Author: Robinne Weiss

Library Evolution

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100_3972 smI remember libraries as a child. They were quiet, austere places. No food or chewing gum was allowed to enter, and librarians had lips permanently puckered from saying “Shhhh!” We tiptoed between towering shelves of books in hushed silence. We spoke in whispers when we dared to speak at all. Our books were chosen and checked out with a minimum of noise. The librarians’ well-oiled carts rattled like cattle trucks through the hushed corridors.

But something happened between the time I graduated from university and the time I got my children their first library cards. Libraries transformed and reinvented themselves.

Comfortable couches in conversational arrangements and large tables that encouraged discussion replaced the tiny desks tucked into dark corners. Children were invited in to flop into bean bag chairs with their favourite books. Librarians stopped saying “Shhhh!” and began leading children in songs, belted out in the middle of the library for all to hear.

No Food or Drink signs gave way to cafés inside the library. Now you can browse your favourite titles while having a coffee or eating lunch. You can sit and chat with friends—loudly—and no raptor librarians swoop upon you with a scowl.

Community groups began to meet in the library. Not in some ante-chamber tucked away behind a soundproof door, but right smack in the middle of the library. Knitting and gossiping, playing board games, having raucous meetings.

Televisions and computers showed up, and now you can watch a football match, or play video games in the library.

Libraries have awakened. They have roused from their quiet slumber and become vibrant community hubs. The smell of book binding glue is now mixed with the aroma of fresh coffee and scones. The turning of pages is matched by the tap of keyboards. The hum of conversation overpowers the hum of the fluorescent lights.

I spend significant time in several different libraries, using them as an office when I can’t be in my own. I am not alone. Most days I have to fight for space at a table and a place to plug in my laptop. Some days it is almost unbearably noisy, and I have to resort to noise-cancellation headphones in order to concentrate. It is a far cry from the libraries of my youth.

I don’t mind. What better backdrop for our communities than that of books? What better place to go to engage and be inspired? To learn and grow?

Long live the library!

Cinnamon-Pumpkin Bars

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100_3970smI thought it was time for another recipe, and this one is seasonally appropriate for you denizens of the Northern Hemisphere. I made it these lovely bars this week with the very last of the frozen pumpkin from last fall.

This recipe is adapted from a recipe in King Arthur Flour’s Whole Grain Baking. These are one-bowl wonders—incredibly quick and easy to mix up by hand. Something even young kids could manage on their own.

¾ cup (170g) butter

1 cup brown sugar

1 tsp vanilla

¾ tsp baking powder

¼ tsp salt

2 tsp cinnamon

¾ tsp ginger

¼ tsp cloves

¼ tsp allspice

1 egg

1 ½ cups cooked, mashed pumpkin

1 ½ cups whole wheat flour

1 ½ cups raisins or dried cranberries

Melt the butter in a largish bowl in the microwave. Add the sugar and stir. Return the mixture to the microwave and heat until it is starting to bubble. Allow the mixture to cool until it is comfortable to touch.

Beat in the vanilla, baking powder, salt and spices. Add the egg and beat until smooth. Stir in the pumpkin, flour and fruit.

Spoon the batter into a greased 9 x 13-inch pan, and bake 40 to 45 minutes at 180°C (350°F).

 

Feta Cheese

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Feta draining the kitchen.

Feta draining the kitchen.

I’m making one of my favourite cheeses this evening—feta. It’s the cheese that inspired me to get goats in the first place.

When we lived in St. Paul, Minnesota, there was a Greek deli just a couple of miles from home—Spiros (a quick Google tells me that Spiros is no longer open). Spiros sold several different feta cheeses, half a dozen types of olives, and all manner of other Mediterranean foods. We almost always had a block of feta from Spiros in the fridge.

When we moved to New Zealand, I was dismayed at the lack of good feta available. When we needed some livestock to keep the paddocks under control (just until we got around to planting the trees…that was 10 years ago), I chose goats so that I could make proper feta.

I was not disappointed by my decision. Feta made from goat milk, and processed just right to get the crumbly texture I like…divine!

We use feta in many ways. Because it is strongly flavoured and very salty, a little goes a long way, and more is wonderfully decadent. We add it to pasta, gratins, and pizza. It browns beautifully in the oven, and the “toasty bits” are everyone’s favourites. It is, of course, an essential ingredient in Greek salad, and also goes well with lentils and grains. And it can be marinated in olive oil and herbs for an incredible pop-it-in-your-mouth snack or appetizer.

And it’s one of the easiest cheeses to make!

Hand and Foot

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100_3964 smHand and Foot always goes hand-in-hand with food.

Hand and foot is a 4-person card came similar to Canasta, and played with 4 decks of cards. The game was introduced to me by my husband’s family. Indeed, I think it must have been written into the marriage agreement somewhere—will learn Hand and Food and agree to play whenever called upon.

The game is a good mix of luck, skill, and partner compatibility, so it works well as an evening’s entertainment at home or when visiting relatives.

Best of all, it is always accompanied by food—usually decadent and seasonally appropriate food. Cookies in the winter, ice cream in summer, strawberry shortcake in spring or pumpkin pie in the fall.

You might win or lose the game, but you always end happy and well-fed.

Dreaming Big

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100_3861 cropDon’t count your chickens before they’re hatched.

And don’t count your apples before they’re in the basket.

But it’s lovely this time of year to think what you’re going to do with that fruit if ALL the flowers end up producing a fruit. All the fruit trees were flush with flowers this spring—apples, pears, peaches, cherries…

But it’s a long time between October and April. Anything could happen, and it usually does.

Some of those flowers won’t get pollinated and will drop from the tree once they’re done blooming.

A storm will blow some of the pollinated flowers off the tree.

The tree will naturally prune some of its own fruit, because it simply cannot support so many.

Birds will snatch the small fruits as they ripen, and possums will eat the larger fruits.

A hail storm will damage or destroy more fruit.

Before you know it, there will be, not bushels of apples, but maybe a few. Enough for a couple of pies, some apple crisp. Not the larder-filling bounty that spring promised.

That’s okay. I’ll still count my apples by the flowers each spring. I’ll imagine the applesauce and the pies, the crisp bites of tart flesh, and it will be just as if they were actually here.

Trench Warfare

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IMG_3951 smWe have precious few trees on our property, maybe a dozen in total, all clinging to the fence lines, out of the way.

Except that they’re not out of the way, really. Though they only cast brief shade on the vegetable garden, their roots encroach well into the garden. I know exactly where a tree has stretched its toes out by the swath of dead and dying vegetables, and the parched earth that accompanies them. Last year, I lost most of my zucchinis and an entire row of strawberries to the trees’ depredations.

I can pull some of the roots out when I’m weeding, but many invade deep in the soil.

So we resort to trench warfare to keep them out.

Every three or four years, we hire a trencher from the local equipment hire place (well, okay, my husband hires the trencher—I stay away from loud petrol-powered machines as much as possible), and dig a metre-deep trench all around the garden.

It makes an enormous difference to the vegetables—I can almost hear them breathe a sigh of relief when the tree roots are cut. The roots grow back, eventually, but the trench gives us a few years to garden without competition.

 

Milk the goat

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DelilahmilkingI can’t believe I’ve been milking nearly three weeks now and haven’t blogged about it.

After her disastrous kidding, my goat Ixcacao was given an antibiotic to prevent infection of her much-invaded uterus. That meant that I had to throw out her milk until the withholding period was over. So, though I’ve been milking, we haven’t had goat milk until this week.

I milk in a sheltered spot behind our large shed, where a previous owner conveniently built a head-lock for his beef cattle. We added a platform, a feed tray, and a roof to create a sturdy milking stand protected from the worst of the weather.

I milk twice a day for the first half of the milking season. 5.30 am and 4 pm. There are usually a few days of awkwardness after kidding, when doe and kids don’t want to be separated, but once everyone is into the routine, milking runs smoothly.

I enjoy milking, especially the early morning milking, which happens in the dark for the early and late part of the season. There is something soothing and centring about milking.

When it goes well…

“Watching you milk is just scary,” said my husband the other day. “You’re so fast at it.”

Milking is not the stress-free experience for him as it is for me. I forget sometimes what a steep learning curve it was for me the first time I was faced with goats with udders tight as drums who had never been milked. There was a lot of cursing, and more than a few tears. And there was a lot of spilled milk.

But with practice, the goats and I got much better at it. As I got quicker, they had more patience with me. I learned how to tell when they were about to kick, and how to prevent them from stepping in the milk. I learned the particular foibles of each goat—how to get them to stand still, whether their milk squirted from the teat at an angle, how to work with small teats or teats with small holes, how to manage an udder that sagged almost to the ground.

Instead of a test of wills, milking became a partnership between me and each goat. And so it became almost effortless.

Almost.

I still lose a pot of milk to a misplaced foot now and again, and ‘breaking in’ a new goat is never a smooth process.

But usually, if something goes wrong, I can fall back on some advice I read when I was first learning how to milk—relax and just milk the damn goat. It’s good advice, whether you’re milking goats, or taking on any other challenge.

Grasp the Nettle

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100_3950 smMy garden is blessed and cursed with an abundance of nettles. Blessed because they are the larval food plants for two attractive native butterflies—the red and the yellow admiral. I love watching the butterflies flit around the garden!

Blessed because nettles only thrive in good soil, and mine are the most vibrant and robust nettles anywhere.

Cursed because…well…they’re nettles. Careful as I may be, I can’t avoid being stung on a regular basis.

But like all problems, meeting them head-on is the best tactic. As they say, grasp the nettle. A nettle that brushes gently against your skin as you’re trying to avoid it will almost always sting. But grab a nettle firmly, even with bare hands, and you can usually pull it out without pain.

It really is a good metaphor for life (even if most people have no idea what it means).

And so I dive into the nettles of life like I dive into the ones in the garden—grappling them bare-handed and pulling them out with a quick, confident tug.

At least, that’s the theory, anyway…

To Pasteurize or Not To Pasteurize

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100_3960 smThis is the question, when you have your own milk-producing livestock. Pasteurization is the process of heating the milk to reduce the number of pathogens and increase the milk’s shelf-life. There are many different techniques for doing this, but they all involve raising the milk to a certain temperature and holding it there for a specific length of time (the higher the temperature, the shorter the time).

I have a number of friends and acquaintances who produce their own milk—some pasteurize, some don’t. There are certainly some strong opinions out there on both sides of the question:

“People have been drinking unpasteurized milk for thousands of years.”

“Yes, but people have been dying of diseases in unpasteurized milk for just as long. Raw milk is the perfect growth medium for all sorts of diseases.”

“It ruins the flavour of the milk.”

“I can’t taste the difference.”

“Cheese from unpasteurized milk is better.”

“I enjoy cheese from pasteurized milk just as much.”

“Unpasteurized milk is more easily digested.”

“I have no problem digesting pasteurized milk.”

“Pasteurization kills all the good bacteria and destroys nutrients in the milk.”

“It also allows milk to be kept for longer, and kills bad bacteria, too.”

The arguments go on and on.

So, what’s the truth?

Truth is that both sides have some valid points, and some points on which they grossly exaggerate or mislead. Yes, you can drink unpasteurized milk your whole life and never get sick. You can also drink pasteurized milk your whole life and never get sick.

I pasteurize.

Why?

Because I know exactly how clean I’m able to keep my milk while I’m milking. I know, from what’s left on my filter afterwards, that a few hairs, a little dirt, some dried skin flakes, the odd bug falls into the milk while I’m milking. Would bacteria from those things make us sick? Probably not. Does the idea of that stuff in my milk make me sick? Yep. Does the idea of drinking something that is the modified sweat of an animal that doesn’t even groom itself make me a little queasy? Yep.

So I pasteurize. For my peace of mind. For my sense of cleanliness.

But I gladly accept some of my non-pasteurizing neighbour’s milk when she has excess, and if for some reason I’m not able to pasteurize, I still use the milk. I don’t fret about it. Life is far too short to worry about whether your milk is pasteurized or not.

Relax and enjoy the cheese!

Mint

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100_3952smMint doesn’t like the dry soil of my herb garden…so it’s only a minor weed there.

And as weeds go, mint is a wonderful one—delicious in all sorts of drinks and dishes, both sweet and savoury.

My all-time favourite way to use mint is in Mrs. Cassel’s mint tea. Mrs. Cassel was a friend of my grandmother, and I remember nothing about her except for her tea recipe—orange juice and mint tea, well-sweetened and served over ice—summer in a glass!

In winter, a hot cup of mint tea is a great pick-me-up, especially when you have a cold.

Mint leaves, cut into strips, perk up any salad, and of course are essential to tabbouli and many other Mediterranean dishes.

And the most important use of mint—homemade mint chocolate chip ice cream! Special thanks to my husband and daughter who made this treat yesterday!