Snapshots: A Horse, a Girl, and Plastic Tea

Let's see what stunning photography I managed this week, shall we?

A happily grazing horse. Between the horse and the sheep, we provide many free weed whackers as a courtesy to the fellow residents of our ghost-village. 

This time of year, I get my wildflower bouquets on the table, and Poppy gets her wildflower hair accessories. Everyone's happy. (This is a weird angle and picture because she was sitting on my lap at the time.)

I buy quite a few pantry staples from Walmart periodically, but my most recent order came not with giant tubs of peanut butter and olive oil, but with a giant box of this:

Definitely not peanut butter.

I got a box full of plastic cups filled with plastic herb tea "sachets." A total of 400 sachets, as a matter of fact, of the "Jade Mint" and "Peach Tranquility" variety. Still not sure how my order was replaced with this, but Walmart told me to keep the tea and didn't charge me for it.

That's nice. I guess. Except I am not dropping tea encased in plastic mesh into hot water for imbibing. Yuck. So I painstakingly cut a bunch of the sachets and poured the tea into mason jars. This left me with a lot of plastic waste.

Gross.

The cup part has a lid, so I washed those out and will use them to hand around snacks in the car, I suppose. 

I brought about 20 of those cups up to the post office and put them out for anyone to take. They were all taken, so that's good. 

Still upset about the packaging on those, though. Not that I'm even close to zero-waste, but that was just ridiculous. It's a Starbucks brand, by the way. 

Yes, I'm calling you out, Starbucks.

And there you have it! My life, snapshotted. 

Friday Food: Starting Summer with Sniffles

School ended, and the kids immediately all got sick. By Sunday, all four were hacking and dripping. Appetizing.

We're mostly all better now, though!

Friday 

Short version: Bull tacos, sick-boy potato soup, still-frozen peas

Long version: Just a jar of pressure-canned bull meat cooked with salsa, chili powder, and garlic powder. Three children ate theirs in corn tortillas with cheese. A. ate his topped with melted pepperjack cheese. I ate mine in a salad.

The very day after school ended, both Jack and Cubby woke up sick. Cubby had a terrible sore throat, so I made him his favorite soup: potato. Just a few pieces of fried bacon, onion, carrots, potatoes, and sour cream. I used these little tubs of sour cream the school cook gave me the day before, because she didn't want to throw them away.

We're always a good repository for excess food.

Anyway, I pureed all of the soup and Cubby managed one bowl before he went back to bed.

Saturday

Short version: Stewed beef, garlic bread, roasted bell peppers and onions, still-frozen peas

Long version: I was organizing the two chest freezers and found that I seem to have already used all the ground beef from the cow we got in February. I asked the butcher to give me 3/4 ground beef and 1/4 stew meat (the same cuts are used for both of those), but it looks as if they did the opposite.

Dangit.

So there's going to be a lot of stew in our future. Perfect for summer. Ahem.

For this round of stewing, I just dumped the meat in my enameled dutch oven with four cubes of green garlic puree and a quart of pressure-canned chicken stock--plus salt--and cooked it until it was tender. Then I added two cubes of frozen basil pesto and about a cup of grated asadero cheese.

It was really good.

Random photo break!

'Tis once again the season for wildflower bouquets presented to me by my children. This makes me very happy.

Sunday

Short version: Roasted chicken pieces; bread and butter; curried cauliflower, green beans, and peas; sprouting broccoli; leftover Crispy Rice Treats and brownie crumbs

Long version: A. bought a package of chicken thighs and a package of split chicken breasts at the store, and I used both for this meal. I salted the chicken a couple of hours before cooking, then cranked the oven up to 475 degrees and roasted it plain for awhile (so it could release juices without the sauce all sliding off), and then sprinkled on paprika and garlic powder, and THEN spread on a mixture of ketchup, mustard, garlic powder, and quite a bit of vinegar. It came out pretty well.

I made the curried cauliflower because I had some cooked cauliflower that really needed to be used up. And then I put way too much curry powder in accidentally. So then I added some cooked green beans, and then a bunch of frozen peas. Plus a bunch of sour cream and cream. It ended up being a lot of vegetables, and the curry didn't really go with the barbecue-ish chicken, but I enjoyed it.

The desserts were both left from different end-of-school events. The brownies were impossible to get out of the pan intact because I baked them right before we went to the school on the last day and they didn't have time to cool enough. Thus, brownie crumbs. The kids didn't mind, though.

Monday

Short version: Leftover stewed beef, bread and butter, leftover baked beans, frozen green peas

Long version: We seem to have eaten bread and butter for several dinners in a row, unusually. Well, the kids did. I didn't hear them complaining about it, either.

Tuesday

Short version: Re-purposed chicken, green salad with weeds (and ranch dressing), pomegranate

Long version: I had the food processor out to make fruit shakes (smoothies) for lunch, so I rinsed it out and made some marinara sauce with a can of tomatoes that were in the refrigerator, along with some green garlic, olive oil, balsamic vinegar, and dried oregano. 

I made pasta for the kids and used that sauce, plus some finely diced leftover chicken (they can't eat around it that way--ha) and some asadero cheese.

For A. and me, I fried some chunks of leftover chicken with leftover roasted peppers and onions and a bit of the tomato sauce, plus some asadero cheese.

The salad was MY LETTUCE HOORAY, to which I added some lamb's quarters because the kids found some out back and brought it to me. Plus this ranch dressing.

The combination of all the vegetables made for a very colorful plate.

Professionally styled food photos are my primary concern, obviously.

The pomegranate was the one that A. bought some time ago so he could save the seeds. He gave each kid a bowl and a chunk of pomegranate and they had a great time spitting seeds and smearing red juice all over themselves.

Like so.

That same child observed while eating his pomegranate: "This kind of looks like bear poop."

I had to acknowledge the truth of this (bears eat a lot of seedy things), but it doesn't seem like the sort of visual that would really improve the appetite.

Wednesday

Short version: Stew meat tacos, pinto beans, carrot sticks with ranch dip

Long version: The latest iteration of the stew meat, this time with frozen green chili sauce and green garlic puree, plus chicken stock, simmered until I could break it apart, and then I added some sour cream. From the little tubs I got from the school cook, of course. Those little tubs held a surprisingly large quantity of sour cream all together.

Thursday

Short version: Breakfast sausage patties, curried split peas, rice, green salad with ranch dressing

Long version: I found a quart jar in the pantry that was about half full of yellow split peas, so I cooked those until they were done on Wednesday. Then I used the cooked split peas to make the curried split peas by simply sauteeing onion and sweet yellow curry powder in coconut oil, then adding the peas and a couple of those little tubs of sour cream.

Still haven't used all that sour cream. And of course, I haven't even begun to start cooking the three giant jars of dried split peas I showed you the other day. 

Okay, your turn! What'd you eat this week?

T.T.: Remote Living, Part 2 (School!)

Several of the specific questions some of you had involved schooling, so that's what I'll focus on today.

How far is the school? 

Although there are many students at our school who travel an hour or more to get to school--because of the large size of our district or because they chose to come to our school from out of district--we are only ten miles from the school.

How do your kids get there on the days you don't work?

Same way they get there on the days I do work: On the school bus. 

A. is the bus driver for one of our school buses. Our small (but mighty!) bus lives at our house. Currently, we all get on the bus in the morning on the days I work, pick up a few more kids on our way to the school, and that's it. On the days I don't work, it's often just our boys on the bus in the morning. However, A.'s bus route does actually include much farther homes, it's just we don't happen to have any kids right now that live out that way. 

Our house is not on the main road, but is visible from it, so whenever anyone is coming who hasn't been here before, we just tell them to look for the school bus parked in front of our house. A handy marker.

The one other bus starts its run at the very edge of the district and picks up a lot more kids along the way. "A lot more" meaning . . . 15.

Is there a high school in your area?

The school our kids attend is actually pre-K through 12th grade, in several buildings on one campus.

If you have to be away while the kids are in school, do you coordinate with someone ahead of time to take them if you get held up? Or would you just call someone from the road to make arrangements?

It's very, very rare that A. and I both go somewhere while the kids are in school. When we do, we don't make any special arrangements. If our car broke down or something, then yes, we would call the school on our cell phone. Cell service is good enough to make a call most of the places we go around here. (Although our cell phone doesn't work in our actual house, so I have to go outside at home if I want to use it.)

Anyway, I don't worry too much about the kids at school if we have a situation that keeps us from being there when school lets out, because most of their friends have a parent who works at the school. So if we couldn't get there for whatever reason, they could just go home with one of those staff parents and we would pick them up when we could. The community here is very, very supportive and accustomed to helping each other out. It wouldn't be a problem.

What about college?

There is no college nearer than 100 miles away. If they decide to go to college, they will not be living at home while they do. Unless they do it online, which a lot of people do nowadays, anyway. 

And a bonus, non-school question: Who is Miss Amelia?

Miss Amelia is our elderly neighbor. She lives alone in the same house she's lived in for probably sixty years, about half a mile from us. She loves children and is just about the sweetest woman ever. She's constantly sending food over to us. Luckily, she LOVES my bread, and also garden vegetables, so I can return the favor.

More answers to your burning questions about remote living coming next week! And if you have anymore, just put 'em in the comments and I'll get to them, too. 

Snapshots: Snakes 'n' Summer

Most of the time when my mom brings the kids random toys and other diversions, I save them for some later time. Last time she came, those diversions were water guns and water balloons. Those I saved for the last day of school, which was conveniently 83 degrees.

(Swim) suited up for battle.

And look who we saw when we were getting on the bus to come home on the last day of school.

It's Howard's cousin!

Instead of a coffee maker on the counter, we have an electric kettle, which I use with a french press to make my coffee. Our five-year-old kettle melted down in a rather spectacular fashion a couple of weeks ago, so I had to order a new one. The one I got is glass, and when it's on, the base is surrounded by a blue light. 

When it's at a full boil in a dark kitchen, it looks pleasingly like a lava lamp.

My coffee is so much groovier now.

And lastly, here is a bowl of fresh fruit. I do not usually have enough fresh fruit to have a fruit bowl of the sort that seem de rigueur in carefully styled kitchens, but I happened to have a very photogenic variety this week. And a photogenic bowl, too.

A. bought the pomegranate so he could plant the seeds and grow a tree. Isn't that why you buy fruit?

And there you have it! My life, snapshotted.

Friday Food: Schoool's Out for Summer

"Schoooool's out forever. School's been blown. To. Pieces."

Name that song!*

Anyway. Food . . .

Friday 

Short version: Pretzels, ice cream sandwiches, pork with green chili, garlic bread, raw radishes

Long version: I was outside weeding my asparagus at 3:30 p.m. when the phone rang. It was the mechanic, telling us the van was ready to pick up.

The mechanic is an hour away, and they would be closing for the weekend at 5 p.m. Our next opportunity to get the van wouldn't be until the following Friday. 

Road trip, kids!

Luckily, everyone was already outside, so all I had to do was pile them into the Honda. I quickly filled a few water bottles and grabbed a bag of pretzel sticks from the pantry to placate the hungry children. We also promised them ice cream after we got the van.

It was really hot on the ride down--the Honda doesn't have any air conditioning--but it started to rain right before we got the mechanic. There was no thunder, so while we were waiting for A. to pay and get the keys, I let them all get out to run around in the (light) rain.

Because we know how to have a good time.

We got them ice cream sandwiches at the gas station before we headed home. Very luckily, I had already made garlic bread and cooked some pork country ribs, so when we got home all I had to do was pull the meat off the ribs and mix it with some of the green chili sauce. I also threw some green beans right in with the pork to up the vegetable content.

Saturday

Short version: Leftover pork, chicken patty sandwiches, carrot sticks with curry dip

Long version: I had a plan involving some of the pressure-canned bull meat, but then I punked out with those frozen chicken patties and leftovers. A. and Cubby were helping Rafael fix his windmill and they didn't get home until 8 p.m., so it was just me and the other three kids anyway. They were happy with the sandwiches.

Sunday

Short version: Roast beef, roasted potatoes, sauteed sprouting broccoli, blueberry/apricot dessert oatmeal

Long version: Sprouting broccoli is a new thing for me. I bought the seeds at Baker's Creek Seeds when we stopped there a couple of summers ago on our way home from Blackrock. They're a fall-planted plant that's supposed to overwinter and produce the broccoli florets in early spring.

The first fall I planted them, they didn't even germinate. Too dry, I suspect.

Last fall they germinated and grew pretty well, but the only ones I got through the winter were the ones that were in one of the sunken box beds. They survived because I could cover them to protect them from both the voracious rabbits and the cold. They're supposed to be winter-hardy, but I don't think they're hardy enough to withstand zero degrees without some protection.

Anyway. They grew nicely in the spring and I finally harvested enough for a side dish.

Sprouting broccoli doesn't form heads, just individual florets on a kind of bushy plant. It looks sort of weedy, but it tasted really good.

This is a purple variety, although they turn green when cooked.

This was the sleeper hit of this meal. Every single person said how good it was. Even A., who doesn't even like broccoli, told me I should grow it again. 

Done.

The dessert was supposed to be a crisp to use some apricots I bought on Thursday that were not as flavorful as I would have liked. However, the frozen blueberries once again released so many juices that they overwhelmed the topping. Also, the topping was mostly oats--trying to use up the crazy quantities of quick oats I keep getting from our neighbors--so it actually ended up tasting sort of like very fruity oatmeal. It was good with whipped cream, though.

Monday

Short version: Cheater's pizza, pizza omelets, green salad from MY LETTUCE, HOORAY!

Long version: I did back-to-back bread bakings this weekend so I could make bread for end-of-year teacher gifts, which means I made garlic bread two nights. Rather than give the kids garlic bread on Sunday, though, I saved that loaf and cut it in half to serve as pizza crust. A bag of Finny's sauce from the freezer, grated asadero cheese, and there's an exciting workday dinner for the children.

A. and I ate the omelets. I've never made these before, or heard of them, but I'm sure there are recipes for them somewhere. All I did was season the eggs with dried basil, garlic powder, salt, and pepper, then fill the omelet with asadero cheese, and top the finished omelets with the tomato sauce. They were quite good.

The salad, though, was what made me very happy. It was my lettuce (hooray!), as well as some of my arugula, green garlic, and the flowers from some wild chives Cubby found when he was herding sheep and brought home for me.

I was so proud and touched when he showed up with plants he had foraged and brought to me, for several reasons: 1) He identified them on his own. 2) He knew I would be happy to get them. 3) He was excited to eat some himself. 

That's my boy.

Tuesday

Short version: Beef stew meat with vegetables, pasta, steamed broccoli

Long version: I cooked the package of stew meat I took out with four cubes of green garlic puree from the freezer, a quart of pressure-canned beef stock, and the remaining half cup or so of Finny's sauce from the pizza. It was very good. I just love it when all the flavor comes from things I prepared in the past, so I can just dump stuff in.

In the same pot as the meat, I put in the last half of a bag of chopped calabacita (like zucchini) from last summer, and a few carrots cut into chunks.

The pasta had two cubes of basil pesto from last summer, plus butter and cream cheese.

Wednesday

Short version: Steaks, leftover rice or roasted potatoes, frozen green peas

Long version: I only cooked four steaks ("only," ha), but the boys had been eating treats in their classrooms all day because it was the last full day of school, so they didn't eat as much as they normally would.

Thursday

Short version: Hot dogs, tater tots, baked beans, leftover peas

Long version: Last day of school! When I was actually in the grocery store myself last week, I was able to buy such indulgences as hot dogs (with buns!) and tater tots. Which I saved for the last day of school.

The baked beans were some from the last batch I had made and frozen.

The children were very excited about this meal. I was not excited by the actual hole that was kicked in my living room wall while they were wrestling as I was preparing this meal.

Welcome, summer! Ugh.

Okay, your turn! What'd you eat this week?

* School's Out by Alice Cooper. And here it is! You're welcome.

T.T.: Remote Living, Part 1

Some time ago, a reader named Lauren mentioned in the comments that she always has so many questions about what it's like to live in "such a rural area."

This made me think that I should clarify the distinction between "rural" and "remote." 

A "rural" area is anyplace that isn't urban or suburban. You can live in a rural place--like Blackrock--that's only a twenty-minute drive from a city. Or even closer. Rural is a place you can have chickens and some land around you, but you're not in a city. But rural areas are not generally what I would consider especially incovenient. They may require a bit of driving, but they are a reasonable distance to an urban center.

"Remote," on the other hand, is inconvenient. At least, in our modern understanding. Where I live now would definitely be considered remote by most people's standards. It's 100 miles to even a small city, and that small city might not even have something like a Walmart.

To get to Walmart from our house involves a lot of miles of this.

There are people who live more remotely than we do--say, the Alaskan bush--but not many.

Anyway.

I think it's really common for people to have a LOT of questions about what it's like to live remotely, so I'm going to do a series of Tuesday Tips post about that. Starting today with Lauren's questions.

How do you get your groceries home intact? Do you have to take a cooler any time you do a grocery run?

Short answers: In the back of the car with all the animal feed, and yes. Usually two coolers. 

Longer answer: Luckily for Lauren, I did a whole post about this once, and here it is! Since I wrote that a couple of years ago, the very small store sadly closed, so now it's just the micro store where we can usually get milk and eggs, and then a lot of open road between us and the nearest bananas. 

Are there different/special supplies you keep on-hand is case of (God forbid) a medical emergency?

No. I'm pretty careful about keeping any over-the-counter stuff we may need in stock--children's Tylenol, bandages, etc.--since I can't just run out to a store to get some. But I don't keep, like, a tourniquet or something on hand. We have volunteer fire departments in both villages that are ten miles away from us, plus there's an ambulance company about 25 miles away that responds to emergencies. And, in more serious emergencies, our county has a contract with a medical helicopter company for transport to a hospital. So if anything really bad were to happen, I would call 911 and one of those agencies would respond.

You can still get Amazon deliveries . . . right?

Right. The UPS driver is a local celebrity because he is our provider of All Things Ordered Online. Anything you can get online, I can, too. Maybe not with the two-day shipping guaranteed, but it will get here eventually. This is, honestly, probably the biggest game-changer for remote living ever. Well, that and the Internet access itself. I order a lot of things online that I have in the past purchased at stores--clothing, canned tuna, paper and ink for A.'s office printer--and I feel very lucky that I can. 

There! Those were Lauren's questions. If there are any more specific questions you have, go ahead and leave them in the comments and I'll answer them next week. Otherwise, I'll do a more generalized overview of the things I think are helpful for living where I live.

Snapshots: Split Peas and Chicks

Thanks to the regular boxes of excess commodities food our neighbors give us, I have seriously alarming quantities of split peas. The bags were flopping all over the upper cabinets in the kids' bathroom where I store overflow pantry things, so I decided to use some of those handy half-gallon mason jars A. gave me for Christmas to corral them.

I was not expecting to need so many jars, but here we are.

I need to start cooking split peas approximately once a week for the rest of the year to get through all of these. BUT THEN THERE WILL BE MORE.

That plastic container on the end has brown rice in it. Also an excess commodities item.

I ran out of big jars before I could consolidate the five bags of powdered milk also in those cabinets. And we shan't even speak of the twenty-five pounds of quick oats that are currently in my freezer.

Apparently, the commodities program is supplying preppers? I don't know.

Anyway. Other things . . .

I planted out my single, solitary surviving pepper plant. I did put some more seeds in wet paper towels to sprout and then I'll just plant the sprouts right outside. But those haven't sprouted yet, and if they never do, this is my only shot for bell peppers.

No pressure, pepper.

Since we actually got some rain, A. decided it would be safe to burn all the various bits of wood that littered  the property.

For additional safety, he contained the fire in this pit the kids helpfully dug many months ago.

I LOVE burning all the nasty, splintery bits of wood that accumulate all over the place. I spent quite some time happily gathering up disintegrating pieces of particle board and random sticks all over the place and chucking them into the fire.

Now if I could manage to collect all the rocks and bits of broken concrete I trip over all the time, I'll really feel like I'm getting somewhere.

And last but not least, we have chicks again.

Hi, chickies!

That one black one under the lamp was the one the boys brought home from school. They always put some eggs in an incubator (many of the eggs this year came from us) at school in the spring and then send the chicks home with the kids. There were only six surviving chicks this year, so we just got that one.

It was so sad listening to the solitary chick cheeping for its friends that we went the very next day to buy six more chicks to keep him company. We were planning on getting some more laying hens anyway.

We went to Tractor Supply to get the chicks--A. chose Buff Orpingtons--and the lady put the chicks in this carrier box that looked disturbingly like a large Happy Meal box.

Would it be in poor taste to make a joke about chicken nuggets here? (Get it? Poor taste?) (Okay, I'll stop.)

And there you have it! My life, snapshotted.