About That Shelf Life

One year ago, Monday, I began my seventh life occupation, this one as a chef for HappyDayFarms. Specifically, I prepared a meal around lunchtime, meant to sustain the farm crew for the rest of the day until dinner.

Una fiesta grande...

I cooked Monday through Friday, with a dozen Saturdays tossed in for the purpose of serving leftovers, a twofer of the greatest magnitude. I did “breakfast at lunch” on Mondays, Mexican fiestas on Tuesdays, shepherd’s pies on Wednesdays, chef’s choice on Thursdays and barbecues on Fridays. I began the last week in April and continued on until Thanksgiving week, after which I was given the winter off.

Except for my just-turned-two-year-old grandson, Ollie Mac, I was a vessel without an anchor a year ago, when Casey hit me up with the idea of me cooking lunches. After all, for 35 years or so I had served as sous chef for Annie, chopping and dicing my way into her culinary plans along the way, but she had left us in January. Was I up for this task?

Under Annie’s guidance, I had absorbed a wealth of knowledge when it came to preparing food, after being no lightweight in the kitchen myself, in a meat-and-potatoes kind of way. In the not-too-distant past, I had assisted her a couple of times a week in similar fashion, cooking up feasts for the farm staff on the two market days, Monday and Thursday. I watched as she prepared lists, checked available ingredients, consulted her recipe boxes and got ready for action. Much preparation went into her creations.

Oven-roasted Spanish rice

There may have been a question about my own durability over the course of last summer, but it took a mandatory wildfire evacuation order in early September to break a streak of more than one hundred consecutive weekday meals. Lending itself to the background was the fact that we had just been plunged into the pandemic, which meant more than ever the emphasis was on preparing what was available on-farm.

I went 134 consecutive days early on without leaving this mountain, relying on Casey to pick up any essentials from Geiger’s on Monday, when he was in town for market. I learned to make my own Italian salad dressing, mayonnaise-based salad dressing, barbecue sauce and tartar sauce. I learned to do without foil and I replaced paper napkins with a pile of cloth napkins, many of them with holiday themes. Any time I had the washing machine going, I tossed in all the dirty napkins and they were good to go again.

Casey at the throttle...

After we processed the turkeys and converted four of them into ground turkey, I had about sixty pounds to work with. I used it for turkey burgers, shepherd’s pies, tacos, taquitos and spaghetti sauce, among other dishes. I had whole HappyDayFarms chickens as well, along with vast quantities of fresh veggies and herbs all season long.

Because the entire crew gathered daily, notes could be compared, schedules could be adjusted and everyone got the chance to set out after lunch with a cohesive plan of action. This coordination allowed the crew to accomplish goals that might have been out of reach, had there not been such continuity from one day to the next.

On top of the cooking, I baked cookies for the HappyDayFarms farm-stand and I preserved produce, primarily tomatoes, but also zucchini squash and apples. I was also the luckiest grandfather in the history of the universe because I got to see Ollie Mac practically every day during this period. Ollie and I have a well-established history of hijinks together, and if I do not get to read him at least three books in any given day, then I try to double that number the next. 

Swapping my pitchfork for a serving fork has been the deal of the century, especially since the two overlap with me continuing to have a hand in the farming process. Last season I canned cold-pack tomatoes, marinara sauce, jalapeño salsa, jalapeño hot sauce, catsup, pizza sauce and oven-roasted, hot-pack tomatoes. I will have to do more marinara sauce and cold-pack tomatoes this summer, as we are already out of stock.

More options this year

This year I am making a run into town every Sunday morning to shop for the upcoming week. In an effort to create more variation in my culinary efforts, I have labeled Monday as International Day (tacos, taquitos, fajitas, enchiladas, spaghetti, rancho styled steak, chicken cacciatore, pizza, etc), Wednesday as stews/soups/casserole day (shepherd’s pie, scalloped potatoes, beef stew, potato/leek soup, chili chicken, minestrone soup, chili con carne, et al), and Friday as “down home day” (barbecues, fried chicken/mashed potatoes, fish/chips, chicken strips, whole roasted chicken, cheeseburgers, and so on).

With the newly constructed, enclosed front porch and side deck, something I squeezed in building from the middle of July onwards last year, I am better equipped to deal with the heat this summer. Lunch on the front porch, sans flies, sounds cool when it gets unbearable inside.

I do seem bent on making myself useful these days, maybe a bit more so trying to compensate for the loss of Annie, but the rewards are great. It pleases me immensely to be able to do something to help forward progress on this farm where everyone works so hard. My growing of tomatoes has been replaced by my cooking of tomatoes, thus possibly extending my shelf life by a season or two. 

Grizzled veterans are part of all great teams and I am stoked to still be on the roster. Vets and rookies naturally hang out together with the rooks soaking up knowledge like a Hoover. I have picked up a pointer or two along the way in life, particularly when it comes to teaching concepts like respect, responsibility and the power of love. 

With as much time as Ollie Mac and I spend together, and as apt a pupil as he is, it is inevitable that a part of me will still remain on that team roster, long after I have headed to those center field bleachers in the sky.

Wanna have a stare-down?

Is There A Doctor in the House?

I journeyed down to Ukiah on Tuesday to see that nice Dr. Mulligan at the VA clinic, about a nasty bit of business growing on my left leg. I had made the appointment four weeks ago before I had even consulted my two EMT sons, who then insisted that I not wait the four weeks, but go right down the following day.

Storm's a brewin'...

Well, the VA does not do spontaneity too well, and I could not wait the required three hours to see “someone,” so I bailed out that Monday and returned home. The rash thingie on my left shin/ankle was suspicious in nature, because included in the eruptions was a lifelong birthmark that had recently become drunk and disorderly, as these things are apt to do. It turned a purplish color and kept scabbing up.

Ugliness abounded down there on my leg but I treated the open sores each morning with peroxide, and then layered on a nice coating of cannabis/pedicularis salve. In the afternoons, when it was burning with the itch from hell, I applied cortisone cream. I was actually pleasantly surprised to see that the rash was responding positively to my treatment, as unsightly as the whole mess was.

So I traveled down to Ukiah, after treating my malady myself for twenty-two days, ostensively to have my leg examined. That being said, there was more to my visit than a gnarly rash: I was a man on a mission. After struggling since 2010 with sleep issues, I was ready to take a stand on a mountain-and die there, if necessary.

One definition of insanity is to do the same thing repeatedly, while expecting different results each time. If that is indeed the case, then I must be a raving lunatic by now, because I went through the whole dog and pony show once again, only to come out with the same result: No sleep aids for me. 

This...

I will give the VA credit for its approach this time, as variety is the spice of life, but I don’t think Markie appreciated it.

Markie is the me that emerges upon occasion, when I need to get someone’s attention. In this case it was that nice Jeff, the attendant who took my vitals and asked me a lengthy list of questions about my health on that particular Tuesday. 

For the first time in my 68 years, when my blood pressure was taken (and then retaken), it was off any chart ever attached to my name. That should have sounded the alarm right there. I do believe the first number was 159. I have never recorded a blood pressure figure that was anything but normal, so that fact may help indicate how I was doing that particular morning. Included in my interview with Jeff, was the reminder from me that I have issues processing information delivered to me through my ears. They aren’t worth the cauliflower they’re made of.

After all of the logistics were dealt with and I was poised to finally have a consultation with my own health care provider, I was informed rather breezily by Jeff, that Dr. Mulligan would be contacting me shortly for my telephone conference.

Even my defective ears picked up that little grenade and just like that-snap-it blew up in my face. Before the door had even shut on the departing Jeff, I had sprung up, gathered my backpack, including my computer with the grisly photographs, and jerked that door open again.

I Katrina-ed out into the hallway and prepared to get the flock out of Dodge, when I paused. Dang! Which way gets me outta here? Both directions looked the same and I am more directionally challenged than a two-year old let loose by himself at Disneyland. 

I went left (of course) but got only a step or two before I heard my name called and turned to see Jeff hurrying toward me. He should have donned a rain coat because the storm was about to burst.

“What’s up? Where are you going?”

You mean besides nuts?

“I’m out of here. This is bogus. I’m supposed to talk on the phone? When I can’t process information through my ears? To my primary health care provider? To explain why I drove an hour-and-a-half to talk on the phone? And she’s going to examine my rash through the phone?” There may have been a colorful adjective or two mixed in somewhere, especially in front of the word, phone.

Each question was delivered in a higher octave and by the end, doors were opening on both sides of the hallway. 

Is there a doctor in the house?

Next: Deja vu, all over again...

Abracadabra

I knew I would have to be organized in order to pull off baking two pumpkin pies, while visiting with my little sister JT. The pies were for a dinner celebrating Ollie Mac’s third birthday, later on that evening, and JT was only going to be here for a couple of hours or so. She had come up the day before for the first time since last September for both Ollie's birthday and that of Frankie, his cousin. The thing is, I get so ungrounded when she is here, that half the time I feel as though I am hovering over the two of us. Nevertheless, I convinced myself I could bake the two pies for the simple reason that organization paves the way for success.

That nice Keelee had already made the cassava flour pie crusts, so all I had to do was brown them for fifteen minutes or so and then add the pumpkin pie mix. When she shopped for pumpkins at the hippie store, we had agreed that if there were no pumpkins, any yellow winter squash would be fine, except for maybe spaghetti squash. Keelee settled on butternut squash when she could not find pumpkins, and that was just fine. The bottom line is that without the spices, both pumpkin pie and squash pie would be bland but with the spices, regardless of what type of winter squash is used, voila! You have pumpkin pie.

We are cooking on-farm without dairy these days, so I was substituting coconut milk for cow’s milk, along with replacing three-fourths the amount of sugar called for, with honey. Before JT even arrived I had already combined two tablespoons of gluten-free flour, two teaspoons of cinnamon, two teaspoons of ginger, one teaspoon of nutmeg, one-half teaspoon of salt and one-quarter teaspoon of cloves into a measuring cup, and set it to one side. I found it mildly interesting that six of the recipe’s ten ingredients, did not take up enough space to fill even a one-cup container. 

I had peeled, cut up, steamed and mashed the squash earlier so it was ready for action. I had eggs, coconut milk and the honey also measured out and ready to assemble, and honestly, I was feeling pretty stoked. I did not see a flaw in my plan.

I had even cut out both parchment paper and aluminum foil templates to cover the crusts around the edge of the pies to prevent them from cremating. I used to use only foil but now realize that cooking with foil is questionable, due to the connection between aluminum and Alzheimer’s disease. So I put the parchment paper on the crust first and the foil over that, so there was no contact between foil and crust.

I was glad I did, too, because those pies just baked and baked and baked for two hours, and the longer they baked, the more baked I became. JT had long since hit the road and I was handling my stress by handling the bong. I stuck the icepick into the center of both pies so many times, it was submitting paperwork for overtime pay.

Why would the pies not set? I had used coconut milk before, but had I used honey instead of sugar? Could that be why the pies were not getting firm? They looked fine and even the crust was cooperating by not cremating but frankly, I was not interested in pumpkin soup.

Mindlessly I began to clean the kitchen counter, rinsing both the big silver bowl used to mix all the ingredients, and the big bowl for the squash. I cleaned the smaller dish used for the eggs and honey and rinsed off all of the measuring spoons, spatulas and big wooden spoons used along the way.  

As I started to gather all of the recipe ingredients to return to the pantry, I grabbed the zip-loc bag in which the flour was stored. As I did so, I saw to my shock, the measuring cup with the spices and the flour.

Horrified, I connected the dots: The pies were not setting up because there was no flour, and if the flour was missing, so were all of the spices. I had managed to bake two squash pies with the personality of mush. What now? Regardless of where they came from, I needed to produce two pumpkin pies.

Possible solutions enveloped my mind, billowing forth like the smoke from my bong, all equally ephemeral. First, I had enough “pumpkin” to make the mix but it was still in its original form: a butternut squash. To convert it to pumpkin took much time. Second, I did not have cassava flour for two more crusts. Third, whereas I had almond flour to make the crusts, I had been specifically asked to avoid it. Finally, even if I could somehow create two more pies from scratch, they would never cool off in time for dinner.

Just like that, the solution hit me like an oversized cream pie in the kisser: Because the pies had not yet set up, all I had to do was divide the already whisked missing ingredients into two parts, and add them to the two pies, respectively. If I sprinkled the ingredients from the measuring cup evenly over the top of the two pies, and then gently rotated the whisk around and around them, I ought to be able to infuse the requisite pizzaz into these otherwise tasteless attempts at a small boy’s birthday “cake.”

Unorthodox, at best, and somewhat bizarre at worst, I nonetheless went about the business of correcting my mistake, blending the essential spices and flour into the mixture. Surprisingly, once I had put them back into the preheated oven, the pies set up almost right away and were ready for our singing of “Happy birthday” later that evening. 

I was washing dishes as the pie was distributed, and I held my breath waiting for the inevitable question, “What happened?” It never came and fortunately, I remembered to start breathing again. 

In a perfect world, you want to avoid the circus tent approach to baking, but if you find yourself in the midst of said arena, make like the magician you are, and pull two pumpkin pies out of your hat.