Like most artists, my work is not always understood.

Right now it is spring break for me. Day seven of my ten days off of work. (This is one of the major benefits of working in education.) However, I spent the first five days of this break suffering from either the stomach flu or Ebola–I'm still not entirely sure–and so yesterday, when I finally felt only mildly queasy but basically energetic, I did what any normal person would do, who is just clawing her way back from the brink of death, and dyed Easter eggs in eight kinds off natural materials.

I have been collecting duck eggs for this purpose for a couple of weeks and I decided to get going right away. First, quite practically, with the aid of my eleven year-old I prepared a slow-cooker dhal for that night's dinner and cleared that away. Having done that, I gathered my dyeing materials, as follows.

5 bags Red Zinger Tea=Violet

Red Onion Skins=Red

Red Cabbage Leaves=Blue

Spinach Leaves=Green

5 bags Green tea=Yellow

Espresso=Brown

Yellow Onion Skins=Orange

Beets =Pink

To each of these materials, I added 2 cleaned duck eggs, a splash of white vinegar and enough water to cover the eggs. I brought them to a boil, then simmered them for 15 minutes. At this point, I checked colors, discovered that all the eggs were still abysmally pale and decided to leave them sitting in the dyes all day. By the end of the day, I had the following results:

• The spinach water wasn't even green, and the egg was still white. I got pissed off and added a couple of drops of green food color.


• The yellow and red onion skins had produced identical results–a deep burnt sienna color.


• The Red Zinger eggs were not violet but grey.


• The espresso eggs were brown. I wouldn't recommend eating them, though.


• The green tea eggs were more olive than yellow. Maybe I left them in too long. 


• The beet eggs were white. I added red food color, after all the others were done (which is why they missed this photo shoot.)


• The red cabbage eggs actually came out blue. Hallelujah!

One interesting problem was that, since these were homegrown eggs, cleaned by mere mortals, some of the protective  bloom had remained, and this caused them to dye unevenly and to peel in an odd way. I decided to work with it by taking the paper towel I was drying them on and using it to scratch designs into the eggs to work with the odd markings. They now resemble oddly shaped stones. 

When they were done, I summoned the kids to look at them. My six year-old had a friend over to play, who looked at them sympathetically and explained that his family every year dyed eggs using small plastic cups and dye tablets and that this was both simple and produced beautiful results.

"Who wants brown Easter eggs?" said my fourteen year-old.

I hoped perhaps that my mother might have a more favorable impression of them, age and experience informing her ability to appreciate their unique beauty. 

"Those are some hippie eggs, Tara.," she tells me.

Like most artists, my work is not always understood. This is all right. I did other useful things yesterday anyway, such as plant out potatoes in straw bales, set raspberries and strawberries in their respective beds, sow snow peas, and begin writing a play for my second graders to perform. Just the normal things you do on your first day back to good health.

And I wonder why I never get 'round to cleaning the baseboards.

It All Comes From What Died Before.

Photo Credit: Flickr by Vanessa Vancour 

I have been very productive today. The sun is out, my yard seems ablaze with the possibility of springtime, and I am shrieking with childlike delight at each earthworm I discover in the leftover decay of winter. Because I practice permaculture–or try to–piles of leaves that have fallen on everything and degenerated under a heap of snow and ice are not a problem for me. Rather than coming in like a maid after a drunken party to clean up the vomit and broken bottles, I am an archaeologist searching for treasure that was left by the world while I waited, snug in my house. Winter has been sitting on my eggs.

Underneath the thick mulch of rotting aspen leaves which I laid on my vegetable bed last fall, there is soil as dark as coffee grounds. And as I lift a handful, worms thick as small ropes slide out from the loam, tiny soil organisms writhe in the embarrassment of sudden light. I am laughing, jubilant. I get it. All possibility is born of decay. It all comes from what died before. I am full of life, writhing with the inner action of soil-turning worms making my waste into fodder for new growth. The world knows, for the most part, two paradigms–rot and cultivation–but this speaks to another.

Putrefaction. The smell of wasted talent, days of usefulness that lie behind one, dreams that will now go unfulfilled. The necessity seems that I lie rotting on the ground, overcome with my pain. "Tara is ill now. Tara is in pain. She can't be asked to make this difference, contribute this service, offer this opinion. She has fibromyalgia and suffers with it terribly." Born of compassion or born of the easy, simple neglect we often show a friend whose illness has taken them from the sphere of our common activities, these thoughts turn me to something corrupted by my illness, unusable as a piece of moldy cheese left too long in the refrigerator. I want very much that the world should notice my need for a comfortable chair, or a call to ask how I am doing, but I never wish that the world would leave me alone to wane quietly in a corner. I am not ready, at thirty-six, to rot.

Cultivation. The tilling of soil, the turning of earth to loosen it for planting, to add fertilizer, to remove rocks, to rake. We have all been doing it as long as we remember, we know how to do it and know that it is right. The work of it seems somehow to be God's work, in particular. And yet, and yet...Just the same as we know, we know the necessity of a positive attitude, a forceful insistence on taking the bull by the horns, conquering indecision, being the author of our own lives, advocating, pushing forward, coaxing the plants to produce. And yet...

I let things lie. I let them compost in place. I cut down the vegetables of last year's garden and leave them scattered about the soil, as messy as the floor of a child's room. I layer down compost, manure, straw, leaves, water. And I practice faith in Nature, which has been making things grow, unaided by humans, for time immemorial. I simply help by moving Her ingredients to the right place. The mistakes of last year–the odd tomatoes, the funky asparagus, the Brussels sprouts that didn't produce in the first year–they are all still there, making that soil richer and wiser. That soil will have a history that can be read in the deep blackness of its crumbly soft meal.

I let myself lie. I makes decisions slowly, letting all of the scraps of consideration slowly turn into something fine enough to use. I am composting everything I ever was, wanted to be, or planned and failed at all the time. No dreams are swept away, just tucked under a protective layer of mulch. The girl who wanted to act, the woman who first married then divorced, the mother who thought she could protect her firstborn son from the world through her vigilant insistence on wooden toys, the runner, the vixen, the addict, the student. They are all in there, steeping in the mingled history of my terra firma.

Because I have swept no parts of myself into the corner of a landfill, I remember what it was to be a teenage addict, and I love addicts, as well as teenagers. Because I have not scorned the twenty-two year-old child who brought my first son into the world, full of ignorance and theory, I remember that I do not know how hard the parents of my failing students may be trying. Because I remember living through a divorce, I stop, catch my breath and try again in my current marriage, over and over and over. Because I have failed and not forgotten, I have humility in my roots, nourishing the leaves and flowers I dare to put forth anew.

I am not better than I was. I am just a product of the power of sunlight and water put to organic matter. I am proof that humanity always moves, transforms, wakens, alters, when we make full use of ourselves.

A Ninja Christmas Brunch

My family is impossibly geeky. It should not be this much fun to use the note-assigned whistles from our traditional British holiday crackers to play "Jingle Bells". 

Victorian Trading Company

Next year, in addition to the holiday crackers we decided that we will also get a peppermint pig. It turns out the only reason anything has been going wrong for any of us is that you are supposed to get one of these and beat it to smithereens with a tiny elegant hammer then share the peppermint shards, and we haven't been doing this. Someone should have said something. I probably wouldn't even have developed fibromyalgia had I known to do this every year. 

I worked all the last two days cleaning and organizing and prepping food, then woke up early this morning. (Actually this was just because I can't sleep anymore). I prepared a brunch which consisted of miniature frittatas made with local fresh eggs, portabellas and baby spinach, home-fried potatoes with Vidalia onions, gingerbread pancakes with powdered sugar, chicken apple sausages and fresh pineapple with pink lady apples. I made a large buffet  thermos of hot chocolate from scratch with cocoa powder, sugar and fresh milk.  There were also dates and nuts in the shell. I whipped cream from scratch, and shaved bittersweet chocolate myself with a vegetable peeler into delicate curls. 

In other words, this was some bad-assed shit. NINJA brunch.

We ran out of food before everyone could get seconds, which was either really cool or embarrassing.

Of course, my husband was called to do work on-call right when we were exchanging gifts, and then one child had a personal emotional crisis and required counseling while standing barefoot in the snow, threatening to run away from home. Another child forgot to take his ADD meds and narrowly missed breaking every picture in the house while he ran around armed with multiple Nerf guns. Somebody's new Narnia shield got broken and they forgot to practice their non-violent communication when explaining their upset to the unwitting perpetrator.

It turned out I am catching a cold, so I progressively lost my voice during the gathering and by the end, when I said goodbye to my guests, I called out, "Have fun storming the castle!" in a voice like gargled cat hairs. 

Christmas is finally over. And I think we snuck up on that shit and smashed it like Silent Death smashes a peppermint pig. Even if we are all bat-shit crazy.

Green Chile and the Quest for Human Fulfillment

For many years now, I have watched with great interest as customers lined up outside of Smith's each fall to have their boxes of Hatch green chile roasted. I do really like green chile. I get some delivered each season in my farm box from Los Poblanos and I use it to make green chile stew (the recipe for which appears on a link under the banner above).

For the first five years that we lived in New Mexico, we didn't have a chest freezer, although we badly needed one. That being the case, I never went and got all that green chile, since the idea of keeping all of it in my under-sized frig-top freezer, alongside numerous loaves of bread, bags of shredded cheese and other oddments, seemed irritating. This summer, however, we went ahead and bought a chest freezer from Lowe's, which is now already almost all the way full, setting aside the fact that we are receiving half of a butchered cow some time in October as well. My understanding is that this will be an extremely happy cow, and therefore, the meat will fill us with great happiness. Anyway, I digress.

The point is that I have, up to now, been frustrated in my efforts to be the right sort of person, which is, of course, the sort of person who buys locally harvested chiles and cows and keeps them in her freezer. So, I thought to myself, smugly calling to mind my new chest freezer-NOT anymore!

My mother lives across the street from Smith's, and is now retired, so I felt she would be in the unique position to do reconnaissance and determine when one might undertake to have their chilies roasted without waiting in a line fifteen people deep for over an hour. I tasked her with the mission of retrieving the chile and having it roasted.

I, quite naturally, failed to give any other specific directions as to whether the chile should be mild, medium or hot, since this hadn't occurred to me. My mom went and selected a random box of chile, which the checker then told her was "hot". She replied that this would have to do and took it to be roasted.This blog entry would not be complete without adding that my mom ended up having to wait in line for at least half an hour anyway. Such is the advantage of motherhood.

Happily, I arrived home Friday to discover a black garbage bag on my counter filled with warm green chilies and a house redolent with the aroma of New Mexico. Now, all that remained was to peel, seed, chop and store all of this chile before it could go bad. Easy.

Being no idiot, I donned vinyl gloves to do this job. (Actually it may be more accurate to say that I was once idiot enough to process quite a bit of chile with my bare hands, and that having hands that burn for hours with an invisible fire may be a wonderful home remedy to cure nail-biting and masturbation, but I have not felt the need to repeat the experience.) Hardly having stopped long enough to hang up my purse, I  stuck my hand deep into the womb-like warm garbage bag to retrieve one large handful of green chilies which I ran under cold water in a large bowl in my sink. I painstakingly doffed as much of the skin as I could manage, and virtually all of the seeds. This took about ten minutes, and only needed to be repeated thirty-four more times.

Interestingly, green chiles omit something like a toxic gas that causes one's throat to tickle incessantly, so, for approximately three hours, both before and after preparing dinner, I coughed and retched my way through the entire bag of green chilies, with the added steps of running each small batch through my Ninja food processor and filling Zip-Loc quart bags with approximately a pound of chopped green chiles, squished flat to freeze. A gas mask would have been useful.

The Ninja lid won't seat well on the blending container and I am contemplating throwing it out the window.

Since I had no choice but to labor through the entire process myself, I forced my mother, who was suffering from a mild stomach flu, to stay in the kitchen through the entire process, so that I didn't die of boredom, and also so that anyone who had to deal directly and immediately with my six year-old was not completely covered in capsacin.

At the point that I had to interrupt the chile production line to serve dinner, my kitchen looked somewhat like a chlorophyll bomb had been set off. Bits of green chile pulp and skins clung to every surface and were intractably cleaved to the tile, as if an entire legion of flu-ridden kindergartners had wiped boogers on the floor and left them to dry for several hours.

The thing I really found striking about this is how many people do it. The conversation between my mother and me centered around our disbelief that anyone not completely hamstrung by outdated notions of Protestant work ethic would undertake this project in their spare time, merely to avoid having to pay slightly more for green chile which has already been processed and frozen for them in convenient tubs. But, then again, it is a peculiar blind spot of mine that I tend to be shocked that anyone else is willing to do foolishly difficult tasks that I perform myself. (For instance, I continue to be shocked that lots and lots of women bear children, despite the obvious discomfort and work involved.)

Somehow, I seem to have arrived at full-fledged adulthood continually surprised and appalled at the amount of actual work that living requires, as if I had very recently been rudely awakened from a prolonged daydream wherein servants attended to my every whim. My natural tendency to eschew work is, however, at odds with my continual pursuit of attaining Perfection. Not that I'm ever actually striving for perfection. I set what seem to be modest goals, and then either abandon them or somehow enlarge my goal, so that I have never quite arrived.  I believe both that this is a somewhat dysfunctional state of affairs and that it is an inescapably human thing to do, and that either I can play along and keep myself entertained with the pursuit or face the consequences of a life lived as a series of half-measures.

As pertains to cooking, I am not the sort of person who would end up being interested in trying to make Beef Wellington or Baked Alaska. I have somewhat less than the necessary culinary fortitude and a great deal less than the required amount of interest. I am willing to spend hours making Christmas dinner, but, on a regular basis, meals must be produced in an hour or less and be something that children will probably eat. That said, I do enjoy cooking, and I am excited by fresh, high quality ingredients and variety. So I tend to pay a fair bit of attention to food and food preparation, which is why I would end up doing something dumb like processing green chile into the evening at the end of a long and overwhelming work week.

I once (well, three times actually) made red chile sauce from scratch using the dried red pods I bought from Los Poblanos . These needed to be seeded, de-veined, roasted and then processed through a blender (which, strangely enough, I still possess ten years after the lid went permanently missing) before being set in a slow cooker with cubed pork loin to make carne adovada. On that occasion, my kitchen looked less like a booger bomb and more like an especially bloody battle had recently taken place. The carne adovada was delicious, but hardly so much so that it justified the ridiculous labor involved in making it.

Anyway, the green chile finally got done, I got to use both my new freezer and my new food processor (complete with lid) and, happily our major weekly housecleaning was scheduled for the next day. Last night I used it to make green chile stew. It was hotter than Hell, but it tasted both of New Mexico and of the pursuit of human fulfillment.

And I have twelve more bags of it for later.

Calendars From the Brink of Insanity

I am suffering from scheduling schizophrenia. My calendar believes that I am more than one person and that dinner can be produced out of thin air, and from across town. Also, my subconscious scheduling mind believes that the authorities will come and put me in prison if I cannot figure out how to get my child to the Bernalillo Soccer Complex this Saturday without me, while I attend my husband and other son's black belt test and the first half of my six year-old's very first soccer game. Or maybe I will be locked up if I can't deduce how to how to get myself to an important volunteer meeting next Monday while also cooking dinner and taking my son to an appointment that ends at the same time.

I am going to produce a cookbook to help other mothers handle these types of evenings. It will be called Soccer Is Ruining My Life! All the recipes will cook themselves using the nothing but the power of positive thought and garlic salt.

I should have encouraged them to knit instead.

Winter Squash is Very Dangerous

To prepare a winter squash, you will need an enormous sharp knife, an immovable surface (cutting board not recommended) and great fortitude.

Photo by Cindy Funk

This cannot be over-stressed: You must know in your heart that preparing this winter squash is the right thing to do-an act of commendable righteousness so perfect that no amount of applied effort is really wasted. Remember that winter squash is a nutritional powerhouse. According to the World's Healthiest Foods website, "We are just beginning to discover the wealth of nourishment supplied by the mildly sweet flavored and finely textured winter squash, a vegetable that was once such an important part of the diet of the Native Americans that they buried it along with the dead to provide them nourishment on their final journey. " So there you have it. A vegetable so perfect it can feed dead Indians.

Prepare for battle.  I must warn you that there is a substantial risk here of severing one's own fingers,  accidentally heaving a heavy object as hard as a baseball across your kitchen and shattering your window, as well as a somewhat smaller risk of blunt-force trauma to hapless passersby. But do not let this stand in your way. Unless you want to give up now on being the sort of person who would regularly eat winter squash-a seasonal eater, someone attuned to the needs and rhythms of the earth, a spiritual person-you must not falter now. This is the anti-fast food food, a food beauteous in its very uncooperativeness. You, too, can do prepare and enjoy a winter squash.

First, you must take this oddly shaped vegetable and coax it to rest in a stationary manner on your kitchen counter. As I said, I recommend you eschew the notion of a cutting board here, since it is prone to flying out from the underbelly of your cylindrical subject with great force, injuring passing cats. You will need to begin by reverently making a tentative first entry into your virgin winter edible with the sharp tip of your enormous knife. (Do not read any more into this than what I have said.) From here on in, you will be thrusting and retracting your knife skillfully from the squash, which will be reluctant to release the knife. A certain amount of amicable insistence on your part would do well here. Do not allow the squash to retain your knife but instead wiggle the handle cautiously and repetitively until each time it is once again freed from the innards of the squash. On each such occasion, you must then re-insert it in such a way as to encourage a slightly larger furrow. This procedure takes approximately 40 minutes, give or take. Such things take time and the world was a better place when it always took four hours to make dinner.

Assuming you have proffered the necessary fortitude to proceed to this point, you will, at some point, experience a great triumph of will over the vegetable, wherein it ultimately splits more or less in half with all the catharsis of that final push with which a mother brings her child out of the womb.

This vegetable is now your bitch.

If you have not already done, please preheat your oven to 350 degrees, scoop out all the seeds and pulp (a really good person would now compost these) and turn your sundered winter squash on its subjugated self flesh side down. It is useful to put a little water in your baking pan-perhaps 1/4 inch or so. Bake this sucker until it relents, approximately 30-45 minutes, depending on initial size. About 10 minutes from the time you believe your squash will be fully cooked, brush with butter and sprinkle with brown sugar and cinnamon. When done, its fleshy insides can be scooped from the peel and served like mashed potatoes or served in wedges from which your guests can scoop their own portions of flesh. Enjoy with other honorable vegetables, such as kale, turnips and heirloom Incan tubers.

Know that you have done the right thing.