It’s been a surprisingly busy week, considering I am supposed to be just sitting at home doing my work.  I’ve had the dogs out to my friend Jay’s farm a few times now, which has been a lot of fun and given me some fresh air and them the exercise and brain work they need.  I so wish I could train more regularly.  I am starting to put my own brain into high focus on trying to sort out how to improve my sheep access for the coming year.

I have also been working on getting my back and general health into shape, at last, after the accident.  I am realizing now just how important it is to seek help as soon as possible after a trauma of this sort.  I didn’t think I had much to worry about since I wasn’t overtly injured in the accident, i.e. no cuts, bruises, broken bones etc.  But the effect of the impact on my body has become clear over the ensuing weeks.  My back started to hurt, I started waking up many times a night, developing inflammatory pain in my hands and one foot and so on.  Strange stuff.  And getting worse with every passing week.  I finally went to see an osteopath last week and she determined that my spine had been compacted by close to a centimeter, my hips were misaligned, various joints had seized and that my internal organs were all out of place.  Whoa!  What a mess!

Osteopathy is the gentlest means of realigning the body, using deep tissue massage and other very subtle techniques.  After one session, I slept better than I have in weeks.  I had a second session yesterday, and she did more work on my back including massaging some pressure points.  I could hardly hold my eyes open for the rest of the day!  Obviously something was released as today I feel even better.  I go again tomorrow.

Today I met with a new homeopath, who will hopefully be able to help me with sleep and other less tangible issues that have stemmed from the accident.  Our initial consultation session took 4.5 hours!  She did not decide on a remedy for me, even after all of that time, and is going to work through my case carefully before prescribing.  How different this is from conventional medicine, where doctors only have a couple of minutes to figure out what you might need.

After yesterday’s adjustment session, I was too tired to do much mental work.  Instead, I did some basic chores in the kitchen: making bread and yogurt.  I had to run to the mall to buy a thermometer for the yogurt, and a pizza stone for the bread.  What a mob scene!  If that crowd is any indication, we are not having any collective economic concerns.  Two days after boxing day and the place was still packed.  I popped into Benix and bought their last two pizza stones, on sale for $8.99 each.  I then managed to get out of the mall without being out trampled!

Once home, I started on phase two of my bread baking experiment.  I decided to use this recipe as I left my bread book behind this trip. This was my first time trying sourdough with a new recipe.  I also woke up the starter in a different way than I usually do.  My sister-in-law said that she just adds a table spoon for so each of flour and water, every time she thinks of it (i.e. every couple of hours) over a day or two.  Soon the starter is bubbly and happy and ready to use in the aforementioned recipe.  I am used to doing a 3-day build before baking my bread, which produces a really lovely and subtly sour bread.  I’m not sure if it is something about this recipe, or if it is how I woke up my starter (my guess would be the latter) but the final product was much more sour than I am used to.  It is really lovely, however, if you like sourdough (which I do!).  And the crust was fantastic.  I bought two pizza stones to better simulate a brick oven, placing one above and one below the bread.  You can also achieve this by lining the top and bottom racks of your oven with unvarnished tiles.  I also added steam 5 times, instead of three, which may have had some effect.  Now that I can reliably produce a decent loaf of bread, I need to experiment with the variables to see what I like best.  This new recipe certainly was nice for a single day bread and I will make it again, probably later this week.  This loaf won’t last me long.  Yum!  I’ll probably make more on Friday for when my family returns.

The yogurt also turned out well, and since I was able to produce both a decent loaf of sourdough and batch of yogurt in a new kitchen, I expect that I am finally understanding the  key points to these simple but touchy recipes.  I started making each exactly a year ago, so apparently not as simple as they seem!  Trying to learn basics like this from books instead of a person definitely is a slow, slow process.  If ever we end up all having to go back to this type of cooking out of necessity, we’re hooped!

The week has been flying by much more quickly than I had expected.  Here it is, Tuesday evening, and I have hardly scratched the surface of what I had hoped to accomplish.  Getting my back in order was priority #1, and I am  happy to say that this is now well underway.  The mountain of paperwork and logistics of who to see in what order, who signs what and so on – all to make the insurance company happy – has taken up several full days.  So I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that my other tasks still sit waiting.  For example, I still have some essays to finish grading, most of my interviews to transcribe, and Christmas cars (or rather, New Year’s cards) to be sent out.  And then there’s my lofty plan to set up a budget for myself.  If I’m going to get into sheep rearing on my tiny income, I need to get really, really smart with my money.

Speaking of sheep, I hope to get out training again tomorrow and Thursday, and perhaps even Friday.  That may be it for the winter as I hear we got a lot of snow in London area.  Everything is white here in Niagara but the snow is not yet too deep to train.  Once the snow gets close to a foot deep, training has to stop for the safety of both dogs and sheep (and handler for that matter!).  I don’t mind taking a break over the winter, but I feel like I’m just getting going with the younger dogs.  Oh well, there’s always agility.  For now, I had best get down to some grading or transcribing.

This evening I decided to try a new fermentation project: Kimchi.  This is a Korean side dish that I’ve eaten a number of times and quite enjoyed.  It is essentially spicy pickled cabbage with some other veggies such as radish and carrot mixed in.  My sister-in-law is Korean and I had planned on sending down a sample of this homemade kimchi for her to evaluate.  However, it’s production is a bit more involved than I expected and so I have postponed the taste test for now.  I will make this batch and then try it out myself and on my local family members.  If we like it, I will then send some on to Ithaca.

The recipe I have for Kimchi is from the book Wild Fermentation, which I am enjoying immensely.  I have found a number of recipes I hope to try in this book, but the Kimchi is the first.  I decided to explore this in part because of my Korean connection, and in part because I had a napa cabbage, daikon radishes and some bok choi in my CSA box a couple of weeks ago.  All of these are key ingredients for Kimchi, and quite frankly I really didn’t know what else to do with them!

The recipe calls for the soaking of chopped cabbage, radish, carrot and bok choi in very salty brine overnight.  It only took me a few minutes to coarsely chop the veggies in question and submerge them in the salt water.  They will sit there overnight and tomorrow morning I will finish the procedure.  This involves making a paste of hot chilis, garlic, onions and fresh ginger – yes, this is a spicy dish! – adding it the soaked and drained vegetables, and then packing it all very tightly into liter jars with lids, and left to ferment.  A very simple initial assembly process, but baby sitting of the jars makes this process a bit high maintenance.  The same is true of making sauerkraut.  For the first week you must check the jars once or twice daily.  Gas forms as the fermentation process starts, making the whole thing bubble.  This pushes the veggies above the surface of the brine.  You must “burp” the jars and then push the veggies back down, once or twice a day for the first 5-7 days.  Eventually the bubbles stop and you can just let it sit and ferment until it achieves a flavour to your liking.  At that point you put it in the fridge to slow the fermentation right down.

I am almost through my last batch of sauerkraut and need to make some of that up as well.  I had wanted to bring along the ingredients since I have them all my extra fridge at home.  But I simply did not have room in my car for a big basket of veggies and a box of jars.  Fortunately the key ingredients all last a long time in the fridge and should be fine still when I get home in early January.

I have also been waking up some sourdough starter as I need to make bread.  Unfortunately I left my cookbook behind.  Tomorrow or Monday I will spend some time searching on the internet for a replacement recipe and give it a try.  Oh, I guess that means I need to also buy a pizza stone as I forgot to bring that as well (mine is broken and I have been meaning to buy a new one for ages anyway).  Hopefully they will have some at the mall, which I reluctantly need to visit tomorrow to buy food.  Unfortunately I don’t have the connections here in Niagara that I have in the Southwest and must shop at the grocery store.  I am almost out of yogurt and need to get some milk to make more, and a few other basics to carry on.

I will report on the results of the Kimchi experiment in a week or so, after it’s had time to ferment for a while.  Hopefully I’ll be able to produce something at least marginally resembling the dish I am attempting!

I am on day 3 of my solitary Christmas holiday, and today I am feeling a little lonely.  My family teleconferenced me in to the gift exchange last night, which was fun, and it was great to have someone to hang out (and train dogs) with yesterday and Christmas Eve. Today all is quiet and I am getting down to the reason I stayed behind: work.

What is most striking to me this Christmas is just how quiet it is.  Other than my family and a couple of close friends, I have heard from virtually no-one this year.  Two or three people sent me actual email messages with content directed specifically to me, which was really nice.  I received exactly one Christmas card.  Sure I was on the receiving end of a bunch of mass e-mail greetings and general Facebook comments (I am really starting to dislike Facebook) but while it is nice to know that you are included, these are generally a pretty indifferent way of sending wishes and greetings.  Heck, a couple of such e-greeting came from people I haven’t spoken to in years.  Clearly my email address is simply still in their address book and they hit it ’send all.’

This very quiet Christmas (New Year’s promises to be even quieter) is definitely a reflection of just how isolated I have become. Once upon a time I used to send out between 75-100 Christmas cards, and received almost as many.  I know it is environmentally unfriendly to send cards, a strike in favour of e-mail greetings which I have engaged in myself.  But Christmas used to be the one time of year that I try to reconnect with friends and family, who are spread far and wide.  I have lived in many places and traveled quiet extensively; I know people on every continent and used to keep in touch with all of them.  Over the years these connections have faded, and many I can hardly remember anymore.  A few I miss to this day.  People have moved and I lost all my addresses after converting them to electronic form and then suffering a simultaneous hard-drive crash and Palm Pilot failure.  I hoped that these friends would seek me out, but alas, few did.  And then when my health failed and I no longer had energy to maintain long-distance connections, they faded completely.

Last year I tried to start rebuilding old ties and managed to send out an electronic Christmas letter, individually addressed to each person with a short personal note attached to each.  I had hoped this would get things going again, but alas, no luck.  I have long since come to the realization that most people are poor correspondents and spend the majority of their social energy on those in close proximity.  This makes perfect sense, as we are not designed to travel long distances or have friends all over the planet.  The ability to do so really only started one or two generations before me, and my parents’ generation is probably the one that really got it going.  This is certainly not sufficient time to really change how we communicate, although the internet is playing an interesting role here.  Still, I can’t blame anyone for not thinking of me when they haven’t seen or heard from me in months or years.

Living out in the middle of nowhere is not helping, although it was really wonderful to have been included in one local Christmas dinner party the week before I left.  That was my first local invitation since I moved last July.  I am sure, with time, that I would make more such connections and eventually start to feel a little more rooted.  But the commute is killing me and there is no stability in the work that I have.  I am guaranteed one of my part-time jobs for next year, but funding for the other most likely will be cut.  I have some exciting prospects for new contracts next term, but I can’t continue to live contract to contract like this.  Doing so prevents me from committing to where I live, knowing that I may have to move in 8 months.

I am really tired of living a temporary life.  I can’t even find the energy to plant a garden when I don’t know if I’ll be able to enjoy it’s bounty.  Besides, building up soil is a big job, which takes time and effort, if not a bit of money.  To get things growing at my current house would take a tremendous amount of work, building up new beds and trimming trees and so on.  I can’t justify the time or expense if I’m going to be moving in June, or even the following spring.  Today I tried planting garlic at my parents house so that we would at least have some home grown garlic, but the ground is absolutely frozen.  Oh well, I guess there’s always next year.

I realize that my lack of access to land right now is a sign that I need to be focusing on other things, i.e. finishing the dissertation.  This is why I stayed home alone for Christmas – I am spending this week doing as much work as I possibly can towards finishing this project.  The sooner I’m done, the sooner I can start to build a permanent life.  I am tempted to try and find a home in the Kitchener-Waterloo area, and commute back to London for a year (for work) while I start to build a life.  However there’s no guarantee that I’ll find permanent work there, and may have to move again.  Likely I will have to spend another 18 months in limbo, which isn’t that long but I’ve already spent 9 years this way and it’s become really old.

I really don’t know if I’ll survive another 18 months of isolation.  I firmly believe that we are meant to live collectively, and that we are very social beings.  While the forces of our society push us towards isolation, I need to find a way to push back.  I may have to make some decisions and take some risks, and hope for the best.  It is ironic that I am staying home, alone, to work, during the only time of year where most people I know gather together.  This perhaps does not bode well in terms of where this path is taking me, but hopefully it’s a matter of short-term pain for long-term gain.  I need to spend time clearing my heart and mind so that I can see clearly what I need to do.  This is what I will be pondering over the next week of self-imposed solitary confinement.

Outside, the rain just chanaged to snow.  I believe that is quite auspicious…

The dogs and I had a great Christmas.  It’s 10pm and they have all been passed out for several hours now. I feel like a good mom again, at last.  We worked sheep both yesterday and today, and they had a couple of nice hikes thrown in as well. Here are a few photos of the girls enjoying their Christmas present:

And here are a few of me working my youngest dog, Kess.  Until today I didn’t have any photos of Kestrel working because she’s such a little speed demon that I couldn’t work her and take photos at the same time.  My friend Janet came out to train with me (she was also home on her own for Christmas) and she took these photos.  The two of us spent the day training our dogs and chatting while warming up in the barn.  Despite getting thoroughly soaked and then chilled, it was a wonderful day!

Janet working her young dog.  We had the young dogs move the sheep along a fence line which means we only have to watch one side as we worked on keeping them from running sheep over us (yesterday I got run over several times and decided it was time to put an end to that!):

Finally, the computer did a strange editing job on this one, but I kind of liked the effect so saved it:

The break is here at last.  I am so tired I can hardly see straight, let alone do much.  I arrived at my parents’ house yesterday and have been doing some running around to get ready for Christmas.  I am all set now, at least presents are wrapped and ready to go.  My father and brother are heading to Ithaca tomorrow to join my mother, other brother and sister-in-law.  I am staying here on my own.  I simply have too much work to do to travel any more than I already have.  It will be a bit lonely but it will be good to have a very quiet week, and to get some work done.  Getting caught up on my sleep and my work will allow me to have a more relaxing winter term.  I also fully intend on getting into some kind of exercise routine.  I stepped on the scale last night and was horrified (although not surprised) to learn that I have gained over 10lbs since last spring.  At least one New Year’s resultion is quite clear, that’s for sure!

I will hopefully have a chance to write regularly for a bit now, and also update some of the info on this blog to make it more useful to readers.  I check my stats almost every time I log on and most people come here looking either for resources around food, or for information about sheep herding.  I am considering overhauling the blog to better reflect its content, which has shifted since I first started.  Something that will definitely require some thought, which will require first some sleep.  And on that note, goodnight!

Another busy week, and now… vacation.  Well, at least a vacation from having to drive into London and teach.  Unfortunately, not a vacation from work.  I have such a mountain of it piled up in front of me that I have pretty much resigned myself to having to skip Christmas this year.  I am going to head down to Niagara to stay at my parents’ house, but they are actually leaving town.  My mother leaves today to spend a few days with her parents in Kingston, then is heading down to Ithaca to  my brother and sister-in-law’s.  This is where we spent Christmas last year and it was quite delightful.  They bought a new house this summer and are looking forward hosting Christmas there.  My father and other brother will be leaving for Ithaca on Wednesday, as soon as my brother finishes work.  I, however, will be sitting in an empty house for a week and grading essays and writing my dissertation.

On the one hand I am looking forward to finally getting a chunk of time to get caught up.  On the other, I really could use a break and some social interaction.  Life gets depressing quickly when living and working in isolation and I am already feeling pretty bleak after just a few days alone here out in the country.  This is why I want to at least stay at my parents house as I know neighbours and have friends relatively nearby whom I can visit in the evenings.  Where I live now, the neighbouring houses are mostly empty and my closest friend is an hour away.

This week I actually enjoyed my first local dinner invitation.  It was absolutely delightful to spend an evening chatting and eating with a group of really interesting and kind people.  I haven’t done anything of the sort in ages.  In fact, while enjoying the meal I realized that it was the first I had eaten in ages with multiple courses.  As I cook and eat alone about 99.9% of the time, I usually just  make one thing and eat it until it is gone, then make something else.  This could explain why I am starting to get bored with just about everything I put on my plate these days.  Having a multiple course meal adds variety and makes eating more fun and exciting.

I just finished (re)reading Michael Pollan’s The Omninvor’s Dilemma. This is really a great book – very interesting and eye opening.  I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to better understand our food system.  There are a few points where I think Pollan falls a bit short on his analysis (for example, when talking about the ethics of eating meat, he doesn’t even touch on the ethical problems of eating the mainstream alternative: Soy), but for the most part the book is an excellent introduction and even fairly advanced analysis of how we feed ourselves.

One point raised in this book that is really starting to resonate with me is Pollan’s comment that we (in North America) no longer have culture to guide how we eat.  Instead, we turn to so-called experts.  As a result, for the first time in history, children do not turn to their mothers (and grandmothers) to learn how to eat.  This is very problematic for the omnivore, according to Pollan.  For the omnivore can eat almost anything, but that doesn’t mean that we should.  Indeed, the reason behind cuisines is that they offer us guidance as to how to eat well.  Many food items do not release their nutrients in ways that we can use them unless they go through a certain process.

Take soy, for example.  Its proteins are essentially unavailable to us until soy is fermented.  This is why traditional cuisines use fermented soy products.  Our new uses of soy (for example, textured vegetable protein or TVP, as a ground beef replacement) is not fermented and thus a very poor source of protein.  People don’t seem to know this, and the “experts” don’t tell us.  Well, at least not the “experts” we have ready access too, through media and advertisement – those paid by Big Ag and Big Pharma.  They push soy as the ultimate healthy solution to eating meat and all the ethical and environmental problems that causes.  These claims are true, I believe, of ecologically grown and traditionally fermented soy products (tofu, soy sauce).  Independent researchers, however, have very different stories to offer about their industrially produced counterparts: these soy products are a poor quality protein source, genetically modified and potential carcinogenic, and produced using very environmentally and socially damaging practices.  For more on this topic, read this article and its many links.

While I never thought much about it before, it is indeed striking that we don’t eat the same way as our parents.  What does this say about our society?  I completely disagree with my mother’s obsession with low-fat products, for example. I eat full-fat everything, believing it to be healthier.  She believes the exact opposite.  Each of us has come to our conclusions through listening to “experts.”  Her advice comes from conventional medicine and nutrition, mine comes from alternative medicine and nutrition (such as from the link above, or books like Nourishing Traditions).  So who’s right?  As our eating traditions have been destroyed, we no longer have any way of knowing.

As Pollan points out, different cultures around the world have dramatically different approaches to their diets.  Some eat mostly plants, others mostly meats.  All tend to be quite healthy, except for Western diets.  So one thing I am certain of is that the way we eat here in North America is wrong.  But even if I turn to my grandmother for help, I can’t find what I am looking for.  She also learned to cook in an era of processed foods, with recipes that call for ketchup or bar-b-q sauces, or cans of mushroom soup.  Of course in her youth, these items were still probably relatively healthy and cooking this way a relatively close simulation to older traditions.  Not today, however.  Nearly 70% of all processed foods on the market today contain genetically modified products and I am not interested in eating any of it.  I strictly avoid anything that contains soy, and do my best to avoid corn and wheat unless organic, locally grown and (in the case of wheat) fermented before I eat it.  I cannot, therefore, use my grandmother’s recipes.

As I get ready to head home for a couple of weeks, I ponder just how much food to bring.  I don’t like making a fuss over this, separating myself from others by my choices around food.  Food actually is often used to draw lines of distinction between different groups of people – for example not eating pork, or beef and so on, according to religion.  But while these customs serve to distinguish various collectives, they also serve bond together the people within them.  This is simply  not the case with all the eating fads found in North America (of which I fully agree that eating locally is one).  Here, as Pollan remarks, you can find four different eating regimes within a single family of four.   This does little to strengthen social ties.  Indeed, it serves to further fracture and individualize our communities, not coincidentally very helpful to the capitalist cause.

In many ways, my determination to eat as ecologically as I know how goes against what I believe food to be all about: community.  At the same time I am becoming more and more adverse to eating industrial food.  While eating locally has introduced me to new friends and community, it is separating me from others.  Trying to decide where to draw the line, how to find the balance between an ethic of eating and building community is what I believe to be the Locavore’s Dilemma.

This morning I took my latest batch of yogurt out of the fridge and opened the jars.  Success!  I am so excited.  This is the first nice batch of yogurt I’ve produced in months!  It is thick and solid, and tastes wonderful.

So how did I do it?  I studied!  I did quite a bit of research on the internet and also received some good advice from someone who also makes her own yogurt.  It seems my problem the last time is that I was keeping the solution too hot.  40C is about where it needs to be.  I was making it at over 50C.

The basic process that I did yesterday is as follows:

1) Heat the milk to 180F (sorry to be switching between unit systems – my thermometer does both).  Take off heat immediately and let cool. Apparently heating the milk to this temperature serves two purposes.  First, it kills any bacteria that might compete with the yogurt making bacteria.  Second, it makes the end product thicker.  Be sure not to let the milk actually boil, however, as this changes the protein structure of the milk and that will ruin the yogurt.

2) Once the milk has cooled to between 38-43C, add a small teaspoon of yogurt culture per jar (I make it in 1 litre jars).  If you are buying yogurt to use as starter, make sure it says “live culture” in the ingredient list.  I’m not sure that “active culture” means the same thing – I tried making yogurt with active culture and it didn’t turn out.  I might have done something else wrong, but I’m sticking to those labeled “live” just to be sure.  This time I used Saugeen County yogurt, and the result is excellent.

3) Screw lid on tightly and immerse the jar(s) in a water bath that is between 38-42C.  I make 4 litres at a time and put them in my small canning pot to incubate.  I put the empty jars in first, fill with water (to know how much water I’ll need) then take the jars out and heat the water.  That way when I put the full jars back into the pot, it doesn’t overflow, or require additional water.

4) It is apparently important not to jostle the yogurt once you have got it going.  I leave my pot on the stove and check the temperature every hour.  I found that it will drop around 5 degrees and hour, so I have to turn the burner on for 1-2 minutes to heat it back up again each time.  This is where an automatic heater comes in handy, but now that mine is broken I have to use this method.  I was going to put it on the woodstove but it didn’t keep the temperature steady enough, and also the pot was so big that it blocked the opening of the stove and had to be moved every time more wood was needed.  This is not good for the yogurt.

5) I let the incubation carry on for 9 hours.  I took one jar out after 7 hours and put it in the fridge and the rest at 9 hours.  The longer you incubate, the more sour the yoghurt will be.  I discovered I prefer that 7 hour yoghurt and have made note of that for the future.  Because you have to reheat the water almost hourly, making yoghurt has to be done on a day when I’ll be home all day.  At least in the winter.  In summer this shouldn’t be anywhere near as much fuss.  Fortunately I work from home several days a week so getting up from my desk once an hour to check a thermometer is not a big deal.

I now have four lovely litres of yoghurt which will last me some time now before I have to do it again.  It is such a relief to have finally figured out this process and I hope that I will now go back to having a reliable source of tasty and healthy yoghurt.  Yeah!

Lately, when I have found the time to write, I have been writing mostly about food (which was the original focus of this blog).  But behind the scenes I have been continuing to work on reducing the crap in my life and making tiny steps towards a more ecologically friendly life.  Looking back over the last few months, I am happy to report that I have purchased very little other than food.  This has been largely for financial reasons, but it feels good and hopefully will become a permanent pattern.

For some strange reason, I have recently been really craving shopping.  I have found myself driving past big box stores and picturing myself, with some nostalgia, walking down the neon-lit aisles.   Strange, I know.  Perahps it’s some kind of re-directed “gather for winter” urge.  Or maybe it’s a subliminal switch that has been programmed into me upon hearing Christmas music: shop, shop, shop ’till you drop… it’s Christmas time!  Because I have been working so hard all semester, I actually had a little extra money for the first time in ages, and decided to allow myself a few purchased.  Last week I picked up a stainless steel canning funnel (I have been looking for one of those for months!) and a stainless steel compost bucket from Lee Valley.  I also bought two sweaters and a pair of pants at a great little second hand clothing store in Waterloo.  I desperately needed new pants as none of my old ones fit.  I am growing quite fat from spending most of my time sitting at a computer or in a car.

Last night, while driving home after a very positive but nonetheless tiring meeting with my dissertation committee, I once again felt the lure of the aisles of junk and neon lights.  I am always tired after such meetings as I worry so much beforehand that they won’t be happy with what I am doing (but, once again, they were).  I decided to allow myself a trip into Winners.  I had a good reason: to buy a good quality pot at a reasonable price.  I cook using my roommate’s pots and pans, which are lovely and expensive.  For some reason, I seem to be incapable of keeping things from burning in them.  Yesterday I twice heated up food that left dark rings on the inside of her stainless steel pots, which took quite a bit of scrubbing to remove.  And every time this happens (just about every time I use the pots), a little more of the ring stays.  Worrying that I am going to ruin her lovely pots, I decided to get a couple of my own and use those instead.  I found a fantastic, brand new, cast-iron skillet and soup pot on the side of the road, and just needed a little pot for reheating the soups I eat almost every day this time of year.

On entering Winners, I was amazed by all the stuff.  I walked up and down the aisles, humming along to the muzak, and was pleased to see that there was absolutely nothing that interested me.  It was pretty much all junk.  The quality is so low on most items that it is really not worth buying them.  A friend commented a few days ago that antiquing and second-hand clothing is going to become a thing of the past as there is nothing that this generation is producing that will last.

After wandering around the entire store, I found a suitable little pot and headed to the cash.  Supposedly originally $50, this pot was marked down to $21.  I heated my dinner in it tonight, and the sides did not burn.  Success!

This weekend I have to finish grading 160 exams, but I am going to try and find some time to get back to sorting through the last few boxes in my room.  I still have about 10 boxes left to sort, and now that we have the woodstove going almost constantly, it is a good time to go through my old letters and cards and ceremoniously dispose of them.  The next project will be my photograph collection, which was once very nicely organized, but has been let slide out of control for several years now.  I would like to have that sorted as well before  spring.  What remains will be a much more manageable collection of stuff, and nearly all of it useful.  Of course at that point I will once again comb through everything to see what else I can get rid of.  But one step at a time!

As usual, this time of year, I have not been able to write regularly.  However, this does not mean that I am slacking in my attempts to live more sustainably.  Indeed, it is the effort to do so that takes up any spare time I have and prevents me from writing here!  For example, tonight I got home after a somewhat shorter day than usual.  To my delight, it was still light out (although the sun was setting fast), the first time all week that I’ve been in the house during daylight.  This meant getting to do a long-overdue chore: scavenging for kindling.

Living more sustainable really means having to plan in advance.  Sometimes months or even a year or so in advance.  This really goes against our last minute society.  What’s the business term?  oh right… “just in time” stocking.  Trying to live “just in time” without corporations is a quick way to freeze and starve to death.  It’s frightening how dependent we are on multinationals.  Not only do we no longer have technical skills, but our very life rhythm prevents most from making the necessary shift.  In my house, we are fortunate to have a gas furnace (yes, fed by Big Oil) that will keep us from freezing as we figure out how to better plan for winter.  As usual, the learning curve is steep and if we didn’t have the buffer of commercial society, mistakes would punished harshly.  If our society ever has to make the transition suddenly (like they had to in Cuba), the outcome would be an absolute and deadly disaster.

Since we heat predominantly with wood in this house (how I love this woodstove, let me count the ways), I am learning a fair bit about building and maintaining fires.  The wood we have is starting to dry out and burn better, but we got it way too late in the season.  We bought it from a local person who splits wood and sells it by the trailer load.  We should have bought it 6 months ago and let it dry out over the summer, but my roommate didn’t have time, and I didn’t know better.  So we have a huge pile of rather damp wood that can be frustrating at times to get burning.  The wood we have was split rather large, another factor making it more difficult to get them burning.

One way to get things burning well is to start a fire with paper and kindling and get that going really hot for a while under the logs you wish to burn. This has actually been fitting will with my ‘destuffing’ undertakings, as I have been literally burning my way through boxes and boxes of useless paperwork, stored and dragged around with me for decades.  It finally is serving a purpose!  This dries out the logs, which eventually catch and burn.  Once a good bed of hot coals is going, freshly added logs catch fairly quickly.

At one point this summer, someone delivered a downed tree to our property.  It needed to be cut up with a chain saw, and then split with a splitter.  Again, knowing nothing about this procedure, I ignored the tree.  Now that I realize how important it is to have well split, nicely dry wood, I will be sure to get this organized in the spring or early summer for next winter.  Assuming, of course, that I’ll be spending another winter here.  I won’t know that for a few months yet.

Since there’s nothing to be done about the large, damp wood chunks we need to keep us warm this winter, I spent about an hour foraging about our property (and the adjacent empty lot) for sticks and branches.  With all the wind over the last few days, there was a wonderful fresh supply to be had.  I was hoping we’d avoid the snow long enough for me to get out and collect this kindling material, as once the ground is snow covered, there’ll be no finding it.  I amassed a good pile and tomorrow will break it down into packets and stack it in boxes in the shed.

Heating with wood really changes the atmosphere in a house. Now that I am accustomed to this source of heat, I can tell the moment I walk into a house if someone is heating their home this way.  I suppose it’s not surprising that many of the people I am interviewing for my research also heat (and some even cook!) with wood stoves, and I have seen more such stoves in the last few weeks than I have in my whole life.

While the notion (and experience) of heating with wood is quite romantic, there’s also a fair bit of work attached.  Of course there’s the cutting and splitting of wood, which can be avoided by paying someone to deliver wood ready to burn.  But there’s no avoiding having to haul it into the house, or constantly tending the fire.  I am getting into this rhythm, but it has taken some self-training.  I can’t tell you how many times I have started a fire then gone into the kitchen to cook, only to come back to a cold, dead stove.  Until the fire is really going, it needs a fair bit of TLC.  And as for hauling wood, it is almost a daily task when the weather is cold.  Two days ago I hauled in 5 loads, yet when I got home tonight the woodbox was empty.  So after I was done finding kindling, I hauled in three more loads (a load being as much as I can physically lift in a large box), which will be used up by this time tomorrow.  If I were to do this long-term (i.e. own a wood-heated home), I would definitely find some way to store the wood closer to the stove.  That said, it’s not bad exercise…

Another long and busy week of teaching, grading and advancing  my research.  I am really enjoying each one of these but they do take a lot out of me.  By the end of the day yesterday, I was really ready for a break.  I have so much on my plate right now that I haven’t been allowing myself any time off in weeks, working while eating, through evenings and even in bed until I fall asleep.  Every morning I wake up, think of what I have to do, prioritize what needs to be done that day, make  a list and then get up and get going.  It’s non-stop until I fall asleep over my books many hours later.

Last night I decided to give myself the night off, which really only started at 8:30pm when I got home.  I treated myself to a non-local bottle of red wine.  It’s probably  not ideal to reward myself with things that go against what I’m trying to achieve, but I really love a good Australian Shiraz and there’s simply nothing local that compares.  I toyed with buying an organic wine but couldn’t justify the expense.  I will only be drinking a little of this bottle and the rest will end up as cooking wine.  So paying $25-30 for one or two glasses of wine is just not in my budget.  I do try find a balance between economics and my values when possible!  I then called a good friend and enjoyed a couple of glasses of wine while catching up like old times.  She used to live down the street and we’d share a bottle of wine and talk until the wee hours in each other’s kitchens.  Now she lives in Québec so we have phone dates.  Phone dates are my only source socializing seeing as my closest friend lives an hour away (other than my roommate, but we hardly see each other these days!).  It was really great to just talk about everything and anything, solving the world’s problems as we always do.

This morning I woke up, thought up my to-do list and got to it.  I really needed to catch up on my basic life chores: cleaning, laundry, running errands, cooking and taking care of the dogs.  I got through the first three items but by the time I finished running errands it was just after 5pm and pitch dark.  The poor dogs got no exercise and I feel bad.  I did bring them with me in the car so they had a change of scene but I’m not sure they really get much out of that.  Mostly they curl up and sleep while I drive around.  I had intended on taking them for a hike on the way home, but I am reticent to go into the woods after dark.  I think it’s illegal anyway (public parks usually close at dark), but I also worry about running into wild animals (skunks, porcupines, coyotes), having the dogs take off chasing deer, or tripping over people drinking in the woods.  Fortunately the dogs are very forgiving, and they will be my first priority tomorrow.  We came home and played soccer in the yard and now I’m getting down to my administrative work.  My energy drops after 4pm, so I save my computer and paper-work for evening by the fire.  The woodstove makes such tasks not altogether unpleasant.

My cooking plans have been postponed until tomorrow as I need to finish grading a set of essays tonight, and also to work on some interview transcriptions.  I am trying to do 2-3 hours a day of dissertation work for the next month to get on top of all I have to do.  Two or three hours a day won’t quite do it, but if I manage that and also a few longer days, I might be where I want to be come the new year.  Specifically, I want to have all my interviews transcribed (at least 100 hours of work), and entered into the analysis software I’m going to be using, and I want to be comfortable with the software so I can start analysing and writing.  That part should be really interesting and I’m looking forward to it.  The interviews I have conducted have been fascinating – every single one of them – and I’m quite excited to see what I make of all the data I have collected.

This morning I cleaned out the fridge in preparation for some cooking.  I had to throw out half of my lovely borscht because I discovered that the meat scraps I put aside for the dogs were quite rancid, which means the meat in the soup likely was as well.  I really should have frozen it!  I am not used to cooking with meat and need to be more careful about how long I leave it.  I will let a veggie soup sit all week and just boil it a bit if it’s old.  But the meat should have been consumed within 3 days, or frozen.  I will remember that for next time.  What a waste!

I have also decided to loosen some of my shopping restrictions to see if that helps with my cooking success.  Some of the problems I have been having is that I have been substituting ingredients that I couldn’t find locally with local items I thought might work, but didn’t.  Now that it is winter and my pantry is largely reduced to cabbage, potatoes, and parsnips, I really need to include a few more internationally produced condiments if I’m going to stay motivated.  So I bought soy sauce, red wine vinegar, coconut milk, fresh ginger and a few other items to (literally) spice up my cuisine.  All are organic, some are fair trade, and I will use them sparingly as they were quite expensive.  But this should allow me to stick more closely to recipes and hopefully have better success.

Because I had to stop eating the borscht mid-week, I have eaten nothing but cheese, bread and summer sausage for the last three days.  I only manage to cook once a week right now, and try to make enough for 6 days of food.  I did still have my pumpkin custard, some sauerkraut (I always have kraut), pickles, yogurt, milk and an oatmeal mix I eat in the morning, but food has been rather plain this week.  Tomorrow I’m going to make several recipes so I have more variety, and freeze the extra to mix in with future weeks’ meal plans down the road.  My plan is to make:

- Parsnip Orange soup (requiring a rule-breaking purchase: one organic orange and a small bottle of Odwalla organic orange juice)

- Cauliflower Cider soup (another rule-breaking purchase: Strongbow cider.  Hopefully it will actually make it in the soup!)

- Corn and Spinach soup (all ingredients will be local, some fresh and some from my freezer)

I am also going to make a new batch of sauerkraut and try two new fermentation projects from the book Wild Fermentation: Sour beets (later to be used in a more traditional borscht recipe he includes in this book) and Korean Kimchi.  The kimchi will be interesting to make as my sister-in-law is Korean and will be able to tell me just how close I come to making the traditional pickle she grew up with.

I am going to get the woodstove going, make the Corn and Spinach soup, and then get back to my grading.  I still have about 5 hours of work on my ‘to-do’ list and it’s already 7pm.  I suspect some of it will need to be be bumped to tomorrow.  I am not sure how much longer this crazy schedule will continue.  I can get a lot done over the holidays, but only if I skip going home and spending time with my family.  We are to spend time in Ithaca again this year, which I would really like to do.  But then I’ll come back to an ever increasing mountain of work, and tremendous stress about trying to finish this dissertation before summer.  I need the break but then the stress will be worse later.  I’m not sure which way to go.  I’ll decide closer to the date, based on how much I’ve been able to accomplish between now and then.  Which means sticking to these daily to-do lists and a longer-term plan I have drafted up for my goals.  Hopefully I can do it!