Wild Blueberries fresh from the Commons

Blueberries, and a few blackberries picked yesterday on Black Balsam.

Yesterday, we took an afternoon trip up to Black Balsam on the Blue Ridge Parkway to look for wild blueberries.

You never know when the wild blueberries will be ripe -- it's usually sometime in August, but you have to hit the right place at just the right time to strike a rich ripe blueberry vein. We had tried Craggy Pinnacle a week ago, but the berries were still green. This week on the Ivestor Gap Trail, we were in luck!

Kelly in the blueberry thickets.

I love foraging on public lands - it feels like a way to reclaim the idea of the commons, places open to all for shared use, and collectively stewarded for future generations.

Stewardship means that while it's fine to fill a bucket or bag with blueberries, it's not OK to dig up a blueberry bush, removing the plant from the ecosystem and depriving others of future blueberries. It's important to make the distinction between foraging for things like berries and wild mushrooms on public lands, which is great, and removing plants or animals from wild lands, which is unethical and often illegal.

A bit more scenic than a trip to the super-market.

Wild blueberries are a native plant, valued in many native traditions as an important edible and medicinal.

Recent studies have confirmed the nutritional value and health-promoting qualities of blueberries, and in recent years blueberries have become a trendy health food. Blueberries are often referred to as a superfood, packed with antioxidants, good for your heart, your brain, your eyes, and your gastrointestinal system, and cancer-fighters extraordinaire.

Luckily, they are also incredibly tasty!

I find wild blueberries especially delicious, and I believe that nothing can beat the nutrition of food growing in the wild, picked fresh, and eaten as soon as

possible.

As we picked yesterday, I kept thinking of Blueberries for Sal, a beloved children's book which my mom must have read to me and my brother and sister hundreds of times throughout my childhood.

We loved the story of little Sal picking wild blueberries with her mother, and her surprise encounter with a mother bear and cub who are also foraging for berries.

I remember picking blackberries with my brother and sister in our neighbor's overgrown pasture (an informal commons) and bringing buckets of berries home to my mom, who would make a cobbler from them. Mouthwatering memories of those cobblers kept me picking yesterday, and bolstered my willpower to put at least some of the berries in my bag, rather than straight into my mouth (this was a difficult task for Sal, too).

Sal and her mother processing berries.

Me processing berries.

Sal and her mother canned their blueberries, to eat all winter long. We will use 3 quarts of yesterday's haul to make a batch of blueberry mead--another, more ancient way of preserving fruit. We'll pick more over the next few weeks to freeze, and the cobbler extravaganza has begun using the remaining quart of fruit we gathered yesterday.

In the spirit of childhood nostalgia, here's my mom's cobbler recipe, with a few tips in her inimitable style (my mom's tips in quotes):

My Mom's Summer Cobbler

(can be made with blueberries, blackberries, peaches, or any fresh fruit)

Dry Ingredients:

• 1 cup sugar
• 2 Tbs. baking powder "make them FULL tablespoons"
• 1 tsp. salt
• 3/4 cup flour

Stir or sift dry ingredients together.

Once they are mixed, melt a whole stick of butter in a baking dish in the oven as it preheats. "Make sure it gets good and hot and bubbly."

As the butter is melting, add 3/4 cup milk ("or rice milk or half and half or whatever") to the dry ingredients.

Pour the batter over the melted butter. Then pour on 3 cups fruit "or whatever you damn well please" (the exact amount of fruit is not important).

Bake at 325-350 for 40-50 minutes until golden brown and slightly crunchy on top.

More on The Commons:

• Here's a good starting point website on issues related to The Commons: onthecommons.org.

• Here's another interesting piece on tenets of The Commons, as established by legal precedent.

• Here's an interview with Vandana Shiva which includes a discussion of the commons. "The commons and the recovery of commons is vital to earth democracy. It's at the heart of sustainability of the earth and democratic functioning of society." -Vandana Shiva

• And here are a couple of excerpts from an article I wrote a few years ago for a local paper about the loss of the commons:

Originally, the term "commons" referred to lands and waters where anyone could forage, grow food or hunt. In ancient Rome and Britain, and in indigenous societies around the world, these shared inheritances were held in common rather than privately owned.

Among the generally accepted modern commons are public lands, the oceans and the atmosphere. But today, the concept of the commons has expanded to include commonly held systems, places and even ideas: community gardens, parks, public libraries, radio waves and herbal lore. Participants at the 1992 Earth Summit defined commons as "the social and political space where things get done and where people derive a sense of belonging and have an element of control over their lives."

. . .

Historically, conquering empires seized the commonly owned property of indigenous peoples for private profit. Here in Western North Carolina, the Cherokee Nation held most land in common until the U.S. government forced it to establish a system of private land ownership just 150 years ago.

Today, battles are being waged around the world over ownership of and access to water, land, energy, services and even genetic material. Ecologist Vandana Shiva points to a "series of enclosures" of commons in the Third World under colonialism, beginning with land and forests, then water and finally biodiversity and indigenous knowledge. Seeds saved for generations and medicinal plants growing in the wild can now be patented by private corporations and sold on the global market. As privatization is imposed, the values that sustain commons as the center of community life are eroded.

This loss has had devastating ecological and social consequences. With multinational corporations and financial institutions like the World Bank leading the charge, what was once stewarded as common property is now plundered for private gain -- a major factor in the deepening global environmental crisis. And the enclosure of commons often happens at the local level.

You can read the full text of my article, which centers on the loss of a particular commons in Asheville, NC here.

Inaugural bread-baking in the woodstove

Here's the first bread baked in the wood cookstove yesterday on President Obama's first day in office:

Nantahala Herb & Onion Bread

This bread is a nostalgic favorite of mine.  It used to be made fresh daily at the Nantahala Outdoor Center resturant.  Maybe it still is, for all I know!  

• 4 c water (I substituted whey leftover from raw milk cheese-making)
• 1/4 c active dry yeast
• 4 tsp sea salt
• 1 tsp dried dill weed
• 1 tsp dried rosemary leaf
• 6 T sugar (I substituted honey for half of the sugar)
• 1/4 c butter, melted
• 1/2 c powedered milk (I omitted this. It's not necessary, especially if you're using whey instead of water)
• 1 c onions, chopped
• 10-11 c flour (i used 1/2 spelt and 1/2 whole wheat pastry flour)

1. Combine water/whey, yeast, salt, dill, rosemary, sugar/honey, melted butter, powdered milk if you're using it, and onions.  
2. Allow yeast to activate until mixture is bubbly, approximately 10-15 minutes
3. Add flour.
4. Mix by hand until uniform.   Turn dough onto floured surface and knead for 10 minutes.
5. Put the dough someplace warm and allow it to rise until doubled, approximately 45 mintues.
6. After dough rises, knead well.
7. Shape into at least 3 loaves (you can also make more smaller loaves, but don't do fewer than 3 or you'll have a doughy center) and place in greased bread pans.
8. Bake at 350 degrees for 45-55 minutes.  
9. Brush tops of bread with butter after removing, and allow to cool or eat warm!

The smell of herb and onion bread baking in the oven is orgasmic. And breathing in that aroma as it fills the house to the soundtrack of newscasts about Obama's plans to close Guantanemo and reverse the global gag order qualifies as peak experience in my world.

Below: The Obamas greet visitors at the White House open house on President Obama's first day in office.

inaugural

adjective

1.  occurring at or characteristic of a formal investiture or induction; "the President's inaugural address"; "an inaugural ball" 

2. marking the beginning of a new venture, serving to set in motion; "the magazine's inaugural issue";"the initiative phase in the negotiations"; "an initiatory step toward a treaty"; "his first speech in Congress"; "the liner's maiden voyage" 

Firing Up the Wood Cookstove

Over the weekend Christopher finished installing our wood cookstove. 

C. was in charge of all of the work of installing the stovepipe, cutting holes in the roof and ceiling, running pipe up through the attic and out the roof, and hooking up the stove. I catered, deejayed, and photographed the event and otherwise provided support.

Christopher on the roof as the chimney takes shape...

...and the hole in the kitchen ceiling.

It was about four years ago that we bought this stove, made by an Amish stovemaker in Canada (ordered via Lehman's).

It was our primary heat source back when we lived in the old, drafty 1600 square-foot house in town before we moved to the ruburbs.* We learned back then that this stove can really pump out the heat. In those days we were living with two friends, and many was the winter night when we all stripped down to tank tops and shorts for a night of hot, sweaty dominoes as the stove blasted away.

Our intention all along was for this stove to be the heat source for our house here on the farm, and also our stove for cooking.  We used it to cook occassionally back in town, but cooking by wood was mostly a novelty at that point.  Now its a way of life.  

The cookstove differs from a typical woodstove in that it has an oven (with temperature gauge) and a large cooking surface on the stovetop. It is also built to accommodate a waterjacket for heating household hot water.  

This summer, our plumber friend will hook the stove up to our hot water system so that when we're using wood heat and cooking on the stove it's also  filling the hot water heater.  Our solar hot water panel will heat household water in the warm months when we're not using the stove for heat, and our plan is to turn off the electric hot water heater all together, using it only as a thermos for water already heated by wood and sun. 

Heating water for household use with electricity is one of the biggest energy hogs in a typical household, and by eliminating this power drain, our electricity load will be reduced to the point that we will be ready to go to a relatively small on-site photovoltaic (PV) system for our main power source.

I love using a woodstove for heat and cooking and hot water. When I lived in Ireland, I cooked on a stove very similar to this one, and I remember loving the simple tactile pleasures of stoking the fire, feeling the air around me gradually grow warmer and drier, and holding my palms above the surface or in front of the open oven door.  

Getting up in the morning, stirring the coals, and putting the kettle on feels like a beautiful natural rhythm to me.  It's so much more grounded, sensual, and humanely-paced than rushing out the door and grabbing a coffee to go.

Another thing that is so satisfying about using the stove is the idea of "stacking functions," a permaculture principle.  The principle of stacking functions means that every component of a well-designed sytem should serve more than one purpose.  

Here's a great description of what it means to stack functions: 

"To stack functions, one designs strategies that meet the most needs with the least effort. Thinking this way helps one become a problem solver: creative, adaptable, effective and abundant. One’s entire life can be based on these principles; they can be implemented with every decision that you make."

- Jennifer Dauksha-English, Financial Permaculture.

The wood cookstove, which heats our home, cooks our food, heats water, and can even dry our clothes (hung on a rack) is a great example of stacking functions.  It feels easy.  I've already found myself thinking things like, "the stove going to be fired up all day today anyhow, I'll put a pot of beans on and they'll be cooked by dinnertime...and maybe I'll make a pot of ginger tea, too."

The final stacked function of the stove that we have discovered is cat happiness. Having a fire in the stove makes Frankie the 

cat very, very happy (here she is sprawled out in the heat about four feet away from the back of the stove).  One downside, however, is that the dry wood heat has apparently made her very thirsty, and driven her to uncharacteristic water theivery.

*ruburbs=rural areas around a city

Stackcake and Bear Scat: Giving Thanks

Wednesday morning we harvested collards, mustard greens, celery, parsley, and lettuces from the garden (above), packed up some of our winter squash and pumpkins, and headed for my parents' home about an hour away for Thanksgiving.


My mom and dad live on 50 acres of mostly wooded land in a rural community* near the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. They bought their land 30 years ago, when land in the remote areas of western North Carolina was cheap and mostly wild.

My parents built their house --the house I grew up in--in 1979 and they live there still. They have been dedicated to preserving and caring for the land for the past 30 years. Over the course of my lifetime, I've seen the hardwood forest around my parents' home slowly regenerating as time passes and the earth heals itself from the injuries of logging and clearing sustained before our time. It has been a huge part of my education to see the plants and trees, animals and birds in the woods around my parents' house thrive and reproduce, creating and strengthening living systems.

The land around my parents' house is just as much home to my sister and me as the house itself -- we spent much of our childhoods outside in the woods, creek, and pasture land, and we know the land as intimately as if were another member of our family. We grew up learning the names of the trees and plants, animals, birds, and insects that shared our home. All of those living things still feel like they are part of my extended family -- all our relations as some native peoples would say.

Calling in the Ancestors

The day before Thanksgiving was my mom's birthday, and I had resolved to try my first recipe from my favorite new cookbook/history book (see my earlier post for details).

I wanted to bake a traditional Southern Appalachian stackcake with apples, but because my mom loves cranberries and because I already had some for Thanksgiving cranberry sauce, I wanted to incorporate cranberries, too.

So here(above) is my modified, nontraditional stackcake. I started with a recipe for Apple Stack Cake from the book I mentioned above, Joseph Dabney's Smokehouse Ham, Spoonbread, and Scuppernong Wine.

Here's some background on stackcake from Dabney:

"This is probably the most 'mountain' of cakes. . . .One story goes that since fancy 'in fare' wedding cakes were beyond the reach of many...mountain families, neighbor wives would bring in cake layers to donate to the bride's family. Author Elizabeth Dunn confirmed the tradition, declaring a bride's popularity was often measured by the number of layers in her cake! As the layers arrived, the bride's family would spread the apple filling between each."

Since Dabney notes that "while plain applesauce can be used in such cakes, dried apples offer a much stronger flavor and therefore were the choice of most mountain cooks," I decided to use some of the apples that Alan gleaned and dried earlier this summer. I made a slow-cooked apple sauce from the dried apples with cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves and then followed this recipe for the cake:

Haywood County Stack Cake

• 4 cups flour
• 1 tsp. salt
• 1/2 tsp. soda
• 2 tsp. baking powder
• 3/4 cup shortning (I used butter)
• 1 cup sugar
• 1 cup sorghum molasses (I used regular molasses)
• 1 cup milk
• 3 eggs
• 3 cups applesauce
  

Sift flour, salt, soda, and baking powder. Cream the shortning [butter] and add sugar, a little at a time, blending well. Add sorghum [or other molasses] and mix thoroughly. Add milk and eggs, one at a time, beating well until smooth. Pour 1/3 inch deep in greased 9-inch pans and bake until golden brown. when cool, stack the layers (around six) and use the applesauce between them.

According to Dabney, "This 1800s recipe was used for many years by Mrs. Dolphus Kerley of Waynesville, North Carolina, who died in January 1948, just shy of age ninety. The recipe actually came from her mother, Mrs. Drury Bigham, of the Allens Creek section of Haywood County, North Carolina."

I modified the recipe in a couple of ways. First, I used butter instead of shortening, which worked just fine. I substituted sugarcane molasses for the sorghum just because I didn't have any sorghum, but I fully intend to try it again with sorghum for a more traditional taste. Also, I decided to make fewer thicker layers -- a major departure from tradition -- and used a bundt pan for the top layer. I lined the bottom of the bundt pan (which became the top of the cake) with fresh apples, about 1/2 cup of my ginger cranberry sauce, and a little (less than a tablespooon of) raw sugar.

Also, the recipe doesn't give an oven temperature or time - I baked it at 350 degrees and it took about 50 minutes before a knife came out clean. If you made thinner layers as the original recipe suggests, I can't imagine you would want to bake it for more than 30 minutes.

Here's how the cake turned out (above). It was unbelievably, ridiculously delicious. It had a very old-fashioned molasses-ey spice cake flavor, and was moist and luscious with the apple and cranberry sauces seeping into the cake adding deep, tart fruity flavor to the sweetness of the cake. Holy smoke, it was good.

I really loved the taste, and of course I loved the feeling of holding a thread spinning back through the generations of food tradition: baking a cake in the same tradition nurtured and passed along by other women in these very mountains years ago. And I loved altering the tradition to suit the particular moment -- modifying ingredients, personalizing the recipe - stirring individual creativity into the rich blend of food heritage as have so many people who came before.

Cooking from an old recipe like this makes me feel connected to my ancestors - not my genetic ancestors necessarily, but all of the people who came before me.

Visiting the Wild Relations

Eventually, after a couple of days centered around the kitchen, featuring much enjoyment of the stackcake as well as baked winter squash from our garden, pumpkin pie, mashed potatoes and mushroom gravy, sweet potatoes, creamed corn, and a huge pot of slow-cooked collards from the photo at the top of this post, we needed to get out of the house and move our bodies.

We all went for a long walk in the woods the day after Thanksgiving, and came across two exciting things. First, we found a gorgeous hornets' nest. It seems to have been made by bald-faced hornets. It was incredibly light, with paper-thin walls made up of beautiful, overlapping swirls of grey and white. The nest was vacant and in pieces, which we picked up and carried home. Also we came across some fairly fresh bear scat full of persimmon seeds. Knowing that at some point in the recent past a black bear has passed through the very spot where I'm standing still sends a thrill through me. Thinking about the bear picking up persimmons off the ground, or climbing high up a persimmon tree to get to the sweet and sticky fruit feels to me like a little spell of connection with all of the wild animals in the woods. The forest was full of all kinds of activity -- but the hornets nest and the bear scat were the highlights -- little reminders of the presence of some of our wilder relations.

Large Enthusiastic Thank-yous

So I'm giving thanks for a few days spent with family and friends including a ritual of connection with the ancestors (baking stackcake) and moments of connection with all of our plant and animal relations (hornets, bears, trees, birds, woodland plants). I spent some time the day after Thanksgiving reading Ted Williams' The Thanksgiving Address, an interpretation of traditional Iroquois prayers of thanks-giving. The Thanksgiving Address is something that my dear friend Tyson shared with me from Williams' wonderful book, Big Medicine from Six Nations (pictured at left).

In the spirit of The Thanksgiving Address, I'll borrow the refrain from Ted Williams' version to offer my appreciation to the universe for the last few days:

Three times three times three large enthusiastic thank yous!

In gratitude...

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

*By "community" I mean a place too small to be called a town...

Adventures in birthday cake: natural food coloring, garden ingredients, and cold weather

My sister Mary celebrated her 30th birthday last week, and we planned festivities for her here in the valley, including a parade of birthday cakes over a four-day period.

I made two of the cakes. Mary's favorite color since she was a little girl has always been orange, and I was determined to create a nontoxic cake involving lots of orange.

In the past, I've made deep red frosting with butter, sugar, and beet juice, and I've played around with various spices (tumeric, paprika) to color foods, but they add their own strong flavor and aroma to whatever you are coloring. I already had a very specific flavor in mind (cinnamon rum butter cream) for the icing, so I faced a challenging task: achieve orange without compromising flavor.

Why not just squirt in some red and yellow food coloring from the little box of brights you can buy in your supermarket? Well, to start with, I like a challenge. But I also like to provide a birthday cake that does not contain known carcinogens and/or fossil fuels. Plus, I wanted ingredients from our garden to be incorporated somehow.

Have a little coal tar with your cake!

The seven main food-dying agents approved for dying food in the US are all toxic -- most are derived from coal tar and the couple that are not are synthetic. Coal tar in my food? No thanks! Confirming the intuitive, common sense notion that ingesting coal tar is probably not good for us, studies have shown that coal tar-based food colorings are carcinogenic. Commercial food colorings are also known to cause allergic reactions, and I would argue that whether we notice an "allergy" or not, our bodies are not meant to process coal tar or synthetic dyes.

In my search for natural food coloring ideas, I came across an interesting summary of old-timey food colorings from Elise Fleming, compiled from cookbooks dating back as far as 1380: natural food colorings of yesteryear. Of course the idea of squirting coal tar or synthetic dye into food is a relatively recent notion, and the old fashioned ways were not only healthier but much more romantic as well (pressing rose petals, for instance).

But back to the task at hand. Carrots were the obvious orange ingredient, and at first I thought of grating them. But the thought of chunky frosting with recognizable carrot pieces in it did not seem like it would fly with the intended cake recipient. Instead, I tried juicing a carrot and stirring that into the icing with a little cinnamon and extract of rum. Viola! It wasn't safety zone orange, but it was definitely orange. I brightened it up by using grated orange zest and tiny flecks of carrots (conveniently left over from the juicing process) like sprinkles.

I used carrots that we grew plus homegrown nasturtiums & zinnias as garnishes, so the garden was well represented. Starfruit added more pizazz, and were in the right color family. The flowers almost didn't make it onto the cakes, because we had our first two nights of freezing weather this weekend. But we managed to protect the tender plants through the first frosty nights, long enough for them to contribute to the festivities.

Here's how the cakes turned out:





















Saturday night's cake (above) and it's sister Sunday brunch cake (below).

Both are vegan double chocolate mocha cakes (recipe below) with cinnamon rum butter cream icing.

They're garnished with nasturtiums, zinnia, starfruit, finely chopped candied ginger, carrot flecks, and orange zest.

Sunday's cake also features local limbertwig apples dipped in dark chocolate.

The recipe for the cake is one that I actually got from my sister Mary (the birthday celebrator) some years ago. I added a cup of chocolate chips to make it double chocolate.

Mary's Famous Ultra-Moist Vegan Mocha Cake

3 cups unbleached all purpose flour
2/3 cup unsweetened cocoa powder
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. salt
2 cups raw sugar
1 cup sunflower oil
1 cup brewed coffee
4 tsp. vanilla
1 cup semisweet chocolate chips
4 Tbs. apple cider vinegar

1. Combine all dry ingredients and mix well.
2. Combine all wet ingredients EXCEPT the vinegar and mix well.
3. Mix the wet ingredients (again, excepting the vinegar) into the dry ingredients and mix until smooth.
   
4. Add the apple cider vinegar and stir.
5. Oil a baking pan and dust with cocoa.
   
6. Bake at 375 for 25-30 minutes until a knife inserted in the center of the cake comes out clean.
7. Cool, ice, cover with fruit, or otherwise fancify, and enjoy!
   
   

Cinnamon rum butter cream icing
I don't have exact proportions for this one...I just winged it.

Here's an approximate recipe:

1 stick of butter
Powdered sugar
1 tsp. extract of rum
1 tsp. cinnamon
A splash of half-and-half

Start with softening the butter. Mix in sugar until you have the desired consistency, add rum extract and cinnamon, and incorporate half-and-half to achieve exactly the right spreadability.

The birthday girl serving the second of the two cakes...