Unpacking my Bag, Part 2

When we travel, I'm always on the lookout for easy-to-pack, non-fragile, lightweight gifts to bring back to my beloveds. Scarves 100 percent fit this category. Our most recent trip to Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand had me all wrapped up in scarf excitement.

While we were in Cambodia, I kept seeing gingham plaid woven scarves -- on men, women and children. Called Krama, Cambodians tie them around their necks, fashion them around their heads, wrap them around their waists, and create slings for carrying babies or firewood.

The hotel where we were staying left a green-and-black-plaid krama on our bed as a welcoming gift. I wore it often over the next two weeks. I told myself that the cotton scarf added an element of chic to my plain t-shirts and helped hide those extra chins that sometimes appear in photos!

On the afternoon of our ATV ride through the Cambodian countryside, we stopped at a roadside eatery and discovered a table full of kramas for sale. Jack bought six and I bought six more. Ed rolled his eyes. Here's one of my six, modeled by Mary's dress form. Can't wait to give them as gifts – and keep a couple for myself.

Next up was a visit to a silk workshop in Chaing Mai, Thailand.

silk worms

silk thread being unraveled from cocoons

natural dyes

weaving the dyed threads into silk fabric

small portion of wall of finished fabric – shelves and shelves of beautiful color

So, of course, I had to buy a silk scarf for Maggie, Jack and Mary – and one for me too. I meant to give Jack's to him before he left to go back to China, but forgot. He assured me that he would appreciate it for Christmas 2015.

I'm only wishing I had bought a dozen more of the Cambodian scarves and a stack of the silk ones. They are all so lovely.

Next up: Unpacking my Bag, Part 3: Pottery

Unpacking my Bag, Part 1

We've been home for almost 48 hours. Ed is still waking up at "way-too-early" hours and then insists on an afternoon nap. Neither one of us can make it past 9 p.m.

I've unpacked my suitcase and started a load of laundry. I saved my carry-on bag to unpack with you. I wanted to show you some of the souvenirs that we brought home from our travels to Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand.

Item #1: metal coffee filters, large and small size

Coffee drinking seems to be the national pastime in Vietnam. And I'm not talking about Grande Skim Lattes from Starbucks. I'm talking about tiny cups of super strong French roast coffee cut with super sweet condensed milk, served at luke-warm temperatures or poured over ice. Vietnamese coffee: It takes some getting used to.

Coffee was introduced to the Vietnamese by French colonists in the late 19th century. Because of limitations on the availability of fresh milk, the people of Vietnam began to use sweetened condensed milk with a dark roast coffee. 

The last afternoon we were in Hanoi, our guide took us to a Trung Nguyen coffee shop and insisted that we try a cup of Legendee -- otherwise known as weasel coffee -- brewed with a single-cup filter. The legend in Legendee coffee has to do with stories about natives who drank a brew from coffee beans that had been partly digested by civits, small furry animals similar to a weasel. Their poop was collected and the beans separated out and brewed into civet coffee. I kid you not. Trung Nguyen, the largest domestic coffee brand within Vietnam, eventually found natural enzymes that duplicate this process and leaves the weasels to blissfully go on their way. 

Anyway, to make a long story short, we tried a cup of Legendee and bought a bag of Trung Nguyen French roast coffee and headed on our way south in Vietnam. Along the way, I purchased two of the aluminum coffee filters at local markets so that I could replicate our coffee experience once we were home. 

Last night before going to sleep I was flipping through a Martha Stewart Living magazine that arrived while we were gone and sure enough, on page 20, there was Martha extolling the deliciousness of Vietnamese iced coffee, made with Trung Nguyen coffee and little metal coffee filters. I am so ahead of Martha....

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Vietnamese Iced (or not) Coffee

adapted slightly from Martha Stewart Living, February 2015

ingredients

• 1 to 2 tablespoons sweetened condensed milk
• 1 heaping tablespoon ground Vietnamese coffee, such as Trung Nguyen
• directions
• Pour sweetened condensed milk into a tall, narrow heatproof glass.
• Remove lid and filter insert. Place coffee in base of filter; tap to settle into an even layer. Place insert on top of coffee grounds and adjust to even out grounds and secure in place (do not pack). Place filter on top of glass.
• Wet coffee with simmering water (it should rise just above insert); wait for grounds to absorb water, 20 seconds. Add more simmering water, filling to top of filter chamber. Top with lid. Let drip, 4 to 5 minutes. Remove filter. 
• Either drink warm, or pour over a glass filled with ice. Stir well.

Note: the coffee and metal filter used for this drink are available at trung-nguyen-online.com, or you can come out to Farm Dover and I'll make you one. 

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Next up: Unpacking my Bag, Part 2: Scarves

Embracing the yin-yang

We are back home. Been away for thee weeks experiencing a slice of life on the far side of the globe -- Vietnam, Cambodia and Thailand. Being immersed in all things Asian, a certain amount of Eastern philosophy has seeped into my thinking: witness my contemplation of the yin and yang of my life.

At no time is the contrast in how I live my days more pronounced than when I travel and then return home. At Farm Dover, Ed and I live quietly and comfortably, in simple abundance, going about our lives with a routine that varies only by the season. Suits us fine. As my mother liked to say: I wouldn't change a thing.

Oh, but when we travel, life does change. We seek out the unfamiliar, the uncomfortable, the strange, the risky, the spicy.

On just this most recent trip, we ate assorted street food (and survived), helped plant banana trees, sat on a hut floor with four generations of women and assembled sticky rice bundles wrapped in banana leaves, kayaked through caves to sparkling blue lagoons and later through dark and mucky mangrove swamps, learned to cook crispy pancakes stuffed with shrimp and pork, rode ATV's through the dusty Cambodia countryside, taught a class at a rural primary school, received a chanted blessing from a Buddhist monk, rode atop an elephant through the jungle, and lounged by the pool at the Peninsula Hotel while sipping fancy drinks. All incredible experiences; all so vastly different from my ordinary Shelbyville life.

It is this contrast -- this yin and this yang -- that keeps me in balance. It is what makes me delight in coming home -- happy with my days and nights spent tending to all things Farm Doverish -- but also excited to pack my bags and seek out what the broader world has to offer. Both complementary forces are essential to me. I crave them both: the comfort of home and the adventure of travel. It is this application of duality that feeds my well being. Home is my yin; travel, my yang.

How about you? What keeps you in balance?

Planting banana trees, near Hue, Vietnam

Early morning visit to Angkor Wat,
7th wonder of the world, Cambodia

At Royal Tomb of Minh Mang, near Hue, Vietnam

Pulling up (empty) fishing nets, Hue, Vietnam

Feeding tiny bananas to tiny monkeys, Thailand

View of Da Nang harbor, Vietnam

Beach to ourselves at Hoi An, Vietnam 

Ed learning to make crispy pancakes, Hoi An, Vietnam

Making friends while making steamed rice bundles,
Hue, Vietnam 

Feeding monks at daybreak, Chaing Mai, Thailand

Child at lakeside temple, near Siem Reap, Cambodia

Cruising Halong Bay, Vietnam

Dusk in Hoi An, Vietnam

At Ta Prohn (Jungle Temple)  in Seim Reap, Cambodia

Jack teaching an English class in rural Cambodia

Jack and new friend at Doi Suthep mountain temple,
Chaing Mai, Cambodia 

Monk at lakeside temple who chanted a blessing for each of us,
 near Chaing Mai, Cambodia

Night market in Can Tho, Mekong River Delta, Vietnam

Inspiration for a neat and tidy garden, Mekong River Delta

Posing before ATV ride, Cambodia 

Riding Asian elephant through the jungle to a

local ethnic minority village of the Lisu tribe. 

Spoiled at our last stop: Peninsula Hotel, Bangkok

Living High, Low, and In-between on the Hog

From time to time, Ed and I would get some heritage pork from The Mayo Lane Market Wagon and were impressed by how much better it tasted than supermarket pork. We decided to go "whole hog" and purchase our very own pig. It was expensive, but not so high that we had to go into "hock."

Just before the new year, Ed and I drove down to Bardstown to pick up our hog. I say our hog but really it is just half of a hog and it had been neatly processed by Boone Butchers – shrink-wrapped to our specifications and labeled, ready for our freezer. We took the pickup truck and every cooler we owned. Our friends, Lynn and Walt, bought the other half, which we delivered to their door.

Our hog was a heritage breed, pasture-raised on Four Winds Farm, just outside of Frankfort, KY. She was born in the spring and weighed in at 237 pounds when she wiggled off to the market in December. I'm sorry to say I don't know much more about her. I would have liked very much to have met her. I understand that she had a nice life, roaming freely around with only a handful of other pigs and allowed to root and forage to her heart's content. She had a nice bedded pen for sleeping and ample wallows. She wasn't pumped full of antibiotics and growth hormone, but allowed to grow at her natural rate, without tight confinement. She basically lived in "hog heaven."

I realize that this photo is not of a hog. I took it at the butcher shop.
It hangs off the front of the warehouse building and I thought it was impressive.
I do wish it was a hog.

Once home, we unloaded into our basement freezer over a hundred pounds of pork chops, spare ribs, bacon, Boston butt, jowl bacon, ham roasts, hocks, feet, neck bones, tail, ears, shoulder roasts, liver, skin, leaf lard, and two kinds of sausage links.

It took half an hour to unload and organize the packages in our freezer. It is a lot of pig -- and really, most of the time, I'm only feeding Ed and myself. We "wee wee" can't eat 100 pounds of pig, so, if you are invited to dinner at Farm Dover anytime in 2015, you can pretty much be sure that pork will be on the menu.

We are looking forward to enjoying the taste difference between our humanely raised pig and the factory-farmed pork we buy at Kroger. Heritage pigs are known for their flavor, tenderness and juiciness. The meat is pink-hued and heavily marbled. It doesn't need to be cooked to death, but can be safely served slightly pink. Each hog yields about 33 pounds of fat, compared to about 10 pounds from industrial-raised hogs. Ed still talks fondly about the pork roast his mom used to make.  And his dad used to cure country hams for sale at the Galloway Market in Owensboro. It's a high standard to "meat."

Tonight's dinner features pork chops. Maybe bacon tomorrow morning. One of these days soon, I'll figure out how to render the leaf lard for use in biscuits and pie crust. Anybody want the leftover cracklings? I'll report in from time to time on this experiment. Hope I don't "boar" you. "Lard" almighty, wish us luck.

Heirloom Recipes

Last night Mary called me from the Whole Foods in Manhattan. She was having a hard time finding the specific kind of hot sausage that my heirloom recipe for Reunion Pea Casserole calls for. I straightened her out.

Maggie, in Louisville, is also planning to make RPC for New Year's Day and while Jack probably isn't baking one in Shenzhen, China, I bet he is wishing he could dig into a big wedge of the black-eyed pea savory pie that I've been making every New Year's Day for the last 25 years.

That's the beauty of a heirloom recipe. It connects people: parents to children, grandparents to grandchildren, friends to friends. Perhaps these special recipes, mostly handwritten on cards with lots of funny notations, are the original social network. Before Pinterest or Facebook, generous cooks would share their recipes with others via these little cards. I started to think about the beauty of these recipes when my sister Kathy sent us a jam cake this Christmas made from my grandmother's recipe. She has the original handwritten card from Grandmommy's recipe box and was kind enough to retype it and send it to me.

The first Christmas that we were married, Ed's sisters, Gay and Bobbie, put together a family recipe cookbook for me. (I think they thought Ed might starve.) It included recipes handwritten on index cards and arranged in a binder for such essentials as Scalloped Oysters, Olive Nuggets, Salmon Patties, Mimi's Custard, something called Spanish Spaghetti, Tuna Casserole and Coke Salad. Yes, Coke Salad. I treasure this volume.

I cook from scratch almost every day. Most of the time, I don't use a recipe. But I have a dozen or so recipes that have been passed down to me from my grandmother, other relatives, my friends, or gleaned from old cookbooks. These are the recipes that I make on special occasions every year. These are the recipes that my children will remember from their childhood and will surely incorporate into their adult lives and pass on to their children. These are the recipes that will live on long after I've stopped cooking.

I've written about most of these before. Here are the links to:

• Reunion Pea Casserole
• Mary Rinehart's Cheese Straws
• Camille Glen's Cheesecake Royale
• Asparagus Lasagna
• Alice Stravelemos' Kentucky D_ _ _ _  Pie
• Anna Sullivan's Peach Pie
• Queen's Own Highlander's Fruitcake

A new heirloom recipe was sent to me this December. It came from Cousin Glenda, who got it from my mom's friend, Jeane Cullen. It is for her famous fudge sauce. I've never needed the recipe because she would always make a jar for us to enjoy over peppermint ice cream. It's high time I figured out how to make my own. I've made it twice this season, but find it doesn't last long enough to use as a topping; rather, I just grab a spoon and dip into the jar for a little mid-morning snack.

_________________

Jeane Cullen's Hot Fudge Sauce

ingredients

1/3 cup butter

2 oz. (8 squares) unsweetened chocolate (I used Baker's)*

2 oz. (8 squares) semisweet chocolate (I used Baker's)*
1 cup sugar

1 cup heavy cream

1/8 teaspoon salt

2 teaspoons vanilla

*Jeane's original recipe calls for 2 squares of chocolate, but Baker's recently remolded their products and 1 original square is now equal to 4 squares. Go figure. 

preparation
In a heavy large pan melt chocolate and butter over low heat. Blend in cream, sugar and salt. Stir over low heat until sugar is dissolved. Remove from heat and stir in vanilla. Store in refrigerator. Makes 2-1/3 cups.

Note: I usually double the recipe, using 11 T of butter, one full bar (4 oz) of each kind of chocolate, a pint of cream,  2 cups of sugar, 1/4 t. of salt and 4 t. of vanilla. 
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So, my question to you is: What are YOUR heirloom recipes? What recipes are you known for? Won't you please share them with me?

The Art of Puttering

I am at the perfect point in my life to putter. Children off living their own exciting lives, no clients clamoring for last-minute changes to their marketing materials, no dogs to tend to -- just an easy-going husband and days without demands. And so, I putter.

Yes, I get things done. But they are usually not the things on my "to do" list, but rather things that occur to me as I move about the house and garden. I'll notice a grimy spot on the door out to the garage and find a Magic Eraser and, like magic, I've made it disappear. But then I'll walk around finding other spots that need a bit of a scrub. Then, I'll open my spice drawer and see that I've spilt thyme all over the place, and that I have two half bottles of cumin, and that I'm almost out of my favorite Krazy Jane salt. So I'll spend an hour or three typing out spice labels on an old typewriter and alphabetizing my spices. (This is only remarkable in that I'm not known for my organizing skills.)

Or today for example, I noticed that my bottle of mouthwash was simply disgusting and so I funneled the rest of it into a pretty, recycled maple syrup bottle. I kid you not. It was very satisfying.

Puttering doesn't have to be a solitary activity. Sometimes I putter with Ed. We'll go out with the intention of doing one small job and end up hours later trying to remember why we went out in the first place. But, in the meantime, we may well have cut down dozens of invasive honeysuckle bushes, mulched around all the trees up and down the drive, picked up a load of long-ago cut wood, and laid down cardboard in the garden to thwart the weeds. We only stop puttering because it is time for lunch.

In a June 2011 New York Times editorial, puttering is described as "small-scale, stream-of-consciousness problem-solving." That's what I do. I solve one problem and then calmly move on to the next one that presents itself to me.

I got to thinking about puttering after reading this post today by one of my favorite authors: Anne Lamott. She says: "I pulled on some baggy pants, in case I accidentally ate a few more cookies than might be ideal. THEN, and only then, I got up, and went to the kitchen, where I put the coffee on, and did the sacrament of putter while it brewed." The sacrament of putter. I like that. Yes, I think there is something almost religious about the art of puttering. Something meditative. Something calming and centering.

In my old life (pre-Farm Dover) I was constantly multitasking, constantly beating myself up for not getting enough done in a day, constantly behind on every work project, every home project, every child project. My whole life seemed a mess of "I'm-behind" projects.

When I putter, I never multi-task. I just do what I want for as long as I want and then move on to the next thing that captures my attention. And yes, I do realize that this is a luxury afforded me at this particular time in my life.  And I'm grateful for it. But I have to tell you, I'm getting really good at it.

_______________

I'm writing this in our study, with a fire going. Ed is in the main living room watching a UL football game, but just stopped in to see what I was up to (and bring me a piece of chocolate and refill my wine glass). "I'm writing a blog on puttering," I tell him. "The most important thing is to keep your head still," he tells me. 

Up. Down. In the Ground.

The thing about a live Christmas tree is that it can't be brought indoors until right before Christmas and it must be taken back outdoors soon after Christmas. Otherwise, it will come out of its dormancy and get confused when it is forced back into cold weather. At least, that's what I've been told....

So on Christmas Eve, we brought our little tree (with its huge burlapped ball) inside. Mary and I decorated it with lights and decided we liked it that way. We only added a favorite bird ornament and some recent ones that friend Jane sent, and called it a victory.

Today, we took off the lights, loaded the tree into the back of the Polaris, and planted it to the right of our drive entrance, alongside our trees from 2011, 2012, and 2013. My plan is to plant all our Christmas trees in one spot and then I can just count the trees to remember how long we've lived out here. Pretty clever, huh?

While Ed dug the hole, I snapped pictures of the previous years' trees.

Here's our 2011 tree. It looks ridiculous because it was attacked by a deer. 

This is 2012's. It is our biggest one.
Too big, in fact. It took three people to move it outside for planting. 

Here is 2013's. A perfectly nice little tree.

And lastly, here's our tree from this year.

While we were out planting, we also put a tiny tree in the ground, just outside our study window. It was a gift from my sister, Kathy. I love to think that someday it may become a towering evergreen.

We came back in and I took down the stockings (with care), cleared our mantle, tossed the magnolia leaves from the table centerpiece, and took a final load of empty boxes out to the recycling.

I did leave up our manger scene, our angel Gabriel, and Madonna & Child painting. Being that it is only December 28th, I figured the Magi have not yet arrived in Bethlehem, so it seemed premature to pack them away.

But other than this little vignette, Christmas 2014 is now history at Farm Dover. I'm ready for the new year. Bring it on!

We went walking...

Fact: 21 of the last 26 days have been cloudy or rainy. Fact: today the sun was out, and so were we.

Mary flies back to her life in the big city tomorrow morning, but for today, she was a country girl out for a walk around Farm Dover with her mom and dad.

Ed, Mary and I struck out for a walk this morning. We checked on Maggie's beehives, headed down to the abandoned wicker table and followed the stream to the property line, climbed up the hill and made our way through some brambles to the trail on the other side of the pond. We circled round the upper field and then cut through the secret path Ed cut for me this fall. We crossed the pond at the limestone waterfall and followed the trail around to the front field, then cut across the drive to the hackberry tree. There we paused for a father/daughter photo.

From there, we showed Mary the new apple trees that we planted since she moved away. We jumped the creek and headed to top field and then took the path over to our neighbor Bobby's farm before jumping the creek back over to our trail. A red tail hawk swooped down low across the field and a pair of cardinals flittered from branch to branch of a locust tree.

We followed the path on the far side of our fields, cut through the walnut tree field and showed Mary our recent attempt at creating a Christmas Tree Lane. We then took the trail to the right and walked the property line between our farm and Bobby's, finishing at our front gate, where we paused for a mother/daughter photo.

We then turned toward home and made out way up the drive.

These are the times I treasure. Walking. Talking. Listening. Looking. Connecting.

Come back soon, Mary. We miss you already.