Hyperfocused on Butternut Squash

Ed is such a good sport. I plan most of our meals and he never complains about what I fix. This week I may have pushed him over the edge. You see, I've been hyperfocused on butternut squash. It's about the only thing coming out of my garden these days.

This weekend, we've had butternut squash soup, caramelized butternut squash wedges with sage hazelnut pesto (twice), roasted squash seeds,  and butternut squash pie.

I can't give you an exact recipe for the soup as I made it up as I went along. It went something like this: peel, cube and then roast butternut squash. Saute 1 diced onion, 2 diced garlic cloves, a handful of fresh sage. Add two bay leaves, one cinnamon stick, and one can of lite coconut milk; then add the roasted squash and a bit of vegetable broth. Cook until vegetables are soft. Remove the cinnamon stick and bay leaves and then puree with an imersion blender. Add salt and red pepper flakes to taste. Serve with a dollop of yogurt and some roasted squash seeds. Made this way, it is vegetarian; and if you leave off the yogurt, it is vegan. 

Here is the recipe for the butternut squash pie. It is adapted slightly from this one on Food52. Best of all (for me), it is gluten free! Good enough to be a contender for our Thanksgiving table. 

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Buttermilk Squash Pie

ingredients

• 2 pounds (1 kilogram) butternut squash (one fairly large one)
• 1 pint (500 milliliters) coconut milk
• 3 eggs, beaten
• 3 1/2 ounces (100 grams) light brown sugar (about 3/4 cup)
• 2 tablespoons (30 grams) melted butter, plus extra for greasing
• 3 1/2 ounces (100 grams) almond meal (about 3/4 cup)
• 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon ground ginger
• 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg
• pinch salt
• handfuls sliced almonds
• powdered sugar, for decoration

preparation

Peel the squash (with a vegetable peeler) and remove the seeds. Chop into inch-sized cubes. Place in a saucepan with the coconut milk. Simmer about 25 to 30 minutes or until soft. Drain and leave squash in a colander or sieve to drain/evaporate as much as possible until cool Then transfer to a bowl and mash or purée the squash.

In a separate bowl, beat eggs together with sugar, butter, almond meal, cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg and pinch of salt. Stir through the cooled squash to combine well.

Pour the mixture into a greased 9-inch (23 centimeter) pie dish. Smooth over the top to sprinkle with the sliced almonds.

Bake at 350º F for 45 minutes or until golden on top and set. The sides will shrink away slightly. When cool, dust generously with powdered sugar and serve.    

             

Royalty flutters by

When we planted our fields in native grasses and wildflowers, we included in the mix a large scoop of common milkweed seed. Milkweed: it’s that plant with the fluffy seeds that escape from pods and float through the air this time of year. As a child, I confused it with a dandelion seed head and would always try to catch it and make a wish. I thought it was magical.

Turns out, it is magical. It’s the only plant that Monarchs eat when they are in the caterpillar stage and the only one on which they lay their eggs. Unfortunately, it’s been rapidly disappearing from meadows, rural fence rows, and sides of roadways, thanks to Roundup® and urban sprawl. Studies estimate that the plant decreased 21 percent in the U.S. between 1995 and 2013.  

And because it is disappearing, so are Monarch butterflies. Remember chasing monarchs as a child? Remember, how they were everywhere? In my memory, they were the most common of all the butterflies. But, despite our best efforts to plant the food they love, we’ve only seen a few on our farm this year. Every time I see one, I whip out my camera to capture it, but it always manages to fly off before I can press the camera icon, find my subject, and snap. It’s a gone girl. 

I’ve also taken to inspecting the leaves of milkweed, hoping to find some tiny eggs or a host of caterpillars munching happily through the green leaves. Haven’t had much luck there either. Seems the milkweed contains a poison that the caterpillars have adapted to – but it stays in their bodies, making them poisonous to any predators.

My awareness of the plight of these beautiful creatures was heightened upon reading Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior, whose plot hinges on an invasion of monarch butterflies in a small Tennessee Appalachian town.

It wasn’t until we visited the 270-acre Coastal Maine Botanical Gardens at Boothbay that I got a close up look at what I’ve been seeking all summer. There, among the beautiful flowers and plethora of milkweed, were hundreds of monarch butterflies, as well as plenty of yellow-and-black-stripped caterpillars, eating hungrily on the milkweed leaves.

And best of all, I got to see the lime green chrysalis, decorated with metallic gold dots, that hung from the wood siding of the various structures around the gardens.

I couldn’t take enough photos, Ed finally walking ahead of me back to our parked car as I called out: “Wait! Just one more. Just one more.”

So, to be perfectly transparent: Yes, I took all of these photos, but all were taken at the Botanical Gardens on our recent trip. None were captured at Farm Dover.

But even now, in mid-October, we occasionally see a lone monarch or two fluttering around the goldenrod and daisies in our fields. I wonder how much longer they will stick around before striking out on their up-to-3000-mile migration to Mexico. I hope the ones that make it, spread the word that there is plenty of milkweed at Farm Dover and invite their friends and family to come back to Kentucky next summer.

What fun it would be to have that most royal of all butterflies fluttering by!

Why I blog (500 posts and counting)

I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at,
 what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear. – Joan Didion

                           

On September 21, 2010 I wrote my first blog post, and today, I’m writing my 500^th. That’s a lot of posts – and for those readers who have been with me on this four-year+ journey, that’s a lot of reading, a lot of loyalty. I thank you for it.

I began writing my blog so that our three grown, out-of-town children would feel connected to the new life that Ed and I were embarking on. After all, we were leaving the only home they remembered, downsizing our belongings, while upsizing our spirits of adventure. We were leaving behind our urban lifestyle – turning in our dress clothes for overalls, my high heels and Ed’s wingtips for muck boots, and our minivan for a pickup truck. I wanted Maggie, Jack and Mary to follow along on our adventure, embrace our new home, and feel welcomed there.

To our friends back in Louisville and around the world, I have always felt that writing my posts is a bit like writing postcards: A way to say hello and that we are alive and well.

After the first year or so I realized that writing about our new life was something I needed to do, that it helped me understand the decisions Ed and I were making, and by telling our story to someone else – to you – it helped me better understand it.

My blog is brought to you from the geeks at blogspot and occasionally I check in to see how many people are reading my site and from what country they are checking it.  Today, for example 136 people have viewed my site. Thanks to Jack, I have readers in Canada, Germany and China. Somehow, I’ve picked up readers in the United Kingdom, France, Russia and Australia. Most people find me through facebook, but some find me by search words. The most popular being mirror over the bed – which I’m pretty sure is kind of kinky.

Whether or not anyone regularly reads my blog, I will, for the time being, keep writing these posts. It has become much more for my own creative expression, my own desire, my own gift to myself – that keeps me at it. I’ve come to realize that I’m documenting a piece of my personal history – a piece that is important for me to remember. Perhaps I will suffer as my mother suffered and won’t remember how wonderful my life was in 2010 or 2014, or perhaps my lovely life will come crashing down and I’ll have a need to remind myself that my life was truly shining for far more than one brief moment.

I’m not sure how long I will continue to blog. Perhaps I’ll find some other creative outlet: I’ll take up drawing, or yoga, or making Santa Clauses from old pantyhose.  But until I do, you’ll find me here sharing a photo of a weird insect or a beautiful sunrise, recording our travels, providing a recipe to a daughter living far away, experimenting with my garden, celebrating our joys and acknowledging our sorrows, taking long walks in every season, and, in every way, enjoying our life here on Farm Dover.

Sea Salt for Sale by the Sea Shore

One of the things we love about car travel with no set agenda is that we can take last-minute detours to obscure destinations. We do it often.

Last month as we were making our way up the coast of Maine, I discovered on my i-pad via tripadvisor that a sea salt company in a nearby town offered tours. We had actually already passed the necessary left-hand turn before I figured out that it might make a good stop. So Ed very patiently turned around on the far edge of Machias, Maine and headed back a mile or two, made a right-hand turn, and two miles later, we pulled into the drive of The Maine Sea Salt Company.

Steve Cook, the owner, met us just inside the front door and sent us out back with one of the workers to take a look at the salt solar "green" houses. Here's what I learned about how the salt harvesting process works:

Sea water is pumped from a nearby bay into large tanker trucks and then unloaded into solar "green" houses. In the first house, any impurities in the water settle out and the sea water is reduced through evaporation by 50 percent. In the next green house, this method is repeated, the water filtered, and reduced by 70 percent. In the third house, the pool of remaining water evaporates, leaving behind pure sea salt. The work is seasonal; it is only hot enough in the summer to cause the water to evaporate.

In the final green house, salt is raked into piles and then scooped into bins to further drain. Next it is ground, which releases more moisture from the crystals. Linen towels are placed between layers of salt to remove any remaining moisture. It is then sifted to separate various crystal sizes.

Natural flavors (lemon, garlic, pepper, or herbs) are added to the seasoned salts and the smoked ones are placed in smokers with apple wood or hickory until they take on a dark color and a smokey flavor.

The salt is unrefined, unprocessed, solar evaporated, and hand-harvested. No drying agents are added.

In the tiny front office, I bought packaged salt for friends and family back home.

And I couldn't resist buying a ceramic "salt pig" to keep by our stove.

The Maine Sea Salt Company has been around since 1998, when Steve and his wife first began selling 1.1 oz. portions for cooking lobsters. Steve went around to the local fish markets and grocery stores hawking packages of sea salt. It quickly caught on.

An original packet of salt still hangs in the front office. 

The salt is now sold throughout the United States to health food stores, specialty food shops and high-end restaurants.

We left the the Maine Sea Salt Company loaded down with salt products and headed to Raye's Mustard Mill Museum. But that's a story for another day...

Fall Flowers

Still lots to gather from the fields...

Polishing Silver

Last week my Dad turned 84 and to celebrate we gathered for brunch at Wild Eggs in Middletown. It was just the five of us: Dad, my three sisters and me.

Afterwards we went back to Dad's house and down into his basement where my mom's silver flatware was spread out on the pool table. Dad wanted us to have it and so we figured out how to split it up among the four sisters.

I ended up with my maternal grandmother's silver. Now, rest assured, amassing flatware is not on my list of things I'm interested in doing. In fact, I've not used my own silver forks and spoons since moving out to the farm. They are just too fancy for our simple life out here.

But I was delighted to take home a wooden box full of Grandmommy's flatware. I'm not sure what I want to do with it. Use it everyday?, or just for special occasions? Put it away with my own silver? Store it for one of my children to someday (hopefully) want?

The box sat on our kitchen counter all week. The silver had not been used in years and was dark with tarnish. It seemed disrespectful not to at least clean it up. So today, I polished it. I polished each fork, spoon, and knife. I polished each iced tea spoon and each cocktail fork. And with each piece, I thought about Grandmommy. I thought about how her hands had held and polished each piece. I thought about how she must have planned elaborate parties that started with shrimp cocktails (yes, I have her shrimp cocktail bowls somewhere in my basement). I thought about how she had hand washed each piece, drying it, and placing it in the right slot in the red velvet lined box. I was mindful of her and her legacy as I worked my way through the box.

I watched as each piece transformed from near black to gleaming silver. I admired the hand engraved initials on each piece. I discovered some featured her initials: MER, and some had her mother's: LMB. A few pieces were not engraved at all. Did she obtain those later and just never bothered (or couldn't afford) to have them engraved? Why did she have so many spoons and so few forks and knives? What did she use for serving pieces? I was lost in the past.

The pieces are now back in their box, gleaming. Ready for someone, someday, to unpack them and use them. I do hope they serve shrimp cocktails...

My Garden is a Mess

Being gone for a month didn't help my garden, which wasn't looking all that great before we left. I need to get out there and yank up all the dried up tomato vines, faded okra plants, overgrown kale, weeds and more weeds.

In the good news column: most of my butternut squash was ready to harvest. In fact, Maggie hauled up a bucket full when she was out here checking on things and I filled up another bucket full earlier this week. A few still lie scattered among the sweet potato vines, stems still green and needing another week or two.

In honor of the harvest – and to take advantage of an overabundance of sage in my garden and the maple syrup that we brought back from Quebec – I roasted a butternut squash and topped it with a sage pesto. My version was loosely based on this one from Food52. (I used almonds instead of hazelnuts, and feta instead of ricotta salata.) It's a keeper.

Going to "Land's End"

Notes from Saturday, September 30th

I don't know of anyone personally who would think it would be fun to drive for 20 days covering 3,514 miles, up the northeast coast, park their car at the end of the road, and hike out to the tip of the Gaspe´Peninsula in the province of Quebec, in the country of Canada, in late September. (See T on route map.) 

Well, maybe our three grown children would; but that’s it. No one else in his/her right mind would do it. But Ed and I did it today. (I’m not saying we are in our right minds.) And now it's early evening and I’m sitting around our campfire waiting for foil-wrapped corn-on-the cob to cook and writing to tell you we did it, and it was absolutely worth it. 

We left the town of Perce´this morning, stopped for picnic food and camp dinner in the town of Gaspe, entered the Forillon National Park and had our choice of camp sites –- as we were practically the only ones camping tonight. We packed our lunch in Ed’s backpack; piled on extra shirts, fingerless gloves, hats and our windbreakers; and drove to the end of the road. We hiked a couple of miles out to the end point, that was marked with a lighthouse and a bronze marker noting that we had arrived at the end of the International Appalachian Trail.

The wind was blowing so hard that we took refuge in the foghorn house, a part of the lighthouse operation. We ate our picnic lunch in that small unlocked wooden cabin at the end of land. 

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So, to back up a bit, this is the ultimate stop in our epic car trip, which started back in August and will end at the end of September. In just under 30 days, we will have made our way through eight states and four provinces. Tomorrow, our 21st day, will find us turning back toward home, stopping in Quebec City and Montreal on the way. 

By the end of our trip, we will have tent camped seven nights, stopped at roadside motels or chain inns seven nights, boarded in bed & breakfast inns or small hotels seven nights, crashed at a friend’s house one night, and splurged on fancy hotels five nights. We will have driven a total of 5114 miles and done laundry twice.

For meals, we cook over campfires, picnic at the end of hiking trails, stand in a long line for the world’s best lobster rolls, eat at seafood shacks and top-rated restaurants. (We eat more french fries than I though humanly possible.)

Other than a hotel in St. Stephens in New Brunswick and one in Quebec City, we are travelling without lodging reservations, or making them through Hotwire as we get close to a town we where we want to stop for the night. Every morning, we wake up and decide what we want to do that day and how far we want to drive.

Good luck is following us. The weather has been spectacular; our Subaru rolled past 100,000 miles without so much as a “check engine” light; we pulled up to the ferry just as it was leaving Nova Scotia for Prince Edward Island and they waved us on board; we found live traditional music in many of the Atlantic Provinces towns and somehow always scored tickets to the sold out performances. We ran into friends from home at the end of a long hike in Acadia. The raccoons could not figure out how to take the plastic lid off our camping supplies. We actually saw whales on a whale sight-seeing expedition. I lost my phone, but then found it. We have met friendly people who gave us unfailingly good advice about hikes to take, restaurants to try, places to stay. 

This trip is a bit of a stretch for us. We will have driven further than we have ever driven. We will visit places we had never seen. Often, we are the only English-speaking people around. We will be away from home longer than we have ever been. We go days without cell phones or Internet. But, you know what? 

It is so worth it.

Call us "irresponsible"

We've been away from home for a month. There is grass to cut, weeds to pull, laundry to do, camping gear to clean up, mail to open, bills to pay, etc., etc.

So how do we spend our day? We head to the LaGrange Farmers Market to wander around, then slip into the LaGrange Coffee Roasters for a latte, drive up to Starview Nursery for a look around, then head cross country to the tiny town of Pleasantville to check out a new cafe for lunch, stop by Mulbery Orchards for some apples and cider, head home, but first stop to marvel at the clouds and an old barn full of tobacco.

Yep, you can call us irresponsible – throw in undependable, too – and we won't disagree...

Did you miss me?

I've been gone – a very long time and a very long way. Ed, Mary and I left on August 31. We dropped Mary off in Brooklyn to begin her new life in NYC and then headed up the east coast. We made our way through Massachusettes, Connecticut, New Hampshire and Maine. We then crossed into Canada and spent time in New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island and Quebec.

Almost a month and more than 5100 miles later, we're back home. In every way, it was an epic journey and I'm so glad we made it. I need to clear the cob webs from the house, the weeds from the garden and do some laundry – but then I'll fill you in on the highlights. Stay tuned...

A Day of Labor

Before Jack headed back to China, he and his dad spent some time chainsawing a downed cherry tree into logs and then splitting them into pieces of the right size for our winter fires. Jack got into a good rhythm and before long, he had a nice pile to show for his work. 

I'll think of him on a cold winter's day and remember the sound of splitting wood.

Planting Peas

I bare my hand and dole out shriveled peas,

one by one.
– from Planting Peas, by Linda M. Hasselstrom 

Seems crazy that I chose the hottest day of the summer to plant my fall garden – but it had to be done. Spinach and beets in the raised bed and a long row of peas in the big garden. But before I could plant, I had to unplant the spent bush beans, cucumber and zucchini vines, hauling them off to the compost pile, making room for the new seeds.

Here's a poem that Ed forwarded to me from American Life in Poetry. The poem, written by Linda M. Hasselstrom, captures some of the thrill of planting peas – no matter that it is not spring but rather sweltering hot outside. I hope you like it.

Planting Peas 

It’s not spring yet, but I can’t

wait anymore. I get the hoe,

pull back the snow from the old

furrows, expose the rich dark earth.

I bare my hand and dole out shriveled peas,

one by one.

I see my grandmother’s hand,

doing just this, dropping peas

into gray gumbo that clings like clay.

This moist earth is rich and dark

as chocolate cake.

Her hands cradle

baby chicks; she finds kittens in the loft

and hands them down to me, safe beside

the ladder leading up to darkness.

I miss

her smile, her blue eyes, her biscuits and gravy,

but mostly her hands.

I push a pea into the earth,

feel her hands pushing me back. She’ll come in May,

she says, in long straight rows,

dancing in light green dresses.

Life Goes On...

Jack leaves for China very early Wednesday morning, for his next year-long teaching assignment. And Mary came home from Lexington last week and announced that she was heading to New York City to seek her fortune.

It's about to get very quiet around here.

You would think I'd get used to my children coming and going around the world. They do it often. I'm proud of them and supportive of their adventures – but with each going my heart hurts a bit. (Okay, actually it hurts a lot.)

I like it when they are close by. I like them coming out to the farm, even if it is just to check on bee hives, for dinner, or to do their laundry.

The up-side is that both Jack and Mary are off to wonderful places – places that will be great fun for Ed and me to visit. And fortunately, Maggie and Nate are just down the road in Louisville, making visits easy and often.

Orange (Julius) Bar now open for orioles

When I was five, The Mall opened just a mile or two from our house. It's official name really was just The Mall (now known as Mall St. Matthews). It was the first enclosed suburban shopping mall in the state of Kentucky and was greeted with much fanfare. It featured an A&P Grocery, Kaufman-Staus Department Store, and my favorite: Roses Discount Shop. It also had an Orange Julius and I thought the orangey-creamy-frothy drink they served up was the best thing ever.

(I just goggled Orange Julius Classic to see what is in it and guess what? It's a secret! Hmmm, no telling what those secret ingredients include. But at the time, I didn't care. I thought it was delicious.)

I hadn't thought of an Orange Julius in a long, long time – until today when Ed put up the oriole feeder that we got at the farmers' market in Alden, MI last week. Orioles evidently have a real sweet tooth and love to feed on oranges. Our new feeder has a spike on each side on which we speared an orange half.

Living at Farm Dover are at least two pairs of Orchard Orioles, and perhaps their offspring hatched in June. We are hoping they stop by our all-natural Orange (Julius) Bar for a drink.

Birds of Farm Dover

We've seen three amazing things around the farm recently and, in all three cases, I didn't have my phone/camera with me to capture them. So, you will just need to use your imagination...

Thing 1: Ed and I were out front by the entrance gate, walking along, pulling up random stalks of much-hated Johnson Grass. Suddenly a mama bobwhite quail flew up out of the short grass and started shrieking and hobbling along the ground. I mean really shrieking. She was dragging a contorted wing behind her, limping along as if she had barely escaped being eaten alive by a terrible creature. Both Ed and I turned toward her to see what was going on.

For some reason, I turned back to where she had flushed from to see a covey of at least 15 ping-pong-ball-sized quail chicks, running every which way, frantic to find their mother. I then realized that she was faking her injury to get us to follow her and leave her babies be. I've seen this bizarre behavior before with killdeer but didn't realize quail performed the same act. Ed and I immediately moved away from the babies as the mama made her way across the drive and into the taller grass. She then began to call to her chicks, giving them very clear instructions to stay still until these silly humans moved on.

Thing 2: We evidently have a pair of pileated woodpeckers living in the woods behind our pond dam. Think Woody Woodpecker and you will know what we have seen. Both the male and female have a flaming red crest and both are large birds, about the size of a chicken or large crow. Twice now, we have seen them on the trunk of a small tree in our back yard, working their way up and around the truck, looking for something tastey to eat. They tend to mate for life and to stay on the same territory for the entire year. We have our fingers crossed that they are nesting and soon we will have a descent of red-heads making their home here.

Thing 3: When we returned from our week in Michigan I went upstairs to water plants and happened to look out the bath window, down on the orchard and cottage. There, parading around, were 22 wild turkeys. It looked like this rafter of turkeys included two large hens, about 10 teenagers, and 10 chicks. They made their way out of the tall grass and into the orchard then around the cottage to the garden, having a big time pecking at things on the ground. By the time I got back downstairs and grabbed my camera, the last one was slipping back into the woods behind the bee houses. I've seen them roost in a tree there, but never seen them walking around, so close to the house.

Ed and I are headed out now, to do some work in the fields. No telling what we might see. I think I'll take my camera...

Cottage Living on Michigan's Torch Lake

Jack is home from China for exactly one month and one day, hardly enough time for me to get my Jack-fix for a whole year. So I was delighted when he said that he would come with Ed and me on an already planned trip to Torch Lake in northern Michigan.

Our friends, Bill and Judy, had offered to rent us a week at the cottage that they rent for the summer in Alden, MI. It was closer than Florida and closer than our favorite spots in Ontario, so we took them up on their offer and are glad we did.

Dock in front of the cottage, complete with plastic owl to scare away the sea gulls.

View from porch.

Their cottage sits right on the beach of what is billed as "the third most beautiful lake in the world." (That's what the bumper sticker says). We knew from the moment that we saw the gravel drive that we would like it.

Gravel drive

Cottage

It's an old, but nicely restored, early 20th-century frame house that features four bedrooms plus a sleeping porch, big living room, a nice kitchen, dining area with a table for eight, and back porch – complete with rocking chairs. Just as we like it, we couldn't see another house through the forest of evergreen, maple and oak trees.

Dining area

Living room

We settled in and began a great week of reading, walking to the nearby town of Alden, swimming and kyaking in the lake, visiting nearby Sleeping Bear Dunes, and enjoying our time with Jack.

Some highlights from our week:

• Walking along the top of the dunes at Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore (and deciding NOT to run down them into Lake Michigan).
• A crazy-good Italian dinner at Trattoria Stella, located in the former Northern Michigan Asylum for the Insane in Traverse City.
• A round of golf at the Centennial Farm Golf Course in Bellaire.
• The smoked whitefish and whitefish sausage from The Bellaire Smokehouse.
• Warm cinnamon rolls and quiche at Afterloon Delights in downtown Alden.
• A father/son flyfishing float trip in Grayling with a guide from the Old AuSable Fly Shop.
• Walking up to the Thursday evening Farmers' Market in Alden and buying yellow plums and black cherries, along with a bluebird house and an oriole feeder. 
• Sitting on the back porch, listening to the lake lap up on the beach and Jack play his guitar, enjoying a rum and tonic.
• And last, but not least, the homemade cherry pie, delivered to our back door by Ellen and Carl, our go-to Alden neighbors and Louisville friends. 

We head home today and Jack heads back to China next week. Nice to have this treasured time together.