FOOD MEMORY
Wild Strawberry Season
By Jessica Spencer



This is a food memory written by a friend of mine about strawberry season in Pennsylvania.

In late spring a blanket of white flowers with a distinct yellow center covers the hayfields and backyards of North central Pennsylvania.

These flowers seek the sour soils of rocky hills to take root and establish for the wild strawberry growing season. As the month of June begins the strawberry blossoms begin to transform and berries slowly appear. The hard unripe berries quickly turn from a greenish-white to a deep red and droop by bunches from a narrow stem. Four or more strawberries can hang on a stem and weigh the tiny plant into the ground. Others grow a heartier stem and hang high like a shepards hook in a gardeners backyard.

The wild strawberries grow in clusters as you walk across the fields. The blossoms in the backyards succumb to the blades of lawnmowers, and never quite reach full maturity except for a few lucky ones. When you discover a patch of berries without a bowl your step becomes light as you tip toe around the myriad of berries careful not to squish the bounty below the feet.

The picking season varies on Mother Nature. Some seasons last over a month, while rainy, cool seasons cause the berries to either not ripen or become mushy from the dampness of the ground and hayfield grasses surrounding the strawberries. Picking wild strawberries takes patience, not just to fill a full bowl of berries the size of the end of your pinky, but also the potential of determined horseflies, deerflies, and mosquitoes preying on hot summer skin.

When the bugs are at rest, the strawberry picking is peaceful and the mind wanders in and out of thoughts of wild strawberry jam, and strawberries frozen for a special treat during winter doldrums. I learned about all of the hearty wild strawberry patches from my Mother. She took me out into the fields when I was just a baby in a stroller tagging along for the ride. Now during each wild strawberry season I try to out pick my Mom, but she still has me beat. I still have a lot of picking to do.

Two quarts of wild strawberries are needed in order to make one batch of jam. Smaller amounts of strawberries suits strawberry shortcake or toppings for ice cream and cakes. Follow these recipes to enjoy wild strawberries in your home either right after picking or throughout the entire year:

Recipe

Wild Strawberry Shortcake
1 homemade buttermilk biscuit- warmed
Whipped Cream
Vanilla Bean Ice Cream
1 cup of wild strawberries (or as many as you would like)
Put a hand full of berries in the bottom of a bowl. Warm the biscuit. Then, separate and place the bottom half over the wild strawberries. Layer on top a scoop of vanilla bean ice cream. Layer on top of the ice cream a dollup of whipped cream. On top of the whipped cream is another layer of wild strawberries. Continue this layering sequence one more time and enjoy.

Wild Strawberry Jam
2 quarts crushed wild strawberries
6 cups of sugar
Bring to a boil in a saucepan until sugar dissolves. Add 1 pouch of certo/fruit pectin and boil for 1 minute. Pour hot mixture into sterilized jars. Let set and enjoy.

STRAWBERRIES!!

Last week, I caught late strawberries off Territorial Highway in Oregon. The place smelled like strawberry jam and I picked a half bucket and ran into a cute little family of strawberry pickers before I headed down the road.

Jen's Folk Remedy for Tummy Aches: Fresh Papaya
















Try this when you have a tummy ache, particularly if your belly is sick from stress or from feeling angry.

1) Take a large ripe papaya, open with a knife, and scoop out the seeds with a large spoon.
2) Consider chewing on a few of the black bitter seeds that lay in the papaya before you scoop out and taste the delicious coral-colored flesh of the papaya.

Papayas contain an enzyme called papain that helps digest proteins. This enzyme is more concentrated when the papaya is not ripe.

3) Throw the seeds and shells over your neighbor's fence (just kidding.)

4) Do something to forget about your stress and let the papaya help your stomach. In an hour or so, your tummy will feel MUCH better.

THIS WORKS!

EXTRACTING THE GOLD OF SUMMER
Delicious Mint Honey from Honey Tree Apiaries



And the guy who harvests it in Alpine, Oregon.



This is Ethan Bennett: beekeeper extraordinaire who started the company Honey Tree Apiaries. He sells his honey at the farmer's market in Corvallis every Saturday. I can tell you unabashedly that it's the best honey I've ever tasted. I bought a quart jar of his mint variety, which was collected from a hive that sat near wild mint and farmers' fields of radish and cabbage. Ethan also sells pumpkin honey and several other varieties- which are also yummy. He also melts down the wax in a solar-powered contraption and makes lovely beeswax tapers you can fit in a candle holder.

Ethan also let me accompany him while he was beekeeping. I have a curiousity for it and wanted to be around the lovely little creatures that accompanied my grandfather for the duration of his adult like. My grandpa was a beekeeper in Idaho while helping raise 5 children. My mom and aunts talk about helping in the extracting room with their daddy. They all have fond memories of it and all have a love affair with honey and I think the art of beekeeping. Of course thinking back on childhood, one is always prone to romanticize a bit. But anyways, thanks Ethan, for giving me a taste of what it may have been like for my Grandfather the beekeeper. (In the next post, I'm gonna tell a little bee-lore that was passed down by my mother. Stories like my Grandpa forcing the bees to sting his arthritic knees before a bowling tournament and otehr medicinal uses like my mom chewing on raw honeycomb to relieve her asthma.)

I have to add in here that I was indeed very comfy around the little bees... little worker bee ladies that buzzed around the hives (I could do without the drones who are slow and the Queen Bee, who is sooo fat) But then again none of us could do with the Queen and her drones now could we? But those little worker bees are so cute, I wanted to take one home :)



He's lighting the smoker with a piece of burlap.



Here he is charming the bees.



Interesting Note: I rather liked the soft sound of the constant and mezmerizing humming of bees but Ethan says he tires of it. Think of it, if you always heard that background buzzing all day long if might get to you after awhile. Ethan says he finds bees everywhere: in his food, in his hair, so I'm sure he wouldn't miss one of those bees one bit if they had hitched a ride home with me.

I'll let you hear about his job in his own words. (And I'm going to add a few more videos when I get them downloaded!)





In all Ethan's got about 80 hives with 40,000-60,000 bees in EACH hive. Which makes him the father of how many bees?? You do the math. He says some of the breeds are feistier than the others. But for the most part, the honey bees are "gentle," particularly in the summer.

Honey Money

He makes his money off honey he sells at the farmer's market but the bulk of his profit comes from farmers who pay him to pollinate their fields. They pay him about $40 per hive and he uses about 4-8 hives per acre. His bees pollinate blueberry, pumpkin, and radish and cabbage seed fields as well as meadow foam (a flowering crop that's under experiment as a possible bio fuel source).

In February and March, Ethan will head down to Northern California with his bees to help pollinate almonds there. The California almond fields need every registered beehive in the US for their harvest, which has given rise to questions of whether the US government should allow more of these bees to come from Mexico to meet the demand of farmers to pollinate fields. Ethan says many of these are Africanized Bees- a breed of bees that have a dominate gene and are very aggressive. He's concerned that if the US allows this, that beekeepers won't want to be beekeepers anymore because the African bees will breed with the domestic bees and produce bees that are difficult to manage. It's a worry he has (and honestly can you blame him? wouldn't you worry? Didn't you see that t.v. movie in the '80's: Attack of the Killer Bees?) Here's an article (albeit old) about the "Mean Gene" in these Africanized bees.

Here's another article Killer Bees.

Ethan points out the Queen Bee to me. She's longer and fatter than the others, but she's the most important bee- you want to keep her fat and happy.




Extractor room


Ethan takes a panel with honeycomb on it and puts it in a machine that spins around, making the honey run down to the bottom.

The extractor


When this thing gets spinning, if you stand over the extractor, a delicious honey wind blows into your face. It's magical. My mom always talked about helping her dad in the extracting room. She and her sisters and brother have very fond memories of the extracting room.. the smell of the honey and how soft her hands were after handling honey all day.




Thanks to Ethan at Honey Tree Apiaries.

Food Memory
Remembering my Mother, domestic goddess, mother of seven
and her famous rhubarb crunch



Here's a photo of my mother with my little sis on our back porch in Idaho. This was taken during the days of her nationally-renowned domestic goddess phase when she almost single-handedly raised 7 children and baked 3 meals a day including amazing desserts like the rhubarb crunch listed below! Not only was she a domestic goddess, she made her Hollywood debut as the star of Name That Tune close to the year when this photograph was taken.

Rhubarb reminds me of a traditional Sunday dessert my mother often made in June and July. My mother has been away for about a year on a humanitarian mission and I miss her, especially today, so I made her Rhubarb Crunch. It's a gooey cobbler with a crunchy topping that helps me remember her! It was a recipe she learned from her own mother.

Rhubarb Crunch
My mom and her well-loved recipe

1 cup flour
1 cup oats (not quick oats)
1 cup brown sugar
1 cube butter

(Mix together, add cinnamon if you'd like! You can also replace the white flour with wheat flour.)

Several (7 or 8) stalks of rhubarb

1 cup water
1 cup sugar (or half honey)
1 tsp vanilla

Put it together according to following steps and then cook at 350 degrees for 25-30 minutes. Test rhubarb with fork to make sure it's soft.

Steps:

Take about 6-7 cups of rhubarb
Cut off the edges and wash well



Cut up into cubes



Take the flour, butter and brown sugar and mix together.



Add 1 cup of sugar into water and heat over the stove until it's melted and hot but not boiling (I used 1/4 cup wildflower honey and 3/4 cup raw sugar.)

Put half of the crumbly mixture onto the bottom of a pan, layer with chopped up rhubarb, then pour on the sugar/water mixture.



Then top with the remainder of the crumbly mixture.



And bake for 1/2 hour at 350 degrees.

Sunday dinners at my home growing up were always memorable, the smell of pot roast, onions & rosemary in the air when we arrived home from our Mormon church meeting famished from sitting for 3 hours and eating only a meager morsel of bread (the sacrament.) But for my mother, (who had 7 children) Sunday was most likely a three- ringed circus trying to get us all fed and to the dinner table while the food was still hot. Of course it helped that my Dad called for us with his commanding deep voice and we'd all coming running like little mice from our respective rooms to perch at the table and pick at the food until my Dad caught us and told us to knock it off. We'd wait till everyone was there and then it was time for the dinner prayer.

We always prayed over dinner, different variations of: "Dear God, thank you for the food and please bless it to nourish and strengthen our bodies and do us the good that we need... AMEN!"

We loved the youngest siblings' versions. I'm not even sure they knew they were saying "nourish and strengthen." What came our was usually something like "nurse-en-stank" - sounds Scandinavian doesn't it?

And I remember closing my eyes and though I was supposed to be imagining the God who provided the food and meditating on how grateful I was, I admit, most of the time, I pictured the dinner table in my head and the exact location of the dish of mashed potatoes- deliciously soft with a square of yellow butter melting in the center. I pictured this so I would be the first to grab it when the last Amen was said.

My mother was the kind of woman who involved all of us in cooking dinner and in preparing the table as well.

Finding the Centerpiece

It was a time-honored tradition in my family for someone to go out and find a centerpiece for the middle of the table. In the summer, we picked stray wildflowers: daisies, camas, yarrow, sunflowers and others and put them into the prettiest vase we could find in the cupboard. In the fall we found dried weeds and grasses; branches with pine cones still attached and things like that. In the winter, I think we looked in the cupboards and drawers for anything that would make-do, like a candle that Mom had caught a toddler gnawing on and we stuffed it inside a candle holder of our own fashioning then used something round, like a berry wreath left over from Christmas to circle the candle. All of these lovely centerpieces were highly prized by my mother who made us feel as though we had just painted the Mona Lisa or something.

And dinner always consisted of something green (a veggie) something fried, some kind of bread (muffin, biscuit, etc.) and most of the time there was something on the table that today would be called "local:" Elk or antelope meat or trout that my Dad had bagged in the woods or caught in the stream. We ate wild mushrooms. We loved morels and picked them right by the river close to our home. Idaho potatoes of course! Or we'd have canned food that my mom had canned the previous summer: pears, peaches, cherries, or pickles or even something that our family friends, the Fosters, had brought us fresh from their garden down in the valley south of our home. They brought us things like snap peas and rhubarb.

So rhubarb has become one of my comfort foods. It reminds of of a few things- my mom, because she made the most amazing rhubarb crunch and the Fosters, who often brought us rhubarb from their home.

Gary Nabhan speaks in Eugene, OR
Gary and a panel, including Aggie Pilgrim, discuss food, healing the earth and native involvement in ecological restoration



Gary Habhan at the West Eugene Wetlands. This week I attended the Willamette Valley Indian Cultural-Ecological Restoration Workshop.




Gary Nabhan spoke, his new book Renewing America's Food Traditions: Saving and Savoring the Continent's Most Endangered Foods, is about how if we want to save endangered foods, we must start eating them. Check out a prior post, where I discuss this!

Here is the warm and wise indigenous grandma Aggie Pilgrim, a Takelma Indian Elder. She is one of the 13 Indigenous Grandmothers. She spoke and prayed at the gathering.


Aggie would like for all of us to pray that she and the 13 Indigenous Grandmothers will get a audience with the pope where they will ask him to REVOKE a 15th century edict that called for the "doctrine of conquest."

According to their Web Site:

WE ARE THIRTEEN INDIGENOUS GRANDMOTHERS who came together for the first time from October 11 through October 17, 2004, in Phoenicia, New York. We gathered from the four directions in the land. . . affirming our relations with traditional medicine peoples and communities throughout the world, we have been brought together by a common vision to form a new global alliance. . . Ours is an alliance of prayer, education and healing for our Mother Earth, all Her inhabitants, all the children and for the next seven generations to come.

We are deeply concerned with the unprecedented destruction of our Mother Earth, the contamination of our air, waters and soil, the atrocities of war, the global scourge of poverty, the threat of nuclear weapons and waste, the prevailing culture of materialism, the epidemics which threaten the health of the Earth's peoples, the exploitation of indigenous medicines, and with the destruction of indigenous ways of life.

We, the International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers, believe that our ancestral ways of prayer, peacemaking and healing are vitally needed today. We come together to nurture, educate and train our children. We come together to uphold the practice of our ceremonies and affirm the right to use our plant medicines free of legal restriction. We come together to protect the lands where our peoples live and upon which our cultures depend, to safeguard the collective heritage of traditional medicines, and to defend the earth Herself. We believe that the teachings of our ancestors will light our way through an uncertain future.

We join with all those who honor the Creator, and to all who work and pray for our children, for world peace, and for the healing of our Mother Earth.

For all our relations.

In these videos, I interviewed Aggie about what she ate when she was growing up. She talks about fishing for eel and salmon on the Klamath. She talks about running a smoke house and the huge apple orchards around her home and how her mother used to break wild horses.



Aggie talks to a group at the Willamette Valley Indian Cultural-Ecological Restoration Workshop this week



She talks about a biofuel concoction her grandson made to run the lawnmower....

"He's not a rocket scientist, if he can do those things, why can't our government?"

She talked about her fear about gas and food prices:

"I'm concerned about elders living out remotely, with the price of gas and the price of food, we're going to have more and more elders dying, I can feel that."

She reminds us all to SAVE OUR SEEDS!

"I've been prophesing for many year, telling people that they need to save their seeds. Seeds are very crucial."
And she give us a call to action!

"All of us are in this leaky canoe together, whatever you can do with your knowledge that you have, put it to good use!"

"We are the wisdom keepers.." She says of the elders. Along with the other 12 indigenous grandmothers, she says they have 1,000 years of wisdom.

IN SEASON
Red fleshy receptacles



Strawberries are on in the Willamette Valley!! A friend of mine recently informed me that strawberries are NOT fruits, but fleshy enlarged receptacles of fruit. The fruit is actually- scientifically, the seeds, or seedlike fruitlets.