INGREDIENTS:

24 medium sized grape leaves
2 T sea salt or 4 T whey and 1 T salt
2 cups filtered water
qt. size canning jar

METHOD:

• ideal time to harvest grape leaves is May/June/July-ish, but you can do it any time until the leaves start turning yellow
• wash and soak in water, salt and whey for 1 hour
• roll up and put in canning jar
• cover with soaking liquid leaving an inch of space at top of jar
• cover tightly
• leave out at room temp for 3 days
• move to cold storage and use in the winter when greens are scarce

Fill with Dolma Filling (Nourishing Traditions, p. 253) and serve with garlic Creme Fraische (Nourishing Traditions, p. 84).

We usually put up about 4-6 qts and use half a jar for each dolma session.

Really. It’s true. Even I like it!

INGREDIENTS:

1 qt. buttermilk
1/2 lb grass fed beef liver (or whatever)
2 large packs of bacon (or more. he he he)
5 medium onions caramelized in one stick of butter
2 sticks of butter
juice of 2 lemons
8 cloves garlic
1/2 tsp cinnamon
6 dashes cayenne
salt to taste

METHOD:

• Soak Liver in Butter milk overnight.
• Drain and put in baking dish with bacon and cook til done
• Dice garlic in the Cuisinart
• Add Liver and bacon with all the fat in Cuisinart and puree till smooth
• Add soft butter, lemon and spices and mix in thoroughly
• serve on Yogurt Dough crackers (Nourishing Traditions p. 485)
• top with garlic basil Counter-Cream-Cheese and sliced pepperoncinis

To. Die. FOR.

Hettie acknowledges that this is not a simple task and apologizes in advance for not being able to help in every instance at all times. However, she does have some good ideas to get you started!

The first principle is that you have to take it too, but given the amazingly absolutely discusting flavor of the new-improved CAT FOOD FLAVORED fermented Cod Lver Oil from Green Pastures (which we recommend and carry at our Farm Stand) you will need help in getting it down even the most stoic and adventurous of supplement-takers. Really it’s that GROSS!!!

So, set a good example and never cringe in front of your children before, during or after ingesting your CLO!

Next, here are a few things that can help it go down:

1. plug your nose while swallowing
2. follow with a strong chaser of water and Apple Cider Vinegar (sweeps every last drop right down your throat)
3. for kids: mix with liberal amount of grade B Maple Syrup or local Raw Honey
4. If you must, beg ad bribe your children with promises of their hearts delight.

Truth is, at the Arias home, since the new CLO came on the scene, the morning routine has been filled with whining and refusal (even from the non-verbal one year old) so Mama & Papa have been bending over backwards trying to find something that worked. Finally, I resorted to the horribly feared GAPS diet (for those of you who don’t know, it’s a pretty strict therapeutic diet that tends to have great results for lots of conditions and ailments) if Cod Liver Oil was not taken (yes, that was a threat) and the response???

ACK, not the GAPS diet! and that was the end of that….

down the hatch big sister!

You’ll be glad you did!

But I didn’t….

Now, I’ll be honest. Hettie was stumped for awhile after hearing this question (and thus the tardiness of this post). After, hearing both our sides (David thinks celebrating Thanksgiving is a sin and Krista loves butter drenched stuffing too much to pass it up) she announced her stand. Read on:

She started on about something to do with frozen culture and Anthropology 101 and then about how cranberries are traditional pre-columbian food. But when she noticed the dazed look on my face she tried again.

“You see,” she said. “The beginnings of a thing only sometimes, or partly, determine its course.”

Culture – when its alive – isn’t static, but dynamic.

It grows and evolves… and repairs, mends, its course. So, she explained, it’s not so much about how something started as how it has evolved or is evolving. We are culture makers every minute of our lives! We mold and evolve culture by our thoughts and actions, by our intentions and our choices.

This Thanksgiving at Tierra Soul we slaughtered our first Turkey. We were humbled all over again as we watched the life drain from its body. We have now slaughtered 18 chickens and one turkey here on the Farm and we have started noticing something.

It feels good to know that we can handle death….

We haven’t completely lost our ability to be with death, to call in the presence and compassion it demands. For us, now that we are sitting down to eat flesh from our own land, Thanksgiving is taking on its own fresh course. It is about remembering the sacred ability to enter the cycle of life and death and be edified by the experience. This year we are grateful for this knowing.

So, take a few minutes right now to think about your Thanksgiving and ask yourself these three things:

1. How is Thanksgiving NOW not about colonialism, conquest, and genocide?
2. How are you re-creating Thanksgiving in your family and community?
3. What can you add/change/let-go of in the future to make Thanksgiving about something new?

Post a comment. We’d love to hear your story! And as usual, keep sending Hettie you questions.

the Tierra Soul gang

Hettie says, tell them about the altar…. and the Feast.

Well, we here at Tierra Soul started building our Day of the Dead altar yesterday. I went down to the basement and brought out the box marked Fall, and we chatted about each item as we placed them on the altar. There is Xoco’s birth-bell (he is a Fall born baby), our Halloween masks from 2009, crumpl-ey paper lanterns from last year, a silken ghost, and a series of memorial shrine boxes we made before we had kids at all. We went outside and collected some dried bits & stuff and strung them on ribbon. It started looking really lovely.

Then we sat around and started talking about who we want to invite to our Day of the Dead Feast this year…  You know the one where you ask your dearly departed to join you at the table during the 3 day Death Festival.

Fia is inviting our recently dog-attacked cat Brux and David is asking his father who passed away two years ago. Hettie is bringing her un-hatched duckling who died in its shell this last Spring.

I decided to tempt my maternal grandmother to the table.

Grandma, aka Baba, is one of the smart powerful women in my lineage, but that is not the main reason I want her at the table this year. This year I have some serious boundaries to draw with her. You see when I was born Baba dumped a huge load of Christian shame on the party. You see, my mother and father weren’t married and he was (sshh…) ahem…. How do I say it… He was, well, NOT-white. According to Baba these things are BAAAD.

This year I want to tease out all that NOT-mine shame and send it back over the threshold with her.

Sound weird or depressing?

Well, Hettie chimes in, your civilized self might resist or fear walking side by side with death….but your soft-as-a-duckling animal self knows how to talk to death.

To Mexicans, the only way to access life is to make friends with death….

For my family, there is a very real way that my grandmother’s shame and shaming blocked my access to my “smart powerful” lineage. Separating out the shame and sending it back frees my access to the amazing smarts and hearts.

What are you missing out on in your lineage??? Wanna start recovering it?

Here’s what I want you to do:

• Make a start-er altar out of something you have or find: a piece of molding, a shelf, a box.
• Choose one person to bring to your Feast
• Put pictures/symbols of that person on your altar. Add to it between now and your Feast
• Sit down with your dead person (or animal) at the Table and ask if there is anything you are carrying around for them.
• Give it back.
• Eat together.
• Pack everything up in storage and make it a yearly tradition that matters.

If you want support, put it in the comments: the person, the process, the new thing you’re accessing, the resistance, the confusion, the epiphanies.

You can also post your altar photos on our Facebook page and TAG yourself so we can all share! I’d love to see them!

And keep the questions coming says Hettie!

It’s so precious, what can I do to prevent it in the future?

Well, Hettie says, sour milk is not really something to prevent. Really, she assures you, souring is just the first stage in milk’s alchemical transformation into one of nature’s perfect foods: cheese. Cheese (as long as it’s made from raw milk) has everything you need to survive – including vitamin C.

Raw milk naturally turns into clabber (sour milk), then yogurt, and finally cheese….

What happens when milk sours is that its own lactic-acid producing bacteria starts consuming the milk sugar (lactose) and reproducing. This happens pretty slowly in the fridge, but it does still occur. How fast tends to depend on how quickly your milk gets cooled after milking. The quicker the cooling, the slower the souring or “turning” as we say. However, ALL raw milk will sour at room temperature and eventually even in the fridge.

Sour milk is NOT rotten.

Hettie wants to make sure you know that sour milk is a safe, healthy, delicious and useful food. It is an important ingredient in a lot of lazy-lady cooking including fermentation of grains and vegetables.

If you let sour milk keep fermenting or culturing it will evetually separate into solid and liquid….

And just like little Miss Muffet, you will have curds and whey. The curds can be used like cream chese and the whey for soaking your morning oats.

oh, what’s that Hettie?

oh yes, of course… Hettie wants me to add that you can also use your whey to prepare your fermented duck egg mayonaise…

mmm……

Send Hettie your questions…. and she’ll happily answer as many as she can!

Best to you,
Hettie Quackers et al.

How do I find the time to cook like an old-time mama? I mean, it takes weeks to ferment a crock of sauerkraut, and I have to get breakfast ready a whole frickin day in advance?! Are you kidding? How can any real live mama DOooo that? If I start I won’t have time for anything else!!!

I know, you’ve read a couple blogs, switched to raw milk, maybe even made something with organ meats (or not). You’ve read the introduction to Sally Fallon’s Nourishing Traditions*, and even though it all makes perfect sense and resonates with every cell in your body…. you are finding it so hard to really get started.

Its kinda like me and meditation…. I know its good for me but, dude, I really just can’t do it! Don’t even want to want to… do it. Well, I didn’t want to…. until I learned Mark Silver’s Remembrance and my relationship to meditation changed forever. He taught me that I didn’t need to be in any special posture or frame of mind to meditate. In fact, quite the opposite.

Authenticity, even if it feels icky, is the first step in connecting to the divine….. And one doesn’t need to meditate for hours and hours. These two fact together changed my life as a mother. I got started right away meditating in the middle of the night while nursing my newborn son, or walking him to sleep, or standing in line at the bank. Now I meditate a lot, and I love it. Love it.

But what does this have to do with cooking the Sally Fallon way?

Well, I have a secret…. You see, recovering traditional culinary rhythms is more than another healthy-eating-regime, or save-the-planet-activity that you should do. No.

• A mother’s kitchen is her sanctuary
• Culturing Veggies her chopping meditation
• Her butter churn her altar
• Grinding Grain her daily movement….

The very motions of cooking traditional foods match our ancestral DNA….. we long for these motions. They calm our nervous systems and allow our Soft Animal instinctual selves to emerge. The motions of creating sacred and healing foods for your family not only keeps them healthier and happier, they are healing to make…..

healing to make.

They are the motions of creating home, family and community…… and these motions also create home for YOU mama….

Just making a start, however small or slow, builds and heals…. as you go, and before you know it, you will be immersed in a way of life that offers itself to future generations – returning your own grandchildren their birthright of radiant resilience and peace…. one crock of kraut at a time.

…. and nourish yourself at the same time. I promise.

So, here’s are the two things I want you to remember as you make your start:

1. Preparing Traditional Foods is healing
2. Your Kitchen is your sanctuary

And here is what I want you to do:

1. Pick one thing (JUST one) from the Nourishing Traditions bible and start doing it when you can.
2. Find one thing to put in your kitchen to remind you that it is your sanctuary

Then tell me about it in the comments….

Soon,

Krista & Clan

p.s. This post was also published in the MamaMuse blog/newsletter. Sorry to those of you who had to read it twice! smile. We think it was worth * This is an affiliate link and all proceeds go to support the MamaMuse Scholarship, Training and Micro-Loan Fund. We are currently setting up a Tierra Soul program – to be annouced soon!

So, here we are with our forty-one eggs on Easter morning…. ready to make our Quiche and crepes. Problem is that because they were collecting over time in our girls secret spot, we have no idea how old they are and if any of them are rotten!

We could blow each one (in preparation for dyeing and decorating for our symbolic fertility hunt) and use our sniffers…. perfectly fine.

However, with a little internet searching (we need a term for the phenomenon of farming in the age of internet ease) we found that you can tell how fresh an egg is by putting it in cold water.

If it’s super-fresh it will sink to the bottom. If it’s a little older it will bob up from the bottom a bit and if its rotten, it will float! That easy!

As an egg ages it develops gas inside…. The increasing gas makes it float more and more as the gas bubble gets larger over time…… cool huh!

So, when you find a hidden stash of eggs (which happens a lot at this time of year when the girls get started laying and we are getting into the groove with them) you don’t have to worry about poisoning your family with rotten eggs or even grossing yourself out by cracking one open into the french toast mix…..

You can just test them and be at peace…..

Hettie, is quacking at me now….. insisting I let her mention the similar water-test for witches from the seventeen hundreds. Yes, ok Hettie. Do you know you can find out if you (or someone on your block) is a witch by tying their left hand to their right foot and right hand to left foot and throwing them in water? If innocent, the suspect will sink and survive from drowning if saved in time. If guilty, the sacred water will reject them….. and they will float.

Oh Hettie, why do you always have to be so morbid? I mean, how is this even relevant?

Well, she’s quacking in my ear, eggs are the worldwide symbol and builder of fertility, they are revered as sacred in many cultures of the globe. So witches (often known as midwives) were basically considered rotten-eggs. Don’t you see???

Well Hettie, as usual I am going to have to think about it…. What do you all think??? Tell us in the comments!

In the meantime:

Happy Easter morning Mamas & families of the world!

Do you have a question for Hettie Quackers? She can answer all things mama farmer and more….. Just shoot us an email!