On Being A Grown-Up

Oh, I couldn't WAIT to be a grown-up.  My mom says I cried for the entire six months before I learned to crawl.  I'm a mom, I feel for her: a new mom, at home in a trailer with a screaming mad-as-hell baby (who was sooo cute when she was asleep) in Upstate New York - as in right next to Canada, not Poughkeepsie - for an entire winter.  Rough.  I' like to say I took it easy on her after that, and I did for a few elementary school years, but come 15, I was at it again.  I needed, NEEDED, to be in charge of my own experience.  I needed to have the say, the bottom line.  I think I was pretty good at accepting the fall-out, but I did get myself in pretty deep: I needed rescuing more than once.  Thankfully, my mom is of the Buddhist persuasion, and believes that she has as much to do with choosing me as I did in choosing her.

As all of us fortunate to have lived long enough to rack up traffic violations, student loans, and off-spring that rise at god forsaken hours not to go to bed again until waaay past the time any adult wants to talk to them know, you don't actually "get to do whatever you want" when you're a grown up.  

You DO get to make choices that decide for you what you have to do, though, and that's powerful.  I gave birth to this bundle of joy, felt more deeply about someone than ever, ever, before, and .. yes, I have to get up when the small boy gets up.  Goes to follow.  [Well, I could not get up.  But then maybe he'd climb on the kitchen counter and paint himself with banana and drink the bottle of wine I forgot to cork before going to bed, get drunk and fall off the counter and go unconscious and I might not wake up right away because it's so nice and quiet and when I do....this is what happens to your brain when you're a parent.  So your heart lurches, and you get up.  Because you love the little eff-er and you love your adult freedom, (no doubt someone would take it away if the above situation went down) and you have a certain idea of yourself as a certain sort of person.  Maybe more the 'watch Dora on the couch, with coffee and eyes half-closed person'. ]

I also get to make up rules for myself, and change them when I want.  I have a rule born out of a belief and personal challenge: we can happily eat from our very own food-shed here in the Finger Lakes.    Sadly, Barbara Kingsolver beat me to the book royalties - if you haven't read her book about her family eating totally locally for a year in North Carolina (?), then do.  It's great.  I know this isn't a NEW idea, but it isn't a very practiced one.  My family practices it - with exceptions, that are mine, and I make up the rules about it. It's great fun, and I get to do it because I'm an adult.

Stuffing the quartered lemon w. salt

We only eat local meat, except when we order chicken wings delivered.

We only eat local flour and grains, except for White Lily flour and white rice.
We only eat locally in season or preserved fruit, except lemons and limes all year long, and oranges when they're in season in Florida, and bananas in the winter.  Avocados if they're real good.  Not that the oranges we eat come from Florida.  See how it is being an adult?  The rules don't have to make sense even!
Only in season veg.  And that pretty much doesn't change.
Local milk.  Sometimes local yogurt.  The 'house cheese' is from who knows where (Cabot?).
Mussels...seaweed.  Olive oil.  Cheddar Bunnies.  Ooof.

Anywho, I' like to have a cafe someday soon where we serve only regionally grown/harvested/produced food.  I'm getting my practice with 42 North 76 West (http://www.facebook.com/42N76W?fref=ts).  It's fun.  I haven't even been preachy yet.  Just fun and yummy.

Preserved Lemons:
4 organic lemons, cut into 1/4's, but still attached at the stem end.
Pack w. kosher or coarse sea salt.
Put them in a quart jar and put the lid on.  Leave out for a day.
Juice 4 lemons, add juice to the jar, cover and put in a cool, dark place (not fridge).
Ready in about 2 weeks.
To use scrape out the meat of the lemon, rinse the peel and use.  Salads, rice dishes, pizzas, omelets...

Tools of the lemon-preserving trade. 

And while we're preserving, a venison back strap cured into Bresaola.  Recipe from Hugh Fearnley-Whitingstall.  Google him for all the deets.
Salt and air curing is perfect for tougher, leaner cuts.  We trimmed the back strap of all it's tendon-y gristle.  Then mixed the marinade (below) which is salt, herbs, garlic and then add a bottle of red wine.  The idea is to dry out the meat.

Coarse Seas salt, rosemary, chili flakes, garlic, cloves, bay leaves, black pepper.  Add red wine.  

We'll turn it in the marinade a couple of times a day for 4 days, and then hang it covered in muslin, in a cool, dry, airy place.  After 10 days it will be dry and hard.  We'll trim it and slice it real, real thin, and it'll be amazing.  Like prosciutto, but the beef/venison version.

Venison in marinade.