The part where things get weird (and bloody, and happy)

Wiggle my thumb under the thick capsule of connective tissue at the insertion of a duct, feel the give of the liver under my thumb, slide it wide open, slipping my fingers under the widening gap, pulling it off of the liver's quivering mass with an insistent tug. Feed the connective tissue to the dog. Feed the liver to us. The six year old eats four slices of pâté for breakfast and I eat it all week long for breakfast and lunch and the baby eats it as an afternoon snack. If I'm feeling decadent, or maybe just hungry, I melt some grass-fed butter or some lard that I've rendered  in a skillet and crisp the slices of pâté, pour homemade kimchee over them, slice an avocado atop, toss it all with arugula and call it breakfast, lunch, dinner.
The work is messy. It looks a little garish. Usually I need to wipe up flecks of blood when I'm done. But I'm El Slobbo in the kitchen, I trust you to be more careful. I'm busy meditating on the liver, not really present to the fresh, iron smell and the silky flesh in front of me.
I'm thanking the rancher that saves us the hearts and the tongue and the cheeks and the livers and the bones because he knows I rhapsodize about them. I'm thanking the French and their economizing ways with the whole animal, thanking Julia Child for sharing it with me, thanking the palates of my two little children who beg me for brie and olives and broccoli and Big Huge Meat, Mama in the grocery store, thanking the wisdom and cultural rhythm of cooking at home with real food, thanking my husband for loving what I make, my friends for eating this way and finding joy and strength in their spirits and bellies, thanking the wisdom of eating fats and proteins that sustain me and satisfy me. I'm thanking this act that ties me to the cutting board, that ties me to this slippery and bloody hunk of liver, this way that I feed us. It doesn't feel squeamish, or exotic, or forced. It's just another day chasing the life I love. It's another little snapshot of daily life. It's me, peeling and hacking a giant chunk of beef liver, reformed vegetarian that I am, something rendered simple and essential to me that once seemed unnecessary and esoteric.
The further and further I head down this road of caring for us, feeding us, pursuing our heart's desire, the wilder and wilder the story starts to feel. I didn't always enjoy cleaning liver (or touching meat at all, for that matter), nor did I give much (any?) thought to culturing creme fraiche on my counter, or brewing comfrey to nurse a wound, or raising meat rabbits in my backyard. But it does seem that in the last three years or so some kind of crack in the levy of conventional thought and personal limitations gave way to a flood of possibility, and the mental liberation has birthed an explosion of productivity and happiness like nothing I have experienced before. I  look down at my (very) bloody hands and start to understand that finally, I am linking my experience with my destiny. It is a connection that propels me forward as much as it stretches behind me, to generations before me, to pull from the collective wisdom of what it means to feed a family, use an animal well, and spend my time honorably.

Call it finding your way, heeding your calling, living the magic. I call it lucky, and happy, (and, dammit, precious after so much hard work and scrambling and wrong turns) and also, I call it:  Pâté maison.

 

Pâté maison, Meaty B-style

I make another pâté of chicken livers that calls for, I am not lying, a pound of butter. This pâté is not as rich and as such, I find I can enjoy it throughout the week without feeling like I ate, well, a pound of butter. I've made a good few pâtés lately and this is the recipe that has evolved from many I have tried.
My relationship with liver got much happier once I started feeding us grass-fed liver (as a disclaimer, I have always liked liver. But this pâté is more reminiscent of -don't get the wrong idea here - lunch meat than it is of the liver and onions I grew up eating). The rancher we buy our meat from happily supplies us ample liver. I do take the time to cut away the ducts and connective tissue. I find this easier to do with my finger than a knife, then use a knife to slice the cleaned liver into thinner wedges. Consider it time to commune with the steer. Merci, say to him. Vous serez delicieux (you will be delicious)!

1 lb. grass-fed beef liver, cleaned of connective tissue and ducts and cut into small chunks
1 lb. coarsely ground, pastured pork
1 large shallot, coarsely chopped
4 tbsp. unsalted butter or lard
1 tbsp. sweet sherry
1 tbsp. brandy or red wine
2 cloves garlic, minced
1 tsp. allspice
1/2 tsp. ground cinnamon
1/4 tsp. ground cloves
1 tsp. sea salt
1 tsp. coarsely ground pepper
1 tbsp. coarsely chopped parsley or thyme, leaves only
4 thin slices of bacon or pancetta

Preheat an oven to 350 F with a middle rack. Prepare a hot water bath (I do this by heating a large casserole in the oven while it warms and then pouring almost boiling water from a kettle into the casserole once I've placed my cooking vessel in the casserole).
Over medium heat, melt the cooking fat and gently cook the shallot until translucent. Do not allow to brown. When the shallot is shiny and soft, about 5 minutes, turn the heat to medium high and add the liver, taking care not to crowd the pan. Barely brown on all sides. The liver should still be very pink inside. Transfer liver and contents of pan (shallots, juices) to a food processor and start the processor. Add all spices and seasonings, except the parsley. Process several minutes, until very smooth. Add the pork and parsley and coarse until roughly blended; chunks of pork should be visible in the mixture and the parsley should be in small, fine pieces.
Butter (generously) an 8x5 bread pan or earthen terrine well and scoop the mixture in to the pan. Flatten with a spatula and layer the bacon over the top. Place the pan into the warm water bath and bake in the oven for 1.5 hours. Remove from the oven, remove from the hot water bath, and allow to cool in the pan. Cover the pan with a sheet of cooking parchment and place a heavy item (a stone or brick work well) over the top to weigh the pâté down. Chill in the refrigerator until set firm, usually overnight. Slide a butter knife around the edges of the pan to unmold the pâté or slice directly from the pan. Keeps about a week wrapped tightly in the refrigerator.
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What food connects you with a visceral and genuine sense of life?

Let it go, while keeping it in mind

I'm a woman who likes a clean house.

Messy closets send me into anxiety fits. (Thank God for closet doors). Dishes piled in the sink do it to me, too. I'm not proud of this aspect of my personality. But it certainly seems to be a part of who I am.

When I was pregnant with our second I made myself "practice" letting little things go in preparation for giving my energy and attention to two small people. I left the beds unmade in the morning. I left dishes in the sink. I left toys on the floor until a single evening pick up. It caused a lot of anxiety. It was a wonderful mindfulness practice tool. But I didn't last long. It takes thirty seconds to make a bed. And then my kids get a calm mom. Jeff gets a friendly wife. I can see beyond myself. Sometimes you can't fight nature. By nature, I love order. By nature, my children don't.

Sometimes there are a lot of dishes in my sink, and not enough minutes in the morning. I close the kitchen blinds and lock the door and we run out into the day and do what fills all of us up. And when we get home and need to collectively exhale (nap, draw, dig in the dirt, whatever) I fill my sink with hot water, open the blinds so I can see all the birds visiting our feeders, and I plunge my hands into the tail-end of my work in the kitchen. I make things shiny and new, if but for a moment.

It took me years to make peace with life without a dishwasher. It took me years to make peace with the need to sweep more than once a day (or more than once a week, at that). But unless I want dust bunnies for children, and unless I start serving all our food on paper plates, the reality is there. My wabi-sabi household is a constant flux of order and chaos. Everywhere I turn there is an opportunity to do, or not do, and sit with the feeling of not-doing, and understand it is a sacrifice to something I deem more valuable: an extra story read, or an extra ten minutes writing to a friend, or an extra few moments to sit with the terror of not doing and come out on the other side intact, not undone.

You can laugh when I tell you I experience terror at the thought of unmade beds but there it is. My mind is a peaceful river when things are tucked and tidy. Granted the six year old makes his own bed and so it is neither tucked nor tidy, but: it is made. There's a house that we've walked by almost every week for almost five years on our way to the library. They have two children. She never shuts her bedroom blinds. And she never makes her bed. I don't judge her for it. I actually love her for it. I think she is brave and knows what matters to her, and she doesn't care who sees it. But still. I want to make her bed for her. I have a fondness, an admiration for people with houses where life is so obviously happening. Those are the places I want to visit. They are the places I feel at home. I remember this when I feel the urge to have a freak-out cleaning session in the middle of a boisterous and happy day. I remember it, and I shut up, and keep playing. I can always get ninja on the mess when everyone is tucked in bed. This duality satisfies both desires of my heart: to play, to be a mama who plays. And that strong desire for neatness. My only exertion of power in world that is constantly disassembling itself around me. Would that I could open my heart to disassembly.

I'm past the point these days of worrying about what this says about me. As I see it, it says: I know myself, I know what I like, and I know I function well when things are orderly. And also it says: I need to work at functioning in chaos. Because the truth of my life is that there's a good deal of both.

While I contemplate the dilemma more, something emerges: I like the process of keeping our home much more than the finished product. The finished product of a neat house was born to die. The process ties me to the reality of life. It's pretty grounding. I like that there is a rhythm and consistency to the way we make our beds, wash our dishes, sweep our floors. Maybe this is what I really love about order, the way it reliably structures pieces of my time. It's reassuring. I'm not so neurotic that I can't receive help. Children wash lots of dishes and (un)sweep lots of piles and scrub lots of toilets in this house. You can imagine that this is not a very pretty process. I think the way we keep house is simple. I like simple. We don't use many bottles or tools. We mostly use elbow grease and a good dose of practicality and consistency. And when it just gets too much, one can always shut the door, or the blinds, and go outside, or under a quilt and deep into a good book.

Really, isn't it just a matter of making daily decisions about what to let go of, and what to hold onto, and acknowledging that despite intentional decision making on either behalf, the outcome is out of our hands? Come to think of it, isn't this the dance of parenting? Of loving anyone? Of making it through the day and choosing happy?

Portrait of a (very) imperfect woman 

Here's a favorite winter recipe perfect for my style of housekeeping, mothering, being in this world. Small bursts of effort, with long periods of time in between for play and wonder. And at the end, oh so worth it.

Daube de Boeuf - Casserole of Beef with Wine and Vegetables  (adapted from Mastering the Art of French Cooking)

I make this with mysteriously designated "stew meat", shanks, osso bucco (cut shanks), chuck, brisket...anything with lots of cartilage, fat, etc, works fine. Doubles and triples easily - you really are only limited by the size of your casserole or dutch oven and the amount of time you want it to bubble in your oven.

Working ahead (anywhere from 6 hours to 3 days in advance):
3 lbs. of beef - either cut into 2.5 inch squares, or into relatively small steaks (as in osso bucco)
1.5 cups dry red or white wine, or dry vermouth
2 tsp salt
1/4 tsp pepper
1/2 tsp dried, crumbled thyme
1 crumbled bay leaf
2 cloves mashed garlic
1 large onion, thinly sliced

Place the beef in a bowl, and mix with the herbs, spices, and wine. Cover and let marinate in refrigerator for 6 hours and up to 3 days. Turn frequently.
In the interest of full disclosure, the only thing I measure closely here is the salt:meat by weight ratio. Everything else I play gallant happy kitchen chef and just toss and stir and smell and relax. Remember. Relax.

Remove from the refrigerator an hour or two before serving and allow to come to room temperature (or don't. This is just my habit).

1 cup coconut flour, sifted
6 slices bacon (JC simmers hers first to remove the smokiness. I cannot be bothered).
8-10 ounces of mushrooms, mixed variety is fun here, chopped into large, roughly uniform-sized pieces
4-6 carrots, peeled and roughly chopped into large discs (like maybe the size of your thumb)
optional:  3-4 other root veggies if you so wish: turnips, parsnips, sweet potatoes. I like something sweeter (parsnips especially) to offset the heartiness of the marinade, meat and mushrooms.
Bone broth (any type - usually I use beef or chicken) - or filtered water.
roughly 2.5 cups of chopped, stewed tomatoes or tomato puree
a few springs of thyme (optional but pretty and delicious)

Preheat an oven to 325 F and set a middle rack.
Line the bottom of a dutch oven with half the bacon. Lay a single layer of mushrooms, root veggies and the onions from the marinade over the bacon. Dredge the marinated meat, piece by piece, in the coconut flour and shake off so each piece has a very light coating. Arrange a thin layer of meat over the vegetables and pour 1/2 the tomatoes over the meat. Start another layer of bacon and continue to layer. Over the last layer pour all the remaining marinade and add broth or filtered water to bring the liquid level to just below the top layer of meat. Bring to a boil over the stove, cover the container with a piece of parchment or foil to create a tight seal, and place the lid. Move to the hot oven and cook for 3-4 hours - the meat should fall apart when touched with a fork.

Take some time to stop doing while you make this. Go outside and walk back into the house and breathe in the smell of this filling your home with your effort.

This is good the night of. Even better the next day. I have been known to put it in the oven, go to bed, get up at midnight to turn it off, and be unable to wait for dinner the next night to eat it. Talk about letting it go, while keeping it in mind.
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What do you work on letting go of, and all the while holding in your mind?

A great distance

I'm not going to bore you with the details of how un-fun it is to travel in holiday traffic with two small children and a senile dog in a cramped car for 10 hours as the only adult. I'm going to let your imagination explore that one without my help.

But it was a great distance, and it is over, and we are all remarkably unscathed. And it was worth it. And it's business as usual in this house, which is to say, everything feels unusual, and a little exciting, and the days seem long and full of possibility again.

But this thing about travel: I do feel like I am hooked onto a trajectory that is flying through the air at warp speed, a trajectory called my children and how they are changing, and I'm being chased by another dart, the one called and everything I need to change to help them, and it's a consuming flight right now, and I have to admit, I wouldn't mind hitting a jag of weather that slowed the whole show down. Does that happen when they get older? I think I used to believe it does and now I am pretty sure it doesn't. This mothering business only gets different, but I really doubt it ever gets much easier. There are moments when it seems effortless, when I look at the sky and I proclaim that I was made to do this (I know, you just snorted your coffee through your nose when you pictured that one), and then again there are moments, days, weeks where I seriously question my suitability for the job. So I try to stay here. To not get carried away by the great arc of flight that this gig really is. If I even start to contemplate the transformation in our lives over the past 6 years my knees shake a little. Better to just think about the grocery list and the nearest task at hand. The journey is so much less terrifying when broken into the littlest pieces, like how many hard boiled eggs did I peel today, when should I plant the sweet peas, does the bird feeder need more seed, do I need to wash some diapers.

So I'm traveling this great distance, and I don't want to bitch out on the trip, and I really don't want to rush the whole way and realize, once we've gotten to our destination, that somebody felt unheard, or unimportant, or just wasn't having any fun. Because I'm not sure we'll ever get "there". I'm pretty sure, in fact, that this is all about the car ride.

It's all about the baby (I am reserving the right to call her that for at least another year, though she's clearly closer to 12 than to 1) and her soup, all over the place mat, the sweatshirt, and the dog. It's about the little boy who opted for no dinner, God forbid he should eat soup. It's about finding the presence of mind to sit with all of this, to not get volcanic. To play Yahtzee with Daddy and wash dishes and do bedtimes that end in sweetness and kisses rather than stand-offs. I often feel lost in this mothering woods, but I am confident that any map provided to mothers would stipulate this very thing, that the place where you feel you are SO lost is the exact place where the you have arrived! pin goes.

I'm keeping it simple. Employing the words "No, thank you". Making sure to play, a lot, by myself and with others. Walking out of the room rather than engage in an argument with a six year old (yes, I stoop that low, and lower). I don't want to win. I don't want to lose. To milk the journey metaphor a little more deeply, I want to keep driving, and play license plate games, and sing 100 Bottles of Beer on the Wall.

So there's soup. I don't think it gets much easier. And when they won't eat it, let them go play with their Bionicles in their room. They can have extra eggs and bacon in the morning. And when they want to drink it out of the bowl, and create a soup splash zone around their chair, let them. Just buckle up and have some fun.

Winter Soup: Green Eggs and Ham, Meaty-style
(Serves 8)

2 pounds of ham might seem hefty but I needed this to be a one-pot meal for a family of protein lovers. Plus we had a ten pound ham for New Year's.

3-4 tbsp lard, ghee, or coconut oil
1 yellow onion, sliced into quarter moons
1 heaping tbsp. whole grain Dijon mustard
2 lbs. collard greens
1 head green cabbage
4-5 carrots
2 pounds ham, cubed
Chicken broth, about 2 quarts (I used unsalted bone broth)
Filtered water
Sea salt, to taste
Black pepper, to taste
1 egg per person to be served
 
Melt fat over medium high heat. Saute onions until translucent and starting to brown slightly. Meanwhile, prepare collards: tear leaves from main central stem and fill a sink with cool water. Swirl gently every now and then and soak leaves in sink for a few minutes to allow grit to fall to bottom. Dry in small batches in salad spinner (good job for baby). Press remaining moisture out of leaves by sandwiching between two kitchen towels. Layer leaves on top of one another and roll into a tight coil, then slice into 1/2 inch ribbons. Add to onions and stir to coat in fat. Core cabbage and slice into 1/2 inch ribbons, add to pot, stir to coat with fat. Peel and cut carrots into bite sized pieces, add carrots and ham to pot, turn heat up all the way, add broth and, if needed, water to bring liquid levels just above vegetables. When boiling, cover, leaving lid slightly ajar, and turn down to gentle simmer (there should be gentle movement in the pot). Simmer about ten minutes, until carrots are soft enough to yield to a fork but not mushy. Break eggs (but don't break yolks) onto top of soup, cover tightly, and turn heat low. Cook until eggs whites are set and yolks are soft (about 5 minutes). Ladle an egg into each soup bowl and cover with broth, veggies, and ham. Set to slurping.

We served these with pretty un-sweet, protein-rich sweet potato muffins globbed in grass-fed butter. Which my kids eat with a fork. And maybe I do, too. But that's fodder for another day.
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How's your journey treating you these days? Better yet, how are you treating your journey?