• Tag Archives thyme

  • Chicken Pot Pies and Memories

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Fall                                                 Waning Back to School Moon

    Before the Vikings game on Sunday I made two chicken pot pies, whole pies filled with chicken, vegetables and a thickened vegetable broth made in the process.  These are my second and third meat pies and I find I enjoy making them as much as I do soup.  Something about baking a pie that has meat and vegetables intrigues me.  This one had our leeks, potatoes, onions, carrots, garlic, parsley and thyme.  My favorite vegetable from this garden is the leek.  The subtle flavor and the delicate flesh of the leek both appeal to my palate.

    Here are a few of the ingredients plus a tomato and raspberries from our garden.  This potato looks similar to the woman of la mouthe in the MIA’s collection.  At least to my eye.670_0300 Fresh ingredients are key to Italian, Chinese and vegetarian cooking so a garden facilitates those cuisines, at least during the harvest system.  Our best meals of the summer happen in September.

    Visiting Westminster today brought up all kinds of memories.  Don Meisel, former head pastor, came into the men’s room once during a Presbytery meeting.  I had a report on top of the urinal, reading it.  Don said, “My, you must get a lot of work done.”  Presbyterian humor. Another surprising Don Meisel moment.  There on the wall of a hallway was the exact same Granlund sculpture, the Tree of Life, that I bought Kate for her 50th birthday.  Don had given it to the church in memory of his wife.

    Jim Campbell’s name came up, too.  Jim was a top exec of Northwest Bank and a leader on the Community Involvement Program’s board.  I worked at CIP for 4+ years, starting as a janitor and week-end staff person during seminary and moving up to Director of Residential programs.  Jim came to me at one point and asked if I would take on directing both the Residential programs and the Day Activity Centers.  I thought about it and said no.  That surprised him, I could tell.  It surprised me a bit, too.  I had no interest then or later in advancement, even though I did end up as an Associate Executive Presbyter.

    Then, the chapel.  What a peaceful space,  a definite English feel to it wood, limestone, slate floor, a beautiful organ.  Wilson Yates, then professor of society and religion at United Seminary, married Raeone and me in that chapel in 1979.  Ed Berryman, the organist, refused to play the music we wanted.  I don’t remember what it was.  We had Handel’s Water Music.  Ed liked it.

    There were, too, many mornings of bible study with urban clergy in the now much renovated basement area.  Bible study was always one of the fun parts because Presbyterian clergy pride themselves on their scholarly ability.

    Well, off to bed.  Gotta catch the Empire Builder at 7:30 am.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Art and Culture Commentary on Religion Memories 📎and tagged

  • Getting Things Ready

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Beltane                                       Waning Flower Moon

    After checking the parent colony with the queen excluder in, I found larvae in the top hive box.  That’s evidence of the queen.  That meant I shifted the middle hive box over to the new foundation and bottom board.  A syrup feeder pail went on top of the new, child colony.  This calms everything down and allows for a peaceful slow release of the queen tomorrow.  Leaving the queen excluder on the hive box in which I discovered larvae, I put two honey supers on it and replaced the inner cover and the telescoping outer cover.  The parent colony now has two hive boxes, one with a queen and brood, plus the other, lower box, which will get reversed on top in 7-10 days.

    Tomorrow I’ll check the package colony for larvae a second time.  If they have none, I’ll have to get another queen for them soon.  If there is no queen in the hive, the lack of her pheromones turns on egg laying in the workers, but, since they’re not fertilized they produce only drones.  Once a hive converts to worker egg-laying apparently you have to start over.

    This has been a busy couple of weeks for the bees.  Kate’s been making supers and frames and hive boxes, too.  If the divide and the package colony take, things will calm down for a while until the honey flow ends.  Then, there’s an end of the whole process I haven’t encountered.  Honey.

    Two more bags of composted manure on the leek/sugar pod pea bed, another on the sun trap and a lot of planting.  The herb spiral has the herbs Kate bought Friday at Mickman’s.  I also planted beets, mustard greens, fennel, onions and a pepper plant in the sun trap.  The tomatoes and other peppers will go there, too.  Those two beds, along with the other bed where I have green onions plants along with radicchio, beets from seed and thyme will be our kitchen garden for the growing season.

    Kate did a lot of weeding, including the blueberry patches.  It really makes a difference to have her focused on that aspect of gardening.  She’s also in charge of pruning which has its on rules.

    The leeks, onions, kale, chard, garlic, parsnips, butternut squash, other beets and carrots will also be available during the growing season of course, but most of these will get canned or dried or frozen for the winter.

    I would not like to do the cost accounting on these vegetables and the fruit because the two fences and Ecological gardens have created a lot of sunk costs.  It will take years for them to zero out the costs, more years, I imagine, than we have left in this house.  In our case, of course, that’s not the big point.  The big point is a more sustainable and healthy lifestyle and in that regard the cost accounting has already tilted in our favor.


    📂This entry was posted in Bees Garden Great Work permaculture 📎and tagged

  • Leeks, Shame and Ancestry

    Posted on by Charles Comment

    Spring                                                           Waxing Flower Moon

    The new dog food must be a mistake.  The whippets did not eat at all this morning, the big dogs ate little.  Hilo (our smallest whippet) is in her crate with what I take to be a belly ache since she doesn’t look seriously ill.  How do I know?  Well, I don’t really, but I’ve seen multiple dogs in extremis over the years and she just doesn’t look like one.  I diagnose it to be a tummy revolt against the salmon and sweet potato I found so alluring.  I bought six bags at 35 pounds a bag.

    As any good chef, if the public refuses to eat the food I’ve chosen, I have to have a different menu selection.  In this case it will be food they’ve always liked.  Off to Costco.  Oh, and I can get that salt for the water softener, too.

    Leeks, basil, thyme, fennel, marigolds, lettuce and oregano starts sit in the front yard right now, still in the cardbox carriers Mother Earth Gardens gave me for them.  Later today, in the mid-afternoon, when it warms up into the high 50’s, I’ll continue planting this year’s garden.

    The leeks especially excite me because I want to learn how to grow this delectable vegetable.  It is, after all, the crown vegetable of Wales.  By that I mean Welsh soldiers would often wear a leek stuck in their hats.  No, I don’t know why, but the leek and Wales have a long standing relationship.  The ancestry I can trace most clearly is Welsh; I can put us in 17th century Denbigh, so I gotta learn how to grow leeks.  Besides, I really like them.  Their delicate onion like flavor is great in soups and wonderful as an addition to vegetable dishes, too.

    Welsh Leek on Reverse of 2008 Proof Gold One Pound Coin
    Also Used in 1985 & 1990

    The time while Kate’s been gone has been busy even adventure packed, though all the adventures were domestic in nature:  hiving bees, doing the complete reversal on the over-wintered colony, buying vegetables and herbs, dogs and their diet and today–the garden.

    Forgot to mention something that warmed my heart yesterday.  I called Kate yesterday and she put Ruth (granddaughter) on the phone.  Ruth told me she was about to go gymnastics and a few other things even Grandpop’s good ear couldn’t grasp through cell phone reception and voice quality.  When she gave the phone back to Kate unexpectedly, I told Kate to tell Ruth I loved her.  Kate told her.  Over the phone came a loud and confident, “I know.”  Gossh.

    Also, while on the drive out to Nature’s Nectar yesterday I began to analyze my feelings when I get under pressure.  I had a bit of those feelings then and noticed a faint, dull ache in my lower left abdomen.  To make it feel better I could tell my body wanted to lean forward and down, then to bow my head.  Oh.  Shame.  Explained a lot.  Somehow either pressure triggered shame or shame triggered pressure, perhaps both.  So, when did I remember shame and pressure together?

    When I was maybe 12 or 13, the Ellis family had moved from rental quarters on East Monroe Street into our first home purchased with a mortgage, and our last for that matter.  This house, 419 N. Canal, has that magical valence that home has.  It also had a basement that flooded during heavy rains.

    Dad was not a handy man, if anything, he was the anti-handy man.  When the basement flooded, his solution was to bail it out with buckets.  Yeah, I know, but I’m sure it was the best he could think of at the time or else he considered other solutions too expensive.  I don’t know, but I do know I had to join him often at night  in the damp to carry buckets of water up from the basement to dump outside.  I didn’t like it, hated it in fact.

    I couldn’t get away from it though and I remember having more than one fight with him over doing it.  That’s the memory I have, the one that came up when I thought about pressure and shame.  It was the perfect metaphor, too.  Bailing out a flooded basement is what my defensiveness and short-temper try to do when I sense myself backed into a corner.  Too much in the id, the just below the mainfloor area in my psyche, needs to get taken out somehow, but I still don’t like the work.

    One solution to this, if I can remember it when pressure hits again, is to stand up.  I’m an adult now, not a 12 year old and I can make my own choices about bailing the basement.  I can choose another option, like, buy a sump pump, put in a drain field, landscape the area around the house so that it slopes away from the foundation.  Lots of options. I don’t have to bend over, bow down and be conflicted.

    Just to be clear.  This is not Dad’s fault. It was the way I responded to what he thought was the best way to handle a difficult situation.  One that probably caused him pain and shame, too.


    📂This entry was posted in Aging Dogs Family Great Work Health Memories permaculture 📎and tagged