To call them in to dinner...

Earlier this summer, my Darlin'Man found this lovely, half buried and rusting out in the 'garden' (by which I mean the slope o' brush that will *hopefully next year be a pig pen and then for the decade or two to follow will be the main food production garden).

Its an old, big, heavy, iron triangle.

He showed it to me and at once I fell in love.  I've always dreamt of being the frontiers-wife who calls in her menfolk and childrenfolk to dinner from hayfields and woods.  I'd rather thought a dinner bell would be a bell, but the instant I saw this lovely, I realized just how wrong I'd been.  Obviously, the dinner bell is a triangle.  A loud clanging one at that!  The past week or so, he's been stacking wood while I make dinner after work, and so I've gotten to use it to call him in - bonus: the noise is enough to break through even his really nice headphones :-)

Do you know that feeling that is part present joy and part nostalgia and part future anticipation and part dream satisfaction all rolled into one?  Thats what I feel each time I ring the triangle. 

#feelingblessedforthesmallthings

First raspberries of the season!

Portuguese kale from the CSA. We ate it with salmon.

Thankful Thursdays: A Gratitude Practice

I am thankful for dreaming together.  I'm thankful for the rain.  For grand plans and little steps.

I'm thankful for the hearts innate capacity for healing, for breath and blood and bone.

I'm thankful for friendships.  For family.  For those taking great leaps into new places on bright scary paths.

I'm thankful for flowers blooming, for herbs eaten and dried and growing in pots.  I'm thankful for good greens to eat and meals to share.

I'm thankful for the lives that sustain my own.  I'm thankful for inner listening, for dancing with joy, and for crying my heart out.




*Thankful Thursdays are my weekly gratitude practice.  They follow the gratitude meditation which ends my Thursday night Kripalu Yoga class.  A gratitude practice, positive thinking, an abundance mindset.  All of these are practices which increase vitality, invite positive transformation, and allow happiness and fulfillment to exist in the here and now rather than in the someday-when.
(Always cross-posted to my yoga blog)

CSA Cooking: Tabouleh

Tabouleh is esssentially a peasant food from the middle east.  We got extra parsley in our share this week, and we have the addition of most of my mother's share (some was given to friends!) while she is out of town, and I chose oregano and a mint for our respective herb choices.  Plus a bunch of baby bunching onion scallions gave us this: 

I was going to dry the herbs for winter use.  I really really was.  I took them to the dehydrator and I just couldn't do it.  They smelled so good!

So instead I made a Tabouleh variation.

First, boil/cook bulghur (a form of cracked wheat, essentially).  Leaving it a little chewy is best.  I used twice the water to the dry bulghur, and it was too much water.  It basically cooks like rice, but quicker.

Chop all of your herbs and onions.  The 'real' recipes for this that I have seen call for a couple tablespoons of parsley and a teaspoon of mint with chopped onion and tomato.  Well, I didn't have tomato, but I did have baby onions with long scallions.  And really, this dish ought to be all about the herbs!  I love traditional peasant foods because they are so easy to make variations: they were born out of whatever happened to be available, and so they are very forgiving :-)

So I added oregano, and used up ALL the parsley!

Toss it together in bowl with the (cooled) cooked bulghur, and pour on generous amounts of good olive oil and lemon juice.  Stir it some more so that its all stirred together and coated in juices and yummy.  Salt and pepper if you wish (I do!).

Its good immediately or the next day.  Like tonight when I get home after teaching class...

A few things...

The Compost!

Benign neglect seems to have stood me in good stead for the compost pile so far.  I went out there Sunday to add the bucket of chicken blood that Maple&Me graciously sent us home with.  (fun fact: chicken blood, like chicken shit, is concentratedly high in nitrogen and will burn roots if not composted for a year before using in the garden; and so into the compost the blood went!) I've been meaning to tend the compost for a few weeks now, and figured that as long as I was adding blood to it - which if left in its glorious congealed state hanging out on the top of the pile, would certainly attract any scavengers in the area - I might as well turn it over.  So I spent probably the better part of an hour with a pitch fork.  There was some IMPRESSIVE lambs quarter grown to nearly my height that I tore up and added in, along with some of the grass and fireweed that was choking the edges.  I forked in the sawdust and straw I'd tossed on top of the pile early this spring and late last fall, and broke up the root balls of last years porch grown container garden I'd emptied in when I planted this year's.  And then I turned the compost, aerating and mixing all the good stuff together...  and I was oh-so-pleasantly surprised to find that we are approaching dirt!!!  Like real, actual, full-of-humus, dark loamy lovely earthy DIRT!!!  Soil, I should say. 

THE HERBS!

Red raspberry leaves, clover, plantain, wild acrtic chamomile (which is such a better name than pineapple weed!)... and some CSA parsley, oh my!!

Thankful Thursdays: a gratitude practice