Son of a Preacher Man

I have said "You're Preaching to the Converted" or have had it said to me at least twenty times this week. Conservatively. Whole lotta defensiveness. Posturing, even. What's going on?

One theory I have is that it's the fault of social media based communication. If you don't actually see me, hear me, talk to me, or come to my house you might not know details about me and you might say something silly, like, have you ever had a tamale? Not knowing that I've owned a Mexican restaurant and that I've been in Mexico more times than, well, most Mexicans I know. But that's just oversight. And maybe a little awkward.

In addition, if you're not clear with your written skills or your reading for comprehension skill you might use someone else's platform/wall/facebook page as the place to speak your peace which makes that person think you're telling them what's UP. And they know what's UP. You're organic? I'm so organic that my chickens are wearing hemp feathers! Don't tell me about organic! That's misguided and inappropriate but easily overlooked.

The Trade Show

Modern Manners and the professional barter. Why do I roll my eyes at the idea of trade? Was I brought up on the Art of the Deal and too much Trump in the 80s, where things were dollar for dollar and dog eat dog? It's exciting, a job well done and check in hand. I don't really want to give you my cow for that handful of beans. Where's the fun in that? And I usually end up missing my cow and hating the beans. You know?

Trade is having a slithery renaissance of sorts. I feel like it has always been around in my chosen careers (food/bar, events and writing are targets for tab runners) but it's nearly preferred as a means to commerce these days what with all the blather about the rotten economy. But until we're ALL doing the Trade Dance? It's awkward. Or you're not doing it right. Or you don't have anything I want. No offense, but I don't want for anything really. And if I do want something, I'll just go and buy it. With the money you owe me.

Holey Buckets!

I used to say holy buckets! and thought it was like holy cats! or a clean sub for holy sh**! but I'm starting to think about HOLES in the bucket. And I like that metaphor.

I can't help noticing that a lot of people are talking about 'no time', 'no energy', 'no money'...I have a guy who works at the Hacienda who is a great, creative, well read technical director of a theater department at a big University. He can do anything. Build anything. Fix anything. Rewire anything. And yet I hear him talk about how he "didn't go to college, so I'll never get ahead..." and "I loved Santa Fe but I didn't think I'd ever earn enough money to live there..." and "I've always earned my age, and I always will. "

He's not as Eyeore as all that sounds, but my ears prick when I hear someone cutting their feet off because they have decided that they won't be able to walk the yellow brick road, so why bother. Carving your own road blocks is a full time job and a huge waste of energy. And it's not about manifesting money, that's a bucket without a bottom as far as I'm concerned. It's about CREATING THE LIFE YOU WANT. Do we even know what that is? If you don't want to live in Santa Fe, that's fine. But if you do but can't ever see how you'd manage? That's a dark fruitless yearning. Where does that come from? I investigate.

I often see people tying their own nooses. I've done it a ton. I've set bear traps for myself, dug holes I couldn't get out of, bought my ticket for the ride on the sinking boat. But I stopped. I sat down, reassessed and cut the fat. Shut down all the chatter in my head and externally. And really looked--- REALLY at what I could do without.  I know the feeling of coming to the end of the month and having $5 until payday. And. It. Sucks. (and why I prefer to make my own money and improv my finances, paychecks and me? Not since 1995)

But I had to call myself out and find the holes in my bucket. Some are small and repairable, like---um, spending $300 a month on WINE. Stop it. (or, in my case, slow it down...) Or maybe weaning off the friends and family who drain the crap out of you. Or turning off the news feed because it makes you insane. And guess what? none of this feels like a sacrifice. 

Giving up grain the first couple weeks was a little sketchy but not nearly as Trainspotting as I thought it would be. The upside is that I have fewer cravings in general which has rolled into less dairy (to melt on the beautiful crust of something) less late night nibblies, fewer 3pm comas, more big piles of veggies grilled, pureed, steamed, raw---and a ton of sustainable energy that I can use for things that I like to do--
like shagging the gardener and making fences out of old branches.

The upsides are plentiful for the other things I cut to. Less really is more. Picture yourself cutting the sandbags off your balloon and soaring. We have been so programmed in our society to think about what we need to get, gain, have---that we don't even stop to think about what we could get rid of. And oddly, that is so much more rewarding.

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I don't have any money! Says the guy with an iPhone, wi-fi, a new Macbook Pro, a $5/day coffee habit, a new car payment and $150 cableTV bill. 

"I'm so exhausted!" says she who fuels her body with crackers, snackies, junk, sugar and caffeine.


"I don't have time for ...(going back to school, learning another language, Tango lessons, volunteering, pottery classes, travel)" says the one with a three hour a day TV fanny.
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I say check yo self. You might be surprised.

No substitutions.

For years I pleaded with customers in my restaurant to not substitute. No changes. Don't recook my ideas. No I will not put the lavender sauce from the halibut on your steak. Gross. Thankfully we didn't have too many whiner diners.

But now I'm looking for a substitute in my own life. For a most beloved, cherished friend.

Wheat.

Namely, bread. My bread. A couple years ago at the Hacienda I started making artisan bread. From one recipe in one book. We clicked. And I was soon known up here for my fennel and lavender organic whole grain crusty loaves. (there isn't a bakery for 50 miles so things like this make a big splash) then Jamie Oliver and his ease and Italian ideas showed me how to make thin, wafer crisp pizza crust. Then someone built that big giant fired pizza oven in my back yard. I had arrived!

And so it seemed had my belly.

Now, I'll admit this isn't the fault of recent bread prep. Back in the restaurant days there were many a night that dinner WAS a loaf of bread, a jug of wine and thou. OH and maybe some melty stinky cheese. My love affair was very French at the time and it filled a yearning and seemed good reward for a long day's work. Any chefs reading this know that we can have terrible eating habits. Pressed for time and often in close reach of carbs on the go...and well, it can be a career that  is driven by late nights of libations---and stress, also gut busters. But sometimes all that cooking kills appetite. You just need fuel. And that's pasta. Bread. Those roasted garlic mashed potatoes or the gorgonzola grits.  Sometime around 2003 I gained 30 pounds. Ack! At 36. And well, that was 8 years ago. Clearly, it is mine. But I don't have to keep anything I don't want. So let's see what else we can do.

But I retired from the resto biz. I have access to acres of greens from dandelion to sweet potato vines. I grow my own chickens for meat and eggs. I live in farm country and am a member of a really great CSA. I run my own little farmette.  feel great, don't get me wrong. Energy is strong and sustainable through the day. No crap out 3pm coma. No hardly any PMS. Rarely if ever get colds, skin clear, and my seasonal allergies are only rotten in May. And they go untreated by OTC drugs much to the frustration of my friend Sandy. But that stuff makes me feel funny. As does restaurant food, anything in a box or from a drive thru. I'm all natural, baby. But I still felt like a jug. An olive jug. Turkish.

Is it because I still found myself rolling out yet another version of my dough? Black sesame and flax flatbread with fresh mozzarella and heirloom okra and tomato oil. Rosemary and arugula pizza with cracked black pepper and shaved parmesan. I think it is. I'm addicted.

So since I'm not a dieter and I think all that South Beach, Atkins is too extreme and not sustainable for most folks, and full of a lot of crap that isn't real food. I was happy to find this book Primal Blueprint from Mark Sisson. The cookbook is laid out well, has really creative ideas for that hopeless, HOW AM I GONNA GET OFF PASTA panic (use zucchini with the mandoline) and other Whiner Diner bargaining. I'll just have it this once. And his blog started it all and it's FULL o' good science and myth debunking wisdom. Which I like. I gotta know the WHY. I like to know why grain isn't our friend. Isn't it the staff of life? Amor es el pan de la vida and all that? I know why corn is bad for cows, but I don't know why wheat is not working for me. They are both grains by the way. For those of you thinking it's veg. It's a sugary fattening grain. That's why they give it to cows. To fatten them up. So why would you be any different? But these NEVER diets do nothing but create craving and cheating. The prohibition model never works. you have to change your taste buds and your habits or you'll always be that guy who went to rehab but who can't stop talking about how he'd love to burn one right now. It's annoying.

It's a little heartbreaking. The goodbye to wheat. I don't eat any other carbs...some squash and maybe a weekly quinoa, but I think my carb cravings were sated by BREAD. It's been 10 days. I'm not gonna lie. It's kinda hard. But looking for distraction this week from a tragedy that I can't talk about right now because I'm not ready...I started making bread substitutes. I don't own a scale but I've lost two inches off my waist, so I might be on to something. I sort of feel like one grain craves another. And not having bread (crack) in there has quelled the wine crave (a little) and since bread likes cheese so much, knocking off one ignores the other. I have a little fresh mozz every OTHER day. I'm surprised at how many ridiculous combinations of foods I ate the first few days trying to 'satisfy' the hole on my bread plate. I seem to be past that a little. So here's my spinach pumpkin seed "bread" stuffed with my neighboring farms veg. English cucumbers, heirloom tomatoes, beets and yes, mozz. So it's not just 'carb free' as the beets and tomatoes and even the seeds have traces. But too much depriving makes Jack fall off the wagon. I'll keep you posted. This was delicious, wonderfully textured and satisfying. Way more than the bloat and crash and weird tongue feel of a sandwich. Soy flour btw was used just to bind with the egg to give some holdable form. There are 8 gr of carb in 1/4 cup so this coming in at 4? No problem. And keeping it under 30 for weight loss...it can add up quickly. Again, it's about changing your palate.

Frozen organic spinach drained and sauteed beet tops, mixed with one org. egg, 1/4 cup of  raw pumpkin seeds (ground in coffee mill), 1/8 cup of SOY flour, salt, pepper, cumin. Make patties and crisp in olive oil in a pan. Press down hard to thin about 2 min on each side. Stuff with your choice of grilled veg and good quality meat. No need for condiments as the veg are plenty moist. Serve with roasted cauliflower, which in it's nutty perfection is a perfect sub for chips or fries.

L'arte di non fare niente

The art of doing nothing. For the love of Italy, I am very bad at this mantra.

I have to sit on my hands, cut my wings, zip it, walk away, do a lot of counting to 10. And I know better. I know that oft times there is nothing that I can do which will change the sitch. For the better anyway. I'm accustomed to putting gas on the firepit but diffusing things has not been my bomb squad. But I'm trying to leave that behind with the childish, impish youth and naivete of ---43.

Sometimes you have to work with what is right in front of you. Our creative DIY resource, event planner and It Girl for the Hacienda writes about how her practical (and for the record dashingly handsome) boyfriend says The Simplest Answer is Often the Best One...and as a homesteader, entrepreneur and city chica turned farm gal? I gotta work with what is. Not with what was supposed to be. Not even really what I wanted and almost never what I imagined. (I can credit 'better than my imagination' ONCE exactly, in a word, France)

So when the river keeper in my town and knower of all things water told me to DO NOTHING about the spring that had popped up in my yard...I was happy. Namely because I've been trying for 2 weeks to get someone to tell me what I should do. **And for the record if you have a job title with the words WATER MANAGEMENT in it, you should know what to do with ground water**, so yes. Natural phenom. What is a private resident to do? Dig a $5000 hole? yea, no. Don't worry about it, he said. It's not near your house. So yay!

I was free. It's not my big fat responsibility to change/help/pay for everything. Who knew?

Years as a self trained chef and restaurateur gave me improv skills to mimic the second city comedy troupe. Cake not cooked in the middle? It's a souffle. Tomatoes too soft for salsa? It's gazpacho. Wine turned rancid? Make sangria.

These are life skills we can all benefit from. Cuz the only way to get through some of these more silly times? Make lemonade. Kegs full.

So here's todays Hacienda Improv. The pork belly I was curing for bacon has had too much time in it's salt crust and the air. So may I introduce to you, my first prosciutto/pancetta. It's all in how you look at it.

Sometimes you have to cover one eye, dim the lights and change the soundtrack--but hey, what is life if not a little bit of theater? La dolce vita may not be "realistic" but I for one am sick of that word. Aren't you? Here's to fantasy.

Unraveling

Maybe it's the end of summer blues. The drooping sunflowers, the spindly tomato plants, the relentless heat baking my scalp. Do I really want to plant a bunch more seedlings for a fall harvest (aka fall dinner buffet for critters) ---? Or should I just stick to growing chickens. Do I want the next group of Rhode Island Reds brought over now to start raising, or should I wait until I get back from the Caribbean. Where I'm not going, but if I'm warming baby chicks I can't even pretend I am. 

Maybe it's the crazy chicken Itty Bitty who comes to my garage every morning and screams for 3 hours that jangles my nerves. Maybe it's all the random workers that cruise in and out of the farm.
The ones who say they want to work on Monday when they call Sunday but then call at 8 on Monday and say their other job needs them and could they come Tuesday and then they call back at noon on Monday and say they got off early and can they come now. To which I say, NO. No matter how much work I have for them to do. You have to maintain an aura of control and mystery as a woman boss in the day labor immigrant camp. I know I have neither but that's not the point. 

The Dearly Deported Calixto

Maybe it's time for a new lover. An oh-good-it's-raining-all-day-let's-stay-in-bed lover. Sigh. The last one who really made me want to hibernate got deported, I think some of you will recall. And others have been empty calorie replacements. A power bar for brunch instead of the eggs benny you really wanted. It's very disappointing. And so I've just decided to give up on brunch all together, if you get what I mean. So yea. Maybe I'm hungry. Starved.





Maybe it's reading about the tragic rise and fall of Amy Winehouse. Which is so not my usual fare. I am rarely sidetracked by rock stars and those who have to be crazy or smoke heroin to create magic, but looking at her before and after pics were compelling. The perfect train wreck. But it's painful and glam. Which I've been a little short on.

And lots of friends always say, what you're doing is so cool. You've got the life! And yes, it is interesting and more fulfilling for me than city life. But I'm having one of those weeks with too much chicken poo, too many feathers, too much digging, cleaning, marketing, water (too little from the sky or too much from broken pipes) too many bee stings, too many rocks in my boot. So when this very nice lady named Becky wrote and asked if she could come visit my homestead because she's planning on doing the same in the near future, I told her of course. But also told her to be careful what she's asking for. I said it tongue in cheek, but I really wanted to tell her this:

Dear Becky,
Just a couple things: 
Always make sure you turn on the lights when you go to the bathroom at night because sometimes there will be a mouse in the toilet swimming around and you will certainly not want to discover that after you've been seated. Also remember that said mouse and co. come in through the back door where you like to let the breezes from the west come in and where the wood pile has been stacked conveniently to stoke the fireplace that you will need for the insanely too long and too cold for Georgia winters. I don't know what your marital status is but last year I dated a tree surgeon to offset the cost of wood. This year I may upgrade to a logger, or better yet the guy who owns my propane company. 


If the chickens aren't making eggs, be sure to check for the big 6ft long rat snake who coils up in the shed. He eats the eggs, but also helps with rodents, so we have a deal. Also make sure the coop door is closed because the coyotes come to eat rodents too, but if they can't find them they'll eat the chickens unless there's a raccoon in there, then he'll eat them. And you'll think the rabbits are cute but then they'll eat all your Korean cucumber heirloom seedlings and you'll kind of wish the coyotes would eat the rabbits.

the infamous Mowgli

Your "gardeners" and helpers will be an array of characters from local color to immigrants of varying legal status. You will delude yourself into thinking you can DIY all of it. Everyday. Then you'll realize that it took you 2 hours to dig a hole and you'll want helpers. The Guatemalans are better workers for sure, so learn Spanish. And if you can, a couple words of an indigenous dialect. At the end of the day I've found it just as easy to understand that as the native tongue of the Appalachia. Some of them will like to stop by after hours. I'll leave it up to you if you want to entertain. But remember the winters. Central American boys put off a fair amount of body heat. The idea of "affordable" labor is bullshit. They want $12-$15/hr to run a shovel. But you'll decide it's worth every cent. Do NOT offer them alcohol. Just trust me.


There is not anything to do at night but you'll work yourself to the bone each day and will be glad that there are no social engagements to attend after 6pm. Thursday nights there is a Barn Sale and you can go mingle and get some livestock and you can wear what you always wear...jeans cut off at the knee and muck boots. Most folk will be younger than 16 or older than 65. So you may not be too worried about fashion, but it is hard to break the habit when you actually do need to appear in public. Keep a closet of "real" clothes. Practice walking in heels from time to time. 


Have fun and I'm sure I won't answer have cell service where I'll be on my barefoot cruise in St. Martin, but enjoy your pioneering woman experience and I'll see you if when I come back. 


Michele

Slaughter House

There I was, slaughtering a chicken in the rain. Racing the lightening and the yellow jackets. My helper is my Mexican butcher who has skills in cutting but not so much in the neck slitting. I thought he'd be my man Friday. But with so many things around here, I am. So he's the foot holder, I'm the Matador. And eviscerater. It is gross, but I grow my own meat, and well, that's part of it.

He goes in to fetch the other stock pot of boiling water for the feather plucking and notes a press clip photo on the wall in the kitchen about one of there restaurants I had.

...he says, "Who is THAT in that article? You? Wow. How long ago was that taken!? You used to be pretty!"

Really? And we're done.

I don't know how to respond to that. I should at 44. Humor, would be handy, no? But somehow in the rain, with feathers and gizzard parts stuck to my face and my hand up the vent of a hen, I didn't feel 'funny'. Or pretty. I was however holding a cleaver.

Sure, this guy is a dumbass. Yea, but still. I don't want to be USED TO BE anything. I am now here and in the flesh and it's very, very valid. And I wonder if this is just the downfall of the human animal to be captivated by packaging. Certainly is a North American pastime. What is it...let's change it.

Spanx to squeeze in and lift up. Minimizer bras for the well endowed. Padding for the less than robust. . Heels for petites. Flats for too talls. Bleach. Dyes. Hair extensions. Tweezers. Acrylic nails. Tanning cream on the desk bound. Straighteners for the curled. Sedatives for the overly excitable, crunky coffee drinks for the chilled out.

We do the same to our food. So that most of it is "food" much the same way for most of my life I was a "blond"...

For the record, I'm not immune to aesthetics. I love beauty just like the rest of us. But I realize that just because I like brilliant musicians, doesn't mean I can hang in the orchestra pit.  I can still appreciate the symphony. I feel defensive in saying this but I like who I am now. No, really! Not a sit around in the mirror and admire my sexy ankles and good hair kind of way. But a, "this is cool that I am raising my own food launching my third business teaching people things meeting cool folk I feel really calm in my mind and productive sort of wise" way. And I've stop coloring my hair and that saves time, money and who knows what chemicals from seeping into my cranium.

I'm weary of all the packaging. The sneaky marketing of sinister foods lurking behind glossy boxes and cellophane, and the powdering, augmenting and contorting of women. It's time to get down to the real. No more falsies.