Veggies, turkeys and a tiny bit of conflict

Posted on by Jen

img_4057A couple of months back I already shared that CSA Day was my favorite day of the week but the reality is that fall is here and tomorrow is the official last day of summer here in the Pacific Northwest. October arrives and we are told to expect wet and cloudy weather from here on out until the spring, so I’m savoring every veggie pick up day and every farmers market.

This week we cam home with some lemon squash which I’m excited about tasting. The size of the squash available this week was massive, but I’m not a believer that bigger is always better, so I stuck with the more manageable small guys. With that said, walking into the barn and seeing the monster squash does make me pretty excited.

We lingered a little bit on the farm this time around. Picking beautiful purple Dahlia’s and Swiss chard for our u-pick items and then marking our pumpkin which we will pick up on the last day of the CSA….but we won’t talk about that right now.

The turkeys on the farm are getting bigger. We sat and watched them run back and forth discussing with Jess, one of the girls who works the farm, how they’ve fared with their chickens and turkeys this year. We’ve already put down our deposit on one of those birds who will find itself on our table for Thanksgiving. I enjoy knowing where my food is coming from, but I have to admit that I feel a tiny bit guilty being entertained by these feathery, quirky creatures and knowing that one of them is going to be dinner.

img_4061With that said, this is part of the reality. While these are cute creatures, they are food. This is the circle of life, especially on a farm. Living in the city, I did realize that the meat I was buying was once a live, thriving animal. I tell my vegetarian friends that while I’m going to eat meat, it is important to me that my meat was happy, running around in the sun during the duration of its life. But now, I see the chicken, turkey, cow or pig that may end up as part of a meal on my plate and as an animal lover, that can be conflicting sometimes.

I’m planning on raising our own chickens for eggs by next spring, and while I’m not raising them for meat, there will come a time when those chickens don’t lay eggs anymore and I’ll have to decide if my egg endeavor is a hobby farm operation or are those girls going to eventually be additional pets for the Peters pack.

Going to the farm each week is therapeutic for me for many reasons. It gets me out of my office at the beginning of the week, we get to meet fellow CSA shareholders and it’s probably going to prepare me for having a few farm animals of our own.

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It’s a dog (beach) life

Posted on by Jen

I didn’t get my ocean view, but I do get to find the ocean and that can mean heading with Moonpie and the Lady Labs to Double Bluff Dog Beach.

The ocean has always been special to me, but add our pups to the scene and it is pure joy. Watching the girls run up and down the beach at full blast makes us laugh every time.

The one member of the pack that surprises us the most on our trips to Double Bluff is Moonpie. img_3481When we left Texas, Moonpie had been suffering from arthritis and seemed to not be into life at all. She’s our oldest dog at 13, but she may be our favorite (sshhhh….don’t tell the Lady Labs).

Since moving here, Moonpie has seemed to come into her second wind. She’s spunky, demands treats and she heards the Lady Labs all around the back yard. She loves running the trails at the Greenbank dog park and here on the beach.

Life is good if you are a Moonpie. And why wouldn’t it, when you have beach, salty Sound waters of the Salish Sea and mountains beckoning you to run.

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Falling in love with sheep cheese

Posted on by Jen

The Whidbey Island Chapter for Slow Food offers a variety of activities from jam workshops, to farm tours and potluck dinners. Since we are a foodie at heart in love with eating slow food, it seemed like a good fit and a way to meet like minded people.

My favorite Slow Food Whidbey event so far is the tour of Glendale Shepherd Farm. I had seen the folks at Glendale Shepherd at the Bayview Farmer’s Market and even purchased some of their cheese, but the tour, which included a wine and cheese tasting made me a sheep cheese fan girl. Walking their farm up and down toward the high cliff coastline looking over to the mainland was beautiful. Their 60 milking sheep have space to roam and graze on land with fantastic water views. Happy sheep make for happy cheese is what I learned.

While the Island Brebis is the cheese that has given them a claim to fame winning awards in the past, but the Tallulah is my favorite.  Tallulah is a mild cheese with a creamy center and on the outside boasts a nutty rind.

There was mention that the sheep were soon coming to the end of their milking time, which means Tallulah is coming to the end of the season. I will definitely be heading to the Bayview Farmer’s Market each Saturday to make sure I have the opportunity for another taste.

In just a couple of months, winter will arrive and the markets will close until May. It seems so far away, the end of October, but I know it will be here before we know it. And then, all my favorite things will be gone until spring.

 

 

The recycling dilemma

Posted on by Jen

We’ve been on the island for almost two months now and haven’t taken one thing to one of the four recycling centers on the island. It’s embarrassing, and frankly it had become a problem in our garage. Is this box something that needs to be unpacked? Nope, just recycling waiting to find its home.

Recycling in the city is pretty simple. Paper, plastic, newspaper, aluminum…all of it…just put it into the big blue bin and roll it out with the trash bin on trash day. Here on the island, not so.

A week after our arrival, I searched for the nearest recycling location and reviewed the rules: sort glass bottles by color, separate cardboard and flatten, rinse all cans and bottles, remove paper from tin cans and flatten….by all means separate everything. This tended to give me a little anxiety about doing this all right.

Flatten the tin cans? I stared at the two bags of cans, mostly dog food cans and made attempts to flatten them with a hammer, with my foot…nope, not going to happen. From there I went to Ace Hardware in search for a sledge hammer. Standing in the tool section staring at the 10 different sledge hammers available, I must have looked stressed or perhaps it was because I’d been standing there for 30 minutes, but I was offered help.

“It’s this recycling thing. I have to flatten the cans? It says here, I have to flatten these cans. How do I do this? I’m thinking a sledge hammer, but surely there is an easier way.”

img_3242The sales associate looked humored or possibly just thought I was crazy. She let me know that I didn’t need to flatten cans as the website instructed and she was sorry that I didn’t need a sledgehammer today after all.

So I went back to the house, sorted my recyclables, loaded up my car and found my way down to Island Recycling in Freeland. I had imagined large industrial bins, but instead found a collage of recycled goods turned into art. This eased my recycle anxiety a bit.

As I began to unload my car, I received a couple of strange looks. Yes, this is my first time doing this recycling thing in the country. Yes, I’m from the city. Yes, I may need help. They guided me through the process, reminding me that lids in no way go on the plastic bottles, as if I needed a reminder because there were signs posted all around me.

An hour later, my recycling had been placed in all the appropriate bins, without lids and paper wrappers and I didn’t even have to crush those pesky cans.

 

 

 

 

Foraging the sea for food

Posted on by Jen

One of the pulls to moving by the sea for Josh was fishing. As we wait for salmon season to open, we’ve been playing around with the crab trap. Honestly, as great as this Dungeness Crab looks, so far we haven’t had much luck.

We learned that without a boat, crabbing becomes challenging. Without a boat, you are left to try your luck at perhaps one of three docks and if you aren’t willing to hang out with the trap all day, there is a high likelihood that someone will nab your crab, if not your whole trap.

But today when Josh retrieved his trap from the Clinton pier, he found success. After throwing back the females and the rock crab that were too small, two tasty Dungeness crab remained. They became lunch. A very tasty lunch.

This wasn’t our first foraging experience. A few weeks back, we tried our hand at clamming off of Zylstra beach off Penn Cove. It was Father’s Day and was packed with people from the mainland.

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Clamming on Penn Cove.

Unlike crabbing, scavenging across the beach was a little overwhelming. There were choices. Did we want to hang out for 30 minutes and forage for Penn Cove mussels or search for clam breathing holes and dig until we found them. We chose the latter, primarily because these wild mussels looked much more difficult to clean than simply removing the beards off of the store bought variety.

Clamming is serious business and the Fish and Wildlife Rangers don’t mess around. We thought we were prepared with license in hand, a clam bag for each of us (so we can keep accurate count), but we were busted when the ranger noticed we didn’t have a measuring tool. I explained how I was measuring the clam by using my pinky finger, buimg_2847t that apparently isn’t acceptable. We only had one clam that was a fraction too small, so she was kind and let us go with a warning.

We focused on foraging for the large butter clams because they would keep us out of trouble until we had a proper ruler. As we began to prepare dinner, we realized seeking the butter clams may not have been the best plan. They are rather large and meaty, but not as tasty as the smaller cockles or little neck clams.

At the end of the day, our meal wasn’t horrible, but we chalked it up to a tasty learning experience.

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Getting familiar, with familiar

Posted on by Jen

Each time I’ve moved some place different, as much as it is exciting to explore, there is that anxiety about finding my way. Did I turn down the wrong road? Where is the nearest grocery store? Wait, where is the farmer’s market? Where is my place in all of this? Where is my tribe?

In San Antonio and Dallas, I fumbled with jotted down directions until (thank God) map apps came along. But here on the island, finding my way is a little different. Nothing has really changed since the last four or five times we’ve been here. There is one road in and out. You get here by Mukilteo/Clinton Ferry or by bridge via Deception Pass. The journey’s are the roads leading one way or the other to the water, past a farm, past a state park or a garden.

After a week here, I decided to make my way out to get this and that. Along the way, I found I knew my way for the most part. And, yet, there was this expectation that I was going to find myself lost, at the end of a dirt road wondering where I went wrong. That’s the thing about an island or a small town, eventually, you run out of real estate. With that said, I know there are nooks and crannies of this island that I haven’t discovered and plenty of people I haven’t met.

Normally in a new city, I dive in to get out of my comfort zone on purpose. Here, I feel like I need to find where that uncomfortable zone may be for me and perhaps that will take some time. We’ve moved to a house on four acres, perhaps the solace in all of this will be beyond my comfort zone, but for now, I’m simply finding my way outside the city somewhere near the end of the earth.