Allyson

Planning out your garden beds is important, because where you put your plants matters. Some plants can’t go near one another. Others love to be close together and help one another. It’s a complex dance, and you need to learn a lot to do a good job at growing enough food to at least supplement your stores.

Luckily, garden beds can be made out of anything. As I mentioned last week, I have beds made out of planks (sort of the standard, and one I actually would no longer suggest), buckets, bins, and tires. Some folks will tell you that tires leach chemicals that can get into your veg, but I have not seen any real evidence of that. Most of the leachable chemicals in the rubber are gone long before tires end up in landfill (which is where you can usually find them, often for free). All items used to grow stuff in should get a good wash before use, and anything small enough to allow it should get at least a rinse every year. I find using Dr. Bronner’s soaps (peppermint or tea tree) work best because they’re biodegradable, won’t harm your plants, and are concentrated so you don’t need a lot.

In-Ground Garden

If you have a very large, square (or rectangular) sized patch, you may want to just till it up and use it as-is. It would be a miniature farm field, basically. With no sides, it takes longer to warm up in the spring, but it allows you to rearrange your garden each year (which is good, as you don’t want to plant the same thing in the same space, year after year). When making a very large garden of this sort, you will need to put down rocks, stones, or planks of wood to walk along between rows. While you can just leave the ground as it is, you will find that weeds come up very quickly and will threaten to overtake the whole garden. Also, walking on the dirt compresses it in ways that can negatively affect your plants. Walking on boards or beams, or on a brick path, will keep the garden from being compressed so much, while also keeping weeds down.

Generally, you want to make an in-ground garden into rows and/or blocks, depending on what you’re growing. Vegetables like peas, beans, and tomatoes are best planted in rows. Potatoes, squash, and corn do better in blocks. You can plan out the garden to keep companion plants together, and keep your veggie foes apart.

Requirements for an in-ground garden are a large, regular shaped space with enough sun, and the ability to till the soil in some way. While tilling can be done by hand, it’s not easy. You can rent or purchase a rototiller at most hardware stores these days, and there are expensive ones and cheap ones.

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This image came across my Facebook page this morning. It had the following rant attached:

Copy pasta:
Signal boosting.. CN: mentions the actions mandated by Ohio law to be taken by a doctor on the body of a girl suspected of not being “female enough” to play sports on a girl’s team, which plausibly verge on sexual assault.
——–
This is my daughter. She just turned 9. Here is why I would never allow her to play middle or high school sports if we lived in Ohio…

A few days ago, the Ohio Republicans passed a change to state law that was snuck in at the last minute, under the guise of “protecting” girls sports.
Am. Sub. H. B. No. 151 (various versions of it are here)

This law allows ANYONE to dispute the sex of an athlete on a school team. There are no safeguards in place to ensure that this is not used maliciously. Girls who do not look feminine enough, girls of color, girls who are “too good” are likely to be the biggest targets. But any girl could be targeted. Maybe someone doesn’t like her parents or maybe someone wants to make sure the opposing team doesn’t have enough eligible players.

So what does a girl have to do to prove she is a girl? First, the physician has to examine the girl’s external and internal reproductive anatomy. I have to emphasize that this will impact girls as young as 5th or 6th grade, ~10-11 years old. A year or two older than my daughter.

Step one to proving your correct sex is female: A doctor will need to spread open your labia and examine the size of your clitoris. A clitoris that is “too large” could be a sign that you are intersex and not female enough for sports. Step two to proving your correct sex is female: A doctor will then insert one or two gloved fingers inside your vagina, while pressing against your abdomen with their other hand, so they can feel your uterus and ovaries. This will likely be quite painful for these young girls, and extremely traumatic. There is no medical reason to do a pelvic exam on girls this young, absent any signs of a problem. This is sexual assault and will traumatize these girls. That is by design. This part of the exam would probably be covered by insurance, depending on how it is billed. But these next two steps would likely not be covered for most people. Step three to proving your correct sex is female: Your blood will be drawn and your testosterone levels measured. How much testosterone is too much? Unclear.
Does having “high T” give girls an advantage? No, not always. But this bill leaves no room for nuance. Step four to proving your correct sex is female: Your blood will also be tested to see if you are XX or XY. Except not everyone is XX or XY and there are XY women who have no advantage in sports because of the nuances of their genetics, but that won’t matter here 🤷🏻‍♀️

This bill offers protection from retaliation for people who report an athlete they suspect is not truly female. There is no requirements that they make these reports in good faith. There is no protection for the athletes accused of lying about their sex. Any athlete who suspects they were “harmed” by an athlete who lied about their sex can sue that school district. If that athlete’s parents are unwilling to have their daughter sexually assaulted, or cannot afford the testing, the district will have to pay $$ to the accuser. So from an administrative standpoint, you basically have to require that all female athletes do this testing in order to play interscholastic sports. Otherwise your district is in danger of having to forfeit games and losing litigation if you don’t have this paperwork up front. Interscholastic sports in Ohio will only be accessible to girls whose parents are willing to subject them to sexual assault and very expensive and unnecessary bloodwork.

Congrats to everyone trying to “save” women’s sports from your trans athlete boogeymen. Is winning the most important part of high school sports? Because setting aside the incredible trauma and expense caused by this bill, at the end of the day, the message is that winning is what matters the most. That’s not the lesson I want my daughter to learn from sports.

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This past weekend, I had the pleasure of attending, vending at, and cooking at the Northfolk Nightmarket in Phillipston, MA. This was its first year, and wow, it was amazing. I did pretty well, and I had a blast. Since this event is Viking themed (though “fantasy” Viking more than historical, they delved into the mythology of Beowulf in a day-long roving play), I decided to both dress as and cook as a Viking woman would. That meant coming up with meals that could have been served in Grylla’s mead hall. I decided to make a pork roast with apples, and a green soup. The soup was delicious, but the pork… It was divine. The following was food for about four or five people (but we were hungry from being out in the cold all day).

Ingredients:

• 1.5 lb pork loin, plain
• 4 apples, rough chopped
• 2 red onions, rough chopped
• 24 oz beer or ale (light, NOT dark)
• salt, pepper, oregano, marjoram, about 1/4 tsp each
• 1 tbsp dried rosemary

Get your fire quite hot and make a good bed of coals to cook in (alternatively, set your oven to 350° F). Over a quick flame (stove burner set to medium high), heat up some olive oil and toss in the apples and onions. Saute them until they begin to soften, but before they start to crumble. Place the pork loin over the vegetables, and sprinkle with the salt, pepper, oregano, and marjoram. Add in the beer, a little at a time so it doesn’t bubble over, until the pork is almost covered (you may need to add more beer later if you don’t cover your pot). Sprinkle the rosemary liberally over the top of the roast, and pop it over the coals for 2 hours.

Check on your pork every 30 minutes or so (or every time a patron asks you what you’re cooking and why does it smell so damn good?), turning it so that every side spends time under the liquid. If the liquid boils out, add more beer or some broth. Continue to cook until the roast is ready to fall apart when poked with a fork. If you’re cooking it in the oven, cook for 2 hours at 350°, then an hour hour or so at 250° while lidded, for the best result.

Remove the pork from the liquid and slice into coins. Using a slotted spoon, pull out the apples and onions and serve them alongside the pork, with a side of rice.

Notes:

I used old apples I’d found forgotten in our crisper drawer. They looked like apples that had been sitting around since autumn, which worked well for my event. Because of that, they were a little older, a little softer, and a little sweeter than a fresh apple. I highly recommend this, because the result was incredible. This came out moist, and absolutely bursting with the flavor of the beer and rosemary. It has a little bit of a sweet immediate taste, with a lovely savory flavor that hits you after.

If you can, I really do recommend cooking this one in cast iron over a fire. It was really easy, and it was very showy for when people came walking by. But the smell of it, and the slight background taste of smoke and ash, just really came together.

I will also say, we didn’t eat it with rice when we were at the market. We ate it with our fingers, dribbling juices into the snow and ice at our feet, and giving no f*’s. LOL… It was just so good!

It’s time to start thinking about gardening. This is not just a pleasant skill that yields tomatoes. It’s a post-apocalyptic skill that is absolutely necessary. Have you ever tried just hunting and gathering? If not, don’t bother; there’s a reason we cultivated plants. Learning to garden now, when we have ample food at the grocery store (because even a lightly stocked grocery store is ample, quite frankly), is imperative. This is not a skill you can learn after the fact. The learning curve is so sharp that it requires early adoption and constant practice.

There are lots of easy plants to grow in a new garden, and I’ll talk about them next week. This week, I want to talk about planning. First off, it’s the best part of this part of winter (the crappy, cold, damp, windy part). You get to huddle near the fireplace and look through seed catalogs (on or offline, your choice), and dream. Dreams are seeds of the mind, after all. Stage one of growing food is literally dreaming about it.

Make a rough map of your yard. This is important because there are several issues that you need to address:

• Where in your yard gets full sun? partial sun? no sun at all?
• What’s the type of soil you have (sandy, rich, damp, clay, etc)? You may have to amend your soil to grow anything, so you need to know this in advance.
• What kind of garden do you want to try (raised beds? containers? little pots? big pots? half an acre plowed by hand?), and how can you do it to best utilize the sun you get?
• What is your Plant Hardiness Zone? Find out on the USDA website. As an example, I’m 5b, which means something. More on that later.
• How much time do you want to spend on your garden? Remember it’s not just planting. You also have to factor in weeding, watering, fertilizing in some cases, weeding, helping plants with frames or structures, weeding…
• What will you eat? Don’t bother growing something you know your family won’t eat unless you have a very good reason for doing so. Plant what you’ll eat.

When you pick out your best spot (with 6+ hours of sunlight a day, if at all possible), you’ll want to sketch it out in a notebook or using a computer program. I can’t draw a straight line to save my life so I use programs online. There are several:

• The Old Farmer’s Almanac Garden Planner (7 day free trial)
• GrowVeg (this is the one I used when we had a big garden)
• myGarden Planner (okay, free, not as intuitive to use)
• VegPlotter (nice, limited free option, inexpensive if you decide to use it)

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It’s tough, being new to the Right. I have a lot of Left habits that need to go. I was in the process of getting rid of many of them anyhow, because they no longer served me, but it’s becoming important.

The Left fights everything with emotion. Don’t agree with a legal standing? Cry at it. Have a problem with a cop or a sheriff? Scream and flail your arms. Care to protest oil drilling, farming methods you disagree with, or a politician’s third wife? Lay on the road and have a tantrum.  They revel in their emotions, and I struggle with it. A lot of why I moved “right of left” was because of this behavior.

The Right tends to make claims that they’re entirely fact driven. It’s not true. A good portion of the Right seems to want to base their facts on a book written by human beings (however inspired) over a thousand years, translated (badly) many times in the interim, and tend to cherry pick the parts they want to use. While I consider the Bible to be an inspirational writing, likely inspired by the Divine, I have enough theological training to know that it wasn’t written by God (or Goddess, or whatever). It’s a great book to use as a moral compass. It has a great outline of moral and ethical laws that apply to a person individually, and specifically to the Jewish (and later the Christian) people. But it isn’t fact. It *contains* facts in some places, but it is not, itself, fact.

That said, the Right does a much better job of putting together coherent factual arguments. They are much less likely to let emotions interfere with their stance. I don’t expect to see someone on the Right break down in cringe-worthy tears because they’re being questioned about something.

I struggle with emotions. I am an emotional person. I grew up in a household where I was forced to sublimate any emotions I had. As a child who was being verbally and emotionally abused, I quickly learned to stifle any emotional response. When I left the house of horrors I grew up in, I decided I would never squelch my emotions again, and so I set myself up to emotionally vomit on everyone around me. While it was important that I learn to emote in a healthy fashion, that was NOT the right way to go about it.

So when I’m talking with someone on the Right about things, and I know that I have a good argument, I sometimes lose track of the words I need. The emotions I feel are overwhelming, and I react rather than act. I have the ability to create logical arguments, but if I care about the outcome, my emotions tend to get in the way. This is an ongoing personal issue that I’ve been working on for years.

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Chicken and dumplings are a staple in my house. They’re something in between a soup and a stew, and I usually get silly and call it Stoup. They’re incredibly easy to make, though it takes a bit of effort until you’ve learned the method. It’s filling, delicious, and you’ll get requests.

Ingredients for the stoup:

• 6 to 8 oz of uncooked chicken per person
• enough water to cover the chicken
• salt, pepper, oregano, thyme, and rubbed sage to taste
• 1 medium carrot, diced small
• 1 small onion, diced small
• 1 large rib of celery, diced small
• a teaspoon or so of butter, margarine, or olive oil
• white wine to deglaze the pan

Ingredients for the dumplings:

• 3 cups all-purpose flour
• 1.5 teaspoons salt
• 1 cup milk
• 1 egg

The chicken for this recipe can be done in two different ways. First, you can use bone-in chicken pieces and make it like “pulled chicken,” meaning you cook it, then remove it from the water and shred it up until it’s the size of bits you like. Second, you can use boneless, skinless chicken breast or thighs, in which case you’re going to cube your chicken into bite size pieces. Regardless of which method you choose to use, you should sprinkle the chicken with salt and pepper, then brown it in a cast iron pan (separate from the one you’ll be making the broth in). Make sure to brown all sides, but remember it doesn’t need to be cooked through. The full cooking happens in the water.

While you’re browning your chicken in batches, add enough water to a pot that it will cover your chicken when it’s added. It’s okay if you don’t get quite enough in the pot; you can add more after. You just want to get enough in there that you can start heating it up to a boil. As you finish browning chicken parts, put them into the water. Make sure there’s enough water to cover all the chicken completely, but not much more, and then lower it from a boil to a simmer. Add in your spices, about a teaspoon of each for now. You can add more later if needed.

As your chicken is simmering, dice up your carrot, onion, and celery. Add a bit of fat to the pan you cooked the chicken in, and saute your vegetables until the onions are soft and beginning to clarify. Add a tablespoon or so of a dry white wine to the pan, and stir and scrape well with a wooden spoon. All of the stuff you scrape off the bottom of the pan is “fond” and it’s what makes your stoup delicious. Add the veggies and fond to your chicken and broth.

Make your dumplings. Add the four and salt into a medium bowl. In a separate bowl or measuring cup, whisk together your milk and egg. Add the liquid to the flour, and mix until it forms a dough. This should be a soft and relatively smooth dough, with very elastic qualities. It may be a bit sticky or tacky, but it shouldn’t stick to the counter when you’re kneading.

Knead the dough on a lightly floured surface until it’s smooth and elastic. Keeping the counter lightly floured at each stage, you should then roll out your dough so it’s as thick as you like your dumplings to be. If you like your dumplings to be fat and fluffy, you’ll want to roll them out to about a half inch thick. If you want them more like noodles (my preference), roll them to under a quarter inch, basically as smooth and thin as you can manage without the dough sticking to the counter. Cut your dumplings into strips, squares, diamonds, or really any shape you like. you can use a dough cutter, or a knife, or even a rolling pizza cutter. Use a bread scraper to lift the noodles off the counter, dust them well with more flour, and let them rest and dry a bit while the rest of the food is readied.

When your chicken is thoroughly cooked (about an hour, or longer if you like), pull any boned parts out of the broth. Shred, if you like, and return the chicken to the broth. Bring the broth to a low but steady boil, and begin adding the dumplings to it a little at a time. I usually add about a handful of dumplings, then stir and let them begin to cook. This keeps them from sticking to one another. The flour on the outside of the dumplings will help thicken the gravy in your stoup, too. Cook the dumplings until they’re tender. This can take anywhere from five minutes to 20 minutes, depending on how thick they were rolled and how dry they were when you started. They should be solid throughout, with no doughy interior. Thin ones will taste like fresh noodles (which is essentially what they are).

If you find that your gravy isn’t thick enough, add a little water or cold broth to a tablespoon of cornstarch, stir until well combined, and then add a bit at a time to the simmering stoup. Repeat until you reach the consistency you prefer. Add in any spices you like, and if you want a fancier look, top each bowl with a sprinkle of fresh minced parsley.

Serve your chicken and dumplings over a pile of mashed potatoes, rice, or on their own in a bowl with a spoon.

Hey all, I’ve been considering a variety of topics for the next few weeks. With spring rapidly coming, I could talk about gardening, and explain how to start seeds indoors, and all the stuff that goes along with making a functioning garden that will provide actual food. I could write about raising chickens (and/or other livestock, though I have less experience with non-chicken livestock) and what that takes. I could go into how one makes staples, like bread, cheese, butter, and the like. I could talk about mending and making clothing, blankets, and such.

What do you all want to hear about? My gut says go with gardening, but I also want to write what is of interest and useful to y’all.

The past couple of weeks have been an absolute whirlwind. So much so that I really don’t have anything specific to write about. Part of the problem I’m having is that when I write the night before (like I am now), it might be out of date by morning. That’s what happened last Wednesday. I don’t like it when that happens.

Let’s see. First, I’ve been very happy to see what’s going on with DOGE. I have long held the opinion that “smaller government is better government” and DOGE seems to be doing just that. I’m confused as all get out over people weeping about “the poor federal workers who got canned” when those “poor” federal workers got 8 months of salary to play on. Most of them will have jobs by the end of the month, and that 8 months of salary is theirs to keep for holiday or Christmas or whatever. There’s nothing poor about them. I never got 8 months (or even 8 days) of salary when getting fired.

NH had a bill, HB 283, put forward. If you’d like to look at it yourself, you can find it (and lots of commentary from pundits) here. Basically, as I read it, it says that NH schools will (if the bill passes) no longer require world languages, arts and music, engineering and tech, computer science, and personal financial literacy in order to graduate. The number of credits remains the same. What I read, when I looked at the bill, was that NH wanted to focus on having students who could read, write, and do ‘rythmatic, first and foremost, and so those were made most important and required. I see that schools that are struggling to put out kids who can do those very basic things can now focus on just those basic things. What the bill does NOT say is that those other subjects are being removed from the school.

However, the NEA and other Dem groups are basically telling their folks that the Republicans want to take all those subjects out of schools. They have ads on Facebook and other places. I keep going onto them and asking people, have you actually read the bill? Most of them very obviously have not, and are simply taking their talking points and moving on. The pearl clutching is horrifying.

I am less irritated by those who did read the bill and have constructive commentary to make about it. It’s been suggested by a friend that less requirements means people will not bother taking courses on art and engineering and such. I find that unlikely. Every high school kid I know (and I know lots of them, because my own kids are just barely out of high school) takes subjects that are not required. They take art, or “language arts in comic books” (a surprisingly robust and very good English course, I might add), or whatever other equivalent to “underwater basket weaving” there is. Art and music aren’t leaving the schools, anymore than the football team is. There’s a ton of opposition to the bill, so I am guessing it won’t pass, but I don’t see it as the major threat that the Left obviously does.

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I made this last week. It was rich, delicious, filling, and just the right thing after a long day of moving snow.

Ingredients:

• 3 lbs beef, cut into 1” cubes
• salt
• black pepper
• 1 tbsp oil
• 1 pkg bacon, cut into small pieces
• 2 large carrots, peeled, sliced on bias into large chunks
• 1 large onion, chopped
• 4 cloves garlic, minced
• 2 tbsp tomato paste
• 2 cups dry red wine
• 2 cups beef broth
• 2 bay leaves
• 1 tsp dried thyme
• 1/2 lb pearl onions
• 8 oz mushrooms, quartered
• cornstarch mixed with cold beef broth, for thickening

Preheat oven to 350°. Season beef with salt and pepper.

In an oven proof pot, heat a little oil over medium heat. Add the bacon and cook until it’s crispy, stirring occasionally. This will take about six minutes. Pull the bacon out of the pot with a slotted spoon and put it on a paper towel lined plate to drain.

Increase the heat to medium high, and then add in the beef chunks in a single layer. Don’t crowd the pot, as the beef needs to be able to move around freely. Do it in batches, removing properly seared beef and adding it to the pile of bacon.

Once all the beef is seared, remove all but a tablespoon or two of the bacon fat in the pot. Lower the heat to medium, and stir in the carrot and onion. Cook until the onions are wilted and the carrots begin to soften, which should take about five minutes. Stir in the garlic and tomato paste, and cook until fragrant. Add a splash of red wine to the pot and deglaze it, making sure to scrape any “stuff” off the bottom of the pot and incorporate it into the onion mixture.

Add in the beef and bacon, the rest of the wine, broth to cover the meat and veggies entirely, spices, onions, and mushrooms. Stir gently to incorporate, and then cover the pot with a tight fitting lid. Put the pot in the oven and cook until the beef is fork tender and the sauce is slightly thickened. This will take about an hour and a half to two hours.

Remove the pot from the oven, and set it on top of the stove. On a medium high heat, bring the liquid to a low boil. Slowly pour in a tablespoon or so of cornstarch mixed in with some beef broth, and stir the stew well. Continue to add a tablespoon or so of the cornstarch slurry until you reach the desired thickness.

Serve your Beef Bourguignon over mashed potatoes, and with a side of your favorite vegetable.

Notes:

I tend to buy larger cans of tomato paste. When I open a new can, I measure out two tablespoon “plops” onto parchment paper, and put it in the freezer. Once it’s frozen, I stick the plops into a baggie, which I can then pull from whenever I need tomato paste. If you’re using frozen tomato paste, let it simmer until it dissolves into the onion mixture before moving onto the next step.

You can thicken the liquid with a roux if you prefer, but the silkiness of a sauce made with cornstarch is hard to beat. Because cornstarch is entirely starch, you need half or less of the amount you’d need of flour, in order to get the same level of thickness. A roux of flour will tend to make a thick gravy that is dark and heavy, while a roux (or “slurry”) of cornstarch will be lighter both in color and texture. There are places for both, but I prefer the cornstarch in this recipe.

If your family are not big mushroom or onion fans, you can cook those separately in a pan and add them as a topping in each bowl, instead of cooking them in the stew. Again, this is a matter of preference.

I know we’re out of season, but this seemed to be a good topic. Butchering applies to all animals, and whether you’re taking something small or large, there’s a level of skill to getting it done. The video is self explanatory, and it’s pretty good. I learned things watching it, and I hope you do, too.

I wanted to talk about butchering in general, though, for those who may not want to sit through an hour long video (though I do recommend doing so when you have time, it’s VERY good). In my very strong opinion, the hardest part about harvesting an animal is killing it. Once the animal is dead, it doesn’t really matter what you do to the body. It’s not going to complain or suffer in any way. So if you can shoot or otherwise dispatch the animal, know that the butchering can go as slow as needed and no one’s going to judge you for your cuts.

The purpose of butchering is to get the meat off the animal and into usable pieces. When you’re talking about large game like deer, elk, moose, bear, and the like, you will be dealing with parts rather than a whole animal. Like in the video, your butchering will consist of taking pieces off the larger carcass, and then preparing them for freezing or otherwise preserving them for long-term storage. Smaller animals like chickens, ducks, geese, possum, squirrel, etc. are small enough to allow you to work with the whole animal, and so the process is slightly different. You can prepare the entire carcass for freezing or preserving, which can be easier (but occasionally is more tedious).

The first order of business with any animal is to remove the guts, the viscera. Generally speaking, this involves opening the stomach cavity from the anus to the ribs, and then carefully pulling everything out. In larger animals this is pretty easy except for the first cuts. I always worry I’m going to puncture something when I’m cutting around the anus, and you don’t want that because you don’t want fecal matter in what’s going to be your food. Basically, you have one long connected tube (or more correctly, set of tubes) that go from mouth to ass, and you need to remove it all. There are internal organs that can be eaten, like the heart, liver, and kidneys. Technically, brain is also edible, as well as other stuff, but the other areas are very much filters for all sorts of things. Liver and kidneys, while filters, aren’t likely to pass anything on to you (especially after both freezing and cooking), but I always avoid the brain, lungs, and other stuff. The sole exception to this is that you can use the large intestines of some animals to make sausage casing (generally you would use pig, but technically any large animal intestine will do), but it requires a lot of cleaning to make it safe. Hides on larger animals can be removed first or last, depending on how you’re storing it during processing.

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