Today in the Kitchen

More peaches. Today we skinned and sliced, tomorrow they'll get canned. Then for dinner I pulled out one of the last Poulet Rouge chickens out of the freezer. Isaac saw it and clapped and screamed excitedly! He signed chicken and wanted to eat right away. Sorry kiddo, it takes 2 hours to table. :)

I pulled out my red French Oven, a cast iron enamelled lovely pot. In it went halved mushrooms, a chopped leek, a yellow onion, celery, and red bell pepper. I placed the chicken on top of that, smeared it with Irish butter and Tickle a spice from The Spice Shed, sprinkled with course salt and then tiny potatoes from our garden tucked in around it.

I first broiled the chicken on high for 10 minutes and then turned the heat down to 350 degrees F. to cook the rest of the way. It took about 2 hours, but I don't trust timers. I always take the internal temperature with a meat thermometer.

Oh, this chicken was fantastic. The mushrooms and leek and the spices were just perfect and the carcass and leftover veggies are now back in pot with some carrots, more celery, and water filled to the top. That will simmer in the oven, covered, at 225 degrees over night. That is how I do stock in the summer, in the winter it sits covered on the wood burning stove.

I was really happy with how this turned out. 10 minutes of chopping prep is so very easy. We'll get three meals or more from this one bird.  I love our farm chicken so much.

Making a meal like this isn't actually hard. For my whole life I thought it was some magical feat to make nourishing food and that it would take all day to make it. Years of attempting and failing left me discouraged.

It wasn't until I stumbled on some historical fiction about French peasant women baking bread and soup that I realized that for centuries people made good food with only what was in their region, usually in season. Sometimes only with one pot, did they accomplish hearty meals. I started paying attention to food in historical accounts, living history museums, simple recipes.

That's where the change came, the heart of it. I studied the chemistry and the layering of ingredients and recipe equations, but the heart of food isn't the math and science..... it is something else. The joy I have in my simple kitchen, the fresh food from my farm, the joy on my child's face when he sees me pull out the red pot and chicken. It is the thankful gratitude my children share at the beginning our our meal together. The random exclamation in the middle of the day or the overheard conversation where they declare that I am the best at making food and it is always yummy, my husband sharing his delight at a simple meal with friends on social media, the intensity of centerdness that I get with my spoon swirling broth in the pot, breathing in the aroma of herbs and fresh meat are the heart of my kitchen. That isn't something in a book or a classroom that can be taught, it is something you experience in the moment. It is something that only simple food has given me.

Recipe for Summer French Pot Chicken:

1 leek, chopped
1 pint of mushrooms, chopped into bite size
1 yellow onion
1 red bell pepper
1 cup of chopped celery
seasoning and salt
handful of potatoes
1 run of the farm raised 3-4 lb chicken
4 T. grass fed butter

Broil for 10 minutes
350 until internal temperature reaches the safe temp for poultry


For the Bone Broth/Stock

Throw the bones back in after the meal, fill the pot with water, leftover veg, add carrots, bay leaf (optional), apple cider vinegar or lemon juice, and simmer for 12-48 hours. Yup. 48 hours.

Ps....peaches are still in the making. They are so perfectly ripe that they are spoiling and we are focused on canning and freezing. The dessert posts are on their way, very soon.

Not Back To School Picnic!

Another year, not back to school! Another celebration at the park with a great group of homeschooling families. Three kids covered in peach juice sticky glory and sand, pine sap in their hair, grinning ear to ear. Queen Lily and Super Hero Holly and Zippy Zap (Isaac) had the best day ever and I heard all about it in detail, with a small break at Grampa and Nana's, until bedtime.

Me? These social gatherings take a lot out of me. I am not someone that moves easily in social situations without a lot of hard work and paying attention to social cues, and that is exhausting. Sometimes I space out in the middle of a conversation or get distracted, which is very rude and not intentional, so I have to work very hard to stay focused and on task.

Yet, I do this to teach my children that it is good to be around people and enjoy the social interaction. My children are naturals, I actually have learned a lot from them. Many of you, maybe even the moms I met today, probably have no idea how difficult the gatherings are for me. I am an introvert. I am at my best completely alone, at a picnic bench at my farm, with the stars and the crickets as company. That is what recharges me. That is where I am centered.

These past few years though, I am getting better at being around people. I am actually seeking out people to get to know. I am even enjoying it. The last 3 months I have met so many amazing people, all who have cheered me on, all who have stories to share too. That got me thinking about blogging and what role it has historically, what role all of this social media has. I have a lot of thoughts on that I am still working out, but for framing this, the social aspect of facebook and twitter has allowed a lot of the pressure and anxiety to be worked out for me. I know who will be there at an event, mostly, I can get familiar with the location, and I get to know people through their pages and groups we are in before hand so there is not that scary factor of not knowing who I am talking to. It is mostly public who is friends with who and who is not, so most of the time I can avoid being drawn into drama that I am not a part of if I pay attention.

People also know where I stand on issues, so there are very few conversations that turn awkward which is a huge blessing. Working on the relationship part, understanding different perspectives, is a lot easier when that part is out of the way. No one likes to invest in a conversation where one of the people drops a huge unexpected poo bomb of awkward political belief one way or another, social media allows us to get to know each other and filter for that ahead of time. Oh, trust me, it still happens, but it is certainly less frequent. Let me tell you how valuable this is in the homeschooling community. Not that people with polarising beliefs don't end up friends, they do, and that can be a very rewarding friendship, but now I know generally what topics to avoid in discussion and what jokes not to make. This alone has helped me so much be able to just talk to folks. That alone is so taken for granted, because just small talk comes so naturally to most people.

So today was a smashing success, not just for my lively and bright children, but for their painfully un-social quirky nerd of a mother.

Wednesday Workday: Berry Harvesting

Thoughts on Love

When Chad saw the farm for the first time we was smitten. I had seen it 2 days prior, I am the one who found the listing online and drove down 65 miles into muddy Southern Iowa to see the house. After getting the car stuck on a grade B road, 2 feet sunk down in the mud, hauled out by a neighbor and the realtor, walking the pasture in the rain, and touring the house (by then soaked to the bone, wet clothes, cranky babies) I had decided that the collapsing roof and flooded basement were too much for us and we'd keep looking. I sent the pictures to Chad to convince him. All he saw was this:

And he was in love.

I argued that the commute was too long.
I argued that the house was too much work.
I worried about small town living, shopping, bleeding to death while stuck in a giant slurping mud hole. Rodents of unusual size. Fire swamp.

He said to me, quietly, "Do you think you could make this our home?"

Quietly he looked at me with intent and I knew, as I always have, that home is whenever I am with him. Wherever. Whenever. Always.

That was that. Here we are. Home.

I am blessed to have a love like ours.

A few years back I shared our love story here on the blog: Love Story.

I think though, it doesn't do the real thing justice. We've been together 17 years now, married for almost 15. 2 apartments, 3 houses, pregnancies and births, 3 babyhoods, starting a business together, farming, 20 sheep, 3 cows, 100's of pigs and chickens, a llama ect, and constantly growing and learning and figuring it all out: together.

Not to say we don't fight. We do. Sometimes it is loud and horrible, but that is rare. Sometimes the silence that falls between us is worse. That passes too. Sometimes I make cream soup for dinner because I am pissed at him. It happens. Yet, through it all, I can count on him to come when I yell out in the dark with a fevering kid or when the window fell in during a storm and I somehow caught it with one hand while nursing Isaac, but the rain and wind and how I was sitting had me trapped- all I had to do was yell out, Help! and there he was. He reads my blog. He reads and comments on my social media pages. He encourages me and knows me. I try to keep up with his social media as well, we co-admin a couple groups, but as much as I veer toward creative mothering he is interested in agri-politics and I cannot keep up. Try as I might, I prefer poetry and babies to cowboys arguing over manure and corn. Yet, somehow we come together everyday, share what we are grateful for (sometimes even over creamy soup), and make it another day.

17 years ago, I looked up at the August sky and saw my first falling star. I made a single wish, To be loved. That night I stood on the edge of Saylorville Lake and watched my 11 year old sister get cranky with Chad and lose half of his fishing gear in the rocky waters, probably on purpose. He was calm and patient. My wish was not specific. At that point my heart was so broken that I did not believe that I could ever love again. That was why my wish was not for me to love, but to be loved. I did not care who or when, but I was tired of being used and resented and disliked. I was tired of fighting so hard to be seen as a person and not some midget freak show, not as a body with boobs, not as a nuisance, but as a person. My heart was broken in a way that took years to grind away and not even Chad could love it back to whole. He led me there though. He prayed with me. He was gentle. He saw me me struggle and was patient.

And it was from that that I grew to love him. He's upstairs sleeping now. When I came home he was holding Isaac who was thrashing in his sleep. Chad has wrangled kids while I caught up on work in the afternoon so that I could be finished at a decent time and maybe have time to write. As I was listing my three things I am thankful for today via Project Happy, I realised that the basis of all of them are the foundation of my family. Love. This love. That even though my proclamation that I would marry the DJ on the radio back in 1994 came true and that makes a fantastic story to tell the kids, the truth of it is that our love is so much more than that. I can count on him to come when I yell help. I can count on him  to hold the baby and rock away the thrashing nightmares. I can count on him in the darkness to lift the brokeness off me in the storm. Always. While the storm rages on outside, he tucks the warm dry quilt around me and the children and re-secures the windows.

When Holly asked me if I really believed in star wishing magic, this is what swirled up out of my memories. Oh yes, Holly, yes I really do.