another wonderful warm fall day. This is the last week for the Friday group, next Tuesday for the Canton group. We have celeriac for the specialty, a root celery that keeps all winter in the root cellar and tastes good in soup or you can shred it raw into a salad. The long white roots last week were parsnips also good in soup or stirfried or baked after cutting into pieces and brushed with oil. Also we expose you to fennel root, an anise like taste. You can boil the whole root and then cut it into pieces or cut it fresh into a salad with pieces of orange. The attached recopies are collected by Brandi, our spring student from Potsdam.
Here is a little story to share with you: A Sunday At Birdsfoot:
I woke up at day light excited to have alone time to read the Dick Francis book I had gotten this summer. After 1/2 hour Kira joins us in bed and I get to read a German story book to her. By 9.30am we clean up the kitchen and Kathleen and her new boyfriend Roman come to make pancakes for breakfast. It is Nutella day at the Hugging House and pancakes are a new way to eat it. After an extensive breakfast with talking and getting to know Roman, they go off canoeing for the day and Steve and I go picking apples in our orchard. In a relaxed mood, enjoying the warm day we pick six bushels from one tree. By three a clock pm we start cooking dinner for the crowd (potatoes winter squash, kale, brown beans and apple crisp for desert.) . While Steve finishes dinner I get the teenagers to help me get sawdust from a carpenter friends house. to get enough sawdust for the winter for our outhouses, guinea pigs and cat litters. We stuff the van with bags of sawdust full to the top. Coming home our friends from Russel already arrived and have dinner at the picnic table outside. I join in and visit for hours. In the kitchen is a lot of action. Visiting, making yogurt, Emilie from SLU is back to visit and is baking bread, Katie is cutting up peppers to roast at the bonfire on the hill, where people gather for a evening hang out with music. After the friends leave, I finish cleaning the kitchen and practice my violin for the string orchestra. While waiting for a turn in the shower to get all that sawdust out of my clothes and hair, I hang out with the teenagers who are discussing where to go for the evening, settling on Colton.Ah, o shower and then home, determined to write this newsletter, I bring my computer bag to the Hugging House. But the house is dark and quiet. Steve and Kira are lying outside in the meadow on blankets with sleeping bags and pillows, looking at the stars and the moon. They invite me to join them and I get my sleeping bag and a blanket to lie on and we look at the stars and the moon and Kira talks a mile a minute "knock, knock" jokes, the guinea pigs in their fence next to us squeek for treats ( they want cucumbers cut in quarters) and I am debating if I should just go to sleep here. I hang out for another hour while Steve and Kira fall asleep then I go inside the Hugging House to write this newsletter, but find the computer bag empty, the computer forgotten at the Main House. So I just hand write this to be typed on Monday. There is a Dick Francis book waiting for me in my cushy bed. What a great day. I am happy.
I hope you had a wonderful Sunday too.
peace, Dulli