Blessings on the helpers

When I was having chemo, part of my healing-through-gratitude regime involved making plans and daydreaming about the massive thank you feast we would throw for all the people who helped us out during that supremely crappy time. I felt that even though things were not that awesome for us during those months of treatment, I still had so much to be grateful for, and I still felt super lucky. Maybe even more lucky than I feel normally. It's true I did have cancer, and I did have one of my boobs removed, and I did go through chemo, which was gross. But I have an incredible, strong, kind, compassionate and loving partner, and 2 beautiful kids. I have an extended family who love me. I had an amazing day-bed out the front of our beautiful little house on which to rest, overlooking a sweet little valley farm which I love. I live in a country with (kind of) free health care, which meant I was able to have the treatment I needed to give myself the best chance of survival. I have access to an abundance of all kinds of nutritious foods to heal body and spirit. 

And I found myself among a community of people who helped out in all kinds of ways. There were people who came and helped Pearl move the chicken houses, and to help load chickens on processing day. There were the people who brought us meals. There were the people who put money into our bank account to pay for herbs and vitamins and medical bills. There were the people who processed our chickens the night I had to unexpectedly go to hospital with neutropenia. There were people who bought us massages. There were people who knitted things for me. There were people who gave me Reiki, and people who gave me acupuncture. There were people who brought us firewood. There were people who lent us their showers and spare bedrooms. Awesome, right?

The party planning started off with me emailing one of my favourite artists, Phoebe Wahl, to see if I could buy one of her images to use for the invite. What I love about Phoebe's art is it's warmth and vigour and heart - all the things I wanted for our party. Because she's lovely, she happily obliged.

Food planning involved the procurement, fattening, killing and processing of a lamb, which our friend David took care of for us, other than the boerwurst sausage-making, which was a team effort.
We bought veggies and salad greens from all our friends with market gardens. I, with the help of 2 very special ladies, made 25 litres of rhubarb and strawberry champagne.

For party favours, I lino-cut a 'thank you' stamp and stamped it onto serviettes I'd made, for people to use at the party then take home and use over and over.

My mum and her partner made a dessert, my nana made her signature custard kisses and a 'thank you' fruitcake, and Pearl's mum made brownies.

Everything was set.

And then it started to rain.

Plan B for Bad weather was to move the party to the incredibly beautiful Quaama Hall. Ain't no way 60 people were fitting in the tiny house.

Saturday morning, the hall was booked, as it seemed like the rain would never let up. And it didn't. In fact, by sunday morning, the day of the party, we, along with food enough for 70 people, got flooded in as the river broke it's bank and covered our main road to town with over 2 metres of fast-flowing water.

The give way sign at the bottom of our road, on the morning of the party

Not really the kind of development you want on the day you've been planning for months.

So we sent out texts and facebook messages telling people the party was off. Ironically, sunday turned into a beautiful sunny day, and we cheered ourselves by cracking jokes about it being a beautiful day for a party. My brother, who was visiting from WA got to spend some quality, flooded-in time with the kids. Some also-flooded-in-neighbours dropped by, and we had roast lamb for dinner.

Nice day for a party. Shame that 'lake' is covering the road to party-town

The next day we made 'Canceled Party Pickle' with all the zucchinis, squash and capsicums we'd bought. We preserved most of the harissa we'd made and froze the marinades.

We breakfasted on harissa and labne and cucumber and lettuce and asparagus and roast beetroot for days. It was actually divine.

Luckily, no food went to waste, between the freezing, the preserving, the eating and giving things away to all and sundry. And Oscar was thrilled to have Thank You fruitcake in his lunchbox today.

So what's the moral of this rather long-winded post? There're probably a few. One moral is that flooding waits for no man, and the river and rain don't give a crap about your plans for thanking people.
Another is that a jar of Canceled Party Pickle and a lovingly hand-made serviette, while not the same as an awesome party, is also quite a nice way to say thank you. And yet another is that all exercises in feeling grateful, whether the plans eventuate or not, are good for the soul. Even though we were sad our party didn't happen, we still feel grateful for all our friends, and the things they do for us. One day, that party's gonna happen, and we'll all be glad.

Community food continues

It's been a  month since we started our Community Food Challenge in earnest. I'd say we're going pretty well! During the last month, in addition to challenging ourselves in the food ethics department,  we've also had some adventures in mushroom foraging, a mastectomy and some time in hospital, many many helpful visitors (bringing delicious, nutritious, local treats like oysters and foraged mushrooms), we've processed a batch of Autumn Farm chickens, and Pearl, with the help of our visitors and local helpers, has done an amazing job of maintaining the farm as I recuperate from my surgery. So yeah, it's been a busy, emotionally crazy kind of time.

In the food stakes, we've revelled in the joys of our community food endeavours, but we've also broken our own rules a few times. The culprits? Nori (the kids love it and it's REALLY good for them), raw organic cacao and coconut butter (it's delicious and has anti-oxidants in it... I know.... weeeeak...), and I believe Pearl at some point bought some discount corn thins for the kids while she was in the supermarket getting toilet paper.

I actually feel OK about these slips, and we're certainly not beating ourselves up about it. We're too busy enjoying the deliciousness and satisfaction of the vast majority of the food we're eating. Here's a little bit of what's been on our plates:

Home-made pork and fennel sausages with locally grown red cabbage and mashed potatoes, with lentils and herbs.

Home-grown eggs scrambled with home-grown leafies and herbs, sliced, just-picked tomato and foraged mushies courtesy of our mate Liz.

Eggs poached in home-grown tomato stew with herbs and local jersey feta.

Eggs poached in home-grown tomato stew with herbs and feta

The kids, Gab and I also had a rather successful mushrooming haul a couple of days before I went into hospital (much more successful, but no less fun, than our mushrooming ventures of last Autumn). It was a drizzly saturday when we all set off for the pines, to see if we could nab ourselves some pine mushrooms. We only found 2 of the pine mushrooms (Gab had them with poached eggs on toast), but we did find 2 baking trays full of slippery jacks!

I've never had slippery jacks before, and some of the accounts I read online weren't too enticing. One writer even went so far as to write that given the amount of time it takes to prepare them for eating (you have to peel off the top slime, and some people recommend peeling of the pores from the underside - I did both), and their kind of bland, slimy texture, they're not really worth the effort. Here, I have to disagree. I reckon they maybe just weren't cooking them to their best effect.

A little more research revealed that this kind of mushroom isn't the kind you just fry up and eat by the truckload like some other kinds. It's most commonly revered by Eastern Europeans, who like to cook them up into a stew. So Pearl fried ours up with some home-cured bacon, home-grown eschallots and garlic, and then used that as a base for a pearl barley, beef bone broth and rosemary stew. Nothing short of amazing and definitely, beyond a shadow of a doubt worth the peeling. Not to mention the fun we had picking them, in a beautiful setting, with beautiful people, which was worth all the work just by itself!

Happy kids and their mushroom haul

The bone broth we used in the stew was something that had been cooked up to assist with my healing after surgery. A few days before I went into hospital for my mastectomy, we started cooking up a bone-broth of certified organic pasture-raised beef bones, courtesy of our friends the Thompsons at Symphony Farm. We cooked it over the fire for about 12 hours, then again on the stove for maybe another 12, to draw out all the super-goodness. While I was in hospital, Pearl continued the brew, adding veggies and garlic and tons and tons of kale. It. Was. Delicious. And nutritious. Luckily for me I was allowed to come home the day after my surgery, so I was able to enjoy this as my convalescing food for the days after my surgery, as opposed to the nutritionally devoid and most certainly not local (processed, packaged and frozen in Goulburn, in fact) hospital food. Perfect.

And I'm pretty sure that the setting for the cooking of the bone broth also contributed to its awesomeness. I was also really glad to be home, healing in my own place, with my loved ones nearby.

Have you had any fun, satisfying, delicious community food adventures lately?

The truly Sublime benefits of not breaking the rules

At Uni this semester I've been teaching a course on Romantic literature. Think Blake, Keats, Wordsworth and Shelley. I'm loving it  - especially Blake! One of the (many) cool things about the Romantics is their fascination and yearning for what they refer to as The Sublime. Basically, for the Romantics, the sublime is like the pinnacle of human experience - emotional, sensual, intellectual, spiritual. It's often to be found in nature, and it's sometimes so overwhelming it's actually kinda scary - but that's OK. It's what we should strive to be open to, and it's what they hoped to convey in their poetry, though almost by definition, The Sublime is actually beyond the measure and description of mere language. Cool eh?

Now while I'm pretty sure that no Romantics ever thought of food being sublime, the other night when I was eating my dinner, I actually felt a sense of joy and contentment that was beyond words and hence, for me, sublime.

Disproportionate serving of green veg for the cancer patient. Fish at top left.

The meal goes like this:

Our beautiful and outrageously lovely pal Brett caught some Frigate Mackerel at Bermi. Knowing that I'm in the market for as much healthy food as I can lay my kisser on, he called and invited himself for dinner, bringing along his 3 beautiful fish. He taught Oscar and I how to clean and fillet them, and they were ready for a light fry in the pan!

As he wheeled the kids round and round in the wheelbarrow, amid some pretty out of control gleeful squealing, Pearl and I prepared the following to accompany the delicious fish: Some local Dutch Cream potatoes, steamed and dressed with local olive oil and herbs from our garden; a 'caponata' (kind of) involving tomatoes, beans and capsicums from Thea, zucchini out of our garden, and olives from Towamba Station; and a massive fricassee of homegrown garlic, kale and silverbeet, picked not 2 minutes before it hit the pan. 

100% community food meals rock my world!!!

As we sat and devoured the deliciousness in the fading light, I felt positively overwhelmed by the love and nutrition and good health and nature and strength and honesty of the meal and the company and the setting. Is it crazy that food should be so profound??? Maybe, but I don't really care, because it makes us happy and it feeds our bodies and souls, and that, in my book, counts for a heck of a lot more than whether something makes 'sense'. I believe the Romantics would concur.

A good lookin' chook, some artichokes and a champion champers...

About a week ago, our preparations for the Bega Show began. We'd gotten the show schedules a few weeks ago, and spent hours poring over them, circling the categories we thought we'd enter: Crochet, patchwork, papier mache, dinosaur garden, flower arrangement in an egg cup, preserving of all varieties, beer, wine, yoghurt, eggs, decorated arrowroots, photography, drawing, a useful item made from baling twine (yes - it's a real category) and, of course, junior soft feather bantam.

We'd resolved that we'd enter in order to contribute to the beautiful display in the pavilion, and that it wasn't about winning... But that didn't stop me from jumping up and down when I saw that my rhubarb and raspberry champagne had won champion wine of the show!!!! 

Wooohooooo!!! I got a ribbon!!!! If it hadn't been locked in the cabinet in the pavilion, I would have worn it like a sash as I walked around the show.

It's true we did have some successes - Pearl got a first for her preserved (home-grown!) globe artichokes, second for her plum jam and yoghurt. I got first for my lager, baling-twine shopping bag, and champagne, and second for my crocheted stubby holder (yesssssss!). 

Fluffy rainbow stubby holder takes the cake in the novice crochet section

Olive's 'baby' Errol, got second in the junior soft feather bantam category, and Olive's papier mache and photography also got some second prizes. 

Olive and Errol in the poultry pavilion. In the words of the judge: "Yeeaaah... He's a good lookin' chook this one". What more is there to say?

Olive's award-winning photo of Oscar, taken on a late-evening roadside raspberry-foraging expedition

Not that it was all winning - we did have some entries that didn't get a mention, but it was really great to see them all there in the display. It's really exciting to walk the pavilion and look at the entries, and check out which friends have won in different categories. 

While it does make an unusual, fetching, sturdy and award-winning shopping bag, crocheting baling twine is not an easy project.

The kids got a real kick out of  seeing their entries, and didn't seem bothered at all when they didn't win anything. They were just excited to be on display, for all the community to see. And one of my favourite things about the show is that it really is pretty much all of the community who get involved. The old farming families, the newbies, like us, the kids from all walks of life all get out and about on show weekend, checking it all out.

But even more than seeing our entries, we all just loved being at the show, meeting up with friends and generally hanging out. The kids made their own fun, running off in a pack and sliding down a grass bank on pieces of cardboard for (literally) hours on end, while we all waited for the grand finale - the smash up derby. We ate (thanks Vickie!) and drank and chatted and laughed and people-watched. It felt like half of Bega was there that night - all the different worlds of Bega, coming together for a very unlikely spectacle. We felt very happy to be a part of it, ribbons or no ribbons.

The kids were super-serious about decorating their arrowroots, and even more serious about eating them after the show.