At the Farmers’ Market
September 24, 2011 § 1 Comment
When I woke up this morning it was dark. The temperature was 45 degrees and my feet were cold, but a quick glance at weather.com warned me of a high of 85. Tank top underneath three-quarter-length underneath a fleece and out the door with a slice of bread-and-butter.
The sunrise on my way to the farm helps the morning to feel calm for ten minutes. It’s almost always orange, pink, sometimes hazy with blue and purple. How crazy what a difference fifteen minutes makes; most mornings I get to the farm at 7 but the sunrise is done by then. 6:45 and I catch the brilliant tail end.
We load the truck, my co-worker Adam and I, and get to the market to set up in the bright (and I mean bright) morning sun.
And then when we’re finally settled one of us gets Silver Canyon Coffee, and we get to talk and sell to the folks of Longmont and Boulder County. How fun to share the produce of Sol y Sombra Farm – the result of our week’s hard work!
As the day goes on we take turns taking breaks, wandering through to see what we want to buy from other vendors, what we might have for lunch or a mid-morning treat.
The market in Longmont isn’t as packed nor as renowned as the one in Boulder, but it has plenty going for it, including music, seriously remarkable face painting, prepared foods, and space, glorious space. Parking isn’t a headache and elbows aren’t so jostled here. Come see the spread of colorful vegetables, fresh-baked and gluten-free breads, handmade soaps, local flowers, grassfed beef and pastured poultry, pies and teas and roasted chili peppers. But you’d better come early if you want okra!
And the best part? Going home and looking at what you just got from your local farmers and producers. Today, for me (in addition to my usual share from the farm): apples and sourdough and this season’s first pie pumpkin.
Then there’s the fun of playing with ideas for what to make, and whom to share it with. It always makes me glad to see how creativity and community and seasonality come together here.
I’ve got to say thanks to all the vendors and staff at the Boulder County Farmers' Markets. And to those involved in farmers’ markets across the country, both bustling and just-getting-started . . . keep up the good work!
Natural habitat
September 22, 2011 § 6 Comments
There is a small private lake – probably more accurately a pond – that I go past on my way to the horse barn. Sometimes, as I am passing, the wind carries a lake-water smell on it. I practically gasp it in. Those are times when my whole self aches for Minnesota.
So I felt that ache tonight, going past after I finished my shift, and then turned my head to see a stunning peach-pink glowing from behind the mountains. At the same time that I thought,
Oh, how beautiful!
I also thought,
I miss rolling land and lush foliage and I am tired of it. I want to see a blazing deciduous forest, cattails at the lake’s edge, and a pasture that has known plenty of rain. I want to see them now.
I imagined pushing the mountains down into the ground and letting green spread over everything, green turning to orange and red, the whole landscape anticipating a golden autumn followed by a deep winter.
And I got home feeling all at once homesick, lonely, disgruntled, impatient, and finally guilty. Isn’t it horribly selfish and fussy to be in a place that some find to be the utmost of beauty and to wish for another kind of beauty? There are things I like about it – things that strike me as marvelous, rustic, whatever, here and there – and I love to document these things and share them and appreciate them. But nothing ultimately fits. It’s like seeing a beautiful dress in a store but knowing you aren’t the one meant to wear it. It’s beautiful, but it’ll look better on your brunette friend with the curves and the wide smile. And you shall have the cotton sundress in the next shop down.
It just makes me wonder: what makes some landscapes fit one person so well, and some fit another? It can’t be only nurture, because lots of people end up loving and belonging to landscapes that weren’t their childhood homes. Some people love certain new landscapes and environments right away. Others don’t. Because life is not easy and not fair all of the time, we can’t always decide where we get to be and when. So what if the places where we end up don’t fit us? What if we are of the temperament that makes it very important to us to find joy-peace-and-inspiration in our surroundings? How long can it take for a person to adapt – and can we, fully, ever?
Pattypan chocolate chip bread
September 20, 2011 § 4 Comments
In case you aren’t familiar with this playfully-named vegetable, pattypan, or patty pan, is just another type of summer squash, and can be used pretty much like zucchini or crookneck. It comes in a handful of varieties and can be yellow, yellow and green, white, or greenish white. These squash look remarkably like spaceships. Or jellyfish. Or characters from Pac-Man. (Come on. Your kids have got to get into it.)
At the farm, our greenish-white variety, Benning's Green Tint, has been growing like crazy. So when we had some left at the end of a market day I got to take some home for myself. I made them into soup, stuffed them, tossed them in to sauté with some veggies, but I still had more and they kept sitting there on the counter asking me to do something with them before they went soft.
Since I’ve been craving chocolate – and since my sister’s zucchini chocolate chip bread wouldn’t get out of my head – I threw together what I had and out came this lovely moist bread. Just right when you feel the need for a bit of chocolate in the morning!
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RECIPE
Ingredients:
1.5 cups all-purpose flour
1.5 cups whole wheat flour
1/2 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup white sugar
1 tsp. baking powder
1 tsp. baking soda
1/2 tsp. salt
1 tsp. cinnamon
1/2 tsp. nutmeg
1/4 tsp. ginger
2 tsp. vanilla
3 eggs
2 cups grated pattypan squash
2 sticks butter (you can reduce it to 1 or 1.5, but I like lots of moisture at this altitude)
10 oz. semi-sweet chocolate chips (again, you could reduce, but I like lots of chocolate!)
Directions:
Mix dry ingredients; mix wet ingredients. Add wet ingredients to dry and stir until everything is moistened. Add chocolate chips. Pour into a greased large loaf pan or two small loaf pans or a muffin tray. In the large loaf pan, bake at 350 degrees for about an hour. Reduce baking time for small loaf pans or muffins (I’d bake for about 30 and 20 minutes respectively). Serve warm with butter for breakfast, or at room-temp for an easy-to-grab afternoon snack.
Muck boot days and flower bouquets
September 16, 2011 § 2 Comments
Goodness gracious, has it been muddy! Three days of clouds and rain. Morning mists, and white wisps hovering around the mountains. It has felt like England. It has meant tea and toast with butter and jam.
It has also meant sliding around in the paddocks with high-strung horses, horses even more eager (read: demanding) to have their food. It has meant mud-caked shoes and wisely switching to muck boots, or wellies. Wellies are great, and it makes me happy when I get to wear mine. But you have to walk rather differently in them, especially when they are heavy with mud on the bottom, and after doing that – while pulling wheelbarrows full of hay or toting buckets full of flowers – for a solid day or so you will end up sore in muscles you didn’t know you had, or at least had forgotten about.
And then you get to go inside and sink into a bath, or stretch out by the fireplace, and let the cold and wet sort of seep out of you. Fleece and wool, sweaters and thick socks. It is only September and yet the rain means I get to drag out and use these favorite things!
I don’t know why what some would call “bad weather” is so often a favorite thing for me. I am completely aware that it means more work. I know it means having to worry about things you otherwise might not. I definitely know it makes more laundry! And it surely upsets the comfort and efficiency of routine.
But isn’t it a relief to have routine upset sometimes? There is just something about having to work around the weather – about having the ordinary course of things thrown off – that I can’t help finding amusing, interesting, and honestly quite satisfying. I suppose some thanks should go to parents who taught my siblings and me to laugh at difficulty and work with the unexpected. After all, that makes it more fun to plow through, if one must plow.
As I write, though, the three days of clouds and water have just passed. After a cold, foggy, coat-hat-and-mittens morning at the farm today, with plenty of sniffling and even a change of socks, I settled with the flowers into the shed to make bouquets, and the sun came out once again. The mountains could be seen blue to the west. The other farm hands and I had slowly been shedding layers all morning; I had to grin a little at going from fleece-lined softshell jacket to tanktop and ponytail in only a few hours. Now in the shade of the shed I was still sweating. Still, at least I had the shade, right?
These Fridays are my flower days, and happily full of color. So many flowers just exude optimism. Others seem more serious, or romantic, or even melancholy, and these can be nice to put together. Cosmos, snapdragons, zinnias, pincushion flowers, bachelor’s buttons, amaranth, love-lies-bleeding, sweet annie, and black-eyed susans have all been gathered into pretty bundles to greet people at the market in the morning. And I’ll be there, too – hopefully with a mug of coffee in hand and a smile more noticeable than my sleepy eyes.
A book to read in fall
September 14, 2011 § Leave a comment
A slim little paperback of 20 poems by Robert Bly, one of my beloved Minnesota poets: The Urge to Travel Long Distances.
The geese in flight reminded me of the cover of this book, a book I dig out this time of year for a good re-read. Here are poems to enjoy by the season’s first fires, with mugs of cider in your hands.
The geese fly south
September 14, 2011 § Leave a comment
Even as I write this several geese are honking overhead, the sound coming and going along with them. A welcome reminder of the nature beyond my apartment and beyond the town. On my way to the farm last week, I caught a glimpse of at least a hundred of them off to my left, settled and sifting through the stubble that remained in an already-harvested field. Yesterday, as we took the last horses from their runs to the paddocks, a large flock flew over, loud and many enough to catch our attention, even while our work requires us to be pretty darn focused on the animals at the end of our ropes and in our near spaces. Look! said my coworker, and I did: several V’s formed against the blue, against the last white beams of the sun as it slipped behind the mountains. Dark silhouettes with long necks and purposeful wings. It is time, and they always know.
Ulani
September 13, 2011 § Leave a comment
Have a look at Ulani, in one of his fancy gaits. He is a Mangalarga Marchador stallion who belongs to hosts I stayed with in France. I just recently found this video on YouTube and it made me miss him, and my hosts Frederic and Dorine (who made the video, I am sure). It also made me remember how glad I am to have known and met them! I never got to see Ulani demonstrate a marcha so it was very cool to come across this. Isn’t he a fine fellow?
The Black Hills, Part Two: Oh, how we ate!
September 13, 2011 § Leave a comment
I think we dined better over a campfire than I often do in my somewhat well-equipped apartment kitchen. We met up at Spokane Creek Campground and Cabins, nestled in a quiet valley outside of Keystone. Such a peaceful place, with just enough conveniences to keep us comfy. The first day, I’d dozed under a tree and listened to the creek running along behind me, waiting for my family to get there (they all came from the east, while I came from the west) . . . they arrived just before dusk and everyone was hungry!
We had quick happy greetings and then, starving, got dinner started. How nice to stand next to my sister, slicing peppers and summer squash and onion and garlic and hamburger to wrap in aluminum for hobo pies. With sweet corn on the grill. Most of the vegetables were from the CSA my sister and her husband belong to, with some of the squash and the garlic from the farm where I work. I brought raw milk and filled everyone’s blue speckled mugs. We were eating late so darkness crept around us as we buttered the corn and felt happy about being together. My father and brother-in-law set up kerosene lanterns, and we put water over the fire for coffee. A good first dinner. A good sign that we’d be eating well for the week. And so we did.
Breakfast was zucchini chocolate chip bread (courtesy of my sister), sometimes cereal, and gluten-free and buckwheat pancakes. Lunches were buffalo meat, cheese, bread, peaches, plums, apples, crackers. Of course we had s’mores. Peach cobbler in the Dutch oven. Dinners of brats and burgers with a side of beans, and more sweet corn. And more roasted marshmallows. (I will make homemade marshmallows one day. This was not that time, so yes, we had the bad-for-you marshmallows, a little food-sin I can occasionally live with.)
Later, we moved over to a cabin at Palmer Gulch Resort. What a fun place! The electricity was out the first day we were there, though, so we laughed and made shiskabobs over the fire. How entirely delicious. Thanks to E. and J. for their hard work! Thanks to the cabin for having a delightful porch, with a picnic table and stunning view.
One evening after lots of driving and hiking and scrambling over rocks, we ate at a pie shop in a purple-and-pink painted Victorian house, aptly named The Purple Pie Place. Admittedly, the appearance of the building got us three ladies to clamor for going there. Mostly we wanted a good dinner after our day’s long activities, and we got it . . . then split a piece of bumbleberry pie for dessert.
Our last real meal together was a good-fun chuckwagon dinner, at the Circle B Ranch. Mom and Dad went ahead of time, to get on horseback for a South Dakota trail ride. We met up with them later to see the miniature donkeys, the wood carver, the small shops on the Old West street, and then to eat: beef, beans, potatoes, biscuits, peaches, and ginger cake on a tin plate, and coffee and lemonade in tin cups, while the cowboys strummed their guitars and sang to us in rollicking harmonies.
Ah, good food. Good times.
Kinds of Honey 