When my mom died, I found the evenings incredibly painful and lonely. I didn’t know what to do with my hands, or my thoughts, so I picked up a carrot one day and wondered if I could turn it into something delicious (not that carrots aren’t delicious on their own, but there had to be a way to build on Mother Nature’s starting point). So I chopped it up. Then I put it in a crock pot with some onions and some celery, and then some tomatoes, some broth, some basil, some oregano, a little bit of salt and pepper… and suddenly I had vegetable soup. And I had something for my hands to do. Chopping, stirring, it all became a prayer for my hands. And at the end of it, I had something warm and nourishing for my body as well.

What I wasn’t expecting was my slow but steady development into a good cook. Once I realized that the food I made was not only healthy, but actually tasted good, I became much more brave in the culinary realm. Stews? Sure! Bread? Let’s do it! Sticky buns… wait, sticky buns? Shouldn’t I buy those at grocery store? No way, Jose. I can make my own sticky buns. I can make sticky buns up the wazoo (though, come to think of it, I don’t recommend that). And now that I feel capable and confident, I want new challenges. I want the hard recipes. I want to discover what else I can do.

I am discovering that confidence is less like a solid and more like a liquid – it doesn’t stay put in a little box, but seeps out and into other parts of my life. Where I would have given up on an idea and turned it over to a “professional”, I am becoming more and more interested in seeing if I can pull it off on my own. It’s opening up the world in ways I never could have imagined before. I feel like anything is possible – and not just in the kitchen.

That’s a very good thing for a gal like me, who’s done the same kind of work for 15 years, who’s never tried anything truly hard in school, who’s always chosen the “safe option” in most of life’s choices.  It’s inspired me to try and inspire others, too. Try something. See if you’re good at it, and if you aren’t, try it again, and then again. See if it doesn’t transform you and the whole damn world around you.

10 Ways to Be Nicer to the World that Sustains Us:

1) Reuse aluminum foil
For real, that stuff never breaks down – ever – and if you are gentle with it, you can totally reuse it for the next thing (e.g., cooking potatoes in the oven)

2) Pure castille soap instead of regular shampoo or body wash
The commercially produced stuff is full of sodium laurel sulfate and parabens (not to mention a bunch of other crap that is totally toxic and pollutes the body’s well balanced systems). Dr. Bronner makes a really good line (http://www.drbronner.com/) but you may have to just ignore the crazy “All One” faith rants that are posted all over the labels.

3) No plastic
This has been especially hard with little kids in the house, but I use the metal lunch containers now to send food to school or on trips (instead of the baggies or Ziploc containers) and for the baby, there are these really sweet silicone food containers that we love called Kinderville Little Bites.

OMG so sweet

4) No factory farmed meat
It’s too cruel. Even Hitler himself has got to feel bad about eating animals that were raised in those kinds horrific conditions. Pay a little bit more and support the farmers who are treat their animals with respect and fairness.

5) Reusable gift bags
As the holidays approach, we turn our minds to the seemingly endless wrapping that’s needed to turn all that loot into a mess of festive surprises. My solution was to buy some Christmas-themed fabric and sew up  different sized bags. We use them every year for our gifts under the tree.

6) AutoShare
This is a car sharing program that works really well in an urban centre. We made the decision to live close to downtown so that we wouldn’t be dependent on a vehicle to get everywhere (the suburbs are hell for this). We can jump on the streetcar or walk just about everywhere we need to go, but there are times when a car is useful (e.g., bringing home a grocery haul). In those times, we turn to AutoShare. It allows you to rent a car for a couple of hours at a time and the price (8 or 9 dollars an hour) includes gas, insurance and maintenance. Way cheaper than buying our own car, and 10 or so people sharing the car means that 9 or so cars are kept off the road.

7) Less Packaging
I buy loose mushrooms and put them in my cloth bag to bring them home. Good for two reasons: packaged mushrooms are massively wasteful; and the plastic produce bags are avoided (see earlier rant re: plastic produce bags from hell)

8) Bulk Laundry and Dish Soap
More on this “less packaging” idea… if you buy your soaps in bulk, you save money and you can reuse the bottles they come in. At Grassroots, if you take in your empty laundry or dish soap bottle, you can refill it over and over. It’s way cheaper than buying a new bottle every time.

9) Wooden Toys
The cheap plastic toys we buy from Toys R Us are made in China, with almost no environmental regulations or standards. That means tonnes of crap pumped into the air and water, and people working with toxic materials, that are shaped into colourful representations of vehicles, babies and other miniature goods, which are then shipped across continents back to us, so we can give them to our children (who will then put them in their mouths). This is crazy, but we don’t think about it because it’s so commonplace. Wooden toys are way lovelier (handmade ones especially) and they don’t leech chemicals that cause tumours.

10) Turn out the lights
This is really obvious, but it’s amazing how often we leave the lights on unnecessarily. We leave a room, but the lights stay burning away. Cut down on your energy bill, and save some energy from being wasted. This past summer, we went to the Exhibition where we saw a display on how much energy things use. To keep a 5 watt lightbulb shining, we had to turn a lever around and around spastically. Unbelievable. It really opened my eyes to how much energy we use in a day – and we’ve been on a mission to reduce that (our bank accounts will also be grateful).

Anyone else have any good ideas to share?

One of his guests wasn’t able to make it, though. His dad called to say he woke up feeling unwell on the morning of the party. His birthday is this month as well, but his mom told me that he wanted a party with his family only, rather than his friends. I thought that sounded lovely.

But we learned this week that he did invite at least one boy from school to his party – and has really enjoyed taunting Josh about the fact that he hasn’t been invited as well. I began to wonder whether he backed out of the party as well… because he doesn’t like Josh.

This awareness is so hard. As a parent, you think your child is the loveliest, smartest, funniest, most exceptional little person and it makes no sense that someone wouldn’t enjoy them as much as you do. But then you send them into the cruel world of the school yard and discover that others don’t see them the same way – and then you have to watch as they suffer the effects of trying to establish a friendship with someone who resists, and not only resists, but enjoys resisting.

I understand this feeling all too well, and perhaps that’s why it hurts so much to watch Josh be excluded. His experience dredges up my own, both as a child and as an adult. The painful times you reach out and your effort is re-buffed. The attempts to connect and have your attempt shunned… As an adult, though, I have the ability to reason that someone’s exclusion of me isn’t the end of the world – and if they behave badly about it, well, that’s a reflection of their own character rather than my own.

But speaking of character, it’s especially hard to watch this happen to Josh because I’ve taught him, I’ve drummed into him, that kindness and respect are non-negotiable and that he must treat everyone with both, even if they aren’t behaving that way back. So I listen to him talk about the sing-song-y way the boy from school taunts Josh for not being invited to his party, and I want to tell him to defend himself, to call that boy a jerk and tell him he has no class… but I don’t. Revenge feels good; returning ugliness for ugliness feels satisfying. But that’s not the kind of person I’m trying to raise. I grit my teeth and take a breath and tell him to respond with kindness and respect, even if his heart is hurting and his face is red with embarrassment. I tell him to walk away rather than say hurtful things back. I tell him that someday, he will understand why being the bigger person is always better, and that it will serve him well, especially as an adult.

And then we get out a game to play, and make hot chocolate, and have some hugs, and I do what I can to take the sting out of the situation. But I know that this experience is teaching Josh something about the world, and about how cruel people can be. I just keep praying and hoping that it doesn’t turn him hard, or make his behaviour ugly. Because he really is the loveliest, smartest, funniest little boy and the others who don’t get that are missing out on having a really great friend. And no matter what happens, I want him to be a person of grace.

I keep learning my lessons by walking with him through his own.

Oh, Front Porch Revolution! I don’t want that to happen to you!

But we haven’t been revolutioning much lately, have we? There are few things as sad as a revolution that peters out. Especially in light of the recent revolutions around the world, it feels like one huge eye-roll to confess that I couldn’t keep it up. So I’m bucking up, friends. And giving it another shot.

To be fair to me, I have recently returned to work after a year of maternity leave. A glorious, luscious, richly-spent year, I might add. So much learning and indulging and drinking up life! But now, things are fairly frantic all the time, and when I do get a moment to stop, I want to stop. Like, plop down in front of the t.v., or go to sleep. I feel like in order to write something here, it has to be brilliant and thought-provoking, and meant to accomplish something. And that feels like it’s going to take a lot of time, which feels overwhelming, and so I just give up.

But I think if this project has meant anything to me, it’s that giving up is what causes bad things to win. As long as people are complacent, disinterested and demotivated, nothing changes. I need to remember that every time I feel like smacking someone who is doing something willfully damaging to the only environment we have to live in. I need to remember that every time I see big business screwing over the little guy. I need to remember that every time I watch people choose “convenient and cheap” over “fair and honest”.

Even if it feels insurmountable, never give up. Even if it seems impossible, never give up. Even if others mock the effort, never give up. Never give up caring, because if we do, we’re lost.

More tomorrow (or the next day).

We should be giving thanks, and not just once a year, but regularly. I considered this as I walked around picking up toys and books and straightening up our house. Why are we safe? We had nothing to do with where we were born – we didn’t choose Canada, we just lucked out. Our children are not hungry. They are not uneducated. They are not sold into sexual slavery. They’re not being captured and trained as soldiers.

Decked out in his Thanksgiving finest.

Why are we safe? Our water is clean; it will not kill us if we drink or wash with it. Our grocery stores are stocked. Our bank accounts have money in them. We hosted not one, but two Thanksgiving dinners. We were able to sit around and leisurely enjoy the meal, and the dessert, and the wine. No one drove a tank up the middle of our street, or dropped a bomb on our neighbourhood.

Why are we safe? I’m listening to the radio. They’re interviewing a man who experienced torture for associating with the “wrong” people in Latin America. I quickly tap the power button as he begins describing being strapped naked to a table and having his testicles shocked with electricity. But it’s too late; my five year old has heard. Wide-eyed, he asks: “Why would anyone do that to a man, Mama?” I have no answer, so I hug him and tell him we, who are blessed with much, must never stop caring and striving to help those who have nothing, not even their freedom.

I’m anxious as I think about what I cannot do to help those who have little to be thankful for… There has to be something, and I have to find it soon. But what I will not do is take this for granted, any of it. It’s a gift, an abundant gift, and I will carry around thanks in my heart for it, always.

I love making bread. I make it so often now that I’ve got the recipe and method memorized. It’s a delight for me, too. There’s just something about kneading the soft dough between my hands and watching it become uniform and elastic and smooth, knowing that shortly, it will be a perfect loaf – crunchy on the outside, soft and fluffy on the inside, and so so delicious. I use the time to pray, even while it reminds me that “man shall not live on bread alone”.

A few things here:

I’ve come across lots of bread recipes and it’s likely they all make an amazing loaf. But I’ve found that there’s something complicated with each one. This recipe is truly the easiest, simplest ever, so it’s very good for those of us just starting out. Also, I’ve adapted it from plain white flour to be made with spelt, so that it’s more nutritionally valuable. I found, though, that whole wheat flour is difficult to use here, so you may want to avoid it.

So, without further ado, here’s how to make it. It feels like an amazing (and delicious) accomplishment! (Up front, let me say, you need several hours for this, so don’t start if you’re trying to kill and hour and then you’re out for the rest of the day.)

Recipe:

2 1/4 tsp (or one packet) dry active yeast
1.5 cups warm water
1 tsp sugar
3.5 cups of flour (all purpose, spelt, or combination of both)
2 tsp salt
A little bit of olive oil

That’s it.

Step 1: Proof your yeast
You start with 1.5 cups of warm water (make it warm, not tepid – not hot). Sprinkle your yeast over the top of it, and add the teaspoon of sugar. Stir it with a plastic or wooden spoon (avoid metal).

Like a pint of Guiness...

Let it sit for 10 minutes until it’s all thick and bubbly on the top.

Step 2:

Whisk together 3.5 cups of flour (I use 1 cup of white, 2.5 cups of spelt) in a large bowl and add in the 2 teaspoons of salt.

Make a well in the middle of the flour and pour in the yeast/water combo.

Step 3:

Stir the flour into the yeast/water mixture, pulling it in from the sides and making a ball out of it.

Stir until all the flour is absorbed.

Cover it with plastic wrap or a warm, damp dish towel and let it sit for 10 minutes (this allows the gluten to form). If you use plastic wrap, save it for the next step to re-use.

It ain't pretty. But it will be. Oh it will be.

Step 4:

Get a nice clean surface, and sprinkle it with flour. You’ll add lots of flour as you go, so keep some nearby and handy.

I keep my flour in a giant glass jar and put it next to the block on a high stool.

Turn the dough ball out onto the floured surface and start to knead it. You knead by pushing down in the middle, gathering up the sides and turning them toward the middle, then pushing down in the middle again – over and over and over. You will need to sprinkle flour on the surface you’re working on, and on your dough ball as it gets sticky. Don’t sprinkle a lot, though, or you’ll make it too dry. Just enough to keep it from sticking.

Build those arm muscles while you make something delicious to eat. It all balances out.

Knead it for 10 minutes, until it’s smooth and taut and uniform. When you pinch it, it should quickly spring back into its shape – that’s how you know it’s done.

It looks like this.

Step 5:

Prepare a non-metallic bowl by pouring a little bit of olive oil into it. Then drop your dough ball in, and turn it over and over until the oil covers the ball entirely. Cover the bowl with plastic wrap (or dish towel) again, and this time, you’re going to let it sit and rise for 2 hours. Kate taught me something here that’s really great – if you put your oven on just for a minute and then turn it off, it will be create the perfect warm, non-drafty environment for the dough to rise in.

Warm & non-drafty. That's my style!

After 2 hours, it should look something like this (doubled in size):

After the first "rise", dough doubles in size. Baker's poetry!

Step 6:

Punch it down. Like, literally. Punch that puffy, bubbly dough back into the bowl. Prep a bread pan with a light spray of oil (or prep a cookie sheet if you want to make it into french style loaf, long and cylindrical, just free-formed by hand). Then cover it again with plastic wrap or a dish towel, and leave it to sit and rise for another half hour.

This can be tricky, as sometimes air pockets collect in the dough where it folds on itself. Push it into the pan well to avoid those.

Step 7:

Bake it. Preheat your oven to 450 degrees and brush the top of the loaf with a bit of water. Then pop it into your oven for about 23-25 minutes. It will form a nice hard crust and sound hollow when you tap it.

Mmmmm. The time has almost come for you, my pretty.

Turn it out of the bread pan and let it cool (so it doesn’t get soggy on the bottom).

Step 8:

Cut off a piece of that masterpiece and enjoy it with some butter. Prepare to make another loaf again tomorrow, because you’ll consume the whole thing by the time you go to bed.

Life smells better with fresh-baked bread.

Making art.

See, I am beyond blessed to live in a neighbourhood with the most amazing women around. And every week, we get together and “do art”. Only one of us (Sara) is a real artist, but she freely shares her knowledge and does her best to teach us her real arty skills. I will state upfront that I’m faking it, because I can’t draw or paint to save my life, but I watch the others bring forth beautiful things and I feel inspired and hopeful.

So I can’t art, but what I am good at is baking. I love, love, love to bake. When I get stressed out, I bake to relieve it (my family appreciates that. Mama gets bitchy sometimes, but it usually results in delicious tarts.)

I figure if I can’t whip up a water coloured apple,  I can at least make an apple cake.

Kate's apple-y masterpiece

There are few things as satisfying as starting with a bunch of individual bits and pieces, and bringing them together into something whole and beautiful. My generation doesn’t do this very much.  We’re much more inclined to buy stuff that’s been pre-made than to make it ourselves. But I’ve discovered this amazing sense of accomplishment and satisfaction and competence in producing things with my own hands. Common things – bread, blankets, clothing… this is my art. So, last night, for Arty Farty, I brought the apple cake and a loaf of banana-date bread, and a bottle of wine, and I dotted some brown paint on a picture of a house, and I sat with some of the most amazing women, and we built community.

My art is to feed.

Even better than the art, the food, and the wine is the company of these women. The conversation. Thoughts are sharpened, ideas are developed, care is expressed – these are the bricks laid in our community building. And to walk down the street, be greeted with a genuine smile and an invitation into a warm kitchen, well, there’s nothing like it. I know not everyone is fortunate enough to have an armful of friends all living within a couple of blocks of each other, but imagine if otherwise-unknown neighbours became those friends. Imagine if your kids knew that they could run to the house next door for help. Imagine if you had something to gather around – some food, some art, some project…  it would change what community looks like. It would make being home a lot more lovely.

(I’ll post the apple cake recipe in the recipe section. It’s amazing.)

Now, I know some people become almost rabid at the suggestion that they should not be entitled to as much meat as they want, when they want it (which is a whole ‘nother story, and frankly, a slap in the face to the world’s populations that go without on a regular basis). Others, well… others become obnoxious about the consumption of meat, and any vegetarian knows just what I’m talking about. But most reasonable people seem open to the idea that how we treat our food will ultimately decide the quality of the food that we consume. And who wants to consume poor quality food?

I have two friends, two dyed-in-the-wool meat-eating friends, who changed their views on meat after discovering how it’s produced in factory farming. I was shocked to see their about-face, and if I had been a betting woman, I never would have put my money on them for such a drastic change. I’m not going to link to any information on factory farming, because it’s truly too horrific and appalling to look at myself, but anyone interested in learning more will find all they can handle by doing a quick Google search on it. Needless to say, animals that are loaded up with hormones, antibiotics and fed the by-products of other animals are pretty sick, and them we ingest them (this does not even take into consideration the mistreatment and inhumane slaughtering practices that most factory farms employ). It really doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see that eating poor quality food equals poor quality nutrition for us, but worse, it also equals sky-rocketing illness (allergies, behavioural issues, cancer, etc.) in our human population.

So what is this meat? It’s the meat at the grocery store. Nicely packaged, clean, federally- inspected meat. There’s no back story included though – and our meat-handling and packaging standards seem like they should be trustworthy… but there’s a disconnect between meat production and the acceptable standards our government has employed for judging which meat is *safe* and which is *healthy*. But if your grocery store has “free from” meat (e.g., free from antibiotics, hormones, etc.) and it is labelled as such, it has to make you wonder, what’s in the meat that can’t bear that label??

Ideally, we want to buy our meat directly from a farmer. We are still trying to figure that out. But in the meantime, we’re choosing the “free from” meats that President’s Choice has started producing, or we’re going to St. Lawrence Market and buying the organic meats that some of the butchers have started stocking. It’s more expensive, that’s true. But this is where the “better meat, less often” idea comes into play. You still pay the same amount if you buy the good quality meat less frequently than the other stuff. There’s lots of other delicious things to eat besides meat – and some creative, open-minded exploration of the internet’s vast recipe stores will quickly reveal that. And you know what else? If more people bought the better quality meat, it would send a message to meat producers that THIS is what consumers want – and they would be inclined (simply driven by profits) to change their practices to attract the business of shoppers who are buying other meat.

So why should you pay more for better quality meat and go without a few nights a week? Because hormones, antibiotics and poor animal feed have a serious impact on human health, especially on children, whose bodies and organs and immune systems are still developing. So, you can pay now, or you can pay later. But the price later is much higher. 

So, as the start of grade one approached, we found ourselves in need of yet another backpack (presumably printed with the theme-du-jour. So far we’ve had Spiderman, Transformers, and Thomas the Tank Engine, I believe). These are very cheaply made and cost about $25-$40, but to 5 year old eyes, they shine like solid gold. Somehow, up until this point, I’ve never really given these bags much thought. Now, I like to think of myself as a fairly with-it gal. I tend to be pretty conscious of what I buy and how its made and what happens to it after I’m done with it. But for some reason, seeing a themed backpack through my little boy’s eyes has totally clouded my normal judgement. I haven’t thought about the garbage they produce when they’re torn and falling apart, or how many hundreds of years it will take for them to breakdown in some over-full landfill. I haven’t thought about the repeated cost (so far we’ve spent over $100 on backpacks, but we still don’t have one to show for it!). And, shamefully, I haven’t even thought about who was paid some tiny amount of money to make it, no doubt in some terrible conditions that I would never agree to work in myself. No, what finally made me realize how ridiculously stupid the whole thing is was: The Mall on Labour Day Weekend.

The Mall on Labour Day Weekend is a sub-set of hell. And the reason is, things are so cheap that we have no attachment to anything we buy. We don’t like to think about the way it was made, or who was exploited, or the resources that were polluted in some poor country far away – we need Hollister. We need to stay on top of trends. So when we buy our cheap crap and then next year replace it all with newer, trendier cheap crap, no biggie.

Except, it’s a huge biggie! It’s a giant biggie! It matters so much.

I can never hope that we’ll suddenly have a mass awakening to the backwards consumerism that propels our society and our stock markets and our hedonism (am I a drag, or what?) but I CAN decide that, in a moment of near-breakdown from trying to wield a baby in a stroller through a giant throng of teenagers with too much disposable income, I will DO THIS DIFFERENTLY.

A lightbulb went on, I’m sure of it, just above my head. I stopped dead in my tracks, turned to Damien and said, “Why don’t we just get him an indestructible bag from MEC?” (Mountain Equipment Co-op for those who don’t know about it.)

Josh caught on to this – and the questions began in a flurry: “What’s an indestructible bag?” “What colour does it come in?” “Does it come in army colours?” (what? Whose kid is this?) “Does it have a pocket for toys?” “Does it never ever fall apart?” “When can I get one?”

And so, today after work, Damien is stopping in to the reasonably-busy store, with his membership in hand, to purchase an ethically-made, durable, cleverly-designed Indestructible Bag for Josh to use throughout the rest of his time at school. Josh has decided it shall be red.

And to that I say, go ahead and give it your best shot, you 5 Year Old Tornado of Destruction!