Wednesday, September 23, 2009
I
was reading back through here and came to the section where I was puzzling
about the weather last year—trying to figure out how I could be the same
phenomenon as the weather, as my vision suggested. I think I’ve figured it
out—it’s the metabolism thing. “The metabolism of the grass and the metabolism
of the horse are one and the same”. The metabolism of the human being and the
metabolism of the weather are one and the same. We represent the metabolism of
Gaia.
Monday, September 21, 2009
I
was thinking about the John Livingston essay again and his idea that we “downshift”
into the egoic self. I had a different way of conceptualizing it flash in my
mind. It kind of reverses the whole concept. I pictured the energy of Gaia as a
ground beneath us, the energy of our immediate environment as another layer
above that, then maybe our collective humanity as another layer, and at the top
(and farthest removed from Gaia) would be our individual consciousness and ego.
Expanding our consciousness is just merging back down into earth consciousness.
I like this conceptualization better, because “upshifting” seems to imply
effort and a striving for a new state of being. But my concept feels more
natural--a surrender back to the ground of being from which we emerged.
Each
individual and each living thing is an apex coming out of the ground of being,
or Gaia. At the peak of the apex is that little dot of self and ego. We look
all around us and it sure looks like we’re all little isolated dots. We just
forget to look beneath our feet. If we did that we’d see we’re still firmly
connected to something larger.
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Yesterday
the cumulative tomato harvest topped 50 pounds. I’m guessing when all is said
and done (barring an early frost, which is quite possible considering our unusually
cool summer) we’ll have a harvest of at least 150 pounds--maybe 200. That’s all
from a 100 square foot bed--actually a little less because the middle of the
bed contains twenty-some odd basil plants. According to John Jeavons a 100
square foot bed should yield roughly 100 pounds for the beginning gardener, 194
pounds for the intermediate gardener, and as much as 418 pounds for the
advanced gardener.
The
tomatoes are the only thing I’m weighing this year, mainly because they’re the
major crop, taking up nearly a fifth of the whole garden. When Collin’s grown I
won’t have to go so crazy with tomatoes, but while he’s still with me, I need
to keep him well supplied with tomato sauces and salsa and ketchup, etc.
Over
the weekend I canned our first batch of tomato sauce. I made six pints of a
basil marinara (there was also an almost-full seventh pint that just went
straight into the fridge). On Friday I plan to can a batch of spaghetti sauce.
I figure about 24 pints total of various types of pasta sauces should last a
full year, especially considering I’m also making tons of pesto.
Then,
after I have 24 pints of sauce, I’ll make a few pints of pizza sauce, then move
on to ketchup. We’ve already done some salsa. I made a 1 quart jar of lacto-fermented
salsa, and over the weekend Collin made four little 4-ounce jars of fresh salsa.
But, if the tomato harvest holds out, I’d like to can some salsa for the winter
as well. We’ve got four different types of hot peppers growing, all doing
extremely well. So I’ve got to use those up.
Then, if the tomato
harvest is still going strong, I like to do some jars of tomato juice and
vegetable juice, tomato paste, and finally, some canned whole tomatoes. And,
of course, we’ve also been eating tons of tomatoes fresh!
On
Sunday we ate our first corn-on-the-cob from the garden, and also our first
cantaloupe.
I
spent the entire weekend in the kitchen. Saturday morning I picked, blanched,
and froze the day’s green beans, then picked basil and made a batch of pesto. Then
I picked chard, made the stems into lacto-fermented pickles (that’ll take three
or four weeks) and put the chard leaves into a double batch of pasta. I started
dough for sourdough bread, and I baked a loaf of lemon zucchini nut bread (my
current favorite zucchini recipe).
On
Sunday I made the basil marinara, as well as rolling out the pasta dough I had
started on Saturday, and hanging it to dry.
Of
course, in addition to all of this was the regular cooking of all of our meals,
from scratch of course. On Saturday I made tostados, which included rolling
sixteen corn tortillas, cooking each one in the cast iron skillet, then frying
each one.
I’ve
been wondering about corn masa—wondering if there’s a way I can make it myself.
I know it’s just corn and hydrated lime. Ironically, the process is explained
in a book I just took out of the library called Wild Fermentation, by Sandor Ellix Katz.
Now
why, you may be asking yourself, would
I want to go through all of that trouble when corn tortillas are readily
available and extremely cheap? And why is it not enough to buy the corn masa
and just add water? Why must I soak my corn for hours, then cook for hours in a
hydrated lime solution or wood ash solution, then rub off all the skins, then
grind the corn, then make the dough, roll it, cook it, and fry it before eating
it?
Probably
because I’m just plain crazy. But maybe
it has to do with this need to get back to the basics. There’s something important
about being intimately involved in all aspects of my food production. In a
spiritual sense I think we need to merge with our food--there has to be
participation on many levels.
And
besides that, if I do this myself, I can buy organic whole dried corn at
Vitamin Cottage, and know I’m avoiding the genetically modified corn that’s in
the masa from the regular grocer. Plus if I do
one day go completely off-grid, I will have acquired knowledge that will be
very useful.
Did
you realize that without this process of soaking the corn in lime, called nixtamalization,
the healthiest qualities of corn remain unavailable? Sander Katz says, “Specifically,
it alters the ratio of available amino acids, rendering nixtamalized corn a
complete protein, and making niacin in the corn more available to humans.”
You
have to wonder what type of process led the ancient Aztecs to this process. It
had to be a spiritual process, a communication from the corn.
I’m
learning so much about plants these days. Actually it feels like I’m learning from plants these days. It’s hard to
describe, but I can feel subtle shifts in my perceptions, in my way of
experiencing the world, as I take in these different plant energies. I believe
living foods share their intelligences with us.
I’ve
been dreaming about plants incessantly. The one night last week (after eating
an inordinate amount of tomatoes) I spent at least the first 2/3 of the night
dreaming about nothing other than tomatoes. Tomato energy was coursing through
me, and it wanted me to integrate that energy.
Lately,
I’ve also been fascinated with the topic of fermentation, both as a food
preservation technique and as a method of enhancing the healthfulness of foods.
So
far, I’ve been experimenting with sourdough breads, homemade ginger ale,
lacto-fermented beet juice, salsa, and chard stalks. I love the idea of
inviting in the local wild yeasts and bacteria. It seems like another important
way for me to participate with and merge with the local ecosystem. Eating the
soil (indirectly through the plants), eating the plants, which express both the
soil and the sun (and all local conditions), eating the local yeasts and the
local bacteria. The only things missing are the local animals, and I hope to
remedy that eventually.
We’ve
become so disengaged from our particular place on earth. We’ve stopped
interacting with place. Instead, place has become an insignificant backdrop for
our purely human activities. We act as if we’re the only things that matter and
we act as if we don’t need the earth.
The reality, of course, is that we are both utterly dependent upon it and
inextricably connected with all of it.
I’ve
been learning so much lately. Everything is fascinatingly interconnected. It
just occurred to me, for instance, this magical alchemy that occurs with corn
and lime—it’s really a way to make earth and sky influences meet. Corn--all
sugars and starches--a sky food par excellence, needs to merge with earth
elements, in this case calcium, in order to confer its healthful qualities to
humans. Left as a pure sky food it’s all carbohydrates—leading to human imbalances
such as diabetes and metabolic syndrome. We desperately need to become grounded beings again, and we can do
that through the foods that we eat.
I’m
really starting to understand the sacredness of food, deeply understand the sacredness of food. Here I get to that point
were words fail. Many people have called food sacred and for years I could nod
my head that yes, of course, food is sacred. But now I know food is sacred, and I know it in a way that defies all description,
in a way that is far deeper and more significant than I ever imagined possible.
Do
you think the Aztecs might have recognized corn as a sky food? Do you think
they intuited that earth and sky needed to meet? That earth and sky (lime and corn) meeting in
a watery matrix would bring about the proper alchemy?
I’m
thinking back to my dream in March about the patch of wheat. The message that
came in the dream was that in order for earth and sky to meet, a plant must be
able to express its true and full nature.
I
wonder if over the past 10,000 years with all of our hybridizing and selective
breeding of plants we haven’t created foods that overly concentrate sky energy?
Hasn’t much of our breeding led to increased sugar and starch content?
And
I’m curious—I’ll have to do some research—but do plant foods with naturally
high sugar content favor soil that’s depleted in mineral content? Would sweet
corn grown on healthily mineralized soil be less sweet than sweet corn grown in
a typical, depleted field? I don’t know where
I could find the answer to that, but I’ll have to do some poking around.
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