Granola

About 16 years ago I was busy at home when I got a surprise visit from an old medical school friend. She just dropped in and we had a brief though lovely visit. It was one of those moments, though, when I realized how much I'd changed in the small handful of years since medical school. No longer playing the role of fairly straight-laced urban medical school student, I had become something a lot closer to what I am today. To whit: she interrupted me barefoot, pregnant, and mixing up a big batch of home-made granola. How much more cliché could it get?

I'm not pregnant these days, and my feet prefer the comfort of cushioned footwear in the kitchen. But my granola-making has gone even more funky and back-to-the-land. It's not store-bought oat flakes I'm mixing up. It's local organic groats, spelt and Kamut that I've bought in bulk and flaked myself in my hand-cranked flaker, mixed with organic coconut, raw honey, unsprayed almonds and fruit grown on our own trees and dried in our own kitchen. This is the recipe I'm using today. Gosh, fresh flaked grains make a huge difference to the aroma of this stuff! I'm happily imagining many breakfasts to come.

Show your work

On the way to Calgary last week Noah was doing some math work. He was in a good mood and things were going well. He finds his current textbook (MathPower9) to be okay for the most part. It's rife with practice exercises, most of which we skip, but they're there in case he stalls for a bit. The math is logically presented and there's a fair bit of challenge. Much of it is review for Noah, but he's enjoying being systematic with his math work and filling his gaps.

But the textbook is made for classroom use and it's got a fair number of silly "working with a group" and "learning to solve problems together" activity sidebars. We normally ignore all the ancillary stuff.

So in the middle of one of these "learning to solve problems" pages Noah pulled out an puzzle problem to solve algebraically ... a number which, if thirteen is added to it and the result cubed and divided by three will equal half of itself times seventeen, or something like that. He formulated the algebraic equation, solved the problem and that was that.

And then he noticed the guidance preceding the actual problem, which said "formulate a strategy, test your strategy, evaluate the results, revise your strategy" and asked students to "create a flow chart to show your problem-solving process."

He quickly scrawled a flowchart in his notebook as a parody of the approach. It went like this:



which I thought showed off Noah's sense of humour and general-purpose mocking skills very nicely indeed. "I got the right answer. Isn't that enough?"

Here we go again

Most of our snow was gone by early April. We did, however, experience a brief snowstorm in Alberta in early June. So our snow-free months have been limited to July, August and September this year. This snow will likely be gone by this afternoon as temperatures warm up.

Snowballs are being made as I type.

Therapods, travels and More-Fun Parents

Chuck's clinic partner needed to be away this week, kind of at the last minute. I had planned to take Noah and Erin to Calgary for their lessons and to leave Fiona and Sophie home with their dad. But with Chuck taking 24-hour call and covering for his partner in the clinic, that was going to mean up to three days of them being home alone. So we went back to last year's Calgary regimen -- taking everyone along and spending two overnights in the motel so that the younger kids could relax and enjoy some R&R between the big drives. We picked Erin up after Writing Class at school on Thursday morning and headed out, catching the 11 a.m. ferry.

On the trip to Calgary we played a lot of word games. That's the great thing about having Sophie and Fiona along -- when Erin decides to nap most of the trip we still have enough people to play some fun games. We played a lot of Twenty Questions, but the game we spent the most time on was Categories. We used to call this the Camping Game, but we've broadened the challenge so now we just call it Categories.

Someone thinks of a category and gives a word that fits. Each other player guesses a word and is told whether theirs fit in the category or not. Then the person who is "it" gives another example that fits the category. From the right and wrong guesses the players gradually discern clues about what the category is. I love this game because it's not really competitive (it ends when everyone has guessed the category, or when everyone gives up) and because it's useful therapy for perfectionists -- only by making 'wrong' guesses can they get the clues needed to identify the category. Among the categories utilized by creative kids on our trip:

~ hollow things
~ things made famous by the internet
~ words where the last letter is 'e'
~ translucent things
~ things wider than they are tall
~ words with an odd number of syllables
~ words with 'r' in them
~ things that are often found in pairs
~ words from the lyrics of a particular song

The fun thing about this game is that the category seems painfully obvious to anyone who knows it, while the others get easily led astray by spurious associations suggesting completely unrelated tangents. When the starting word given is "apple" and both grape and orange are deemed correct, while truck and igloo are deemed wrong, you're unlikely to consider the category likely to be "words ending with the letter e." You'll be thinking fruit, or food, or plants.

In Calgary we ate and swam and shopped at IKEA. And watched Discovery Channel. And got Noah to his viola lesson, and Erin to her first violin lesson of the weekend, as well as to a rehearsal with her accompanist.

Discovery Channel was playing a lot of shows about dinosaurs this weekend. We've done dinosaurs in the past in this family. Far in the past. Noah was four the year we all learned the difference between centrosaurus and styracosaurus, between sauropods and therapods. It's been a while. Sophie caught only the tail end of dino-mania in this family, and Fiona missed it entirely. When I suggested that the Tyrrell Museum was only a couple of hours away and it might be a good opportunity for a repeat visit I expected Fiona and Sophie to be enthusiastic but figured it would be a hard sell with the older two. Suprisingly, though, Noah was keen; the Discovery shows had awakened a certain nostalgia in him for his days of dino-love and Tyrrell Museum rapture. And Erin was facing a dull day in Calgary otherwise, as her More-Fun-Parents (which is how she refers to her Calgary teachers / billet hosts) were both busy all day. So we decided to head east to Drumheller instead of driving straight west home on Saturday morning.

The museum was absolutely and totally fantastic, of course, just like the last time. It added a good 7 hours to our day, what with four extra hours of driving to get there and back to Calgary, and the time in the museum itself. Then there was the 7-hour drive home, during which we played more Categories, talked, listened to music and podcasts and such. So it was a long day. But it was fine. With the early start and the time-zone change we were home by 9 pm.

Erin usually claims the back bench in the minivan and typically spends more than half each trip slumped over asleep. Part way home Noah craned his neck towards the back seats and asked "where's Erin got to?" He had forgotten that the main reason we'd gone to Calgary was to drop Erin off there -- she hadn't been with us for hours!

The new arrangement with Erin living part-time in Calgary seems to be working well so far. She's motivated, practicing 4 to 6 hours a day. She began work on the Mendelssohn 1st movement last month (as well as a couple of new unaccompanied Bach movements) and is planning to perform it at the end of this month. I haven't heard it, but her accompanist says it's coming along just fine. The two of them also hatched some plans for piano coaching for Erin; Erin has been suffering ambivalence about piano. Julie gave her a bit of a nudge, suggesting she bring a couple of specific pieces to work on in three weeks, a movement from a Mozart Sonata and the Bartok Rumanian Dances. She's getting about four hours of violin teaching each time she's in Calgary and is being treated to dinners out, concerts, social opportunities and occasional extra violin classes here and there. While I wish there were a way to give her orchestral and chamber music experience that's pretty much impossible on a part-time basis. We can't have it all. I'm thrilled that she's getting consistent teaching with regular follow-up so that she can actually make significant technical and musical progress.

Dealing with the all-day eastbound Greyhound bus, and the overnight westbound bus, is getting pretty routine for Erin. On her trip to Calgary at the end of September she also had to deal with some fairly complicated and somewhat unpredictable public transit routes and schedules within the city -- after dark on her own with suitcase and violin in tow. And she managed.

Noah is getting monthly lessons only. This was not optimal for Erin, and it's not optimal for him, but he's getting better at making it work. He's done some excellent remediation of his note-naming and pitch-reading skills. He's paying more attention to details and to consistently implementing the guidance he's given at his lessons. Taking more responsibility for working on things that don't come easily. There's been a big jump in his maturity over the past few months.

Pantry joy

This is what keeps me going through two hundred pounds of pears, recurrent apple-picking sessions, the grinding of spelt and wheat, the hours of collating, sorting and hauling around bulk orders of nuts and grains. The pleasure of a pantry that looks like this. Glass jars, food sorted and ready and waiting, to last us the whole winter.

And see -- my Eschenfelder has arrived! We had fresh-flaked oats for breakfast. Deelish!

Levitation

Thirteen

Another teenager in the family. A handsome one, too, if I do say so.

Yes, that's the Portal cake, painstakingly decorated by Sophie.

Pears done!

We finished with the last of the pears today. We spent the afternoon picking an awful lot of tart apples. Then we combined them in a 3:1 ratio with the pears. We filled the cider press five times just today, and a few more times over the past week or so. Our freezer is now filled with 75 litres of lovely fruit juice. We also have a few gallon jars and bags of dried pear slices.

There's plenty of opportunity for more apple juice in the weeks to come, but we may call it a year on the juice-pressing. It's been a big week.

Pear math

Eight slices per pear. Fourteen pears per tray. Six trays on the dehydrator. Eight batches so far. That equals 5,376 slices over the past five days. Sophie probably contributed a third of those. Fiona loves the "pear puzzling" task of placing the slices on the trays so that we can fit in the maximum number. We've also pressed some apple-pear juice which quickly dispensed with hundreds more pears. The freezer is filling with juice. The bags and jars are filling with dried slices.

Next up, mid-season apples. After that, prune-plums. And then finally it will be late-season apples. Fall fruit is bountiful and wonderful this year. We feel so lucky.

Soon we will take delivery of 120 pounds of locally grown organic grains and lentils. Six weeks after that our bulk nut order will arrive. The new hens will start laying soon. It's harvest season.

Twenty years ago fall didn't mean harvest to me at all. It just meant cheaper fresher food in the grocery stores. My whole orientation to life, food and the natural world has changed so much over the past 20 years.

Look what I ordered the other day. Fresh-rolled oats are such a totally different food from the sawdust you buy in stores. Mmmm....

Un-running update

It was six months ago today that I started running. Unfortunately, I basically stopped running about a month ago due to recalcitrant hip pain. I did a few short easy runs after I got hurt but I ended up in a lot of pain. So I stopped running at the end of August. My pain improved about 50% but my improvement stalled after that. I can walk with little to no limp most of the time, but any jogging or anything that puts more force on my leg than normal standing and walking is totally out of the question -- the pain is immediate. So no half marathon for me.

After a couple of weeks of zero running with no improvement I went to see a chiropractor, a runner himself, with lots of knowledge about gait and sports injuries. He was mystified -- I have complete painless range of motion and good strength, but persistent weight-bearing pain, and it hasn't responded to the manipulations and exercises he's suggested.

So at his request I'm waiting to get a bone scan to rule out a femoral neck stress fracture. In the meantime I am needing a lot of help with day-to-day stuff like carrying bags of pears and groceries, moving the fruit press around, hauling bags of chicken feed, lifting the apple press, emptying out the cat litter, moving the dog food to the basement and such-like. It's really frustrating. I'm so accustomed to being able to lift and carry and haul and move stuff. I don't like asking for help. And to be honest my family isn't so great about actually helping even when asked. I need to keep working on them -- but it's hard when I don't like having to ask. I suppose I should welcome this challenge as an opportunity for personal growth.

Dorodango tips

Many of you have asked about how we make our dorodangos. You can try dorodango.com for some good links and basic information. That's where we started.

We're certainly not experts. We're each now four mudballs into the endeavour. Our efforts are still rudimentary at best. But we're improving! See the photo for a comparison of my first doro (on the left) to today's as-yet-unpolished effort. Lots smoother! So, for what it is worth, here is some of what we've discovered.

Put your dirt through a sieve. A coarse sieve is fine for the initial muck-ball formation. Your soil can be fairly sandy if that's what you've got, but get the roots and leaves out. A finer sieve, and use of soil with a higher clay content, is best for the later stages.

About the various stages. There are basically three. First you start with wet dirt and your ball will feel jiggly and mucky. Handle it plenty, encouraging it to be a round shape. You can dust it with a bit of dry dirt once or twice, but don't do more than that. Adding too much dry dirt on the surface too soon can lead to cracking. We handle our jiggly mud for 20-30 minutes, at the end of which it's still slightly glistening with wetness on the surface. It seems like nothing has happened, but lingering at this stage is fun (muck!) and it seems to prevent cracks from developing. Don't squeeze to get rid of the water -- subsequent applications of dirt will draw moisture out; squeezing will cause cracking.

During the next stage you add dustings of dirt to form a proto-capsule, which will make the dorodango quite firm by the time you are done. Use fine-screened dirt with a reasonably high clay content. Again, don't squeeze, and don't hurry. Trickle on a tiny mountain of dry dirt, and brush most of it off gently with your thumb. Rotate and repeat. Use your palm to gently smooth off the excess. Once all trace of actual wetness is gone and the shell of the ball is feeling fairly strong, get a small jar about three-quarters of the diameter of the dorodango. Place the open end of the jar against part of the dorodango and move it in small circles extremely gently to smooth the damp-but-not-moist ball. Continue over the entire surface.

If it's not totally smooth now, you can place it in a closed Ziploc bag or under a jar until the surface feels a bit moist again, then repeat a bit more of the proto-capsule step.

Now the dorodango should rest for a while. An hour in the sun outside, or a few hours inside. It will shrink and firm up, hopefully without cracking. (Our cracks have all occured within the first 20-30 minutes.)

The final capsule creation is something we haven't really mastered yet. Glossiness and strength seem to be a bit of an artisans' secret. Tips or suggestions are welcome. We've managed a sort of semi-gloss finish on a couple of ours. We can only dream of something approaching the lacquer-like finish on the ones on the dorodango.com site.

Pear production

We're into day three of pear processing here. All six trays of the dehydrator have been loaded up yet again.

We pulled out our copy of On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen" by Harold McGee to figure out how to handle the ripening. Ninety-five per cent of our pears are still not ripe, which is a blessing. If we can continue to ripen a steady trickle of 4 or 5 pounds a day, they'll be easy to deal with. For now we have a bag at room temperature with a few ripe ones to encourage "climacteric ripening" courtesy of ethylene gas. We also have two bags at cellar temperature and the remainder outside in a chest cooler which the bears have so far not discovered. This is working well so far.

Dorodango morning

Look at my finished dorodango this morning! Oh my gosh, we are seriously addicted to these things. Talk during polishing of our imperfect balls was of "next time" and "by the time I've made thirty" and "when I get better at this."

We've hatched plans to bring 50 litres of dirt inside for the winter to continue production. Maybe we won't be doing much knitting this year.

Dorodango

	We started making dorodangos today. We had been meaning to try this for a few months. Somehow the summer flew by without us getting to them. Things are fairly quiet this weekend, so we dived in. We started with the dirt-pile left in front of the deck. It's smaller, but it's still there. We picked up some dirt from the dirt pile. Sieved it into a dishpan. Added some water.
		Then we packed the muck into balls that fit in our palms. And patted and juggled and rotated our balls for a while until they started to feel less wet inside. About the duration of a single Teaching Company lecture, which was nice and convenient.
		As the dorodango started feeling a bit more solid we began dusting it with little bits of sifted dirt and brushing the excess off. Over and over and over again. Good company helps. We have three of these things on the go. One is mine, one is Sophie's and one is Fiona's. Erin, off in Calgary, is missing the opportunity of rolling her eyes as we enthuse over our mud balls. Noah offers his own brand of disinterested enthusiasm. Seems like an oxymoron, but he pulls it off.
		Finally our dorodangos got firm and dry enough that dirt would no longer stick to them. We set them aside in ziploc bags to rest and "sweat" a little. We want any shrinkage to occur gradually, and before we begin polishing the capsule on the outside. The balls are curiously heavy and solid-feeling already. This is a very fun project. We hope to do some polishing tonight and tomorrow. Stay tuned.

Ap-pearant bounty

Today we cleaned a pear tree for a seasonal resident. It took four of us an hour and a half to pick about 200 pounds of pears. For the homeowners we're providing a service -- ridding their tree of fruit they can't use and which would attract bears and wasps. We get free fruit if we want, or fruit to donate to community groups.

Whatever shall we do with all these pears? People in this family are not fond enough of pears to justify doing much if any canning.

They need a few days to ripen off the tree. Then I suppose we'll start madly dehydrating them and pressing them to make cider. We did a few gallons of apple cider last week with the early apples. A combination of apple and pear will give a nice tart cider that we can donate to the preschool. But I'm still not sure how we'll use so many!

This is an amazing year for fruit in our area. The huckleberries were lush in the sub-alpine during August and the apple, pear and plum trees are so laden with fruit that their branches are breaking under the weight. And yet the bears have yet to descend from the mountains. Every morning I wake up and check the fruit trees first thing, and every morning they're still bending under the weight of their ripening fruit.

Our Gravenstein apple tree has normally been cleaned of still-small unripe apples by the end of August thanks to ursine visitors. This year the heavy branches are brushing the ground, the apples are so thick they almost seem to outnumber the leaves. And the fruit is juicy and almost maximally sweet.

Whoot! Wheat!

I thought I had missed out. I had tried to buy a share in the Kootenay Grain CSA but hadn't heard back from them last spring. But today at the Garlic Festival I found out they still have a few shares available. I couldn't get out my chequebook fast enough. I paid the better part of $200, but for that price I'll get 140 pounds of organically and locally grown hard spring and hard winter wheat, Red Fife wheat, spelt, khorasan (a.k.a. Kamut®), oats and small green lentils.

"Local" in this instance means the Creston Valley, the closest grain-growing land to us. It's about 100 miles as the crow flies, longer by road. But the grain will be travelling from Creston to Nelson by sailboat, so there is really no environmental cost to the transportation.

I've been following the evolution of this Grain CSA, the first in Canada, on the "Deconstructing Dinner" radio show / podcast for over a year. I'm thrilled to finally be a part of it.

An actual homeschooling day

I use this blog mostly to keep notes about noteworthy things. It's rather telling, then, that I feel compelled to post about the fact that we did some actual homeschooling today. The sort of thing you could write down in a journal, have a teacher-friend or a grandparent or skeptical co-worker look over and they wouldn't immediately feel the need to start "expressing concern" or to call a truant officer. All told today the younger generation in this family:

Practiced violin, viola and piano -- with the small person getting proper parent guidance on both her instruments
Helped make a batch of root beer
Picked and pressed cider from a press-full of apples (3 gallons)
Did various levels of algebra learning
Practiced handwriting
Did a short unit in a language arts workbook
Read some biology
Reviewed the previously-studied written French and moved ahead to new stuff
Played math-friendly board games

Later this evening we'll finish our day with readalouds -- Story of the World Volume 1 (this series of books is in re-runs for Fiona, with Sophie listening along again) and some historical fiction from the "Dear Canada" series.

Now it must be confessed that it was mostly the younger two kids who did this stuff. My layabout teen and pre-teen mostly practiced violin (the former) and fondled the computer mouse (the latter). But still, not everyone is going to be "on" at the same time, on the same day. I'm merely happy that I managed to not only initiate a couple of activities but to respond with enthusiasm and due diligence to requests for school-type things, and still have enough creativity and energy to do a decent job practicing with my kid.

Root beer

We've done ginger beer a few times, using lemons and fresh ginger. It's wonderful and not very complicated at all. I think you can use large plastic soda bottles to bottle it, but for us half the fun is filling and capping all those non-twist-off Corona beer bottles we've been hoarding for years. They've held lagers and ales and most recently batches of ginger beer. Thanks to my friend Rosalie for turning us onto ginger beer!

Today we tried root beer. Traditionally sarsaparilla root was used to make it, but for most of the last century "root beer" has been made from natural and artificial flavours. While we have wild sarsaparilla (sometimes used as a substitute for the Central American variety) growing on our property the kids really just wanted something fun that was similar to, though less sweet than, commercial root beer.

So we started at the beer & wine supply store. We found a bottle of root beer Royal Old Fashioned Soda Extract and basically just used the recipe on the back. We mixed 8.5 Litres of water with 1 kg of sugar. Then we dissolved 1 tsp. of beer yeast in 250 ml of lukewarm water, then pitched that in. Washed and filled the bottles, then capped them. To allow the yeast to develop these bottles stay undisturbed at room temperature for 10 days, and then go to a cool dark location (the shop) until we're ready to drink them.

This root beer will be slightly fizzy, more like beer than soda. If we want more of a fizz, we can use sparkling wine yeast.

Taste test in a couple of weeks!

First Corazón

First Corazón youth choir rehearsal of the year today. Noah is now part of the choir. He'll be in the 2nd soprano section, as his voice is still young and high. He tried alto briefly today at Allison's suggestion but that's definitely not his range. There's a short performance in 13 days. About 70% of the choir is made up of returning singers, so they'll be singing three songs from last year, and the newbies will just have to do their best to power-learn and be shored up by the veterans.

Everyone was asked to introduce themselves by name and share one thing about themselves. Erin said:

"I'm Erin, and I take the overnight bus from Calgary to get here for rehearsals."

Haha.

She loved her weekend in Calgary and all her lessons and practice time. Her bus trip home was relatively uneventful. Sharing jellybeans and listening to tales of kidney stones and woe with a seatmate in the middle of the night doesn't count as particularly eventful in Erin's book.

She is a violin maniac these days. Worked on technique exercises on just one string for two and a half hours tonight. Hopes to get to the other three strings tomorrow. Of course tomorrow includes a shift at work and the first day of school, whatever that turns out to be.

Wind

Thursday I left Fiona and Sophie home alone. I was on my way to Calgary with Erin and Noah, it was a nice day, Chuck was supposed to be home any time, and I had a ferry to catch. So I left, which I've done for short stints before, reminding them of various safety issues, of people to call if they needed help. Within the hour a freak windstorm blew up, the power went out, and trees began crashing down around the property. They were "a little bit scared." I'll say. Our house is surrounded by 50-100 ft. trees. We have an arborist friend who had looked them all over last year, felled the older ones that were most at risk of falling on the house. But still. Debris was falling like rain. At least two trees fell within view of the house.

Chuck had managed to phone them (the phone service later went out) and had told him he was on his way home.But the road was closed due to a tree with live wires in it down on the road. He parked, bushwhacked around the tree and hiked home. He got the girls packed up and evacuated them to a friends' place, retracing the bushwhacking with them and their overnight backpacks.

In town the situation was if anything worse, but they were safely with friends now. They quite enjoyed the adventure. They stayed 24 hours with their friends, returning home after the road was cleared and power restored.

The storm brought down dozens of trees around town as well, including many giant cottonwoods and cedars along the lakefront.

Several fell on trailers, sheds, campers and atop or near houses but no one was injured. Beneath this one is the remains of a park bench:


Fiona took me around town today to survey the damage. She was quite excited to show me all the mayhem I had missed.