Happy Solstice! Merry Christmas! Happy Hannukah! Happy Eid! Merry Kwanza! ( . . .did I forget any?)

We’ve had our Christmas groove going lately – and it’s been good!

I had planned to write this post about the neat events we’ve discovered around Spokane during this season and maybe include pics of a couple of neat craft projects I’ve made for family. When I actually started cataloging things I nearly fell over backward. Holy scheisse! How am I not a total stress ball right now?? I think the key is that I haven’t done a damn thing I didn’t want to. I was determined to simplify the season – emphasize the fun stuff and let go of the rest. I couldn’t be happier with the results. So here’s what we’ve had fun doing:

One Friday, CT and I played hookie from school and work (we were sick, cough cough) and made our way downtown for some fun. First we stopped by the Davenport to check out all the decorated Christmas trees and sip hot chocolate in the posh lobby. Afterward, we ran through the 13 F weather next door to the Bing Crosby theatre to watch a noon performance of Holiday Inn. My parents and I have had a long-standing tradition of watching Holiday Inn  and White Christmas every Christmas eve. Watching it on the big screen with my girl on my lap was really fun. And she liked it! I still can’t figure out how or why CT enjoys black and white films so much, but I can’t say I’m complaining.

The next weekend, while I was busy with CPR/First aid training, CT and her Dad headed to the Davenport for a gingerbread making workshop. Professional chefs competed against each other to make the best gingerbread houses while the Towhead worked on making the best graham cracker “gingerbread” house.  The results, both amateur and professional, were fantastic! The chefs even created a gingerbread pirate ship with hidden items that the kids had to find  – it was a dessert, a game, and a work of art all in one!  Afterward they headed to the carousel and Radio Flyer slide in Riverfront Park. The story of the day though – the one I had to listen to intently as soon as I got home – was about how CT lost her mitten. You see, outside the carousel is a metal statue of a goat. When you hit a button on the rock wall to the side a vacuum turns on inside the goat. The idea is that you can feed the goat the leaves littering the ground; free entertainment for the kids, free grounds cleanup for the city. I think it’s a wonderful concept. Except that the goat does not discriminate. Like any healthy goat he will eat anything you stick in front of his mouth. Including mittens. CT found this out the hard way. Luckily, one of the carousel staff was able to extract the mitten from the goat’s innards.

The next event of the season was CT’s preschool Christmas program last Thursday. It was a short half-hour deal where the kids got up on stage and sang. You can tell the kids have been working hard on this for awhile. CT has come home singing all sorts of songs over the last few weeks. And their practice paid off – they did awesome! You can’t help but smile with that many dressed up cuties singing “This Little Light of Mine (I’m gonna let it shine).” I had a silly-stupid grin on my face the whole time. My hat truly goes off to her teachers though. Thirty kids onstage for 10-15 minutes. No one cried and almost every kid actually sang. Now that’s an accomplishment!

The craft-making tally is what has me truly flabbergasted. I’ve had so much fun I don’t think I realized how much I’ve actually done over the last month. I, or CT and I, have managed to produce the following:

• 1 fairy
• 6 bean bags with a laminated list of games
• 2 hats
• 10 pints apple butter
• 3 quarts of applesauce
• 2 apple pies (happily waiting in the freezer to be cooked later)
• 3 pints pumpkin butter
• 1 pint cherry butter
• a bagful of dried apples
• necklaces for CT’s cousins
• books for CT’s grandparents
• a tray with CT’s art modgepodged onto it for the grandparents

The irony, which I’m kicking myself for now, if that we have so few pictures of all of this. Maybe that’s why I’m not stressed – I haven’t worried about documenting any of it. We’ had fun and didn’t worry about how it was turning out or whether we had “captured” the moment. Smiles, giggles, skipping down the street, or dancing through the house were enough. Those images burn brightly right now. I hope the memories don’t fade.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Endearing words

For some reason they are all around today — the sweet little bloopers that make me love my family so much.These are the mistakes I will never correct or comment on because they always make me smile:

When Towhead asks to be picked up, Mr. A and I will often tease her by only lifting her part way off the ground. Her response is usually, “No, I want upper.”

Mr. A’s use of the word “plausibility” instead of “possibility.”

My father-in-law’s spelling of “Christmass.”

Towhead’s requests for a “dambaid” when she has an owie.

The times when Mr. A pronounces celery the same as salary.

I am so grateful that I have such sweet and wonderful people in my life. I love hearing the laughter that greets me on so many mornings, often before I even get out of bed. The abundance of silliness, the chasing, the tickling, the games and fun that make up our family make me so warm and full I don’t think I’m going to need food on Turkey Day this year.

**As a postscript, I discovered three more eardearing word I don’t want to forget: Daddy drinks “beard” with dinner, Airplanes land at the “oar-port,” and after a storm it’s often “froggy” out.

Summer Mania: A Long-winded Update

OK, I’m aware it’s been awhile. Summer is a wonderful and awful thing for me. I love summer – the way plants and grass smell in the evening after soaking up the sun all day, backpacking to alpine lakes, calling up friends for last-minute backyard BBQs, digging my hands in the garden’s soil, and the inordinate amounts of socializing we do with family and friends that we lost track of during the winter months. But what it means is that I don’t really read, knit, or blog much. Which frustrates me because there’s so much going on, and so much to say! Truthfully, I gave up many years ago and realized that summer and fall is my time to do, and winter and spring are my time to think about and reflect on it all.

The short version is that we were on vacation for the first half of July. Mr. A, the stinky Towhead, and I flew down to Orange county to visit family and attend a wedding. In the process we also got to play at the beach, visit with college friends and their families, and Towhead got to go to Disneyland for the first time.

Every year Mr. A’s parents throws a huge 4th of July celebration – an average of 40 people show up every year and it has become an unofficial extended family reunion of sorts. The last few years someone has brought a BBQ/smoker, the kind that’s 8-10 feet long and has to be pulled on it’s own trailer. The meat that comes out of that thing is heavenly. If that and the pool are not enough, the other major draw is that their house backs up to a baseball field that adjoins the Seal Beach Naval Weapons Station – and those navy guys know how to put on a hell of a fireworks show! The entire neighborhood shows up to spread out blankets and chairs.  Kids run around waving glow sticks (no more sparklers – party-poopers. What’s 4th of July without someone getting burnt fingers from a sparkler they couldn’t bear to part with?) and grandparents cuddle under blankets to watch the colorful lights explode overhead.

Well, that party got canceled this year for the sake of a wedding. Even though it was a different setting, it was still wonderful to see family and friends. The reception was at the Hotel Maya within sight of the Queen Mary and overlooking Long Beach harbor. It was a lovely day in a gorgeous setting. The wedding was beautiful and very thoughtfully put together – I cannot fault them for that. That said, it is hard to get enthusiastic about a wedding when you don’t even remotely agree with the couple’s vows or their view of what marriage means. Marriage is a partnership – two whole individuals that decide to support and enhance one another through life’s changes. One person often takes the lead in certain situations, but it is understandable – I would say expected – that the lead role can and does change regularly. Marriage is a collaborative, fluid, dynamic process – a symbiotic relationship that creates something bigger than the sum of its parts. I will never understand individuals who glorify subservience in a marriage, and elevate the status of one person (in this case the man) over the other. I remember hearing the word “worship” – and I agree only in the sense that every person is worthy of worship and reverence as a fantastic piece of the biological puzzle. However, on oh so many levels I have issues with a partnership based on the male half (either half really) being lauded as a Christ-like figure that inspires and guides the other in a savior/devotee relationship. Even the benevolent verion of these roles makes me cringe. I firmly believe that although religion can be a part of any marriage, marriage itself has nothing to do with religion. That’s the optional part of the ceremony as far as I’m concerned.

Every feminist bone in my body was boiling in outrage – so I boiled, and took it as a good exercise in self-control.

But I also realized mid-ceremony that I am not required to agree with their vows or view of marriage, because I was not the one getting married. This ceremony needed to be meaningful for them, and I have no doubt that it was, which is wonderful.  In spite of it all I am proud of Mr. A’s cousin, who I’ve watched grow from a gangly 10-year old to a confident, polite man with a positive and respectful attitude toward his new wife. I may not agree with him but I still love him dearly. We may have missed dancing at their wedding, but we did arrive back at my in-laws in time to spread out a blanket and curl up with the kids to see the firework display illuminate the neighborhood.

After a week in southern California, Mr. A and the Towhead flew up to Sacramento to visit the other half of the grandparents. (We figured they were already in California, we might as well make the most of the trip. However, I had to fly back home for work, which sucked. I miss my family.) They had a blast! I know only what I heard over the phone and saw from pictures, but the stories and one-liners that emerged from their five-day trip are hilarious! Most of it consisted of the chaos of ordinary life and tasks – like shopping, doing crafts and playing ball. But that doesn’t mean I couldn’t hear the laughter across several states. The most quotable moment though involves Towhead’s recurring obsession with playing doctor. When examining her “old Nana” (great-grandma) she told her that, “her brain wasn’t working.” I love where we live but boy, do I miss family! Vacations like these are what summer is all about. Summer always reminds me to live, and not take the world too seriously. That is when we’re not busy laughing and playing, and I have a moment to think about it all.

Sarma, and Kufta, and Lahmajoon – oh my!

Let’s face it, the economy sucks right now and everyone is trying to cut costs. Prior to the economic meltdown Mr. A and I had been trying slowly, bit by bit, to transform our eating and buying habits so they better fit a model of sustainability – that meant buying organic and/or buying locally produced meat and vegetables. While we were still living in Reno we got involved in a CSA (community-supported agriculture) basket, where once a week during an 18-week growing season we received mostly organic produce grown within 80 miles of our house. And let me just say it was fantastic! Eating became fun and interesting: “I’ve heard of fennel but I’ve never tasted it before. What can I cook this with and how?” We learned more about what grew well in our region and what didn’t. We learned new recipes and met new friends. It was a very community-driven and grounding (pun intended) experience.

In spite of our move, we decided to make an effort to continue to eat mostly meat and vegetables grown and harvested within our region. This is not as easy as it sounds. Most people are becoming increasingly aware of how far their food travels from the ground to the dinner plate. The hard part in talking to people about this issue is that they assume that if you want to be more consciencious about what you eat you should buy organic. The problem being that organic can still mean that it was shipped, half-ripe from 1200 miles away. On average, it takes 87 calories of fossil food to get 1 calorie of food to it’s destination (Kingsolver). I’m a new convert – when money is tight (and even when it’s not) I’d rather my money go to supporting farmers than to supporting oil companies.

But I digress. With the goal of living local, it wasn’t  long after we moved that Mr. A got in touch with some local rancher/farmers about ordering a whole lamb. Given his Armenian heritage, and anyone who knows him, this is not surprising. Almost all Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cooking is centered around lamb, and Armenian dishes are no exception. In fact, upon first meeting Mr. A’s family (we’d been dating for maybe 6 months) I was warned that they would offer me raw lamb to taste, and my response was “likely to determine whether or not they approved” of me.  ”Just kidding,”  he said. But it was hard to tell if he was serious or not.

In Mr. A’s family there can never be enough lamb. And for the most part, I’m inclined to agree. So last winter we bought a 18.5 cubic foot freezer – to store lamb, any meat Mr. A brought home while deer hunting, and any fruits and vegetables we stocked up on during the summer. The behemoth is still not full but what we managed to put in it last summer has definitely supplemented our fridge during these tight times.

And did I mention the never-ending supply of lamb. We’ve gone through two already. Mr. A has found decently-priced, locally-raised sheep . . . and he is in lamb heaven. We make sarma (similar to Greek dolmades), lamb chops, lamb tacos, lamburger casserole, leg of lamb, lamb stew, lahmajoon (an Armenian pizza of sorts). Between the lamb, the one deer we got this season, and the 30 pounds of fish we brought back from Alaska I haven’t bought any meat except the occasional chicken in almost 5 months.

So, in the trend of sticking with what I know here’s a recipe for sarma, as Mr. A and I learned how to make it from his family. This was originally written for a photo-recipe project my friend attempted to put together last fall.

Armenian Sarma

 

2 lbs ground lamb

1 cup rice to start (Uncle Ben’s long grain original rice works best)

1 ½  small cans of tomato paste

1 bunch parsley, finely chopped

1 medium onion, finely chopped

4-5 cloves garlic, adjust to your preference

1 tsp salt (to taste)

1 small jar grape leaves

 

Optional:

Lots of friends and good wine

 

 

Put all ingredients, minus the grape leaves, together in a large pot or bowl. Squish with your fingers until everything is mixed together. If you’re a little squeamish about the squishing with your hands, I don’t know what to tell you, it’s really the only way to mix it all thoroughly.

 

This is a family recipe, passed down from my husband’s grandfather, who immigrated to the US from Armenia after the first World War. After escaping the Armenian genocide in modern-day Turkey, Mike’s grandfather wanted to make a new start. He wanted very little to do with Armenian traditions and customs. Except for the food. He passed down his favorite dishes, which we found out later are primarily appetizers. Sarma was one of his favorites, and it has become a family tradition to roll sarma and fix other Armenian dishes on major holidays.  

 

Once you’re done mixing, taste it. Don’t be shy. Add more salt or rice if needed. In our family, this recipe is always subject to individual tastes. Some like more garlic, some more rice; it’s your choice.

 

Open jar of grape leaves and wash under cold water to get all the brine off. Lay the grape leaves out flat on a cutting board or large, flat surface. Take one leaf and place it on the cutting board vein side up. Cut or pinch off stem. Grab a small handful of lamb and rice filling. Mold it into a hot-dog shape and place toward the top of the leaf (near where the stem was). Grape leaves are shaped like hearts. First fold the rounded tops-of-the-heart over the meat. Then fold in the sides. Now roll the whole thing tightly, as if you were rolling a cigar. In fact that’s what it should look like when you are done: a cigar. You want to roll the sarma fairly tight, or else it will unravel during cooking, but do keep in mind that the rice will cause the filling to expand slightly.

 

Now rolling the sarma is fairly time-consuming. This is not a dish to be prepared for a week-night dinner. It requires several hours, depending on the amount of sarma you’re making. The time obviously goes quicker the more people you have helping, and wine always helps. In the kitchen craze the evening before one of our Armenian feasts, you’ll find most everyone taking a break at some point to sit down, roll sarma and talk.

 

Once the meat is gone, Place the remaining grape leaves on the bottom of a large (16 qt) stock pot. This will help prevent the bottom ones from getting burned. Stack the sarma in the pot, alternating directions as you layer upwards. Fill with water. Place a plate on top to keep them from floating away. Set a glass jar (we always use the grape leaf jar) filled with water on top of the plate to provide additional weight.

 

Boil for about an hour. Drain the pot, but be very careful as the greasy water can inflict a nasty burn. We always serve them hot, sometimes with a side of yogurt to dip them in. But this is a family favorite so I can vouch for the fact that they’re just as good eaten cold the next morning. Surprisingly, they also freeze pretty well.

“Mary had a little lamb . . . but I ate it.”

For Mother’s Day Mr. A and I decided to do something we’ve been wanting to do for awhile but haven’t had the time. And no, I’m not talking about sex. We went on a birding trip with the Audubon Society at a conservation area south of Spokane called Slavin Ranch. It was bitterly cold for a May morning but the area is fantastically beautiful with coniferous forest and sprawling wetland rushes and ponds. And the wildflowers are beginning to bloom (which makes it very hard for me to keep my attention on the birds)

While we were walking we got in an interesting conversation with a couple of people in the group about hunting and conservation. One man posed the question, “What gives someone else the right to hunt my animals? If they are on public land they are, by right, part mine. So what gives other people the right to hunt them?” With Mr. A working as a game and non-game biologist, this is a relevant issue for him and a question he not only wants, but needs to have an answer to.

Mr. A’s first and probably most obvious response was “Yes, but as public land it belongs to all of us.” Public lands are held in trust for the American people by the federal government and were set aside with multiple use mandates. There is no one public opinion and therefore no single public use of these pieces of land. Many public lands are set aside as wilderness areas, and the values and uses of these areas are outlined in the Wilderness Act passed in 1964 (I could digress and examine the language in this one document alone. It makes for an interesting analysis, but maybe another day).

Management agencies like the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park’s Service, and federal and state fish and wildlife departments have a responsibility to maintain the health of these lands, particularly wilderness areas, and hunting selected species is often one tool used to keep populations under control. So, for the sake of argument, let’s say that the man mentioned earlier (I’ll call him Bob) is right. The public does not have a right to hunt animals that have been trusted to the rest of the general public. How then do federal and state managers control populations? Bob was speaking specifically of deer hunting so I’ll use that as my primary example. Mr. A and I figured there are a couple options.

Option 1: Reintroduce native predators like wolves. Problem: Deer specifically tend to wander through populated areas. There are enough problems with wolf reintroduction in uninhabited areas. Wolves wandering through the suburbs creates a whole new set of problems.

Option 2: Managing agencies could thin the populations based on need themselves. Problem: Transparency. If a state agency, or any agency for that matter, were to harvest animals there is too much potential for abuse by the members of that agency. There would be public outcry over the whole process. Best solution to this problem? Let the public harvest the animals whose populations need to be controlled. You see the circularity of the problem.

Option 3: Don’t hunt. Problem: Starvation, disease, habitat degredation, general unsanitary conditions from dead deer carcarases littering the countryside.

These arguments seem pretty obvious to me and I’ve heard them numerous times before (though it does help in thinking through the problem.) The best explanation that Mr. A and I settled on boils down to a question of biology.

We are mammals and omnivores. For better or worse, we eat meat. There are several ways we can obtain the meat we consume. One is through commercial farms and dairies (and these range from the local organic farm to the mega-corporation that have crowded and sometimes inhumane conditions). Another is through hunting.

With more and more people becoming conscious of what they eat, both for health and environmental reasons, there has been a growing interest in organic and locally-grown food. While preganant and since the birth of Crazy Towhead, Mr. A and I have begun to learn more about our food and where it comes from. A large source of our learning has come from our involvement with a CSA (community-supported agriculture) while we were living in the Great Basin. This program delivers a weekly basket of organic and locally-grown vegetables and fruits to people who live in town. The subscribers are connected to the farmers via a newsletter and an end-of-the-season “day at the farm.” The “think global, eat local” concept, also popularized as the Slow Food movement, has been explained eloquently and persuasively by Gary Paul Nabhan in his book Coming Home to Eatand in Barbara Kingsolver’s Animal, Vegetable, MIracle. The underlying idea in all of this is to know where your food comes from, how it was grown/processed, and to lessen the distance it travels to get to your table. In this way consumers can eat healthier food, support local economies and small-scale agriculture, reduce their carbon footprint, and it encourages people to be more concerned about the health of their own ecosystem since that directly affects what they eat.

Whether people approve of hunting or not, there is no better way to know your own food and where it comes from than to go out and harvest it yourself. When fruit comes from Chile or Mexico we don’t think twice about it but what do we know about the water supply in that area? The vast majority of people eat meat but a small fraction of those know where that meat came from, what that animal was fed, and thus know very little about what they’re eating. Most don’t want to know. And that’s OK. There are parts of biology and anatomy that are not all that appetizing. But as Mr. A said, “The only person who I think has a right to object to me, or anyone, hunting is a vegetarian.” And we do have a number of vegetarian friends. Ironically a large number of them will eat game meat. We’ve jokingly dubbed them “gametarians.” Perhaps this is because most of the vegetarians we know don’t eat meat because they object to the way meat is raised and processed in this country. But most of them don’t object when they know the animal lived a life in the wild, who shot it and how it was processed.

 Given the consumption rate of first world countries, the US in particular, it seems to me that we have an ethical responsibility to choose (when possible) what we eat and how that food is produced. Whether they exist on public or private land, isn’t hunting selectively better than eating meat from a corporate farm that potentially abuses the animal, or kills it an inhumane way, and pollutes the surrounding environment by the concentration of animals it packs into a smaller space (ie feces concentration in the local water supply)?

So Bob, the answer Mr. A and I came up with is this: It is more than anything else a question of biology - we eat other organisms to survive.  If we are concerned about our environment and the species that co-exist with us then we should be more concerned about where our food comes from and how we harvest it. And if that’s the case the main ethical question should not be whose land it’s on or whether we should kill other organisms in the first place, but how do we better connect with what we eat. How do we change our habits so that our bodies, our deer, and our ecosytem beneft from a necessary biological exchange?