There's a food revolution happening in our kitchen these days, mostly thanks to the very hip moms we've been hanging out with in the forest nursery. We use recipes from the Nourishing Traditions cookbook for a lot of stuff, and also we just make up recipes, which is fun.  Here's a view of the week's experiments:

Homemade granola. butter, oats, raisins, cashews, honey, cinnamon. I warm it on the stove top to mix the honey and butter, then put it in the oven for 20 minutes at 200 degrees. Presto, cheap good granola. (maybe $2 a pound rather than $8-10.)

Yogurt. 4 cups raw milk, 1/2 cup starter (we used thick greek yogurt for the first batch, and left over yogurt from the second batch as a bacterial starter.  Heat the milk in a double boiler to 180 degrees. Cool it to 110 degrees. Mix in the yogurt starter. Put it in a clean sturdy container (we use a clay pot) and keep it in a warm place for 7 hours. (An oven with a pilot light is a good one, or a pre-warmed oven. You want to keep the temperature at about 110 degrees so the bacteria can eat the milk.)

Pickles.  two large cucumbers cut into sticks. two cloves garlic, some sliced up leeks, a pinch of cayenne pepper, two seaspoons of salt. Mix it, stuff it all into a jar, add some water to cover the cucumbers, (leave an inch at the top of the jar so it doesn't explode.) Keep at room temperature for 3 days and it's done. Refrigerate after that.

We have to admit we were wary of raw milk but now that we're using it, we're ecstatic. It tastes better than ultrapasturized organic milk and it's cheaper. We get ours in glass jars-- no more plastic milk jugs, and no more plastic yogurt containers-- all the yogurt is now in a clay pot. And, we pay the farmer directly. It's nice to pay a farmer for milking his cow.  We've read through the endless safety warnings from the FDA and CDC re: raw milk and have found that 1) pastuerized milk and all kinds of other corporate farmed foods (spinach, for example) are the major culprits in food poisoning, and 2) the small number of raw milk food poisonings have mostly come from raw cheeses served off the back of taco trucks. Also, the beast prefers warm maple milk, so her raw milk tends to be home-pastuerized at 165 degrees anyway. 

Meanwhile, the estimate is that 100,000 civilians died in the Iraq War and 4000 plus Americans got blown to bits. We're done with all that now. Except for the pesky blood stains that won't come out of our clothes. This is what we've been reflecting upon as the solstice nears.

We'll be back next week with news of this and that. The beast and papa are reading Tintin and it's time for the mama to take over reading duty. These days we're finding that even twenty minutes away from the Beast feels like too much. She's just so damned fun to hang out with.

Peace people. And eat the rich; pickle them first.