We are fortunate to have a freezer full of moose meat from the Yukon. A beautiful moose that my spouse and his sister bagged in September (after 3 unsuccessful hunting trips in the past few years).
So we have moose sausages and stew meat and, of course, ground. I was craving meatballs so I searched my cookbooks for some recipes. One recipe from Sheila Lukins’ All Around the World Cookbook – called for allspice and nutmeg. No thanks! I do not enjoy nutmeg at the best of times, and certainly not in my meat.
So I charted my own course.
My thoughts on wild game are that one should not try anything too wild. The meat is wild, so when experimenting, go tame. That said, pecorino is a sharp and dramatic flavour but it worked. (I want to take a moment to thank the AMAZING Pemberton Valley Supermarket that always has pecorino in stock. PVS – you are the BEST.) As for spices, I went for dry mustard, paprika, S&P, oregano and basil – and not too much of any. And of course parsley. I rarely make anything that does not call for parsley or cilantro, my faithful culinary companions. When I do not have any of these two in my fridge, sure enough, I embark on a recipe that calls for one of them. So those two are always, always on my grocery list. Serve these meatballs with Pemberton mashed spuds and some broccoli or another green veggie. A good and satisfying fall dinner! Fall cheers to the hunters and the farmers! And thank you to Lisa always for being the amazing host of this food blog site!
Method: put all ingredients, except for olive oil, in a large bowl. Mix well and form into 1 tbs balls.
Heat 1/3 cup pure olive oil in large skillet with sides at least 4 inches high (oil splatters). Heat oil on medium heat. Gently place meatballs in pan. Do not rush but gently rotate the balls so they brown and cook thoroughly.
Serve with Pemberton russet mashed potatoes and a green steamed veggie. Enjoy!
Back at home after most of the summer on the coast, I am now blanching and freezing veggies from my in-laws’ garden. Chard and zucchini. The chard is a welcome addition to my chilli recipe, as well as the deer lentil soup that I make regularly in winter. The zucchini does an amazing job of fibre-ing up chilli, shepherd’s pie and other soups.
I have mentioned blanching before but I wanted to share my storage technique which I just came up with. Instead of using medium ziplock bags for each portion, I decided to get away from the plastic and wrap 2-cup portions of chard and zucchini in parchment paper. I fold the parchment around the 2-cup portions and once wrapped nicely, place them in a large labelled ziplock. Thus, the ziplock stays clean and I much prefer my freezer food to rest on parchment paper. This is going to greatly reduce my use of ziplock bags, yet I still have the large freezer-weight ziplock to protect the food. As I work to de-plastic my lifestyle, I still want to have convenience and I think this technique will be useful.
Happy fall preserving everyone! (The next level up is canning – we will see!)
Much is conjured in the kitchen, over the steam and bubble of a jam pot – sweet anticipation, yes, I am bottling summer, but also, curiously, a deep lament, for the fact that I am learning this out of a book that I must return to over and over, attempting to land the instructive words, like wily fish that dont wanna be caught, to drop head-knowledge to the dock of deep muscle memory. And my bones ache for the lack and the longing, that this is not second nature, that every year, it still feels foreign and fraught. That it is not bound in apron strings of beloved mothers, aunties, grandmothers…
I sense all the grandmothers watching, mysterious women, unknowable stories, knowing I am downstream of the broken chains of transmission, of lands left, or of things survived or left behind or not passed on or not sought out. Of stories not treated as inheritance. Of recipes not recognised as legacies or spells, able to conjure us back into connection.
my mysterious matriarchs (from left to right): great aunt, great grandfather, great grandmother, grandmother, and seated, great great grandmother
Are they cheering or tut-tutting or intervening with whispers, or wishing that they could?
Who knows what they’d think when, after lowering the rack into the broil of water that has steamed up the already-too-hot-house and raised the temperature by an unwelcome additional two or three degrees Celsius, the bottom of one jar shears right off, and the emptied out vessel floats like a dead fish to the top, and the rest of them are then water-canned in a purplish soup with bleached out chunks of raspberries burbling around that look like someone’s puke.
What would they say? or want me to know?
I am trying to teach my son to be a problem-solver, to look at disaster or blank sections as problems so solve, instead of inevitabilities or failures or freeze frames or dead zones, and perhaps that is what they care to see: that we keep trying.
We, who move forward, who are the living garden of their DNA, the repository of their dreams, are teaching ourselves, are asking for help, are finding allies and guides and cookbooks and tenderness, and trying to send that tenderness, that resourcefulness, that regenerative energy forward, and backward through time. That we may know that this is the flavour of the season, of the first harvest, of Lammas time – the sweet and the sour… the fruits of our lives, the tang of our skins, the shape of the places we’ve grown out of, the shapes we make with ourselves.
I have a weird inability to throw old jars into the recycling bin. Instead, I tuck them in the drawer, for future use. (And every now and then my partner silently stages a protest slash intervention and culls them all. And I start over, undeterred.) There is some part of me that believes we are going to run out of jars, one day, globally, as a civilization, and my foresight will mean I have plenty of storage devices that smell faintly of decades-old peanut butter or salsa.
Dr Mehdi Serati from UQ’s School of Civil Engineering said the amount of sand in the world was finite, so ingenuity was necessary to solve the problem of a looming shortage.
“If we don’t do something about sand depletion at a global scale, our grandchildren are not going to see sandy beaches,” Dr Serati said.
“Over the past 20 years the cost of sand has increased by six times, and it’s the second most consumed natural product globally, after fresh water.“
I’m Australian, so sandy beaches are sacrosanct. Life in Australia doesn’t make sense if there are no sandy beaches. It’s just unimaginable.
And so, I merrily hoard.
Which means I was even happier this week when the Zero Waste Chef book arrived in the mail.
I’ve been following Anne-Marie Bonneau on instagram for a while. She’s core. Super core. She knows how to make ginger beer from ginger bugs from ginger, sugar and water. She knows how to make kombucha. She’s an evangelist for sourdough and fermentation, calling “Fermentation an act of defiance against our broken food system.” All the things I’ve been learning about, she’s the resource.
“I’m not claiming that fermentation will save the world. But preparing food this way does put us more in tune with the natural world – the food is alive, after all – and that might lead us to better preserve and protect the world.”
Anne-Marie Bonneau
She’s motivated to help us kick our plastic-addiction. You could join Plastic Free July and see if you can reconfigure your summer days to avoid single use plastic bags, water bottles, takeaway coffee cups and plastic straws.
It’s really about rethinking “disposable”, because lovelies, nothing is disposable. Nothing is so without worth or value on this Earth that we should just mindlessly chuck it away.
Bonneau recommends developing a zero-waste kit… you don’t have to go buy any fancy stuff – “we can’t shop our way out of the climate crisis”, she says. Just put together an on-the-go shopping kit (of shopping bags, produce bags and jars or containers), and a out-and-about kit (a stash bag with water bottle, utensils, cloth napkin, jar or metal container and produce bag.) Wherever you are, if you get a craving for a coffee, a snack, or a smoothie, use your own container. Pandemic precautions have put a pause on a lot of these practices, but we need to get back on them, as soon as we can, and try and counter the impact of all those disposable masks. Aaaagh.
Your Zero-Waste Kit works like a shield to deflect unwanted single-use trash
The Zero Waste Chef
Also, to solidify her status in my heart, once she posted: we don’t need four more people to do zero waste living perfectly. We need millions of people doing it imperfectly. And that was it. She’d won me over. I don’t really need any more aspirational benchmarks that I’m incapable of meeting, because I’m flawed, flailing, and trapped in a system that means every aspirational thing I want to do, to help improve the world, or life for other people, essentially means swimming upstream.
So, darlings, bring your flawed and flailing selves, bring your big hearts, your hope for your kids, your affection for a grandma or aunty or someone you imagine had a little earth mother wisdom, bring your fetish for collecting jars, bring your love for kitchen experiments and weird science. Bring your friends.
Don’t bring righteousness or judgment and let’s leave the despair at the door. Or in the hammock out back taking a well needed rest.
So, as we pick away slowly at deconstructing and remaking systems that actually flow with life, I’m just gonna do the best I can, and PS Don’t nobody mess with my jar stash.
How creative can you be, at rethinking “waste”? Can you turn old fabric scraps into sandwich wraps? Can you turn last night’s leftovers into tomorrow’s frittata? Can you forego bubbly water and make your own ginger soda? Are you ready to get really next-level and make your own sauerkraut? Or granola bars?
Apart from a host of great recipes, Bonneau’s new book offers this beautiful rethink, which anyone with a garden or a harvest box (CSA) subscription, has bumped hard up against: how do you cook opportunistically, rather than “diligently” to a menu plan and a series of recipes?
“Rather than allowing your cravings to dictate what you’ll make, let the food you have on hand in your pantry, refrigerator, and freezer, serve as the basis for your next dish. This method will eliminate food waste in the home.” It will make us more creative, as parameters tend to do, and that makes cooking more fun, she says. And who doesn’t long for time in the kitchen to actually feel like fun?
It’s a big shift – to start with a pile of ingredients first, rather than with a recipe or a go-to meal (oh, it’s Tuesday, so pull out the taco shells and jar of salsa.) To say, okay, the bok choi is coming up, and there’s still some asparagus in the garden, what shall we eat today… but once we re-orient to this way of thinking, and begin flicking through recipe books with an ingredient-first lens (okay, what features kale, because I sure grow a heck of a lot of kale)… it becomes more natural. Grill some veggies on the BBQ. Turn the leftovers into frittata the next day. Blend up whatever is fresh and green into a pasta sauce, or toss it on a pizza. End of the week – time for leftovers soup or stock with whatever is wilting away in the crisper.
I’ve realised, after decades of anguish about being a sub-par home-maker, that it’s all about having a repertoire. Once you have a few things in the repertoire, everything gets a little easier. You don’t have to think as hard. Habits carry you through. You don’t even realise you’ve graduated and aren’t sub-par anymore, but are successfully keeping your people alive and fed, because you’re not expending anywhere near the same amount of brain space that it once took and you’ve somehow absorbed this story that cooking healthfully and eating well is a giant uphill grind.
Until it’s not.
The biggest shift required is breaking old habits of consuming-out-of-convenience. Convenience has a cost. It’s a kind of Earth-tax. As soon as something is pitched to us as “convenient”, we should get squinty-eyed and start asking about the catch. Someone is going to pay for this. Possibly your grandkids.
The Zero Waste Chef is a good helpmate if you want to, ultimately, be a good ancestor. If you want to enjoy your life right now (which is basically built on the good things that people who came before you have done) AND set up future generations to also flourish and enjoy themselves and play on sandy beaches and eat a yummy sandwich under a tree. As she says, in the first chapter, that has graphs and mathematical equations and that I skipped over to go look at the glossy photos of yummy food, “zero waste isn’t an all-or-nothing proposition. You can live a little bit zero waste. And if 10,000 people reduced their waste by 10% that would reduce 10 times more waste than if 100 people got their waste down to zero. The point is, every little bit counts, especially when it’s amplified by a lot of us having a go.
A lot of her recipes are on her website, but it’s nice to have the book on hand as a reference – especially when it comes to things like fermentation, which are processes that I find I need to read about, again and again. And if you missed the pandemic sourdough train, or fell off and want to get back on, there are a ton of recipes for things to do with all the starter. Including how to make the starter. (But my favourite chapter is called Naked Snacks and Natural Sodas. Naked snacks probably are the type that will make you feel better naked, but it really means no packaging. )
So, your summer mission, should you choose to accept it: Eat naked. Save your jars. Carry a napkin and a mug and a fork wherever you go. Shorten the distance from food to plate. Go barefoot, so the idea of lightening your footprint connects to an actual sensation of bare toes and soil. Have fun.
Yes, it has been a weird year. And these are the shortest and darkest days of the year to boot. Right now I am craving calorie-laden stodgy food and damn the consequences. Lighter fare will appeal when the days brighten up.
I have made this casserole with some good Pemberton veggies but the mayo, sour cream and cheese do not put this casserole in the healthy category. But dark days plus face mask-wearing at all times? Sign me up for a retro casserole.
Here is to hugging family and friends in 2021 and to our Pemberton library being open for real – SOON! Happy Christmas to all!
Chicken Casserole with Pemberton Veggies
4 cups cooked Pemberton-raised chicken, diced
2 tbs pure olive oil
1 large yellow onion, diced
2 cups blanched Pemberton-grown Swiss chard, chopped (Do NOT add raw – it MUST be blanched first)
1 cup Pemberton-grown corn kernels
1 cup chopped cauliflower
2 cups chopped celery
1 cup chopped cilantro
1 cup diced tomatoes
2 tsp dry mustard
1 tsp cumin
1 tsp paprika
1 tsp sambal oelek
1 tsp salt
1 tsp pepper
½ cup mayonnaise
2/3 cup full-fat sour cream
1 8-oz package Pad Thai noodles
1 cup mozzarella, shredded
Method:
Sauté onion, corn, chard, celery, cauliflower and cilantro in olive oil in a large cast-iron Dutch oven. Sauté until well caramelised. When caramelised, add cumin, paprika, dry mustard, sambal oelek, salt and pepper, tomatoes, and diced chicken. Mix well.
Cook Pad Thai noodles by pouring boiling water over the noodles and leave immersed for 5 minutes. Drain well.
Add cooked Pad Thai noodles and mayo and sour cream to veggie mixture. Mix well. Sprinkle top with cheese.
Thanks to Belinda Geisler, the program coordinator for Stewardship Pemberton’s Feasting for Change initiative, for putting together this reflection of this year.
This spring I was so nervous, wondering if it would be possible to run any of the Feasting for Change programs, as for this I was asking people to come together, voluntarily, and work together to help grow, and gather food that could help feed us all. Suddenly though, the need to feed ourselves without bringing that food in from outside became a priority, not just for me personally, but for our community as a whole.
I looked at all our projects, the Fruit Tree Project, Grow it Forward Garden, Seed Library and Crabapple Project, and thought hard about how to make it all work, eliminating all the indoor workshops and focusing on the bare bones of our projects: keeping bears wild, while feeding our community.
What I didn’t expect was the number of people that were not only willing but wanting to donate their time and energy to our projects. We’ve always had an amazing rotating crew of volunteers, some that have been with us from the beginning and some who are still, to make it to a fruit harvest, or garden workshop. But this summer we had a bunch of fresh faces join us and stick it out to the end. At our 22 fruit tree harvests, we had 45 different volunteers gift us their time, many of them came to several harvests, (be warned, it’s addictive) and we ended up counting 124 “volunteer occurrences”.
The grand total of 3,364 lbs of fruit is proof of all the hard work our volunteers put in, not to mention the trust that tree owners showed in allowing us to come to their property and harvest their trees. We had several firsts this summer that need to be celebrated in and of themselves: We took on our first farm, harvesting over 300 lbs of blueberries from a farm that struggled to get their usual crew of workers in to manage them.
We also had one of our largest ever harvests where we took on 11 trees, in a single harvest, getting over 600 lbs of apples and pears. As our final harvest of the year it felt like the perfect covid friendly fruit party: 26 adults and 10 kids all keeping to their bubbles by taking on a tree each, happily chatting from between the branches, while the owner was blown away that we got them all cleared in a single morning.
It’s possible that as people were working from home, more bears got caught in the act of accessing fruit trees, and so we got several new properties signed up to our fruit tree project. This kept me on my toes, as each property needed a plan. However, it also meant we could flow from cherries, to apples, to blueberries, to plums, grapes, back to apples, crabapples, and finally pears and more apples. Those that came to multiple harvests now have wonderfully full freezers full of local free fruit. The project works quite simply; we pick the fruit and split it 3 ways, one third goes back to the owner of the tree, one third goes to the volunteers that pick the fruit, and one third gets donated to be shared further.
Usually we try to have a network of local social groups (like the seniors) who can take fruit from us after a harvest and then divide it up and distribute it. With the restrictions in place this year we scaled back and focused on donating to the Food Bank.
The Food Bank needs to be celebrated to the fullest here, expanding and attempting to reach and fill the needs all over our community and into the surrounding areas. We are so, so lucky to have such a dedicated crew able to adapt and address the needs that arise. Without them, our community simply couldn’t thrive.
The bi-weekly harvests from the Grow it Forward Gardens became quite the social morning (in a safely monitored, spaced out kind of way). Last year we had 18 volunteers over the course of the season, this season we had 38. The garden itself always provided a fun treasure hunt. I think some of our volunteers came just to see where the cucumber vines had wandered off to next, or if the beans or toddlers had grown more in the 2 weeks between harvests! Either way, they put in the efforts and we reaped the rewards. This summer we donated a record 650 lbs of fresh locally grown vegetables of the food bank. While we always offer food from the garden to our volunteers, most were content to take home the “weeds” and try out things like purslane smoothies, or chickweed and carrot top pesto. I know that without the dedication of these guys (you know who you are!) we would not have had nearly as successful of a season. Even on the muggy, buggy days they were there, working hard, periodically jumping in the air and running out for a bug break, or slapping ourselves with rutabaga leaves to keep going “Just to weed to the end of this patch”. They were true garden heroes.
With the library closing down right in the midst of planting season and seeds running into short supply, I rescued the Seed Library and attempted to create a virtual inventory and contactless pick up system to make sure that this project could continue to make food-growing an option for everyone and anyone. What I didn’t expect was that again this community saw it as an opportunity to fill the need, and ended up donating almost more than was given out from the library. (Which is perfect, as the seed library depends on people ‘returning’ their seeds to keep it stocked for the next library patron). We always try and include seed harvesting in our grow it forward garden harvests, which helps to keep the library stocked.
Most in jeopardy was the re-invented crabapple project. While we may not have crabapple trees lining our main street (I’m looking forward to experimenting with lilac jelly btw), we do have a number of them in backyards. Last year we helped keep the bears out of harm’s way by harvesting the crabapples, but we inundated our fruit distributors and saw the potential for a scaled-down version. While we made close to 500 jars of jelly, unfortunately, we were unable to include volunteers and people dropping in to investigate the smells of jelly-making. We’re hopeful that the jelly travels further than we can right now and maybe encourages other communities to start looking at their fruit trees more as an asset than an inconvenience. As there’s limited supply of jelly this year, I’d recommend stocking up!
The support these projects get not only from volunteers but also from partners and sponsors keeps them ticking along, evolving, growing, and changing. These include the Whistler Community Foundation, The Pemberton Wildlife Association, Sea to Sky Soils, West Coast Seeds, the Pemberton Legion Branch 201, Bluehore Financial (Donation Program), the Fall Clothing Swap, Pilates Integrated, and the donations from the blueberry harvest. Each of these places has donated various amounts to various projects – together they make all our Feasting for Change Programs possible.
As I’m looking into winter, I’m so grateful to be here, in this community, where so many people are willing to come together to help us all – the people, the wildlife, the community as a whole – to grow, and harvest our own food, and, of course, eat jelly!
Longtime champion of local food, Glenda Bartosh, turned her attention to apples this week, and discovered that our very own Traced Elements regular, Mike Roger, is quite the apple man. Glenda gave us permission to repost her column here.
Photo by Glenda Bartosh
Apples, apples, apples. They’re everywhere this time of year, especially southern B.C., including Sea to Sky, so you don’t have to hit the Okanagan.
From West Van to Birken and beyond, you’ll find apple trees, babied and pampered, dwarfed and full-sized. And neglected old troopers that tug at your heartstrings—twisted and tortured, maybe 100 years old—still bearing fruit, in yards, orchards and ditches, where the goodness is yours for the taking, as gleaners well know. Even Whistler has a tree or three. (Ask Feet Banks about them apples.)
Fresh juicy apples; dried apples; apple chips. Apples baked, boiled, canned and pied. My 92-year-old mom, who’s lived a long and happy life eating many an apple, recommends a dab of peanut butter on an apple slice.
If you’re of a certain age or from the prairies, you’ll smile at the memory of bobbing for apples (the apples were bobbing, hopefully not you!), and the sing-song “Hallowe-e-en a-a-apples!” called out on doorsteps when, truth be told, we were hoping for candy, not apples at all. And who’d ever want one now in their trick-or-treat bag?
Poor apples! They’re so common we take them for granted, not realizing what a rich and noble lineage they come from, and how good they are—for health, nutrition and pleasure—especially those heritage varieties.
We have some 7,500-plus kinds of apples on the planet, but most of us can name, maybe, six. McIntosh—the original big Mac—so ubiquitous in Ontario, where it was first grown by one John McIntosh, in 1811. Delicious apples from the States. Spartans, created by R. C. Palmer in Summerland in the 1930s by crossing Macs and a pippin. Maybe Galas and Ambrosias, and the ever-green Granny Smith, a friendly apple from Australia, circa 1868.
But how about Grimes Golden, which could be a rockstar? Or the Hubbardson Nonsuch. Blacktwig. Buckingham (The Queen). Greening from Rhode Island, going back to 1650. The Gano. The Gennet Moyle. All poetic, and all apples grown in southwestern B.C. since the 1850s, and now sought after by many a heritage apple buff and association, including the Royal B.C. Museum, UBC’s Botanical Garden and Mike Roger of Willowcraft Farm near Birken.
Mike, who plants six apple trees a year, is known for helping out on older farms dating back to the 1950s and bringing heritage apples such as sweet Annanas; super-tart Cox Orange Pippins; or humungous Boskopps (great for cooking) to Sea to Sky farmers’ markets.
Photo courtesy Willowcraft Farm
“The heritage varieties are usually grafted onto full-sized trees, like, 30 feet [9.1 metres] tall and 25 feet [7.6 m] in diameter, so they’re massive. They can give several hundreds of pounds of apples,” says Mike, who’s also known for making amazing apple juice—150 litres in a few hours—by running a gunny sack full of ground apples through a top-loading washing machine on “spin.” (The juice pours out the drain hose—how excellent is that?) Recent commercial varieties, by contrast, are grafted onto semi-dwarf or dwarf rootstock so they’re easier to pick.
As for that noble apple lineage, cast your mind back 10, maybe, 12 thousand years, to the earliest proto-apples in Neolithic Britain and Europe—wizened little things, more like crabapples.
Wild apples spread like crazy, but what we think of as an apple today most likely came from the Caucasus Mountains of Asia Minor, near where 17th-century historians located the Garden of Eden. BTW, there’s no scientific evidence confirming it was an apple that tempted Eve. It was just (forbidden) fruit, possibly a fig or apricot.
We have Ancient Romans to thank for breeding apples for size and taste, although they don’t grow true from seed (ergo the above-mentioned grafting). Plato, for one, could name about two-dozen apples, and in ancient Assyria, apples were served at a wee gathering for 69,000-plus people hosted by the king. A thousand oxen were also on the menu.
Apples are a key ingredient in classical Arabic cooking. I love how Farouk Mardam-Bey in Ziryab: Authentic Arab Cuisine points out that at the centre of every apple, we’ll find a five-pointed star, “the symbol of knowledge and power.”
As for an apple a day keeping the doctor away, it’s true. All the fibre in apples is good for your gut, plus it helps you feel full. Several studies show that apples’ polyphenols help prevent heart disease and lower the risk of stroke, while the flavonoids and anti-oxidants could help fight cancer.
University of Michigan researchers, who concluded that apples’ only health benefit was an avoidance of prescription drugs, analyzed just how big that beneficial apple should be: At least 7 centimetres in diameter and 149 grams. But an Italian study showed significant benefits in reducing heart disease and cholesterol when people ate two apples a day versus consuming the same amount of sugar and calories in apple drinks.
If all this makes you curious about branching out, ahem, and re-thinking apples, excellent. And if you’d like to branch out when the snow flies, and try some lovely homemade baking featuring all kinds of apples—maybe even from their own orchard in Naramata—head to Ian Gladstone and Joni Denroche’s cozy cafe at Cross-Country Connection in Lost Lake Passivhaus, just a short walk from Lot 5 in Whistler Village.
Joni’s taught me a great new trick: Simply wash, core, then slice your apples and freeze them. Use them, as is, for baking, or freeze them on a pan before bagging, so they don’t stick together. Voilà! A “super-cool” snack straight from the freezer.
Glenda Bartosh is an award-winning journalist who tips her hat to everyone who helped with these apple tales, including my mom, Feet, Mike, Joni, Ian, Bob Deeks, Lisa Richardson, Pauline Wiebe, Cate Webster, Paul Burrows, and Bob Brett. Long live the apple buffs!
I guess I always did say a kind-of prayer when I planted garlic – “okay then, do your thing.” I’d brush my hands clean of the moist black soil and feel again the improbability of all this growing business – stick clove in soil, anticipate its budding five or six months from now. I mean, how the hell does that even work? Shrug.
“Over to you guys. Here’s hoping.”
And there was a certain kind of hope in the action, a brave kind of reclaiming my right to grow my own garlic and feel a bit empowered, but the prayer itself was largely a faithless one – a parcel dropped by my suspicious feet, with no address, beyond a scribbled “To whom it may concern”.
I am always caught by surprise by the little nubs of green shooting up through the mulch in the spring. It inspires wonder… but the wonder of the doubter… like, “that’s wonderful, but I can’t really believe it actually worked. There must be some trick to this Life business.”
I think the difference is that this year, there’s a new word in my vocabulary. The Underworld.
Says the Google:
Hidden deep within the bowels of the earth and ruled by the god Hades and his wife Persephone, the Underworld was the kingdom of the dead in Greek mythology, the sunless place where the souls of those who died went after death.
It’s a word that kept coming up this year, from some of the thinkers I follow, folk who try to parse meaning from news headlines, whose idea of bigger picture involves mythology and ancestors and cosmic time.
What I gleaned from those thinkers is that we could possibly think of this pandemic time, this “lockdown Lite” (as it’s been in BC) experience, as an opportunity to be initiated. An invitation to take things seriously. To go deep. To be confronted. To stop running around like the White Rabbit (“I’m late, I’m late, for a very important date”) and turn bravely and acknowledge Death. To shed some stuff – some of the ego’s favourite props. To emerge out the other side a little wiser… rather than just annoyed and anxious to reclaim my old life, exactly as it was.
The climate emergency is the real event horizon that looms large. Maybe, I thought, COVID-19 might teach us something that can help us approach that bigger drama, treat this as a threshold into a different way of being, instead of just an interruption to our regular programming.
Garlic planting with my helper in more innocent pre-pandemic days
So when there was a brief window through which I could race out to the garden, clear a few beds, and insert cloves, I was in a different frame of mind.
What has happened, strangely, in this last year, is that I’ve been invited by wonderful meditation and wisdom teachers, (thank you Susan Reifer and Natalie Rousseau) to allow myself to feel supported. Like, literally, to sit and close my eyes and feel my bones on the ground and the floor meeting me, and all the bits of my house holding things up and the earth beneath that… everything that rises up to meet the parts of me that settle down.
And whenever I felt the lonely weight of all my feelings throughout the spring and summer, as we practiced physical distancing and hunkered in our wee bubble and I lamented all the things and people I was missing, the falling away of all the things that used to prop my ego up, the shock of lost momentum, the loss of all that had suddenly been cancelled, I walked outside and sensed the trees creating a kind of open-air church around me, all steadfast and able to contain the leakages of my emotions.
And when I got curious about the idea that my great-grandmothers probably lived through pandemics, and did a little ancestry research, I arrived at this powerful sense that I am now the garden, I am now the physical matter in which my ancestors have the opportunity to flourish. I am the place of bloom. I am the landscape of Life and vitality, and they are all informing that, nourishing that, infusing that with richness, with the compost of their own lives.
In short, instead of working in this hopeful-but-not-really-convinced state of reclaiming life, growth, gardening and garlic, I became reclaimed. I was reclaimed by my ancestors, by the soil, by the life force, by the trees around me.
I planted the garlic this year, and I knew, without doubt, that those little cloves were not being cast out into an uncertain future, but that they were being offered back to Life, returned to soil that I tend with care, that I nourish with compost that has been generated from a combination of yard waste, our food scraps, wonderful worms and a host of other microscopic life. I understand that under every foot of soil, are gazillions of microscopic living beings. It is not me, kinda hopeful, against the emptiness. It is me settling down and receiving an immense amount of support that rises up to meet me, from every imaginable direction. Invisible, sure. But, even though I don’t see it, I sense it. I sense it now.
I pushed the garlic into the Earth, and tucked them in for their winter sleep, their journey to the Underworld, beneath a blanket of maple leaves that I scraped up from the yard.
This year, I have come to believe in the Intelligence of All Things, an intelligence that is encoded in all of us, a deep Knowing of what to do. The garlic will lie in its depths through the Dark Season, as the wheel of the year rolls from Samhain (pronounced sow-en in Celtic, the pagan precursor to Halloween) through to Solstice and over into Imbolc, the spring, and then they will rise again.
And it won’t be a surprise. Because this is what Life does. It returns. It sprouts forth, it blossoms, it revels, it fruits, it pares away, it dies, it is absorbed, and it returns.
So I tucked them in to the bed, and I offered my prayer, and this year, it wasn’t: hope you know what to do now… It was “thank you, thank you, sleep well and I’ll see you in the spring,” silently uttered with a little tearfulness and the deepest kind of gratitude and reverence I know.
Once again, I went for a walk in the woods and was shocked by the bounty that nature provides when I make the time to search it out. Look at those beauties!
In case you haven’t gone mushroom hunting, it’s a delight. I leave the house with a vague destination, no peak to bag, no panorama to catch, no goal except to meander slowly and pay attention. It is so nice to just BE: to be present, to smell the forest, to remember which direction I came from, and pick where I want to go. To watch the world work its magic slowly, growing with seasons and time, and to forget about needing to DO all of the time. I carry a wicker basket, so the spores of the mushrooms can fall out as I walk (a trail of breadcrumbs to the mushroom patch once they fruit too!). I carry bear spray, water, snacks, I bring the dog, and with no rhyme or reason, I explore!
You can see in the first picture- chanterelles can be mischievous, hidey little devils. Sometimes, as with most hunts, it’s best to expect to find nothing so that I can’t come away disappointed. Sometimes, however, when you find one, there are probably more around. Chanterelles are in season right now, they like partly sunny, wet, mossy forest floors. And in the right conditions, can be as big as my face!
Once I get chanterelles home, I clean them with minimal water and a toothbrush. Water makes mushrooms mushy – but since they pop up out of mossy forest floors they often need some kind of cleaning.
I think chanterelles are best fried in butter until they lose all of their moisture. When they start turning brown and crispy, add them into pesto or stirfry. YUMM!!
And in the situation when I have so many I can’t cook them all at once, I like to dehydrate the rest and save them for later.
A cream of chanterelle soup late in winter really makes home feel cozy and warm!! And I love the memory of the adventure that brought my food to my home. Meals paired with memories taste even better.
As a child I avoided eating vegetables as if they were toxic. The final scene of many dinners was a stand off between my parents and I over an untouched side of raw carrots. Eventually they surrendered, not willing to torture me or forego sleep to prove a nutritional point. For many years after these victories I avoided vegetables altogether. It is a strange turn of events that today I am working on a small organic vegetable farm.
Like many people in British Columbia, I am not from here. I have the indistinct story of being from Ontario. After graduating from Dalhousie University last spring, I moved back home to work for my parents and save some money. When the fall came around, I built a bed in my car and set off for a road trip through the United States. I had a ski pass and a National Parks pass, and I was going to see the natural splendour that is so celebrated.
As I approached the end of my trip and the bottom of my bank account in the early spring of 2020, I had to decide what to do next. Rounding the turn and heading north from California, BC appeared to be a natural conclusion. In the past, I had spent my summers working on golf courses. I wanted to continue working outside, this time putting my efforts towards work I felt was part of a solution, environmentally and physically. I went on GoodWork.ca, a jobsite connecting eco-minded workers with sustainable work.
One posting caught my eye: Laughing Crow Organics in Pemberton, working as a farmhand. I emailed Andrew Budgell and Kerry McCann, the owners and operators of the farm. A few days later, I had a Skype interview from the visitor’s centre in Yosemite Valley, and they offered me the job. I started looking for a place to live that would also be financially sustainable.
Kerry McCann, Laughing Crow Organics’ co-owner: “People need to eat.”
But soon after this, the world entered a pandemic, and suddenly every plan was on shaky foundation. No one had any idea what would be possible a week, a month, a year from now. I was in Lake Louise staying with a friend from home when COVID hit, planning to continue west. He had been laid off from his job at the hotel, and we both decided to head east and wait things out.
I got in touch with Kerry. Would there still be a job for me? People still need to eat, she said. “We will be growing plants and feeding people and we will need your help.” A month after my first cross country drive, I turned around and headed back west.
Immediately I knew I had made the right decision. Even in May, at the height of COVID confusion, Pemberton was a pocket of normalcy. The next month, when Black Lives Matter demonstrations erupted across North America, the events of the world felt even further away. In both instances, I wondered what part I played in it all. What is my responsibility?
Farming was an attempt to answer this question. Our food systems are some of the most oppressive systems we have, environmentally, socially and economically. Like many others in the capitalist mindset, optimization has been focused on profits, rather than quality. As a result, large scale agriculture has sterilized the growing process in an effort to grow more food for less money. These costs do not evaporate. They are passed down the line onto the health, the environment, the worker, and the consumer.
When I was on the road, I did most of my shopping at Walmart. It was the cheapest option, and they let me sleep in the parking lot, so it was convenient, but I knew there was something wrong with this decision. By spending my money on cheaper food, I was inevitably supporting practices I do not believe in. Cheaper food is cheaper because it exploits workers, and abuses the environment.
Eating is a completely different experience on the farm, one I am very fortunate to have. The work is fair, the pay is honest, and our relationship with the land is respectful. We give it what it needs, and it repays in kind.
Unfortunately, there is an observed problem of access to good food, one that can often be drawn on lines of racial inequality. Buying organic is often out of reach, and Walmart or McDonald’s appears to be the best or only option. But when I go to market, and see what our customers get for $30, in quality and quantity, I cannot believe I shopped at Walmart. If I were a customer, which I have no doubt I will be in the future if I am not still an employee, I would be proud to be supporting better practices, and to be receiving a better product.
To be an activist does not necessarily mean you must be on the front lines with a picket sign. It can be as simple as making more informed choices at the grocery store. By supporting local, small scale sustainable agriculture, we are supporting the health of the earth, the health of ourselves, and the health of society. It is an act of liberation and solidarity. The more we choose to buy from farmers who are doing the right thing, the more this opportunity will be presented to others.
I needed to find myself on a farm before I truly grasped this, but awareness is free to anyone, and it is often the most powerful thing we can do.
Traced Elements 