Stretching the Pesto

This is a yummy, nutritious way to stretch your basil into a great pesto!

2 cups kale leaves, stems removed, roughly chopped
1/2 cup walnuts, chopped
3-4 garlic cloves, minced
2 cups basil leaves, roughly chopped
1/2 tsp sea salt
1/2 cup good olive oil
1/2 cup parmesan cheese, grated

Briefly steam kale in steamer basket (about 30 seconds), then dunk into ice water to stop cooking. Drain.

Add kale, basil, walnuts and garlic to food processor. Process about one minute. Slowly add olive oil until pesto is smooth.

Stir in parmesan cheese.

Serve over pasta, or freeze in flat quart-sized Ziploc bags (as a thin slab of pesto).

Plain Canned Tomatoes

I make a bunch of jars of these tomatoes each year; I use at least 1 pint per week and sometimes several more. Tasty, easy, fast!

4 cups tomatoes per quart jar
2 tablespoons lemon juice (per quart jar)
1 teaspoon sea salt (I use RealSalt – per quart jar)

I do not peel my tomatoes, primarily because I can my own organically-grown fruit. If you’re using non-organic tomatoes, they should be dipped in boiling water for 60 seconds then into ice water, to peel.

Core tomatoes if necessary; quarter then dice roughly.

Heat diced tomatoes in juice in a large stock pot, stirring frequently. Boil gently for 5 minutes.

Fill hot, sterile quart jars with hot tomatoes, leaving a 1-inch headspace.

Add lemon juice and salt to each jar. Top with hot lids and rings. Process in boiling water canner for 60 minutes (at 3500′ elevation – 50 minutes for lower elevations, adjust for higher).

To use this recipe to make pint jars, use 1 tablespoon lemon juice and 1/2 teaspoon salt per pint jar, process for 45 minutes.

Homemade Tomato Paste

This is a great recipe to either can or freeze, when an abundant tomato harvest means that you need to utilize every possible option to use them up! It’s also more healthy and better tasting than store-bought. For organic or homegrown tomatoes, I do NOT skin them.

16 cups Roma or Amish Paste tomatoes, chopped roughly
1 cup red bell peppers, diced
1/2 to 1 cup onions, diced (or 1/4 to 1/2 cup dehydrated diced onions)
2-3 bay leaves
3 tablespoons fresh basil leaves, chopped (or 2 tablespoons dried basil)
2 teaspoons fresh oregano, chopped (or 1 tablespoon dried oregano)
1 tablespoon sea salt
4-6 garlic cloves, minced (or 2 tablespoons jarred minced garlic)
1-2 tablespoons honey (optional, if you prefer it sweeter)

1 – Wash and chop tomatoes. I simply quarter them then slice sideways through the quarters 2-3 times so they are in rough pieces. It is NOT necessary to blanch and remove skin in this recipe!
2 – Combine all ingredients in a large crockpot, and cook on High for one hour, then turn to Low, prop the lid ajar with a toothpick to let steam escape, and let cook 12+ hours. I set this up during the day and let it cook overnight. The lycopene in tomatoes is released during long, slow cooking, so you are actually making your tomato paste more nutritious with a long cook time! The released steam will condense your tomato paste so it isn’t so watery.
3 – Let cool somewhat after cooking. (I remove the lid entirely)
4 – Remove the bay leaves.
5 – Process in batches through a food processor until smooth. This micro-minces the very soft skins so they are virtually undetectable in the final product. Dump batches into stockpot as you go, and reheat gently as you prepare 1/2 pint jars for canning (boiling them in hot water for 10+ minutes, and place lids in very hot but not boiling water to soften).
6 – Here in Billings, Montana we are at 3500 feet elevation, so I add a bit of processing time. Process 1/2 pint jars for 50 minutes in hot water bath.

Jill O’s “Chop It With The Hand GOD Gave You” Slaw

I just have to share this great recipe from my friend… it’s great for this time of year! I have to admit that it is presently the *only* coleslaw recipe that I actually like… can’t stand raw onions in my slaw, or sugar, or Miracle Whip (feeling faint). This hits the spot, especially when you’ve got a big, fresh, organic head of cabbage just begging for special treatment. We find it super delicious! Here goes:

Jill’s Slaw:
4 cups green cabbage, chopped
1-2 medium carrots, minced
1-2 green onions (or a few tablespoons minced chives)

Dressing
1/2 cup mayo (thinking Hellmans or Best brands, or homemade)
1/2 cup sour cream (I use kefir or yogurt instead)
1/2 tsp sea salt
1 tsp apple cider vinegar
pepper, to taste

She writes, “I use my vitamix to chop the veggies but you can use a food processor or the hand GOD gave you, ha. Blend the ingredients for the dressing and pour over slaw, mix with spoon. Enjoy!”

It’s super fast and really easy, and kefir/yogurt and apple cider vinegar are really good for you… let alone cabbage and carrots and green onions or chives! We’re having it tonight with roast chicken.

Freezer Stewardship

One of the blessings my family enjoys is that we have two very large freezers. They are often full, between the facts that my husband and I both hunt large game animals, when we buy beef it is a side at a time, and I garden like a crazy person in Spring-Summer-Fall. This is great!
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What is NOT great is the fact that there are most definitely items in those freezers (and let’s don’t forget the one on top of the fridge) that are completely forgotten, mostly unidentifiable, and taking up valuable frozen-airspace. So for the past little while (ok about 2 years, but I choose not to beat myself up about it), it has been on my mind and conscience that I really need to get in there and clean out the freezers. A little bit freezer burnt? I can make that work into a meal. As old as my youngest child? That would probably need to go.
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The benefits are obvious:
– Feed my family of four for less while we’re eating out of the freezer instead of the fridge;
– Responsibly consume the flotsam and jetsam of accumulated sides of beef… short ribs? Soup bones? One incredibly monstrous roast?
– Respect the providers and the garden: several packets of 2-3 each mountain trout caught by my kids… 900 pounds of shredded zucchini… gallon ziplocs of sliced rhubarb…
– Clear the way for the potential landslide of produce headed directly for the freezer as harvest comes in earnest. What doesn’t get canned or dehydrated gets frozen!
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So I’m posting this as a blog basically for accountability, plus I figure I can’t possibly be the only one! I don’t want to let it slide again into the nether regions of the Arctic tundra that is our freezer space. I see alot of smoothies in our future. Some bone broth. New recipes as I attempt to find something that drains off the excessive fat off the short ribs so that it’s palatable to my leaner-foods-eating fam. And the friendly urban hens in our backyard coop will be the beneficiaries (and us, via their eggs) of what I just can’t bring myself to serve up on the kitchen table due to age or frostbitten status.
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Tonight’s Supper: Ham, Split Peas and Lentil Stew.
Freezer space opened up: 8 cubic inches.

Gardening for Life

Want to grow more, healthier, tastier produce in your garden, without breaking the bank? Invest $20 in the new book “Gardening for Life” by Wayne Burleson, and start applying their ingenious methods! Wayne and his wonderful wife Connie garden in a USDA Ag Zone 4 garden in the foothills of the Absaroka-Beartooth mountain range in Montana. They also travel to 3rd world countries teaching native people groups how to grow healthy food using found resources and creative methods.
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Wayne teaches that the health of any plant is in the soil, and that sometimes the old and mostly forgotten ways are best, feeding the soil and earthworms in order to gain a powerful health base for vegetables to really produce. To make these ideas work in modern America as well as poverty-stricken areas on other continents, he applies his natural problem-solving perspective to new ways of thinking.
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It is a wonderful book, one I had the extreme pleasure and honor of pre-reading, and I recommend it highly!

Location, Location, Location!

Location, location, location! Whether you are looking to sell or buy a home or are searching for just the right spot to grow a kitchen garden for your family, location matters!

It can be completely overwhelming to consider putting in a garden. For those who did not grow up with a garden in the yard or community, the mere word “garden” implies unpleasant things… like the “Three W’s”. Work. Weeds. Watering (endlessly). And then you end up with (click link to finish article) “http://www.simplyfamilymagazine.com/online/2013/04/kitchen-garden-primer-location-location-location

The Lawn Ranger

I have to admit that I despair when I see the lawn care chemical trucks start rumbling through town in early Spring. The little flags go up to warn folks to stay off the grass… I nervously check the wind, call my barefoot children in from outside, sometimes have to close the windows on the side of the house that is sharing frontage with a neighbor out to murder their weeds.

We have been on a journey, removing toxic chemicals from our foods, our home environment, our lives. Despite my always having believed instinctively in the concept that an organic garden was a healthier, happier place for me to while away my time, I had no idea that I would be so “crunchy” about so many other aspects of life once I became a Mom. But first the boy, then the girl, came to change the way I thought about consumption, being a consumer, and being a participant in the world at large.

Seven years into this journey, I now grow a greater portion of our family’s vegetables. I grow enough to do some major preserving come harvest time – from dehydrating to canning to freezing. My canning total in 2011 was 353 jars. I scaled back (due to a better idea of what we used and when) in 2012 with less than half that, but increased the amount I dehydrated and froze. The theory is simply to grow what we will eat, and to eat what we can grow.

Somewhere along the line of our Urban Organic Farmer growth, my eyes turned to the lawn. From this article at (http://www.organiclawncare101.com/dark-lawns.html):

•  “researchers reporting in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute found that exposure to garden pesticides can increase the risk of childhood leukemia almost sevenfold. Contact with low levels of pesticides increases miscarriage rates, and a study recently published in the American Journal of Epidemiology documented a link between residential pesticide use and breast cancer risk in women. Researchers at the Harvard School of Public Health found that frequent exposure to pesticides increased the incidence of Parkinson’s disease by 70 percent.

OK, so pesticides applied to lawns – and these can range from our personal front- or backyards to those surrounding businesses, churches, parks and sports fields – can seriously increase the potential for harmful and even deadly disease. Besides the pesticides and herbicides themselves lie danger in the “inert” ingredients, which are not even required to be labeled. Heavy metals, anyone?

Here’s a very informative site about easy organic lawncare. Wait, EASY? I thought anything organic meant a lot harder to accomplish? Not really. Honestly, what grows a healthy lawn is the same thing that grows a healthy garden (which grows a healthy person), and that is healthy soil. Natural, God-given, nutrient-rich, earthworm-active, biologically-exploding soil! http://www.richsoil.com/lawn-care.jsp

From sites like Richsoil.com and Organic Lawn Care 101.com, I find that the reasons my grass tended to struggle a bit in the summer are twofold: first, we mowed too low. Setting the mower higher, the grass is sturdier, stronger, takes up more nutrients and fights off the bad guys (aka weeds). And second, we were bagging our clippings. Now, in our defense, we were either feeding the clippings (remember, these are untreated, natural grass with no chemical dressing) to our small flock of urban hens, using them spread thin as a mulch in the garden, or using them to make compost. They were not going in the dumpster to drive on down the road… however, even alternating mowings and leaving one to self-fertilize the lawn and taking the next for the abovementioned activities, the lawn still benefits.

So… there are my thoughts about urban lawnkeeping! I have to admit that a bigger chunk is retrieved from our front lawn every year as I keep expanding my gardens. Even in a front yard, with graceful lines edging the beds, and the beds themselves a lovely cottage-garden style of mixed flowers, herbs, and attractive vegetables, I find no reason to make a garden look like a mini-farm. A birdbath here and there, some foundation flowering or evergreen shrubs, attractive woodchip mulch, and you have a front yard that feeds the senses as well as the body, helps along the avian wildlife that keep bugs minimized, and reduces the amount of water and energy that are strictly for “show”… ie, an American front lawn. But there is a place for most everything, and if it is integrated well and has a purpose, and we are good stewards of the land under our care, even a lawn can be healthy, attractive, and easy!

Explaining Easter

What do you tell your kids when they ask about Easter? About the real story, the real reason for it. The truth about what Christianity is all about, not the Easter bunny hoopla, hunting eggs…  the fact that Jesus was the only perfect man who ever existed, and was equally God. That none of us could make it to heaven because we’re human, we’re messed up, we are prone to wander and determined to have our own way. The fact that Jesus was and is the only way that faulty, imperfect, sin-prone mankind could ever come running straight to the Father, all debts paid, all sins forgiven, love abounding. What do you tell a young child when they ask?

 I’ve heard and read people’s opinions that you should tell your preschooler or young elementary-aged children that bad guys killed Jesus, and He rose again after paying for the sins of mankind, and that He is our way to heaven. Well, that’s true enough. Except that it isn’t enough.

 If we don’t gently share with our little ones the very real truth that WE are the bad guys, that it is OUR sin that put Jesus on the cross, then some day someone is going to tell them “Jesus died for YOU” and it is going to be an insult. If they grow up thinking that Jesus was taken by force, beaten, mocked and scorned, and then forcibly restrained and nailed to the tree… all because the bad guys took control… then the new information that THEY had anything to do with it, that THEY are the reason as much as any one else in creation, then what is the response? After having grown up fully secure in the knowledge that “bad guys” killed Jesus, what is the compelling reason to accept their equal culpability in His death? No wonder so many kids fall away from the church. The world is telling them that they deserve the best, they are a rock star, they are a winner. Self-esteem is this huge issue, as though any human child needs to be told again and again of their own importance when it is something that kids feel instinctively from birth. And self-esteem, pride, rears back its head and says, “Wait! What? You’re saying that I’m messed up, dirty, sinful? That I’m one of the bad guys who killed Jesus? NO WAY.”

 Since our children were very young, and I’m talking 2 or 3 here, we’ve been gentle but we’ve been honest. We show them their sin. We admit to our own, and apologize to them and to God in front of them. We call it sin. We call ourselves sinners. We don’t pound the pulpit or judge, we simply point out who is in control of our hearts when sin takes place… and Who is in control of our hearts when love takes place. We call it like we see it through the eyes of biblical love and compassion.

We explain to our kids that Jesus Christ of Nazareth was not forcibly taken, restrained, nailed to the cross against His will. No, He did it willingly. He could have had legions of angels immediately rescue Him at any instant. God the Father could have destroyed the Earth in one blink to rescue His Son. But Jesus took the hurt and the shame. It wasn’t “bad guys”, it was all of us… the same ones who were crying “Hosanna!” and waving palm fronds just days before. Why did He do it?

• Because He loves us, as specific and individual people.
• Because it was and is the only way that each one of us can get past the stain and ugliness of the sin we carry around in our bodies, and join a resurrected Jesus and His Daddy, His Abba, in heaven. And He didn’t want to live without us.
• Because that was the plan from Genesis, and repeated throughout scripture, and God’s scripture is always true.
• And mostly, He did it because His love compelled Him to do so.

 And our love should recognize that it isn’t an “us against them” good guys with white hats versus bad guys with black hats… it’s all of us, sinners, equally unworthy, that are rescued by Jesus and the work that He did.

 I don’t believe that a child can be too young to hear that Jesus chose the cross because He wanted that child to be with Him in heaven, and that there was no other way for that child to be good enough. It should not instill shame in that child to hear that they are so beloved that a Savior would go to any imaginable lengths to assure their safety and security forever.

It is not a curse “You are dirty!” but a cry, “We are all dirty, unrighteous, un-able… but, God…” But, God… was pleased to see His Son die for us, because God loved us that much. But, God… was willing to become man and live a life on the Earth, to share our experiences and to suffer and die for us. But, God… never intended to leave us alone. He always intended salvation. And through Jesus, understanding and accepting that what He did and we celebrate joyously at Easter, He suffered through utter love for us. Kids get it. They see Mom and Dad’s fierce love for them, their joy with them, their compassion and the security the child feels with them… and they understand that God is the source of all of that good, and that they are God-esteemed.

 We do our kids, even our very young kids, a disservice to imagine that they don’t know that choosing behavior that they know to be opposite of the directives of their loving parents is, actually, sin. We do them a disservice to not be honest with them in the explanation that Jesus is the only way to heaven, for ALL of us. None of us are good enough without Him. We do them a disservice to pretend that we do not sin, or to be unwilling to acknowledge and repent of it, change our ways and apologize. We do all of us a disservice not to accept that the Bible says that No one is righteous, no, not one. That ALL fall short of the glory of God. That the only way to the Father is through the atoning work of the Son. We need to prepare them for the truths that they will more fully understand as they get older.  We should be gentle, compassionate, empathetic… but we need to be honest.

 It must never be Rules and Laws, us versus them. It should focus on the relationship, always. We were, and our kids were, created for relationship with Him… so it is us and Him, not us and them. It’s a good thing. It is grace.

Back to Eden Film

How absolutely lovely it is to find a film that combines two of my very favorite things in the world: God, and gardening! If you haven’t spent the time to sit down and watch “Back to Eden” (free at www.BacktoEdenFilm.com), you don’t know what you are missing! Gardener Paul Gautschi shares how God has revealed Himself through His creation and His Word.

“The ground is a living organism. As all living organisms, God has designed and made it so it is always covered with something. It’s all about the covering!”
– Paul Gautschi

For about 20 years now, I’ve been a huge believer in sheet composting. Basically, rather than tilling the soil, which I find:

– destroys soil tilth (if there is any at all);

– kills earthworms; and

– kills your back to boot

the concept of sheet gardening involves covering any existing sod with several layers of (non-slick) newspaper, wetted down. Then you apply a nice layer (4″ or so if you can) of compost, and this can be fairly raw! Weed-free animal manure is great – if you can get it from the source, even better. Then layers of available materials… chopped leaves (run them up in your lawnmower instead of raking), peat if you have it and don’t mind using it… a thin layer of fresh (untreated) grass clippings… finished compost (either from your compost bin or the bagged stuff)… and finally a visually appealing layer on top.

So where the Back to Eden gardeners differ is primarily in their choice of top covering. They choose wood chips, and have plenty of gorgeous garden and example to prove why it works! I’d always heard conventional wisdom to say that wood chips took up too much nitrogen when used in a garden, but here’s the rub. That is not the case if they aren’t tilled in! These are on TOP – a nice deep covering (4-6″). They very slowly decompose into the soil, releasing nutrition as they go.

So after “mostly” using this type of garden for the past two decades, I have decided that wood chips are my new top covering of choice, trumping chopped leaves. I’m going to begin implementing them immediately on my various gardens (from every corner of the yard, to our church, to my community garden plots). Heavy mulching and lots of composting has always been very effective in my experience; it will be exciting to garden with a Biblical approach!

My gardens are a combination of several non-conventional styles: companion planting with square-foot gardening spacing (although I only rarely measure), lasagna raised beds with Back to Eden covering. I’ve got happy worms and lovely vegetables, herbs and flowers! And the best part is that it minimizes both weeding (bleck) and watering needs, while improving the soil itself. What a blessing!

“No matter where you live, if you apply a covering to your garden, God will do the rest, and you will be blessed!” – Paul Gautschi