There's No Place Like Home

Last week Susan and I attended a local production of the Wizard of Oz. Toward the end of the show, we witnessed Dorothy, acting on the guidance of Glinda, figure out how to return to Kansas. All she needed to do was close her eyes and click the heels of her ruby slippers three times while chanting the magic words, "There's no place like home." Voila! I-70.

It's Christmas Eve and I was reminded of Dorothy's lesson yesterday in a surprising way. This is a time of ritual, when many of us set aside business as usual for a fortnight, to celebrate family, friends, and relationship to the divine. One the ways we do that is through food—in particular, traditional dishes or libations. Perhaps tied to ethnic heritage. Perhaps linked to an old-time family favorite. Perhaps something clipped years ago from a newspaper food column.

In my case that includes plum pudding, a steamed English dessert featuring plenty of dried fruit in a thick, sweet batter, and served with hard sauce (powdered sugar worked into butter until your wrist falls off) and a warmed up sugary bechamel laced with bourbon. You can feel your fillings dissolve when you eat it. The roots of this dish go back to Aunt Hennie, my mother's homesteading older sister.

[To give you an idea of how far back this particular recipe goes, it's often called "suet pudding," after what used to be its most prized ingredient: beef fat. Back a century or more, people craved calories—of course, they still do in less developed and overpopulated countries today—and nothing delivers like fat. In my modern adaptation I substitute butter, but this dessert has never been a good choice for dieters.]

In the fruit department, my recipe calls for raisins, currants, figs, candied orange peel, and citron. While I've never had any trouble in the past (I've made this pudding many times) I was frustrated this past week in my attempts to locate orange peel and citron. I struck out at three grocery stores as well as at a hoity-toity gourmet food emporium. It turns out to be easier these days to find sriracha, hoisin sauce, or wasabi peas than candied fruit. Who knew?

Thus, I returned home yesterday evening empty handed after my final forays in the hunt for orange peel, resigned to my fate: I would need to substitute or do without. How about candied pineapple and dried cherries? As I was mulling this over, Susan decided to take a look at what we had squirreled away on the top shelf of one of our kitchen cupboards—you know, the shelf you need a step stool to access and have forgotten what you have up there.

When what to my wondering eyes did appear
But miniature containers of holiday cheer.

I'm talking about a pint of candied cherries and a small stash of orange peel. Hallelujah! 

Dorothy was right. There's no place like home.

Giving Thanks 2016

Today is a day of rest and reflection. After a full day yesterday, Susan and I have a gloriously unscheduled Friday with her son, Jamie (up from St Paul). Family time.  

This stands in sharp contrast with yesterday, which was completely orchestrated. I had infusion therapy in the morning followed by a full-court press in the kitchen as soon as I got home, to continue prepping a Thanksgiving feast for eight, the cooking for which started Wed night. Don't get me wrong: I love cooking in general, and celebration cooking in particular. Even better, it's something on which Susan and I are totally sympatico. 

Our biggest challenge is dancing gracefully through the choreography of two busy chefs in the kitchen at the same time. The prime prep spot is a bit too close to the sink, putting wayward arms and hips at risk when the rhythm of wielding sharp knives and sweeping away detritus are executed in the vicinity of quick rinses and sudden tool extractions. But we're figuring it out.

I find 6-8 is the perfect size for a dinner party. It's hardly any more trouble than cooking for two, gives you more latitude to try out dishes (while at the same time honoring de rigueur menu items such as turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy, and cranberry relish), is easy to divide between two accomplished cooks, affords us a suitable opportunity to bring out the fancy dishes and linen, and you can fit everyone around one table, holding a single conversation. What's not to like? Talk about slow food, dinner yesterday stretched from 4-9. All the way from hot-out-of-oven crab-stuffed mushroom caps to coffee accompanied by pecan pie topped with whipped cream.

• • •

As I happened to be at Susan's for Thanksgiving last year, this is a great time to take a snapshot of all that's unfolded for me in the past year, enumerating the wealth of things that I have to be thankful for.

o  Last Thanksgiving I was experiencing steady back pain, but the worst was still ahead. I was three weeks away from it deteriorating to the muscle spasming hell that would make it almost impossible to travel or even get out of bed for six weeks, ultimately leading to hospitalization and the discovery of my multiple myeloma. I almost died.

o  While contracting cancer would never be on anyone's wish list, from that grave nadir many wonderful things have emerged. By incredible good fortune, my breakdown occurred in Duluth. Not only did I receive irreplaceable emotional and logistical support when I most needed them, but it turned out that I received superb medical attention once I got over the hump of accepting that I seriously needed help.

Duluth is not a large city (pop 86,000), and has only two hospitals (St Luke's and Essentia). Yet they both have invested in their oncology departments and I could hardly have picked a better place to have discovered my cancer. I was morbidly sick and went to the St Luke's emergency room Jan 31. Within hours I was accurately diagnosed (in contrast with the cancer being missed when I was tested for it in Missouri in December 2014), admitted to the hospital, and started on treatment—my kidneys were barely functioning at 20% capacity, I had been leaching calcium from my skeleton to the point where I was in imminent danger of fracturing something, I had three collapsed vertebrae, and my bone marrow was producing a plethora of unwanted plasma cells. I was one sick puppy. I was thankful for excellent medical care and a loving partner—as the reincarnation of Florence Nightingale who unstintingly jumped into the role without any clarity about their being a future for our relationship beyond nurse/patient.

o  Since bottoming out last winter, I have steadily responded to the protocols laid out by Dr Alkaied, my oncologist. It turns out that multiple myeloma is a variety of cancer for which there there has been tremendous recent progress made in understanding the disease and how to treat it. Not only is Alkaied current with the literature and research, he was able to consult with the rest of his cancer team (seven in all) and he had immediate ideas about how to proceed. I was thankful that of all the cancers I could have had, it was one for which there was hope for containment.

After some judicious experimenting with various protocols, we hit on a chemotherapy mix that my body responded to well and that drove down the cancer. I was thankful for having a strong enough heart and lungs to handle the strain of my recovery. (All those years of healthy living and good diet at Sandhill Farm were coming into play).

o  My gradual recovery was in service to a master plan that called for an autologous stem cell transplant at the Mayo Clinic this summer. It's a procedure in which they are world experts, and my case was overseen by Dr Buadi, a hematologist who specializes in treating multiple myeloma. I was thankful to have access to top-drawer treatment in state. (As Alkaeid necessarily treats all kinds of cancer, he only occasionally sees my disease; Buadi sees patients with my illness day in and day out.) I was also thankful for Ceilee, Jo, Alison, Annie, and (of course) Susan who comprised my indispensable on-site support team during my five weeks in Rochester.

o  Happily, the stem cell transplant was a full success. My cancer is currently in total remission, I have been given the green light to resume my consulting/teaching career (within reason), and I am starting a maintenance course of chemotherapy where I receive a lower dosage of Kyprolis, one of the drugs that was effective in containing the cancer last spring. I am thankful that there is a drug that works well for me and that I tolerate well (which is not everyone's experience).

To be clear, the cancer is dormant (good) but not gone. It is inappropriate to see myself as "cured." The cancer may return at any time, or it may not. Meanwhile, I am fully aware of living in a state of grace. I am thankful that I get to enjoy these days (years?) of "extended play," with sufficient recovery to do the work I love (cooperative group process) with as deft a touch as I've ever had, and to have a surfeit of friends and loved ones with which to celebrate life and smell the roses (as opposed to interacting with people more or less in passing, on my way to the next thing).

o  While my choice to live in an income-sharing community left me rich in relationships and experiences—for which I'll be eternally grateful and don't expect to ever second guess—it did not lead to financial security. Thus, I was scrambling to handle the staggering health bills I ran up this year. I am thankful that this crisis did not bloom until I was 66 and already on Medicare, and that I had the foresight (and good advice) to buy a generous supplemental insurance policy. 

While that protection meant that I was insulated from the vast majority of my bills, I still had thousands of dollars of liability and was facing the double whammy of not being able to work while I focused on my recovery. I am thankful to the 30 some people who generously responded to my June blog appeal for financial support, effectively bridging the gap between what I had and what I owed. Whew!

o  My bedrock in all his has been Susan (how do people make it through life without a loving partner?). Of all the many things that I have to be thankful for today, none is more precious to me than Susan and the unprecedented opportunity that was opened up from behind the clouds of my health crisis for the two of us to enjoy our latter years in curiosity, in laughter, and in the exuberant exploration of love.

Now We're Cooking

Over the years I've done a fair amount of wilderness camping, much of it canoeing in central Canada. While we could always depend on catching fish for a certain number of meals (mainly northern pike and walleye), we were essentially packing in all our food and packing out all our inorganic waste.

While that's unquestionably the right thing to do ecologically, it was invariably a challenge physiologically, because you are necessarily most loaded at the front end of the trip, when your muscles are least accustomed to the workload. Every day, as we steadily worked our way through the food supplies with purpose and appetite, the packs got a little lighter—a phenomenon that we referred to as "eating our way to mobility." The more we consumed, the easier it was to load the canoes each morning and to portage the remains.

I tell you that story because Susan and I have been going through an analogous gauntlet of food management the last five days.

When I visited her in early July (during which time we successfully launched our young relationship between old friends), one of the many things we discussed was what we might do together on future visits. It didn't take us very long to settle on hosting dinner parties as a possibility: cooking is something we both enjoy and it would be a delightful way to include others (rather than holing up in her house playing doctor).

Dinner Party #1
Looking ahead to the visit I'm now enjoying, Susan's first thought was to organize a dinner party for eight, where three other couples who enjoy good food would be invited. While that sounded fine to me, it turned out that the dates didn't work for one of the couples, so she switched off to hosting a neighborhood party, taking advantage of her kids visiting at the same time I'd be there. She knew that many of the neighbors would appreciate catching up with Britta (33) and Jamie (31), and vice versa. Because my overlap with the kids was only a few days, we needed to schedule the party for the day after I arrived (Wed). Then, because it was hard to know where to draw the line on who to invite, dinner for eight mushroomed into a freewheeling affair for 19. Yeehah! 

Reasonably enough, Susan's ease in expanding the guest list was influenced by the likelihood of being able to accommodate the flow in the back yard as well as the living room and dining room (think end of the summer block party). Unfortunately it started raining Tuesday night and was wet and soggy all day Wed, with temperatures in the 50s. Oops. Time to switch to Plan B, where all the milling was confined indoors—with Jamie bravely manning the barbecue grill out back, dancing between rain squalls. Even though we didn't quite have enough seating for everyone, in the end only 17 showed up and it all worked fine. Britta and Jamie were game for helping out and the home team pulled it off without a glitch.

In addition to a few contributions from the guests (who were told that nothing was needed but brought favorite recipes anyway) we served up:
—Swedish cucumbers with sour cream
—Sri Wasano's Infamous Indonesian Rice Salad 
—Sliced fresh tomatoes, red onions, and shredded basil marinated in aioli
—Guacamole
—Watermelon cubed and tossed with mint and feta
—Grilled bratwurst (both pork and tofu) and grass-fed hamburgers
—Peach cobbler
—Plenty of wine, beer, and soda

Did we have enough food? We didn't even bother to pull out the second dessert and we were giving away doggie bags to all comers by the end of the night.

Dinner Party #2
While the refrigerator was already stuffed with leftovers, we bravely turned around Thursday and began planning for the second dinner party that Susan had queued up—this one for her mah jongg group on Friday. Susan is a card-carrying member of a dedicated group of four women who meet monthly for schmoozing and game playing. While the males do not typically attend these gatherings this party would be an all-skate, with Susan and me cooking. (Thus, Susan managed to preserve our opportunity to cook for a party for eight.) Now all we needed was a menu.

Susan and I tossed around a number of ideas before settling on:
—Appetizer tray of assorted olives, assorted cheeses, peppadews, marcona almonds, and French bread
—Locally made linguine with fresh spinach, served with a sauce featuring onions, garlic, and crimini mushrooms, cooked in a red wine reduction, topped with fresh whole sage leaves fried in butter
—Pork tenderloin smothered in caramelized onions, served with sour cherry chutney
—Frenched green beans stir-fried with garlic chunks and turmeric
—Potatoes au gratin
—Dessert was a birthday cake for one of the guests, who's special day was coming up at the end of the month

This worked pretty good, and we even got in several hands of mah jongg, with two of the men playing for the first time.

As the evening wound down (circa 10 pm), we distributed another round of doggie bags to our happy guests and sent them off into the night. After corralling all the party detritus into the kitchen, Susan reloaded the dishwasher and somehow manged to find a home for all the leftovers, creatively manifesting holes in a refrigerator that appeared to be completely full when she began.

Dinner Party #3
Saturday morning we slept in. Jamie had departed Thursday (for a bachelor's party weekend with 10-12 guys at a cabin on Lake Vermillion), and Britta had left Friday morning, headed back to Denver, by way of Northfield MN, where she'd do a spot of alumni fundraising for Carleton College, from which all four of us had graduated.

After luxuriating in an unscheduled morning with no one else in the house, we prepared to head to Babbitt and a rendezvous with friends Jane & Mick at a cabin they had rented for three weeks on Birch Lake, very near Ely and the Boundary Waters Canoe Area. 

Taking into account that Jane & Mick would be arriving from their home in the Twin Cities only scant hours before we got there, and that we didn't want to be ungracious guests for our overnight stay, Susan volunteered that we'd cook dinner. (Hell, we were on a roll, right?)

While we needed to be a bit more creative to accommodate their vegan diet, it wasn't hard to settle on a reprise of the previous night's pasta dish. We just made sure to bring eggless noodles and to use olive oil in place of butter in building the sauce. So we dropped the sage leaves and substituted a handful of minced green olives and a jar of sun-dried tomatoes. We also contributed some of the choice leftovers from Friday: antipasto, the frenched green beans, and a loaf of French bread to fill out the simple menu.

Dinner Party #4
Tonight is my last night in Duluth. Amazingly enough, Susan and I will be dining alone. (Notice the near perfect progression: 17 on Wednesday; 8 on Friday; 4 on Saturday; 2 on Monday. Looked at through a geometric lens it seems inevitable that I'll be on my own come Tuesday, and fasting by Wednesday.)

I brought with me a special bottle of Chardonnay Reserve from Chateau Morrisette that I picked up when I was in Floyd VA at the beginning of the month, and we'll start the evening with that, augmented by baked garlic, a wedge of champignon brie, and the ubiquitous loaf of warm French bread. From there we expect to make further inroads on the surfeit of delicious leftovers, coming to the rescue of our hardworking refrigerator.

In case you couldn't tell, one of my favorite things is to cook and eat (and drink) with friends. This week I got to indulge in all three to my heart's content.

Seder of Opportunity

I'm visiting my daughter (Jo) and son-in-law (Peter) for 10 days, sandwiched between 10 days in northern California and the FIC's spring organizational meetings in Prescott AZ, April 5-7.

As it happens, my visit coincides with Easter (coming up this Sunday), which means there's a Seder lurking in there somewhere. Pesach (Passover) started Monday, March 25, and runs until Tuesday, April 2 (notice it takes a looong time for it to pass over—there are some Broadway shows that don't last that long). 

In any event, we decided to celebrate Thursday, about in the middle, by having a dozen of Jo & Peter's friends over for a Seder. It's not so much a religious holiday as a cultural one, marking the Jews' exodus from Egypt (you know, Let my people go), and what can be better than an all-skate dinner, eating and drinking to the theme of libation liberation? As my daughter and I enjoy celebration cooking about as much as anything, we got into it. 

Though I'm not Jewish, Jo's mother (Elke) is, so we had legitimacy (it's a matrilineal thing). While I left it to Jo to suss out a suitably liberal haggadah (yes, we had an orange on the Seder Plate), she and I collaborated on the menu:
o  Lotsa matzo
o  Two kinds of haroset
o  Prepared horseradish
o  Fresh parsley sprigs, paired with dipping bowls of salt water
o  Chicken soup with matzo balls
o  Stir-fried green beans 
o  Baked salmon encrusted with seasoned matzo meal
o  Flourless chocolate cake (think intense)
o  Lotsa wine  

Notice the bookend sacraments of unyeasted bread—served both neat and as a featured ingredient in multiple dishes—washed down with plenty of yeasted grapes. Think of it as the yin and yang of Passover.

We did the shopping Wednesday evening, and then jumped right into prep. Jo popped a whole chicken in a pot to stew with carrots and celery. I mixed up the matzo ball dough (it needed to condition in the fridge overnight) and shelled pistachios (for the Persian haroset). Jo whipped together the chocolate decadence & baked it.

The next afternoon, while Jo was at work, I set aside report writing to boil an egg for the Seder Plate, picked the chicken for the soup, boiled the matzo balls, ran both batches of haroset through a Cuisinart (a regular Ashkenazi version with walnuts, honey, apples, cinnamon, and red wine; and the aforementioned Persian offering, featuring pistachios, dates, fresh orange, and wine), French cut the string beans & blanched them, portioned the salmon into servings & rubbed them down with seasoned matzo flour.

One of the things I appreciate most about Seders is that everyone gets to play. It is expressly a time when Jews and non-Jews can sit together, making common cause at a common meal. While I didn't participate in my first Seder until college, I've now been to 20 or so—in a wide variety of settings—and as far as I can recall, there has always been at least one participant who was attending a Seder for the first time. I just love that—gradually widening the circle of people raising a glass to anti-oppression, expressly bridging across lines of ethnicity, creed, and sexual orientation, where the heavy lifting needs to be done.

While the ritual of Seders always draws attention to oppression—as it should—it is celebrating the movement away from oppression and is essentially a joyous holiday, replete with singing, responsive reading, and jocularity. For the children (and more frisky adults) there is the ritual hiding of the afikoman, a broken piece of matzo that is meant to be the last thing consumed at the meal. While that was not a big hit when offered as an alternative to chocolate cake, it kept the kids in the game. In an interesting juxtaposition of hoary ritual in a contemporary setting, it took quite a while for the someone to locate the afikoman, which had been sequestered by a clever child in the narrow slot under a computer keyboard.

All and all, it was a lovely way to spend a Thursday evening. In essence, we were celebrating collaboration and I couldn't help but reflect on how it stood in sharp contrast with the Sweet 16 games from the NCAA men's basketball tournament that were also taking place that evening, representing a ritual of competition.

I'll Be Home for Christmas; Just Not in My Own Bed

Home is one of those elephant words, whose meaning at any given time depends upon which part you’re touching. As I’ve promised Ma’ikwe that I’d unpack some of those meanings in a blog series, this seems as propitious time as any to begin…

Essentially, I experience home as the familiar yet precious elements of our lives. Home is where we feel seen and connected. It is where we touch our roots and the place from where we fruit. It is at once a paradoxical touchstone that is both now and hopelessly distorted by a past that we can never really return to nor ever truly free ourselves from.

Here’s the outline of my series:

—home as family

—home as place

—home as culture

—home as routine

—home as work

In this first entry, I’ll focus on Home as Family.

Home for the Holidays
Christmas is coming! Whether or not the goose is getting fat or I place a penny in an old man’s hat, I’m going to be with family—which is something I look forward to with relish (often made with cranberry at this time of year). I’m typing this in the partly sunny skies of northern Arizona as Ma’ikwe, Jibran, and I zoom west along I-40, inbound for a rendezvous with my son Ceilee, his wife Tosca, and his daughter (my granddaughter) Taivyn for the long Christmas weekend. Ceilee’s mother (and my ex-partner and dear friend) Annie flew in from Virginia yesterday, and my daughter (Ceilee’s sister) will join us Christmas Day. Ma’ikwe’s got Paul Simon’s 1991 Concert in the Park cranked up on the tape player, and we’ll be there by dinner. Life is good.

When I was growing up, I did Christmas with my parents. By my late 20's, after having a kid of my own, Annie and I started Celebratign Christmas at Sandhill. Now the wheel has turned again, and we parents are traveling to our son's. It's both different, and exactly the same.

While it's important to me to protect time with my kids as much as possible, I especially cherish being with them at holidays such as Christmas and Thanksgiving, where it is possible to suspend one’s everyday routines to be with loved ones for days at a time. Thus, today I’m driving home to family. Even though Sandhill, where my mail comes, is 1000 miles in the rear view mirror, in the sense of the word I’m exploring today home is wherever my family is. Thus, if we‘re all together in one spot, then that location is assuredly home.

This year the timing is nearly perfect. We'll arrive within minutes of when Ceilee is expected to get off work Wed afternoon, and we'll depart Monday morning, just as he's due to head back in.

Home for the Holidaze
As it happens, Ceilee and Tosca live in Las Vegas (the glitzy one in Nevada; not the sleepy one in New Mexico), which is perhaps as great a testament to consumption and excess as one can find. The lights of Ceilee’s Christmas tree will be backlit by the never-extinguished twinkle of The Strip, just a few miles to the northeast. (Given Las Vegas’ tireless efforts to promote itself as a major sports venue, you might think of it as the Magi meets Mammon in the best two of three falls.)

While Ma’ikwe, Annie, and I have consciously chosen lives of inconspicuous consumption (at least by first world standards), my son has not and it’s a measure of our love of family that we’re not going to let a little materialism get in the way of a good time. We all like giving one another presents, and no one will be cheated out of the unwrapping ritual Friday morning.

The greater danger, when it comes to the Holidaze, is not so much getting caught up in a billboard driven urge to see Carrot Top live at the Luxor, as it is to not over-indulge in holiday spirits. In the end, no one is proof against libations with too much proof.

Home for the Hollandaise
There are a number of ways in which I bond and celebrate with my kids, including game playing (the internecine Siedler competition is downright fierce), butchering (we did that at Thanksgiving), eating and drinking (hence my cautionary note above), and even wilderness canoeing (we’re hoping to get up to the Northwest Territories next summer). But for all of that, there is perhaps nothing we enjoy doing together more than cooking. While everyone in the family enjoys dining out, we’re accomplished enough in the kitchen (and sufficiently vain about it) to begrudge a meal out when we can often prepare the same thing as well or better ourselves, and at a fraction of the cost.

Ma’ikwe and I have brought with us new crop piñons from the Land of Enchantment, so that we can prepare a dessert featuring vanilla ice cream, hot fudge, and toasted pine nuts. And we couldn’t resist scooping up two-thirds of the fresh brussels sprouts last night at La Montañita (Albuquerque's local food co-op), knowing how terrific they’ll taste after having been kissed by a frost. We’ll steam them until barely tender and then smother them in home-made Hollandaise. Yum!

Of course, that’s just a taste. In five days there’s sure to be time for such family traditions as plum pudding, a roasted turkey, egg nog, baked garlic, and ribbon sandwiches, not necessarily in that order.

I can hardly wait to find out what we’ll cook up. Just like a little kid, I can hardly wait to be home for the holidays.

The Perfect Farm Holiday

It's late in the year, late in November, and late in the day. A weak sun made a cameo appearance this morning before ducking behind the rolling banks of grey and leaden clouds that have been brooding over Missouri most of the month. Temperatures are in the 40s and should slide below freezing tonight. Most days it drizzles a little; some days it actually rains; tonight snow flurries are predicted. It's been a hard season for deer hunters. Yet for all that, it's one of my most anticipated times of the year and nothing can dampen my spirits: it's Thanksgiving week.

The larder is full, we have wood enough stockpiled to heat ourselves into 2011, and both of my children are coming home for the first time in three years. The agricultural year is over and the gardens have been put to bed. It's time to gather, cook, relax, drink, laugh, eat, and tell stories with loved ones. If you live on a farm, Thanksgiving is the perfect holiday to have others come to you. What better place to celebrate the harvest than where the harvest happens?

Late Monday night I got home from a week in Virginia. After a cup of coffee and some trip accounting Tuesday morning, Emily and I got to work butchering poultry—eight older chickens culled from the flock, as well as the featured guest for Thursday's dinner: our biggest tom turkey. We spent most of the day on this ritual, carefully taking the life of each one, plucking, dissecting, and canning all the chickens. The tom, of course, was left whole (sans viscera), ready for the oven first thing tomorrow morning.

Thursday we'll be celebrating with a joint meal at the neighbors, Dancing Rabbit. I'll go over early to help my wife, Mai'kwe, make tamales, one of her specialties gleaned from five years of living in Albuquerque. My daughter Jo & her partner Peter will be timing their drive in from Toledo to arrive just as we sit down at 2 pm. After a blow-out meal, we'll repair to Sandhill for the remainder of the day, which translates to more laughter, game playing, and drinking, roughly in that order.

Sometime after dark, Trish, Joe, and their one-and-a-half year old son Emory will arrive from St Louis for the start of a five-day visit. We've been courting each other for most of the year, and Sandhill is hoping they'll move up as early as February, when the Earth quickens for the new growing season. Their last visit was Labor Day Weekend (a quarter turn of the calendar back, at the advent of harvest), and I'm pleased to welcome them into the circle on this occasion of wood heat and camaraderie; the days of toasting and being toasty.

Friday, my son Ceilee arrives with his wife Tosca and my granddaughter Taivyn—now a curious and highly mobile 19 months old, and a match for Emory. As Friday will be the only evening my family is all together (Ceilee has a flight back to Nevada Sunday morning to be on the job Monday), I asked to be assigned to cook that day. Cooking and eating together is one of my family's favorite recreational cum spiritual activities, and orchestrating an opportunity to do that during Thanksgiving weekend renders Friday something akin to a high holy day.

Both of my kids grew up at Sandhill, so their coming this weekend is more than seeing Dad. It's coming home.

Cutting Up in the Kitchen
The last time both Jo & Ceilee were at Sandhill was three years ago, also at Thanksgiving. It was right before Ceilee moved from Columbia MO to Las Vegas NV, and he was happy to spend most of the pre-Thanksgiving rifle season on the farm hunting deer. Jo had spent the summer of '06 at Sandhill while she sorted out what she wanted to do after culinary school. Among other responsibilities she shouldered that summer, she raised two pigs, with an eye toward butchering them at the same time as we tackled Ceilee's deer.

All of this came together in the days before Thanksgiving, when the three of us spent three solid days butchering two pigs and eight deer. There are many choices to be made in how meat can be used and we love the art of catering to people's culinary preferences while making the fullest use possible of all that the animals have provided us. It is simultaneously joyous work and sacred work, as we have a bond with our food to honor it, just as it nourishes us.

This year, though the poultry butchering necessarily took pace before my kids arrived, there are still six deer hanging in our walk-in cooler and it's probable that part of the precious time I'll have together with my kids will be spent in the kitchen with meat and knives—where we'll be strengthening familial ties even as cut up roasts and grind sausage.

On the farm, my children learned about the rhythms of seasonal cycles, about finding pleasure in work well done, and about taking time to savor fresh food, the smell of wood smoke, and the campanionship of others. In the coming hours we'll have together, we'll retouch all of these themes, weaving an ever-finer tapestry of connection and contribution—all of which is why I've found Thanksgiving to be the perfect farm holiday.

Happy Birthday, Jo!

Today my daughter, Jo, turned 22. Fortuitously, I have meetings in Ann Arbor this weekend, and that afforded me an easy occasion to be on hand for the festivities in Toledo, where Jo loives with her partner Peter Lipphardt. In truth, she's been celebrating all week.

Tuesday she and her partner Peter took possession of a new puppy—seven-week-old Yoshi, a just-weaned black lab/boxer mix. Believe me, this dog is going to have a good life. When we arrived early this evening to my Zingerman's Roadhouse rendezvous in Ann Arbor, it happened that there was a farmer's market going on in the parking lot. When Jo, Yoshi, and I did a walk-through to kill time, three different vendors came out from behind their stalls and insisted on holding the puppy. We could have sold tickets.

Wednesday we had the party proper. While my kids and I love to eat out, it's even more fun to cook. Jo made sushi for 12 (unfortunately, there were only six at the party, but it's considered bad manners to run short of the main course), plus a fabulous four-layer ice cream cake, made of alternating slabs of green tea and ginger ice cream, dusted with ginger snap crumbs and edged in whipped cream. Luckily, we'd skipped lunch (as well as breakfast and lunch the following day).

Thursday (today) Jo drove me up to Ann Arbor (just an hour straight up US 23) and she collected on her present from dear old dad: a shopping spree at Zingermans' Delicatessen, located on brick-paved Kingsley St in old Kerrytown. Believe me, Zabar's on Manhattan's upper west side has nothing on this place. The cheese and sausage selections are simply mind boggling. Jo even picked up an iced container of fresh caviar to go with the "food porn" dish she had in mind for her & Peter tonight: angel hair pasta tossed with the leftover uni (that was special ordered for the sushi extravaganza) and garnished with the caviar.

What says love more than food, family, and a new puppy?

Economic Leverage in Hard Times: Part 6—Entertainment

This is the sixth and final installment of my series (started Feb 5) on how everyone can get more out of the life they want while at the same time spending less money to make it happen. My motivation is that most folks today need to be more careful about their economic choices, and I have some good news.

Through what's been learned about cooperation and sharing in community living, it's possible for most of us to continue to enhance the quality of our life while at the same time cut back on cash outlays. To be sure, my suggestions will require some lifestyle changes. Yet what I'm offering is meant to be widely accessible, and does not involve a change in personality or altering one's core values. In Part 1 I focused on Housing; in Part 2 I looked at Food; Part 3 was about Transportation; Part 4 spotlighted Energy; and Part 5 examined Health. Today I'll tackle Entertainment and Recreation.

• • •

The typical American family’s budget devotes 5% to Entertainment, yet there is another 7% that goes to the Three Legal Evils of alcohol, tobacco, and caffeine, and I'll include them in today's focus. What's more, you have to figure that a healthy chunk of the 17% used for Transportation is travel for the purpose of recreation (including both the accumulation of small trips to the movies—or Blockbusters—or the annual family vacation to the beach). So all together, this catchall category probably represents something in the 15% range, and is well worth a closer look.

Here are a half dozen suggestions for how to you can make a serious dent in your Entertainment expenses, without any sacrifice in enjoyment:

1. Celebration Cooking
This is one my favorites, and when done in season—relying mostly on local raw ingredient—you'd be amazed at how inexpensively you can produce a gourmet meal. Even if you decide to indulge in exotic ingredients, buying them raw (or at least less processed) will save substantially over the price you'd pay at a restaurant. What's more, if you cook with others, that can provide high-quality social time in addition to the camaraderie enjoyed in the eating. Kind of like double dipping.

One of the highlights of Sandhill's culinary calendar is the 10-day window in late-April/early May when we can wildcraft morel mushrooms in the neighboring woods (see my blog of May 7, 2008 for more about this). No one misses those meals, and the cost is simply the time it takes to walk in the woods with a bread sack. Even if you come back empty-handed (which happens), how bad can it be spending a couple hours amidst the transitory explosion of spring wildflowers, watching the trees buds unfurl from their winter doldrums? (Stan feels the same way bout deer huntign each fall: either you get some meat for the family table or you've had a lovely day in the woods. You can't lose.)

For a handful of years when I was growing up (in La Grange, a bedroom suburb on the west side of Chicago) my family would host an annual summer block party, where everyone on our street was invited to wheel their barbecue units into our backyard and cook a meal together. While families were mostly cooking their own food (rather than a potluck), my family would supply drinks for everyone, and the kids would race around while the adults schmoozed and grilled. It was terrific fun, with everyone contributing only what they were going to cook for dinner anyway, and there was no driving involved at all (except maybe to buy ice to keep the drinks cold).

Going back to 2005, I've been devoting the first Saturday night in Novermber to preparing and consuming a slow food dinner for 12-14 friends (see my blog of Nov 10, 2008 for more about this). The last three years I've been doing this with my partner, Ma'ikwe. We essentially start cooking as soon as we hit town (late Thursday or early Friday) and take about 12 hours to prepare a meal enjoyed over four hours. We do the cooking and the guests divvy up the bill for the ingredients. It's so much fun that Ma'ikwe and I have already begun reviewing recipes vying for a spot on the 2009 menu.

What if you're not a great cook? Find someone local who is, and volunteer to organize the dinner and help chop vegetables! Hell, everybody eats.

2. Salons
No, I'm not suggesting getting your hair done as a mood elevator. I'm talking about conversation salons. While you can set this up any way you want, I encourage you to pick a group of people (preferably local, to keep travel costs down—think bicycle, not automibile) who don't see the suggested theme of the conversation the same way. Rather than only having the liberals over to discuss Obama, think about inviting some thoughtful Republicans or Libertarians into the mix, and getting interested in the possibility that someone's mind might be changed (rather than existing views reinforced or defended) and that participants might discover new insights (read hope) about how to bridge between positions that are traditionally better bunkered than the Maginot Line. World peace has to start somewhere. Why not in your living room?

Another version of this is the book club, where everyone agrees to read a certain interesting title and then gets together (once a month?) to discuss what the reading stirred up for them. Perhaps a more contemporary version of this might be a movie club, where people agree to linger after a joint showing, to discuss what they just saw. Did you see Crash, the 2004 Best Picture? If you get the director's cut of this provocative film, John Waters explians that he was expressly trying to create a movie that viewers would want (need?) to talk about afterwards. Instead of trying to create escapist fluff or fantasy; he was aiming to get audiences to reflect on the complexities and incongruities of everyday life. I thought it was a terrific film, and every bit as thought provoking as Waters intended.

3. Walking
Under Point 1 I mentioned my once-a-year sojourns in the woods hunting morels. But that's only the exotic tip of the pedestrian iceberg. You can walk every day. In addition to accomplishing commuting and errands—if you live close enough to where you work, or your kids go to school, or where you shop—walking can be both exercise and entertainment.

Sandhill is located on a ridge that drops off sharply to the southwest, affording us breathtaking views of the sunset. If the clouds are just right, an after-dinner walk along the ridge road on a June evening can be the highlight of the day. You can literally watch the sky run through its full range of palette options in 30 minutes. You can watch the barn swallows come out, and slash through the sky on their evening forage for the latest hatch of mosquitos. When the light drops too low for them to sight targets, the swallows abandoned the skies and are immediately succeeded by brown bats, who hunt by echolocation. Their flitting, darting movements are more abrupt and erratic, though no less beautiful or effective.

We had a couple living with us last year—Kevin & Ann— who were seriously contemplating moving in as next-door neighbors. Over the winter however, they decided they were not yet ready to settle in northeast Missouri. A major hestancy was around not having ready access to wilderness. In Flagstaff, where they had been living before launching their serach for community, they could literally walk from downtown into national forest, and that became precious to them.

Some people meditate; some practive Qigong; others walk. All offer a change of pace, reflective time, and a chance to unclench muscles cramped by sedentary confinement. All can be inexpensive elements of the Good Life, and cost next to nothing.

4. Reading
In addition to the book club idea mentioned in Point 2, reading can be immensely pleasurable, as well as edifying. For most of my adult life, I had been in the habit of reading about 25 books a year, fiction and non-fiction in roughly equal amounts. Then, in my late 40s and 50s I started getting away from it, relying more on videos as entertainment and conversation (and email) for stimulation.

When I married Ma'ikwe in April 2007, we carved our five weeks for a honeymoon in Europe, and I made the decision to leave my laptop at home. (Yes, I occasioanlly got on the web at an internet cafe, but I never checked my email even once.) Instead, I brought books and rediscovered the joys of reading. While I wouldn't say it was the best part of the honeymoon, it was a happy mid-course correction. Now I'm back to reading 25+ books a year and more frequently closing my laptop before I'm exhausted. Now I'm apt to spend the last hour or two of the day curled up with a book instead of subjecting myself to one more stream of electrons.

Don't want to bust your budget on new books (or even used ones from Amazon)? Libraries still work.

5. Singing
Singing is one of the most distinctive human activities. While many of us were shamed as children about not being able to sing well enough to subject others to our attempts, I believe singing is a human birthright, and everyone should indulge themselves as much as they desire, so long as they're reasonably mindful of those around them. (For more on my personal journey with singing, see my blog of Feb 26, 2008.)

At the FIC's Celebration of Community in 1993, one of the keynote speakers was Kirkpatrick Sale, the noted independent scholar and environmentalist. As part of his talk he told the story of Ladakh, a remote mountainous province in northern India that had for centuries developed its culutre substantially uninfluenced by those around them. Among other traditions, the Ladakhi were proud singers and song was a common element of local celebrations, big and small. Then, when radio waves finally penetrated their remote region after Word War II, the Ladakhi learned what "good" singing was by hearing brodcasts from Delhi. in particular, they absorbed the message that their brand of singing wasn't good. Within a generation, Sale reported that the Ladakhi had mostly stopped singing. I get sad every time I tell this story, reflecting on the loss of culture, and the loss of joy.

At neighboring Dancing Rabbit, they have a weekly singing circle, and it's common to witness an a capella choral performance at high celebrations like Equinox and Land Day. At both communities we typically sing a song as part of the blessing before the evening meal, and it's not rare for everyone to break out the Rise Up Singing songbooks for an impromptu hootenanny after Tuesday potlucks.

Top Secret: while an ability to hit the notes and a proficiency at reading music are undoubtedly helpful, the key to enjoying singing is showing up energetically. If you put your heart into the attempt, you'll enjoy yourself, and (mostly) so will those around you. If nothing else, try singing along with CDs of your favorite vocalists while you're in the ktichen or cleaning windows.

It doesn't cost anything, and it's something you can do alone, or with others—whichever strikes your fancy.

6. DIY Drugs
This last piece is not an encouragement to establish your own meth lab in the basement as a way to provide tax-free supplemental income in a flagging economy. I'm talking about brewing your own beer, making your own wine, rolling your own cigarettes, and even roasting your own coffee. We've done all of these things at Sandhill over the years. In addition to forcing us to be more mindful about our consumption of these drugs (legal though they are), the prepartion rituals create yet another social opportunity, substantially reduce costs, and enhance the pleasure of the consumption.

Today there are more home brewers than ever, and if the prospects seems overwhelming, think about trying to find someone else in the nieghborhood who's already doing it. If you like their product (be sure to drink a bottle first—all home brew is not created equal), consider apprenticing with them, or perhaps commissioning them to brew a batch for you. You'll still save money, and be bonding with the neighbors.

TNG

Ma’ikwe and I just finished up a weekend in Ann Arbor MI, where we participated in the annual Institute hosted by the North American Students of Cooperation (NASCO). It was my 12th consecutive year as part of the faculty for this event, and as much fun as ever.

NASCO is an umbrella organization for student co-ops, and the 300+ participants come from all over the US and Canada. While the strongest co-op systems send a raft of folks (Berkeley CA, Austin TX, Madison WI, Oberlin OH, and the locals in Ann Arbor), there are representatives from all corners of the continent and it’s a great mixing ground. These are the co-opers who are excited about group living—as opposed to those drawn mainly by the lure of cheap rent. They are The Next Generation of community seekers, happy to swap stories about how to do group living better and to explore their post-graduate community options.

This year I did five workshops:
—Stump the Chumps (where Ma’ikwe and I field questions about knotty issues in group dynamics)
—Essentials of Meeting Facilitation (where I go over the highlights of the facilitator’s skill set, trying to get folks inspired about what’s possible and why it’s a craft worth learning)
—Conflict (where I try to sell folks on the idea that conflict isn’t bad—doing conflict badly is bad—and it’s a very good idea for groups to discuss how they want to work with emotional input and constructively address distress if and when it enters the room)
—But Seriously Folks… (where I examine the complex nature of humor in meeting dynamics)
—Should You Start a Community or Join One? (where I give participants a close look at the gauntlet of challenges that community pioneers can expect to face and how they morph into something else as the community makes the transition to the settler phase)

In short, I get to share information and perspectives about my life’s work with an eager audience. How much better can it get?

• • •

Well, four years ago, with a little help from my friends, I did figure out a way to make a good thing better.

I was sitting around with my Ann Arbor friends lamenting that my heavy travel schedule (I’m on the road half the time) had the unwanted consequence of sharply limiting my opportunities for celebration cooking. No doubt thinking foremost of my psychic well being (it’s bad for a person’s health to have their creativity stifled), my friends spoke right up: “We can help with that. How about you cook for us Saturday night of the NASCO weekend? We can make it a dinner party for 12-14 people. You cook and we’ll buy the ingredients.”

I accepted this offer with alacrity, and thus was born the annual Ann Arbor Slow Food Extravaganza. While I worked solo to produce the inaugural dinner in 2005, Ma’ikwe joined me the second year and it’s been a husband-and-wife tag-team performance ever since. We commit to selecting the menu and manifesting an ingredients list by Oct 1, and the supplies are dutifully awaiting our arrival in town in November.

I used to think my NASCO weekends were fully subscribed if I was teaching workshops in every slot. Hah! Now I’m prepping for Saturday night in every moment I’m not prepping for a workshop. Our routine is to drive to Ann Arbor Thursday and start cooking first thing Friday morning. The biggest crunch occurs Sat afternoon, when I race back to the kitchen (at Sunward Cohousing, three miles west of the Michigan Union, where Institute happens every year in downtown Ann Arbor) and try to add the finishing touches to all the dishes that cannot be completed the day before. Luckily, Ma'ikwe tends to not have as crazy a workshop schedule as I, and she can usually don her apron earlier in the afternoon.

Two nights ago, Ma’ikwe and I produced the 4th Extravaganza, featuring Greek cuisine on this occasion. People started arriving around 6:30 pm for cocktails and antipasto and everyone stayed past 11, by which time we’d made a serious dent in the baklava, port, and ouzo. As intended, participants took their time, lingering over the presentation and enjoyment of four courses and innumerable conversations.

Thus, there are myriad reasons why NASCO weekends have become firmly established as one the highlights of my annual calendar.