a couple of years ago, adn I haven’t used it much — but turns out, it’s a great reference when you’ve got a single ingredient and you’re looking for something to do with it. Of course, I can’t seem to folllow a recipe all the way through to save my life, so I tossed the eggplant slices in olive oil and baked them instead of frying, and I left the capers out of the marinade but I kept the mint, and garlic, and hot peppers. When the eggplant slices had turned golden, I tossed them in the marinade, then packed them into two half-pint jars that I’d sterilized because I’ve been canning so much lately that the idea of putting food in an unsterilized jar has become an anathema. I topped off the jars with more olive oil, let them sit out all night to meld the flavors, and stuck them in the fridge. The garlic is a little dodgy since apparently garlic in olive oil can create a good medium for the botulism toxin, so I might freeze one of the jars if it doesn’t look like they’re getting eaten right away. But I’m thinking marinated eggplant on toast with a little cheese melted on top might just make an awfully yummy lunch one of these days …

As for canning across the internets — here are some links:

Bonnie’s making pickles and KimChee over at Ethicurean:
Teresa is salting beans and making sauerkraut at Down on the Farm
The Nolls in Oregon chronicle over 30 years of canning online
Fellow Montana writer, Jennifer Savage writes at Culinate about the compulsion to put up food, even when it’s hot, and you’re very pregnant. The payoff was feeding her new baby food she knew …
Brendon in Davis, California walks through one of my favorite farmer’s markets in the world, and finds himself the proud owner of 25 pounds of tomatoes. His adventure in canning is here:

LivingSmall Lifeskills: Making Jam

Posted on August 6, 2007 by cmf

I was showing my house to some visitors from LA last week, and Brooke noticed the jams and preserves lined up at the top of my pantry. “Do you know someone who makes those for you?” she asked.

“I did that,” I said.

“Really?” she seemed surprised, as if she’d never known anyone who made jam. “If I’m here next summer will you show me how?”

“Sure,” I told her. “It’s easy.”

It got me thinking about skills that used to be considered perfectly ordinary: making jam, running up a skirt on a sewing machine, growing some of your own food, fixing a broken appliance.

Making jam is actually really easy, and it’s one of those things that once you’ve done it a couple of times, becomes almost second nature. You can buy one of these canning kits at most hardware stores, although since I already had a big stockpot, I just bought an accessories kit (for the funnel and the big tongs to pull full jars from the hot water).Then you just need some jars, or if you’ve done this before, all you need are new lids.

And fruit. I have more fruit than I know what to do with — there’s the grove of pie cherry trees in the empty lot down the block from me, and in my backyard I’ve got 2 plum trees, 4 apple trees and although they’re not producing much yet, a patch of raspberry bushes. I’ve also been known to buy fruit sometimes — a couple of summers ago I bought a flat of beautiful raspberries from a kid who’d driven them up from Utah on a truck. Or last summer I made chutney from some gorgeous peaches that Maryanne brought me up from her sister’s place in Colorado. It all depends. What’s nice is knowing that if there’s a plethora of beautiful fruit, I can put it up for those long stretches of the year when the only fruit available has come a long way in a plane or on a truck.

As for the nitty-gritty, there’s no magic to it. You need to be careful to sterilize everything, and to watch out for chipped rims on the jars, but as my mother used to say, “If you can read, you can cook.” For most of my preserving, I rely on the “Preserves, Pickles, Relishes and Canned Fruits and Vegetables” chapter of The Fannie Farmer Cookbook. There’s a great section of general info like” “The basic proportions for jam are 3/4 cup sugar for each cup of prepared fruit.” That’s the kind of “recipe” I love — a general guideline that you can use with lots of different variations. Last summer I put up cherry jam, plum jam, spicy plum barbecue sauce, and I took a stab at a jalapeno-mint apple jelly (which didn’t jell, and that tasted weirdly muddy. I threw it out.) This year I decided that rather than put up jam, which I don’t really eat, I’d do cherries in syrup. I found this terrific recipe for Spiced Cherries and Cherry Syrup online. I did eight pints of the spiced ones, and six jars of plain cherries in simple syrup. I figure that should be plenty for a winter of desserts and sauces for game, with some left over for Christmas baskets.

One of my big goals when I moved up here was to learn to be more self-sufficient and there’s something enormously satisfying about growing and putting up your own food. You know exactly what happened to that food at every step of the process, and you wind up with a pretty row of jars along the top shelf of your pantry.

LivingSmall

Life, Literature, and the Subversive Power of Living Small

Category Archives: life skills