Autumn eats

Autumn goodies

Just a day's harvest around our mini-farm. You don't really need a lot of space to at least start feeding yourself.

Upper left, clockwise:

1. Blue eggs from our four little Easter Egger (Amaracauna/something-else crossbred) hens.

2. Raspberries that took over the sunny side of the shed.

3. Red Flame grapes from the greenhouse.

4. Chanterelles, cleaned, and simmered with butter.

Dinner and desert, for at least a couple of days. Remember, hunter-gatherers worked about 3-4 hours a day. Which is about how long an artist working color can do before the eye perception grays out. The Work Ethic was invented by the people who wanted to do nothing themselves, so they could work everybody else do death. Yes, it was.

If you don't have to kill yourself getting the necessities, you can work all day on what you really want to work on - and working on what you want to work on makes everything work better. There is plenty of food and surplus for everybody, including the young, the elderly and the ill. PLENTY. Enough to go to "waste" and rot back into the earth to feed the plants. I've seen it happen, if we just let nature work. 

Watch the animals in the autumn - they've pretty much done raising the young, and now it's time for food and fooling around, before courtship kicks in. They get vacation, as much as a couple months. They weren't put on the earth to work themselves to death. 

(If you mention honeybees, the workers are clones of the Queen; the Work Ethic works for HER. But you're not a worker bee.)

Kurt Vonnegut in the Berry Patch

Us: Lalalala, let's go pick some berries and make wine and pies. And not pay attention to it being a Krakatoa year, and berries might not be as common as they usually are.

Bear waking up on the hill: RAWR! (Translation: You fucking monkeys get off my hill and away from my hibernation food!).

Me: Click all car doors open, walk quietly but QUICKLY over to Dan, and mutter, "Pick up all your equipment and get in the car."

Dan:  Didn't say a word. Picked up his equipment and got in the car.

The September 11 harvest.

Well, for most humans, berrying and stuff is only a hobby, anyway. We can buy all kinds of subsidized food, including berry jam. Ursa Major up there needs the food he can pick to make it through the winter.

And when you see two-inch-thick berry canes ripped to shreds, as with a machete, maybe not so much arguing with a much larger, more irritable omnivore who is worried about the food source.

So we went and picked Chanterelles, instead. Results: Blackberry wine, blackberry pie, more blackberry filling, and mushroom rice for supper.  Not so shabby. That double dish is corn-breaded fish fillets from the freezer, from a couple day's teasing the greenling on the beach.

(Kurt Vonnegut, captured at the Battle of The Bulge, said he and his fellow platoon-members didn't say "Nuts!" or anything to the SS. They held up their hands and went along quietly. Basically, we didn't make any smart remarks to anything that heavily armed and wearing black, either.)

(Sadly enough, ran into my childhood in the Pacific Northwest, again. When I was a kid, dumb-ass grownups used the back gully as a rubbish tip. Ran into a local rubbish tip up here, again, when you think people would finally have learned better. One wonders, sometimes, if one is in a time-warp from the 1950's.)

On The Beach

Just some photos of wandering on the beach, limbering up after painting the house and getting exercise.  It's usually a pebble beach, but in the summer we get a collection of sand -- and the other end is sand, by the river.

It's the "Injun's fault" there are no fish -- not the out-of-town fishermen who flip lethal Styrofoam bait packets into the water.  And we never find these things until summer.  It's also the Injun's fault there are baby diapers by the side of the road all summer -- I guess the Injuns stay in Neah Bay except in the winter, huh? (Where would we white people be without the Injuns to blame?)

Gull tracks!  The California and Heermann's gulls are relaxing on the beach right now, splashing and swimming in the river.  The river used to get filthy during the summer because the mouth would close up due to stupid human engineering (more Stupid White People Tricks).  Now it's found a more natural mouth it looks like it might flow all summer and stay clean.  Those are my fancy toes -- in the summer I do too much sloppy and dirty with my hands for polish, so my flip-flopped or bare feet get all the attention.  You see this with the Makah -- the women get fancy feet at celebrations, with polish, cool flip-flops and sandals, even jewelry and tattoos.  Kind of leads to Shoe Envy at the Neah Bay graduations.

Wading pools in the Clallam River!  My favorite thing in the world on a beach or stream is those very shallow, clear wading pools.  It's a kid thing.  I just adore it.  Now there are all these immaculate, clear, clean pools to splash in.  But watch the kids -- there are some deep holes in this river.

July 30, 2011, and the river mouth is still open.  It doesn't have to fight its way past the high embankment on the other side of the wooded "island."  See?  Stop fiddling with nature, and she rights herself, like a good sailboat.  It will be like having a whole 'nother river up here for fish runs -- one in the summer as well as the winter.

You snooze, you lose.  I spotted these oyster mushrooms on a log.  I squatted down and stuffed my pockets.  On the path, I ran into a guy we'd seen on the beach, running back with a plastic bag. I asked him if he was going to collect garbage like we were (it's becoming something of a hobby thang up here).  He said, "Something," and kept on.  We realized he'd seen the oysters -- and gone back for a bag.  And he was wearing a hat!  Mushroom hunters are ruthless -- all I left was the mycelium. 

TOO MANY GOOD THINGS

Been over on Facebook, not posting here as I should.  First of all, today's haul:  a nice mess of Woodland Russalas, found in a park in Port Angeles while walking between busses.  They're simmering here in chicken-stock sauce, with homemade egg noodles, made with eggs from our hens, and green beans.  Took advantage of Terry Gross's latest interview, that was running while the mushrooms were sautéing on the woodstove.  When the dish was ready, I popped some fresh black pepper, a dash of lemon juice, and home-collected sea salt over each helping.  The acid combined with the sweet, hazelnut-like flavor of the mushrooms made the whole melange to die for.  Thanks, Terry!

Billions of gorgeous mushrooms this year; biggest chanterelles we've ever found.  Honeys, white oysters and puff balls.  

Hadn't gone fishing in four years, since we lost Spuds.  At his end, I'd been fishing and gathering seafood only for him, and was missing him too much to go collecting again.  Back to picking up nice little greenling off the beach.  They were only yanking the bait off my hook, until I muttered, "First one grabs it, I stop fishing for today, smash up the rest of the bait and throw it in.  So somebody come help me feed your brethren."  BAM -- fish on.  Smashed up the bait, threw it in, took the one fish home.  Nice greenling, which provided too lovely fillets and a sweet backbone for bone crackers.  

No fishing yesterday; our neighbor brought over a couple pounds of fresh halibut.  Fried up in lard with black pepper and sea salt made of seawater collected from Clallam Bay, boiled in an old pot on the wood stove.  A gallon makes about 3 ounces of Fleur de sel.  Because of its mineral and iodine content, it's entirely cut back on our salt cravings.  It's excellent when used for Live Salt (my term for the fresh grains thrown on a dish at the last moment to spark the flavor).

Built a THIRD chicken coop and it really is a chicken tractor, now.  Easy to move, a lot easier to clean, and more accessible for eggs, while retaining security.

The people we got the hens from stuck us with a skinny gray rooster -- who has grown up into a nice, quiet, masculine silver, who only crows a little at dawn, and all the girls love him.  The neighbors say he doesn't bother them. Nice deep body on him, too -- if he sires chicks, they may be nice for egg-laying.  Dunno; will have to see.  His name is Blue.  The hens are named Red, Black, Splash, and Inky.

We are SO ready for the rains -- and getting back to some real drawing and writing.