Domesticating

• I made a fantastic rhubarb sauce sweetened only with chopped raisins. The original recipe [from my favorite cookbook, How to Cook Everything by Mark Bittman] called for dates, but raisins can be used as an alternate. It was delicious! We've been eating it on our pancakes. I love rhubarb, but h-a-t-e refined sugar. I'm always looking for ways to get around it in conventional recipes.
• I love hanging laundry on our clothesline. It isn't a chore, it is a pleasure. I've hung our diapers out to dry since Starbeans was born and tried to hang as much as I could from fencepost to fencepost in our backyard in Minneapolis, but now that I have a pair of sky-blue clothesline poles behind our garage under a towering ash tree, I am in hog's heaven. The breeze - the shade - hearing the leaves rustle above me - hanging the damp articles with Wilburn's wooden clothespins. It feels so good.
• I rendered lard last week. Yes, I did! My in-laws bought a pig from a local farmer and when I found out, I begged them to save the lard for me. They did, very obligingly, and now I have 3 shiny quarts of snowy-white lard (and more to come). I followed directions from a blog I found on my google search called An Obsession with Food & Wine. It was easy. I made refried beans with it for our bean-and-cheese quesadillas last night and it dyn-o-mite! There is a reason why - other than necessity and using what they had - that Grandma and Great-Grandma and Great-Great Grandma used lard in their cooking. It is fan-tabulous. Besides, who doesn't want to use a good saturated fat vs. these freaky man-made fats that have dominated us for the past 30-40 years?
• I've been re-re-reading Nourishing Traditions by Sally Fallon recently, which has spurred me into soaking and fermenting grains before consuming them. I have already been soaking and sprouting the beans I cook with (I highly recommend this - not only does it heighten their nutritional value, but they cook up in a snap). This week, I've eaten amaranth porridge for breakfast - it has the consistency of Cream of Wheat and smells like roasting corn as it is cooking. I eat it with cinnamon honey, butter and/or yogurt, and walnuts. Delicious. Starbeans, however, prefers his oatmeal.
• Speaking of cinnamon honey, I finally met our neighbor - the beekeeper. Her name is Walentyna: she is 81 years old, Polish, and as fit as a fiddle. She eats whole foods: the woman makes her own butter and bread and who-knows-what-else. She told me of her elderly mother visiting her here in the Rolling Prairies from Poland who shook her head and said, "America - a country so rich, that eats garbage food." While we were at her house, she introduced me to cinnamon honey: 1 tablespoon of ground cinnamon in 1 cup honey. Simply amazing. I've always loved cinnamon toast, but that dratted white sugar has kept me away from it all these years; I don't know how I could have forgotten about our friend the honey bee. Now I can have my toast and eat it too.

My lard, before the final step of melting it down