Guilt

I like to joke with my BFF that I am part Catholic and can therefore relate to some of the Catholic angst, particularly, GUILT.  She doesn’t think I am as funny as I think I am, but we still love each other…but I digress.

I was not raised Catholic but my father was Catholic.  I grew up Episcopalian but then forayed into some other Protestant traditions none of which seem to have as overt a reliance on guilt but I found that most snuck it in on some level.  Apparently it also makes me a “good Calvinist”, so I am told.  All of this to say, GUILT is a thread that seems to weave itself in all areas of my life’s fabric.

There is your typical situational guilt…I shouldn’t have eaten that cookie (OK, those five cookies), I should not have used that tone when asked how I was, I should have woken up earlier, etc.  But I feel like I also struggle with BIG GUILT that bubbles to the surface of my conscience consistently about issues some of which have no resolution or solid closure.

This winter my last surviving grandparent died.  He was 99.  Events such as this always remind me of the guilt I carry about not living closer to home, not being in touch more, etc.  But weighing more heavily was the fact that I don’t seem to have very many clear and distinct memories.  This was brought to light as I listened to my cousin recall stories at his funeral and I kept thinking “We did that?  He liked that?”.  I did find some relief through conversation with my older sister who apparently shares my inability to save specific details.

Last fall I was given an African Violet from the daughter of my great aunt Eleanor.  It was such a meaningful gift because my aunt meant a lot to me and she treasured her violets.  She passed away a couple of years ago and this violet was one of hers that she had allowed to thrive for a long time.  Unbeknownst to Eleanor’s daughter, I am practically poison to house plants.  I cannot for the love of all that is fertile keep them alive.

This was all that was holding on this past winter, it has since completed its march to death.  Every time I passed it I would feel like I was letting Eleanor down and somehow it was diminishing the relationship we shared.  I tried and tried to make it flourish but I failed.  GUILT.

Not to part on a depressing note, the good news is that despite the layers and layers of guilt that I find myself under, self-inflicted or otherwise, I do realize that no one is harder on me than me.  I know that my Poppa loved me and I love him.  I know that Eleanor and my relationship is no way based on my ability to keep her flowers alive.  Now if I could figure out a way to keep those truths bubbling up consistently…I would be so much less angsty!

Homemade

I decided that LIlia needed a homemade stocking and so I set out to knit/felt one.  I haven’t had a new knitting project in a while, although i’ve been knitting a blanket for the better part of three years now.  It was nice to have something to refocus on (just like Becky said it would).  And, although I know the magic of felting, it’s difficult to keep in mind when your stocking is coming out to be such a beast!

Here is the before…

and here is the after…

I used the same model each time so you could really see the difference..heehee.  I will spare you the harsh critique of my own work, overall I am quite pleased with the result!  In the process I learned how to do a sock heel and the kitchener stitch :)  I am sure Santa will enjoy filling up the stocking!

Happy Holidays, everyone!

My Famous Blog Post

I wrote a guest post for the Fed Up With Lunch blog, and it was published today!

http://fedupwithlunch.com/2011/10/guest-blog-camp-food

Ambition

Yes, we knew we were having a baby in early June way before we made our garden plans for the season.  No, we didn’t listen to people who told us we were crazy.  Yes, we are crazy.  No, not everything worked out.

Here’s the rundown of our growing season:

  We had a bumper crop of strawberries!  They are planted right in the front of the house so it was easy enough to pop out there where Lilia was asleep and pick (and eat!).  Also, because they are so easy to freeze, that is where most of them are.  We ended up with four gallons of frozen strawberries, not to mention all of the berries I ate :).

 We had a few raspberries from the plants we planted last  year, and the ones we got were delicious.  Here they are pictured with some of the wild blackberries we have by the stream.  None of these made it to the freezer.

For some reason, after the berries were done for the season, the rest became much more difficult to manage.  It could have been the combination of wretched hot weather followed by torrential rains, life with newborn, earthquake, hurricane and flood.  We had a great crop of onions, garlic and potatoes, some nice shell peas and the first harvest of green beans was great!  I made some pickles early on, although not nearly as many as last summer.  The tomatoes were pretty much a total loss and that was the most heartbreaking thing of all.  This picture was taken after one of my more recent trips to the garden to cull what was left.  The pumpkins, although not prolific, gave us a good number for what we can currently manage.  I hunted butternut squash through tall grass and weeds and came up with about 10 of them!  Soon to be made into baby food :).  We have a couple of green cabbage, plenty of carrots (still in the ground), a couple of leftover cukes and green peppers that FINALLY started to produce.  Somehow we ended up with tomatillos that have been fun to play around with.  In addition, we got about 10 pounds of peaches from a co-worker of mine that I was able to preserve…half in jars and half in the freezer.  Wow, how much would I love a peach tree?

In other news, the hens have decided not to lay eggs.  We aren’t quite sure what is going on with them except maybe performance anxiety?  I had all these people lined up to buy our eggs and now I have to tell them all “sorry”!  What the heck, birds??

Anyhoo, despite some of the veggies not growing, our little Lilia Bean continues to thrive!

Here’s yet another picture of her sleeping…just over 4 months old already!  Just one look at her and the failed tomato crop just doesn’t seem like such a big deal.

<3

Time.

 

 

 
I have spent a lot of time looking at this picture.  To me it says a lot, but yet it is difficult for me to get those thoughts into words.  Suffice it to say at this time that these clogs have been with me through all my years cooking at camp.  They trudged through those nine long summers in very early mornings and late evenings, while I learned lessons about myself and about life.  Now they sit on the porch in hopes of an occasional trip to the garden but grateful for the rest.

 

Peaceful

Happy three month birthday, my sweet, peaceful baby girl.  I love you.

(photo credit T.Tice – http://tabtic.tumblr.com/)

 

 

 

 

Keep Calm and Carry On

 My mother is one of the most creative people I know, and also probably the least selfish.  She came to visit exactly on the day that Lilia was born (how serendipitous!) and stayed for a little over 5 days.  In her time with us she cooked and cleaned (the kitchen floor with a toothbrush!), provided fresh flowers (something I love but couldn’t even manage even before the baby), ran errands, organized, and of course had good Grandma time with Lilia.  Although the flowers have wilted and the kitchen floor is regrettably gathering more filth, one of the lasting things has been this small token she made for me with some great advice, “Keep Calm and Carry On”.  Of course it has a Grandma Linda twist.  I am not sure if this is something she’d have given any of her daughters or if it’s just that she knows her middle daughter better than her middle daughter thinks, but it has been a small little something that has helped me keep my head in times when I thought I might lose it!  Mind you, I have a good baby and am well aware that it could be a totally different situation if she were colicky or cranky all the time.  But even the best behaved baby can make you a little nutty at 3am when you’re sleep deprived and nothing seems to make them want to settle down.  Besides remembering to” keep calm” in those kinds of situations, I am in the process of learning how to be at peace with all of the other stuff in life that doesn’t get done.  My personality is such that I like things organized and I love to cross things off my to-do list.  However, this is the time in life when I just can’t accomplish things that would normally just take me a couple of hours…mowing the lawn, weeding the gardens, cleaning the house all at once.  I need to be reminded to “keep calm and carry on” regardless, knowing that I am doing the most important thing by being with Lilia and that these times will go by too fast!

I could learn a thing or two from this adorable creature:

Murphy is doing a great job of keeping calm and carrying on (:  He’s just the best dog and we love him.

Here’s a calm baby to look at, too!  She just breaks my heart wide open with all of the love I have for her…sigh <3

Time for Me to Fly

“Time for me to fly 
Oh, I’ve got to set myself free 
Time for me to fly 
That’s just how it’s got to be 
I know it hurts to say goodbye, but it’s time for me to fly” 

I have a secret love for REO Speedwagon.  Up until now only two people really knew about it, Daniel the Kitchen Nymph and of course, Jordan.  However, the lyrics to this song are so appropriate for this time in my life that it was worth outing myself as a fan.

Over the last year I have been reflecting on my experiences at summer camp, most notably in my role as the camp cook.  There is no doubt that my time as a camper growing up and as a camp staff person the last 24 years has made me who I am today on so many levels.  But as the song lyrics clearly say, it’s time for me to let that part of my life go.  Clearly I will always have the experiences, the memories, the life lessons, and it will always be an integral part of who I am.  However, last summer I knew that a change was on the horizon and I spent a lot of time debating how one knows when it’s time to let something so profound go.  I can’t say I could answer that question point blank if someone were asking my advice for themselves, but for me, I just knew it was time.

And so, as staff training for summer 2011 began yesterday, I found myself both waxing nostalgic and breathing a sigh of relief…thankful for the times i’ve had but knowing that I am leaving a role that has been so important to me in very capable hands.

It also doesn’t hurt that my arms were full of my new full time summer job, Miss Lilia Eleanor White <3, born 06.07.11.

As my “last hoorah” I finally assembled a long-awaited Camp Fowler Cookbook (went to press a week before Miss Lilia was born), and will be available at the camp store this summer!  Next time you are in Speculator, stop by and pick up yourself a copy :)

Have a great summer!

Baking.

Probably the most quintessential act one thinks about when they imagine spending the day in a kitchen is baking.  The act of mixing ingredients, kneading dough, smelling freshly baked cookies coming out of the oven and spreading butter on a freshly sliced challah bread.  Baking is both satisfying and risky…when you try a new recipe and the dough rises as it should or the scone crumbles appropriately, you feel like you could be the next Martha Stewart.  However, the failures can be devastating…why did the cookies go flat?  How did the pancakes burn?  It’s as though you had never set foot in a kitchen before.

One of my life goals is to one day own my own small bakery.  One of my goals in the Camp Fowler kitchen has been to bake as much as possible from scratch.  Ideally I wanted to get to the point where I could JUST do the baking and leave the rest of the cooking tasks to my many able assistants over the years.  That never quite panned out, but I got to do my fair share.  Each summer over the last nine years I’ve tried to pick out the next item we’d add to our “homemade” list.  In the beginning it was easy to bake all the cookies and brownies from scratch…no brainers.  And, so much more delicious than using frozen dough or boxed mixes!  And really, it doesn’t take that much more time.   Pancakes, another no-brainer.  One reason why homemade is so much better is because you can tweak recipes any way you want.  In our pancakes we add oats and whole-wheat flour to increase nutritional value, and have the flexibility to do the same with ANY of our baked goods.  We know exactly what goes into our products and this helps us to address allergies and other food issues.

Also included in our baked from scratch list are:  bread for grilled cheese and other sandwiches, bread bowls for soups, cornbread, coffee cake, blueberry love muffins,  banana bread, pumpkin bread, granola, Italian bread, dinner rolls and pizza crusts.  This past summer we added the cinnamon raisin bread for French toast and the English muffins for the “moose muffins” (breakfast sandwiches)!  The few items we do not bake from scratch are hamburger, hot dog and sub rolls, tortillas and bagels.  Pretty impressive considering the amount of people we feed!

Here’s a slideshow of some of our delicious baked goods.  Enjoy!

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The Meat Challenge

One of the first items I wanted to take a look at on the “old” camp menu was how we used meat.  Given that one of my goals was to increase sustainability, meat would certainly have to come into question.  There are many reasons to reduce one’s consumption of meat, including that it takes a lot of energy to produce meat, meat that is humanely raised is not the norm, along with basic nutritional concerns that come with eating a lot of meat just to name a few.

Initially revising the camp menu to reflect some of these ideas meant that we didn’t need to have meat at each meal.  As long as the rest of the menu had enough variety there would be plenty of protein around…but the challenge was definitely more of the emotional hardship that many people would endure at the reduction of their meat choices!  In fact, nine years later I STILL get crap about the fact that there are no meatballs alongside the spaghetti.

Besides removing the meatballs from the menu, I wanted to at least increase the quality of the meats that we would continue to serve.  The big quest was the chicken nugget, which initially I attempted to eliminate by serving fish sticks with mac and cheese.  After two weeks and many wasted fish sticks I conceded to just look to increase the nugget quality. What we ended up with is a nugget that at least behaves like real chicken as opposed to a sticky mass of chicken parts mashed back together (think McDonald’s).  This past summer I really wanted to try to do something about the hamburgers.  Having read a couple of articles from Grist and NYT I was renewed in my enthusiasm to serve only meat I believed in.  Instead of buying the frozen burger patties I wanted to buy fresh ground beef and make the burger patties.  Well, Hannah and Austin made a lot of burger patties… but overall the verdict was that SYSCO didn’t carry the quality of meat I was seeking whether frozen or fresh.

One of our biggest successes in my eyes has been our homemade breakfast sausage (as seen here).

My favorite breakfast of the week!  Using a recipe I got from a Vermont public school, my assistants over the years worked to tweak the recipe until we got it just right and although there are still a couple of closed-minded people unwilling to accept a breakfast sausage not crammed into some synthetically produced casing with unpronounceable ingredients, those who feel they need/want to eat meat in the morning tend to love this.  It doesn’t hurt that it is served alongside homemade cinnamon-raisin french toast :)

We’ve been accused of being “vegetarian camp” but in reality when you look at our menu there are still meat options everyday, but they are offered alongside delicious vegetarian options, some of which have become more popular than the meat.  Homemade veggie burgers, tofu “wings” and tofu pot pie are some of the favorites.

One thing that we’ve been consistent about throughout the years is not settling on something until we are satisfied.  Looking for the best whole foods options to satisfy our quest for sustainability, to feed the campers nutritionally sound foods and for people to genuinely like camp food.  We will never be a vegetarian camp, and since we won’t be able to raise our own chickens, cows and pigs to provide meat from a truly local source where we have knowledge of its entire life, we will always have to compromise on the meat issue.  What we can do it feel proud of where we have made positive changes towards our goal, offering many options (instead of meat or nothing) and educating our campers about how each choice we make regarding our lifestyle and foods makes a difference.