Are you familiar with the sweater curse? If you are a knitter you are. Another version of the proverbial curse is to attribute the same to family members or friends. You spend hours and hours — weeks, even months of your time knitting some article of clothing or an item that you hope they will enjoy and will offer them a piece of your heart, and it gets relegated to a back closet somewhere or worse, treated with disregard: on the floor, the dog chews on it, you get the idea.

I would like to propose a version of the sweater curse as it applies to organic produce. As a gardener, you spend hours and hours preparing the soil, agonizing over organic, heirloom seeds. Start those seeds indoors, baby them along, harden them off and finally plant them in your carefully tilled garden. Then they are tended: protected from hail and varmints, heat and cold,  and bugs meticulously hand-picked and disposed of. Weeds kept at bay with a hoe — back breaking work, but worth it for the result of wholesome, organic sustenance for your table.

Then comes preservation! Picking, shelling, chopping, pitting, preparing, mixing. Jars to sterilize, boiling pots of water to heat in the thick of summer. The canning, the checking of lids. All in the name of quality organic sustenance for your family.

Eggs! What of organic eggs? The maintenance of the flock, the cleaning of the coop. The feeding, the watering, the doctoring when needed. All for those organic wonders to place in a cardboard carton.

I admit, when I hand over a basket of produce, a jar of jam, a carton of eggs, it is difficult to let go.  This is so much more than mere groceries — it is true sustenance, obtained by many hours of planning and laboring. I am hopeful that the recipient will realize what a gift from the heart it truly is. I know when I am the lucky recipient of such — I take it for what I hope it is worth. I am grateful — excited — wanting to be worthy of such a treat.

To me, the best I can do is to return the favor, in kind. Some of my own produce that has made it this year, a carton of eggs, a few jars of wild raspberry jam. Or even, perhaps, a hand-knitted hat or mittens in preparation for the colder months to come.

*Image by Swedish Folk Artist Elsa Beskow.

We broke down and got a “Have a Heart” trap to get that pesky skunk that keeps skulking around here at night. It’s been set and waiting for a week now. So far we have caught:

2 of our own turkeys

4 of our hens

The neighbor’s cat

I was getting pretty discouraged until Bean came in screaming that there was something in the trap! And it is black and white! Hurry Mommy! Hurry!

I rushed out, not sure what the heck I was going to do about this situation, beings Mark was not home and I am not getting near a smelly critter locked up in the trap. Indeed, the closer I got, the more black and white fur I saw, wriggling around in there.

This is what I found:

Does he look contrite? I am hoping so . . .

Yesterday was the first day of school for the public school system in our little county. When is our first day of school? Well, that is a subject of much debate these days.

Mark says: After Labor Day. He is old-school. He likes things by the book, done how they used to do it in “his day”. I am still searching for a hill for the kids to walk to and from school on. A hill that goes uphill both ways and is always having a blizzard. Just so they can do things like dad did.

Bean says: I want to start school right now. Now, now, now, now. Maybe tomorrow. But definitely now. I want to start now.

Lula says: What? Now? But I am not ready! I don’t know exactly what I need to be ready, but whatever it is, I don’t have it. I am not ready. I am not sure when I will be ready. But I am definitely not ready now.

Me: Hmmmm. What to do? Got it! Each of you kids write a two paragraph argument on when will be the best time to start school. A persuasive paper, if you will. Present it to me by this afternoon and I’ll make my decision based on the arguments presented to me.

So there you have it. We started school today. In my own sneaky little way.

One of the realities of living a home-grown lifestyle is eating livestock and animal by-products that you raise for food. Unless you are a vegan, that is. I am not a vegan, obviously.

Realities are, that you will be raising said livestock for the specific purpose of eating them. I don’t currently have the space to raise large animals such as bison or beef. I do, however, have a somewhat intimate connection with either of those animals that we choose to put in the freezer. Call me crazy, but I like to have a look at the animal, know how it was raised, be relatively satisfied that it is healthy. I am not going to turn a blind eye and just pick up a roast or a package of ground beef in the grocery store and not even think about how it got there.

Our bison is harvested by Mark from a local ranch every year. He shoots the animal himself. Our beef this year was not harvested by us, but I did have a look at the animal before he was processed. I feel it is the least I can do to somewhat ensure the quality of meat we are getting and also to ensure in a small way that the animal has lived as natural a life as possible. It is not feedlot meat, it is grassfed, and up until the time the animal is harvested it is living on the range in a herd with its family. No stress there.

Chickens are something I can raise here and we can butcher ourselves. We do raise chickens for their eggs, but the fact of the matter is, roosters are undesireable to have around, and if a batch of pullets turns out to have roosters, they are going to end up in a pot. Roosters are going to bother my neighbors as they are loud, they are mean, and they beat up on the chickens. When the hens are no longer laying, they too will end up in a pot to make room for younger chickens.

Up until the time the rooster  or chicken is harvested it has lived a free-range life. It is not shut up in a tiny cage with thousands of other chickens only to be fattened for butchering. Take a second and google factory farmed chickens. It is not pretty.

In my opinion,  compassion is being responsible for the meat my family consumes. I have a responsibility to make sure that animal has lived a life that does not cause it to suffer. It is allowed to live like a chicken until it is harvested, and at that point, and yes by my husband with a .22, it becomes food for my family. We choose the .22 method because it is quick, over in a second, before the bird even knows what hit it. Listening to a bunch of squawking birds held down for the blow would only stress out everyone, including the birds themselves.

Once the chicken is processed, disregarding feathers and heads, I use every single part of that bird for sustenance. Feet & bones are used to make stock, meat takes us through several meals from stew, to pot pies to enchiladas. Even the innards are cooked and fed to dogs and cats. There is no waste here.

So, before you decide to climb up on a soap box and lecture me for my “lack of compassion”* for butchering our home-grown roosters for our family food, have a look at your dinner plate and think about where your own food came from. Can you guarantee the kind of life it lived? Was it humanely harvested? Was every single piece of that animal on your plate used for sustenance and not wasted? It has only been in the last 50 years or so that we have been so far removed from our food source. Before you point your finger in judgement at me, have a look at the other four that are pointing back at you. Then we’ll talk.

* I am responding to a comment left here berating me for my “lack of compassion” in “bragging” about shooting roosters for our dinner in a post below, along with a few other choice things, namely about my children which really pissed me off. I deleted the comment because it is my blog and I can and I don’t need that kind of karma, thank you very much. But I felt I owed it to the roosters to explain why we eat the way we do, not that it is any of that commenter’s business. For the record, I write this blog to entertain myself and to communicate with friends I know in real life. If you stumble upon it and don’t like what I have to say GO AWAY!

If you do stumble upon it and choose to stay, I welcome you: all I ask is that you are nice to me.

Dell is coming back out tomorrow for the 5th time to replace a motherboard (4th one), harddrive (2nd one), memory (2nd time) and some other stuff they think will fix my continually crashing laptop. I’m thinking perhaps they may be smarter to just cut their losses and replace the system but hey– what do I know? So! If you have tried to email me and I haven’t responded (Wendy, I know I owe you an email!) that is why. I’ve been playing Merry-Go-Computers for about three weeks now.

There is a backstory to this particular bread making excursion.

When I was a little girl I devoured every and any book that had a horse on the cover — books about horses, people who owned horses, horse anything! I became an utter and complete fan of the My Friend Flicka books by Mary O’Hara. (Please don’t confuse these books with the movie that came out a few years ago by the same name. Not even.)

These books (that I re-read quite often even as an adult) were so well-written, so deeply, most hearfully written, as to take me away from my small town in Massachusetts and transport me to a wind-swept Wyoming ranch where a family lived and bred horses. I felt I knew the family, their ranch, the ranch hands and the animals, and what it would be like to live on the frozen plains of Wyoming. To get my mail at the Tie Siding station, to watch the trains haul up the continental divide, to throw a checked oil-cloth over the kitchen table every morning and sweep clean a painted apple-green floor after breakfast.

Imagine my own sense of deja-vu when I, a girl in my twenties, found myself living in that exact same spot I had read so much about as a young girl — first Laramie and then Cheyenne, driving by the Tie Siding station, and seeing where that train chugged up the fierce divide. To see rolling and undulating hills, any one of which could be the fabled “Saddleback Mountain” so often quoted in those beloved books.

Mary O’Hara talked of the mother character, Nell, in her books as a revered figure, the essense of motherhood. A woman who lived a harsh life on a Wyoming horse ranch, but did not let that deter her from her love of music, her gracefullness, her quiet athleticism. Nell, in these books was really Mary herself — and in one of the episodes, I don’t remember if it was Flicka, or Thunderhead, or Green Grass of Wyoming, she talks of a process of making bread. Of  an evening of “setting the sponge for tomorrow’s baking.”

Later I found a loosely written autobiography of Mary O’Hara, in reality Mary Sture-Vase. who actually lived and walked and breathed on the Remount Ranch, located off the Lincoln Highway between Laramie and Cheyenne in the 1930s. Called Wyoming Summer it details the struggles of her husband and herself on this very ranch, in the house built of pink granite. In this book she goes into more detail about her special bread.

She speaks of this bread with reverence, of how she has searched for a recipe that will give her a hearty bread,  with a substance– almost like that of cheese. She finally finds a recipe purported to be a favorite of Teddy Roosevelt and she sets about making this bread. She talks of how, in setting the overnight sponge, that her indicator of success will be a distinct and unpleasant odor, like that of old socks, that will permeate the entire kitchen and cause her to fly out of bed with anticipation and fling open the windows to rid her kitchen of a smell that indicates success, but which she can hardly stand. The ingredients? Cornmeal, “new milk” and salt. And that was the end of the information Mary gave in her books.

I was intrigued.

I set to my trusty friend google to find what this bread could possibly be. I stumbled upon two recipes. One here and one here. This had to be it.

Luckily, I have access to new milk. I found non-germinated corn meal. I got out my yogurt maker. I was ready. If you read through the recipes you will see that you are making your own starter using bacteria from the air. I like this! A commodity just laying around my kitchen in the AIR! Something no one is marketing to me and I am not having to purchase. Food from air. Wow.

So here goes:

Milk, cornmeal, sugar and salt. Heat the milk to scalding, cool and place with the rest of these ingredients into a yogurt maker that will maintain an even 100 or so temp. I let it ferment for 24 hours. I opened the top with great anticipation laced with trepidation. Immediately my nose was assaulted. Old socks! Stinky Cheese! Toe Jam! It worked! It bubbled! It had come alive!

Next step, make the sponge from the starter. Whisk together butter, sugar, flour and the starter. This also needs to maintain at an even 100-120 degrees. Hmmmm, what to do? Ah ha! Just what the doctor ordered. The thermowell in the Chambers! Sweet!

Cover and leave for 3 hours. It will grow and bubble and foam and become a living thing!

Next, add baking soda dissolved in water and watch it go even more bonkers. It might even start to talk and walk around your kitchen.

Mix the sponge with the rest of the flour and knead for 10 minutes. I cheat and do 5 minutes in the Kitchenaid. Divide into three loaves and set to rise for 5 hours. Yep 5 hours.

Now, let’s pause here to talk a little about bread and South Dakota. It is dry here. Bread has a really hard time here. I have found that the best way to get bread to rise is to create a warm, moist environment. Before the Chambers this was tough. Now what I do is place the bread in a pan of water, put on top of the Chambers and cover with a towel. Perfect proofing box. Your bread will rise nicely.

Bake for about 30 minutes in a moderate oven. I know this seems time consuming, but in reality it is not. Your total hands-on time is minimal. It takes time for the starter and sponge to grow and the bread to rise, but all you have to do it put it there and let it do its thing. And you will end up with this. The richest, most flavorful sour-dough-like cheesy bread you will ever eat. It tastes like nothing you have tried. It is wonderful! Delicious! And something you actually made out of thin air!

Making “stinky cheese bread.” I know you are dying to know what that is. Stay tuned!