Red Fin 2009

While I survived the night without my kids, Snacks' Beta fish did not fare so well. I found him lifeless this morning when I went to raise the window shade in Snacks' room.

One week ago we thought we were going to lose our dog but, thankfully, did not. Now I have to tell Snacks that his beloved fish died.

Snacks talked all the time to his fish, played music for him, insisted he understand English, and has declared him to be his favorite pet, even above the dog. He asked to repaint his room so Red Fin could feel more like he was in a tropical region.

When he left yesterday he asked me to make sure that I played music for Red Fin while he was gone overnight. I played a few minutes of Dan Fogelberg's greatest hits while I fed him.

The kids drawing pictures of Red Fin

We'll miss you Red Fin.

John drove away with the kids not five minutes ago to go on an overnight sailing adventure in Lake City with Grandpa E.

This is my first night alone at home in over 6 1/2 years. While there are so very many possibilities, I have no idea what to do with myself...

Life doesn't often give second chances, but the kids and I feel like we got a second chance with our well-loved furry friend today.

We thought today would be our last day with him, but it looks like we've been given the gift of (hopefully) many, many more days with Sebastien.

Days we'll remember to scratch his favorite spots more, give him more treats, and let him scrounge around in the strawberry patch all he wants.

The kids and I went to the H*neymoon Creamery picnic this afternoon to meet the cows who give us our milk every week.

It was the perfect afternoon--beautiful weather, good food, and friends.

We got to see the farm, tour all the outbuildings, see where the cows are milked, socialize with the farmers (Paul & Emily), and learn about the animals.

The cows--100% grass-fed!

The potluck--lots of healthy, yummy homemade food!

Looking for chickens in the berry patch.

Truly free-range chickens!

Snacks and I spent the better part of the afternoon at Dowling. He worked on some kind of "construction site" for earth worms while I tended to the disaster that is my tomato space. We seem to have a ravaging case of blight and that, coupled with the cheap tomato cages we used, means things are not looking so good over there.

Nevertheless, we hauled 8 more pounds of tomatoes home.

Today's experiment was trying to dehydrate the cherry tomatoes from the CSA box. I think we're close to 11 hours (they were supposed to take 7-11 hours total) and most are not even close to "leathery". I'm not sure I feel like staying up 'til all hours watching over a few cherry tomatoes, but we'll see.

I thought I was pretty ingenious with dinner tonight--used up lots of CSA veggies! Arugula salad with tomatoes (of course) and a cucumber and chives from the back yard. I did a little improvising with Alice Waters' Curly Kale and Potato soup and threw in the rest of the Anderson Farm hot dogs. Truly delicious! (Though, I admit, I was the only one who ate it.)

I thought I had a lot of tomatoes when we brought home 7 pounds from Dowling yesterday. Today we got at least another 7 from the CSA box.

I can't make salsa fast enough.

Our first tomato harvest!

It's hard to believe that the 16 gangly, tangly tomato plants at Dowling started out as teeny tiny seeds on our window sill just a few months ago.

Snacks is holding the 7 pounds of tomatoes that we picked today. Tomorrow I make SALSA!

Today was a busy but satisfying day of work:

Full breakfast for everyone followed by lots of laundry catch-up after not having a washer for over a week. Got Sissy fitted for ballet slippers for her fall class and then dropped her at Minna's to decorate her Pinkalicious birthday cupcakes for tomorrow. Modified Alice Waters' Ratatouille recipe to use up lots of CSA veggies and some yummy sausage from the Trad Foods warehouse. Cleaned out and organized the upstairs freezer, watered the food plants in the back, and brought the laundry in from the line just in time for the rain to start (it rained only because I had just watered, of course). Picked up the house, threw together quick dinner of leftovers while John gave Snacks a haircut, and got the kids to bed. Made cream cheese, worked on ANOTHER trial version of fresh milk yogurt, soaked oats and pizza crust for tomorrow.

Whew! Feels good.

This week's veggie faces from the CSA box:

Veggie Face by Sissy

Veggie Alien by Snacks

Today's cucumber harvest from the back yard:

Tonight's dinner fresh from the CSA box:

Salad
Napa cabbage, arugula, tomato, cucumber, sweet pepper, basil (from our Dowling garden!), garlic, chives (from the back yard!), pastured hard-boiled eggs, and pastured chicken, homemade vinaigrette.

Dessert
Corn on the cob dripping with pastured butter and Real Salt. Heavenly!

Chickens have been a hot topic at our house this week since Snacks is at "farm camp" at Dodge for four days taking care of the chickens and other animals. Snacks and Sissy are currently sitting on the living room floor building chicken coop templates out of Magna-tiles.

John and I are signed up for Urban Chicken 101 at the co-op in September. Snacks declared that is "like a year" away and can hardly wait for us to return with all the information.

Having overcome the hurdle of who would take care of our chickens if we went out of town (neighbors on both sides have enthusiastically volunteered in exchange for free eggs), our current hang-up is what to do with the hens when they are no longer laying.

If they have become like pets, how can we eat them? But if we have all these "old hens" milling around, how will we have room for hens that are actually laying? Snacks is already thinking up names...

We could be in trouble.

We still have more than two months to go with the veggie CSA boxes. Every week we venture over to pick up our box, the kids throw the ball for the drop-site doggie, and we head home so I can figure out how to stuff all of those veggies into my already overflowing refrigerator (I haven't been 100% on keeping up with my plan to have all the previous week's veggies eaten before the new ones arrive...).

This week, this kids talked on their zucchini "phones" all the way home. Then Snacks felt compelled to make a "veggie face" out of some of the contents of the box (notice the red pepper and green bean barrette).

He was delighted to find some unusual looking carrots and a "Siamese twin" yellow squash--something you would never see in a grocery store!

Snacks found our very first tiny baby watermelon in our back yard garden today. We are keeping our fingers crossed that our little chipmunk friends (and we use that term loosely) have no interest in watermelons.

It was a busy day for me in the kitchen again. I had a list that seemed a mile long but only got through about half of it (as usual). I pulled apart the chicken that I cooked last night and separated it into batches for eating quickly and freezing. (The days of eating big pieces of chicken as a main dish are temporarily on hold--must stretch chicken as far as we can!) Then I made chicken stock that filled the whole house with wonderful yummy smells all day. Homemade macaroni and cheese (with bits of chicken), fresh green beans, and rhubarb crisp (from the back yard garden) for dinner.

Basil and other herbs will have to wait to be harvested. Again.

I've learned that there are always little gifts whenever big scary things happen.

This time, one of them is that I finally got the clothes line I've been longing for for years. I used to want it for "green" reasons; now I need it for financial reasons. Either way, it is a great feeling to know that the wind and the sun are doing something that used to require fossil fuel to accomplish.

The added bonus is that I've found it to be a completely Zen experience to be out in the yard listening to the late-summer crickets and frogs while taking the freshly washed and dried laundry down from the line after the kids have gone to bed.

I wonder what the gift will be that comes out of our latest challenge: a broken washing machine...

I'm still spending much of my time in the kitchen. I haven't quite gotten the rhythm of planning and cooking down to a science yet. Things need to be taken out of the freezer and thawed a couple days ahead of time or soaked for hours in kefir or whey. Harvesting and using or preserving the small amount that I have here in the kitchen garden is overwhelming...I wonder how I'll do it all next year when I'm planning to grow what we've been getting in our CSA boxes this summer.

I ate a few blackberries off of our new bush tonight while I was watering. All of this sure is a lot of work...

But so worth it.

Things that we will (hopefully) look back on one day and laugh about:

1. Our bathroom ceiling, our back door threshold, and our laptop are all currently held together with duct tape.

2. 75% of our dinners include some variation of rice and beans.

3. I was able to figure out how to sign Sissy up for the ballet class she has been begging for this fall by piecing together monetary birthday gifts from all of her grandparents to get her tuition paid through Christmas, at which point I'll piece it all together again to (hopefully) get to spring.

4. I sent John out to get a $4 clothes line to hang in the back and he came back with a $18 piece of rope which I went back and returned in order to get the $4 clothes line myself.

5. I have a spreadsheet the shows the cost of every ingredient we have in the house and where to get each ingredient at the best price, and another spreadsheet that shows the cost of all our regular recipes per serving.

6. I follow John around and wave my fist at him yelling, "That glass of milk is 38 cents!!!" and, "Put some of that cheese back--I said a SPRINKLING of cheese!"

7. I have significantly lowered my standards and let the kids "recycle" clothes I would previously have made them throw in the laundry so we can do fewer loads and reduce our water and energy costs.

8. We sit in the dark. A lot.

We are working hard to face up to our current financial challenge. Our income this year will be about half of what it was last year. This will likely be a good learning experience for us--I'm looking at it as a kind of game where I have to figure out how I can get everything for cheaper without compromising our values and quality of life.

I calculated that our current food budget is considerably less than we would get if we qualified for food stamps. I have to prepare three meals a day for four people that average $4.60 per meal--that's $1.15 per person per meal with no snacks! John had a loaded PB&J, two hard-boiled eggs, and a glass of milk for lunch yesterday that totaled $1.76! The good news is that we have a fully-stocked chest freezer in the basement and our CSA veggie boxes are already paid for and will continue through mid-October.

I told John tonight that, miraculously, we were really prepared for this. We have a little bit of money in savings, both cars are paid for, and I read all 1000+ pages of The Complete Tightwad Gazette last spring.

I already have a detailed spreadsheet that shows the cost of most of our staples at the co-op, Whole Foods, and the other places we shop, so I know what to get at which store. I also have it all broken down by cost per serving per ingredient and per finished recipe per serving. I know that our pastured eggs cost 27 cents apiece and that our homemade bread is 10 cents a slice and that our sea salt is 3 cents a teaspoon. I am so grateful that I already had all that in place because, under stress, it would have been way too overwhelming.

I had also already been stocking up and buying things in bulk so I get case discounts and the quarterly 10% discount from the co-op. I was already freezing produce from our garden, washing and reusing baggies, and washing my hair with baking soda and apple cider vinegar instead of shampoo and conditioner.

Now we are washing fewer and larger loads of laundry and washing everything in cold water (all the "green" folks swear this works just as well and, so far, I'm finding it does!) and John is rigging up a clothes line in the back yard tomorrow. We are even running the dishwasher in cold water with half a shot of detergent and unplugging it before the dry cycle is done. I've unplugged all the night lights and things that keep sucking power even when off, like the computer, the coffee maker, and the phone chargers. I've been mending things with an actual needle and thread instead of just throwing them in the give-away pile. I'm a woman obsessed.

Thankfully the kids are well-stocked for clothes for fall and winter, including winter coats. I just picked up a pair of pink winter boots for Sissy at a garage sale for $4--just need to find boots in a size 4 for Snacks. I got Snacks' new backpack and lunch box on sale with free shipping and all his school supplies at Walm*rt (a first for me!) for under $20.