It has been one year since I started teaching myself how to cook. Somehow, I left the nest without that skill and managed to happily subsist on Aunt Jemima pancakes, tortillas with cheese, frozen pizza, and microwave burritos for many, many years.

But last year, the likes of Gary Taubes, Michael Pollan, Barbara Kingsolver, and Sally Fallon changed my life forever, and I went from having to look up the "recipe" for hard-boiling eggs to sauteing chard and beet greens in bacon grease with onion and hot chili flakes in a cast iron pan.

Last year I believed that feeding my children anything labelled "organic"--from mac & cheese to boxed cereal--was doing the best for them. In the past year, I have taught myself to make ratatouille, yogurt, pizza, sourdough bread, and even breakfast cereal. I have tried new recipe after new recipe, even learning to improvise and make up my own.

I taught myself to cook by watching PBS cooking shows while Sissy napped and Snacks was in school, by watching and listening to my friend (and chef extraordinaire) Kristie, and by reading Sandor Katz, Mark Bittman, and Alice Waters. I've come from asking John to cut up an onion for me to being able to give Rachael Ray a run for her money on a fine dice. I made little post-it notes for my refrigerator that show me how big a 1/4" dice or 3/8" slice should be. I unplugged my microwave and took it to the basement.

Sometimes I get really overwhelmed, and sometimes we just throw in the towel and order an "Emergency Pizza", but I'm proud of how far I've come, and I can't wait to see where I go from here.

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.

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!

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.

Homemade Mint "Iced" Tea

Wash and skim the leaves off of 4-8 stalks of freshly-picked mint (I'm playing with this to see if the level of "minty-ness" changes with the number of stalks).

Gently crumple the leaves to bruise them and put in 2 quart bowl.

Pour 4 cups of boiling water over the leaves and steep for 10 minutes.

Strain leaves out and add 4 cups cool water to hot water in bowl.

Pour into glass container(s) (I use G.T.'s kombucha bottles) with lids and refrigerate.

Note: I don't add ice since I just grab the chilled bottles out of the fridge to drink. If you were to add ice, you would need to experiment with the level of concentration of the tea to allow for the melted ice.

I am tired. Keeping up with our food is hard work. Trouble is, there's no turning back now. I wouldn't dream of doing anything any differently...except maybe trying to get more sleep.

Last night I was up late in a panic trying to figure out where we are going to get fresh milk come end of summer. We were officially notified last night that our current dairy and egg CSA farmers will be retiring.

Though I can easily get milk through a farmer who is affiliated with the Trad Foods warehouse, I have become very spoiled by the milk we've been getting from Jersey cows--sweeter with a higher fat content than other dairy breeds. After much research, some phone calls, and a flurry of emails, I think I have secured a spot with a farm that at least has Jersey-cross cows. I was thrilled and relieved to find that they are still accepting new customers.

This puts us one step closer to making the decision to get our own laying hens...the only thing holding us back at this point is trying to figure out what we will do with the hens once they are no longer laying. John says we should put them "in the stew pot" as most other folks do (he was inspired by our visit to the Anderson Farm a couple of weeks ago), but I'm not sure I can do that if the kids (and I) have come to know them as pets.

I am getting behind with the veggie CSA box. I pulled out all the veggies that needed to be eaten by tomorrow night so John could figure out what to do with them while I made the spaghetti for dinner tonight. (I decided I can't take the pressure all on my own right now.) We used up some zucchini in muffins and in spaghetti sauce (of course, the children have no idea), and John made a salad with the rest of the lettuce, some dill, steamed beets, and some pickling cucumbers. I still need to make sauerkraut with the red cabbage but I haven't been able to work up to it...or the bread-baking this week, for that matter. (Thankfully, I always make two loaves at a time and had some stashed in the freezer!)

In my own garden, there are so many herbs that I want to harvest and freeze but, somehow, there just aren't enough hours in the day!

The last couple of days I had been fearing "kitchen burnout"...only I knew I didn't want to do anything any differently so, really, it wasn't an option.

I took last night "off" (AFTER dinner, that is) and just let all the dishes and collateral mess sit while I sat...on the couch.

Though there was still the mess to clean up this morning, it was totally worth it to have at least part of last night off.

With renewed energy this morning I cleaned the kitchen in no time. Then I made zucchini spice muffins for breakfast (the kids' favorite recipe so far...they have no idea there was zucchini involved), pulled all the chicken off the bone (it cooked by itself last night while I sat on the couch), set some chicken aside for dinner and froze the rest, made four quarts of chicken stock, two quarts of beet kvass, one quart of sauerkraut, kefir, and some pesto.

Whew!

I'm back.

We are certainly getting our fill of fresh berries these days. Every day we are getting them now from Dowling, or our yard (only a few there), the CSA box, or the neighbors. We are berry-stained and loving it!

On the 4th we had red, white, and blue sundaes with Cedar Summit ice cream, strawberries, and black raspberries (we called those "blue")--delicious! There have been strawberry rhubarb crisps, strawberry pie, and just plain berries to eat with our fingers.

I'm on a hunt to find some fall raspberries to plant in the back yard...

Yum!

The last several days have been filled with gratifying work.

Wednesday was all about strawberries...picking, washing and hulling, baking, freezing, and, of course, eating strawberries. It was fun listening to the kids--as they stuffed themselves full--saying, "I picked this one! Mommy picked this one!"

I was up late working to get as many berries as I could into the freezer while they were still just-picked fresh.

Yesterday Sissy and I picked small handfuls of the first red raspberries and black raspberries at our Dowling garden and ate them right up. We watered and weeded the tomatoes and basil and marigolds.

It was CSA veggie pick-up day and the usual race to get all the veggies in the fridge and figure out what needed to be eaten first (the strawberries, of course!) I made red beans with coconut rice and pastured bacon for dinner and threw together a romaine salad with fennel, garlic scape, green onion, and John's homemade vinaigrette. Sissy begged for her own salad and ate every bite!

This morning we went to Dowling to dig out the unhappy basil (not enough sun!) and stake the tomatoes. We scored a few more raspberries and decided tomatoes cages would work better than stakes, which meant we would have to purchase 16 of them, so Snacks and John ventured off in the Big Rig this afternoon in search of some.

We worked quite a bit in the yard--mowing, weeding, moving plants around, mulching...it was heavenly to see things come together that we've been "meaning to do" for a long time. The kids filled a kiddie pool and splashed around for hours. John and I used the water to water our trees after the kids went to bed.

Dinner tonight was homemade quiche with whole wheat and spelt crust, Sweetland eggs, pastured cheese and bacon, chard and garlic from the CSA box, and chives from the back yard (I made a "plain" version for the kids, but Sissy asked for ours!) Dessert was a homemade strawberry pie. Delicious.

To use up the LAST of the strawberries, I assembled two strawberry rhubarb crisps for the freezer.

I'm exhausted, but life is good.

I love being immersed in the world of growing and preparing food--it is becoming more and more a big focus of my life. One year ago I hardly knew how to cook; now I'm making three meals a day from scratch and enjoying (almost) every minute of it.

Wendi and I went to see Food, Inc. last night and John went to see it this afternoon. I haven't been able to talk John into reading any of my books, so I was thrilled to discover that the film rolled many of my very favorite books up into 90 minutes that would hold his attention. He came home ready to build a chicken coop in the back yard and even offered to help us fill the water barrels at Dowling this afternoon.

Earlier today Snacks helped me make bread. I measured and he dumped, and then we each kneaded a loaf while talking about why we don't buy our bread from Great H*rvest anymore (for example, they're not organic and they get their ingredients from C*rgill...) and what it means to genetically modify food.

I tried whole wheat bread flour instead of spelt flour in my rye sourdough loaves today. They felt a lot different while I was kneading them--less pliable, I think--and they didn't rise nearly as much as I expected them to. Also, they feel slightly heavier, if that's possible. I can't wait to slice one tomorrow morning to see how they handle and, of course, how they taste!

We had homemade pizza for dinner tonight for the first time in a long time. It was so much fun going out to my "kitchen garden" and cutting fresh basil and oregano for the sauce. I used green onions and garlic scapes from the CSA box. John grated the pizza cheese and made a spinach salad and the vinaigrette while I rolled out the pizza crust and made the sauce. It was nice working in the kitchen together, even if we do end up tripping over each other and arguing about who gets the only cutting board.

I've got yogurt warming overnight and granola and cereal soaking to bake tomorrow. Eggs from the farm with my fresh-baked bread and sausage from the Trad Foods warehouse for breakfast tomorrow. Can't wait.

We ate the last of the CSA veggies tonight (except for a few potatoes that will keep for awhile). Both kids ate kohlrabi raw with salt on it. And--in keeping with the recently discovered miracle of no snacking--both kids ate my spaghetti. With sauce on it. With meat in it. Every bite. (Sissy even had seconds.)

I'm not a big pasta person, but I was especially proud of my spaghetti tonight because I made the sauce from scratch with green garlic and green onions from the CSA box, and oregano and basil from the back yard. It felt so good chopping everything up and throwing it in the pot.

I weeded the strawberry patch out back after the kids went to bed. It was hot and humid, but it felt good to be outside. I love the serenity of summer evenings.

I feel like fresh produce is running my life. I'm remembering now why I've gone with frozen fruits, veggies, and meat for so long--you have to PLAN and stay on top of things when food is fresh. I think I'm much more up for the challenge now, but I definitely have already learned some things about the CSA veggies.

Next week I'll know to use the edible greens from the veggies like radishes and kohlrabi FIRST, and then start in on the salad greens. I'm bummed the veggie greens wilted before we could eat them. I could make chicken stock with them, but I decided with all the "pressure" of the strawberries and my first CSA box, I'll just feed them to my worms. Next week I'll know better!

I've been harvesting and freezing rhubarb today, both from my yard and Dad's. I have such big plans, we really need to get that second basement freezer soon--I'm running out of room and it's only mid-June!

We finished up the last of the fresh strawberries tonight--we got quite a bit of mileage out of our bounty! We had strawberries and cream the first night, baked two strawberry rhubarb crisps last night, and I whipped up some Strawberry Fool for dessert tonight.

Today the kids and drove out to pick strawberries. It was the first time the kids have picked them (they've done raspberries and apples...), and they had a great time. We didn't get as big of a "haul" as I had hoped for, but we managed over 4 p0unds in about an hour (plus what Sissy ate while she was picking--she ate everything she picked!) and we celebrated with strawberry sundaes afterward.

On the way home we stopped at Dowling since we hadn't been by the garden for almost two weeks while we were away. We couldn't believe how big our tomato plants have gotten! We harvested some basil, watered, and weeded.

Dinner tonight was inspired by the CSA veggie box and the leftover burgers from last night. I roasted some gorgeous deep purple potatoes and made a bechamel sauce from The Art of Simple Food to crumble the hamburger into--along with a handful of my very own homegrown parsley--which I ladled over the potatoes.

Tonight's huge salad included the rest of the butter head lettuce, spinach, arugula, parsley, green garlic, green onions, and radishes in white, red and purple, tossed with the same homemade vinaigrette as last night.

We ate in the back yard and finished off the meal with our freshly picked strawberries with pastured cream poured over the top.

Yum.

Tonight's dinner was local pastured burgers on the grill, fresh milk from the farm, and a huge salad from our very first CSA box--butterhead lettuce, spinach, and arugula. I made a simple vinaigrette from The Art of Simple Food with green garlic and green onions from the CSA.

Doesn't get any better than this...

Peonies are one of my very favorite flowers, along with lilacs and lily of the valley. We cut a few and took them to Snacks' teacher on his last day of kindergarten. Today I got around to cutting a bunch for our dining room table. You can't beat fresh cut flowers from your own yard.

I think I've finally talked Snacks into letting his caterpillars go. He reported that one didn't survive last night, and I'm guessing that we don't have the right leaves for them to eat. We've tried maple, birch, rhubarb, lilac, Virginia creeper, hosta... they don't seem to be eating any of them. He is sad about letting them go, especially the babies that hatched from the eggs he had, but I explained that they had a much better chance of surviving in the woods than they do in his little plastic box, and he seems to understand.

We think we'll drive them back to Dodge where we got them so they can find their old homes. I'm not sure about letting them go in the yard since I don't want to be introducing some caterpillar species that we don't already have in our neighborhood, just in case...

I told Snacks we could look into getting some fish when we get back from Idaho. He seems to be ready for pets of his own and I think I can handle a couple of goldfish.

I've been busy with my latest project of figuring out exactly how much everything we eat costs. I've gotten sort of fanatic about it--comparing prices between several different stores and figuring out how to get things at the best cost. I'm probably driving John crazy following him around telling him the cost of everything he is putting in his mouth, but it is truly fascinating to me!

For example, I can make a loaf of organic sourdough bread for $2.22, while I used to pay $5.75 for a genetically modified loaf from Great Harvest. And I can make a quart of organic yogurt with milk from cows on pasture for $1.88, when I used to pay almost $5 for a quart of organic yogurt from cows in a CAFO.

Most of our food is actually much more expensive than what we could otherwise buy, since we're buying eggs and fresh milk straight from a farm and I insist on buying pastured meat, so I've been having fun figuring out the cost of each serving--this should help me lose weight really fast. It's definitely cut down on the amount of food that the worms get--we salvage and reuse a LOT more than we used to.

I love Sundays because we usually don't have any plans. I make a big breakfast and then clean the house first thing before the kids get "squirrel-y".

Sunday has also become "baking day", and it's often the day that I undertake some big new cooking project since I have more time. Today, along with my usual loaves of sourdough bread, I made chicken stock. It made the house smell wonderful all day as it simmered. I am especially proud of this batch because I was able to use the first bunch of parsley from my new herb garden!