Monday, October 30, 2017

Halloween Costumes

Young Wonder

Imagination Lives On 

Kids love to play dress up and imagine great adventures. Lucky the children sneaking up to an attic with trunks of vintage clothes, high heels, big hats with slightly ratty feathers, baseball and railroad caps, cowboy boots, a Mary Poppins magic brolly, capes and sou'westers!

Imagination flowers with real things.

I was lucky in my clever mother: she made my Halloween outfits. She might buy a mask, but then sewed costumes from crepe paper. My fave was the owl mask and a tunic and trous of overlapping feathers, winged sleeves that all but flew away! 

They only lasted the one night, but remembering such unabashed outrageous creativity remains a lifelong source of joy. 

She also made cookies for the trick-or-treaters, oatmeal-raisin and chocolate-chip, before we started fearing our neighbors, and dared buy only food-industry candy.

In the Rocky Mountain town nearby, the community has made it safe for families on Halloween. The plaza sports a haunted house, games, a pirate ship. And small businesses in the walking area of town get costumed themselves and offer treats to the wee witches, ghouls, angels and superman..-woman..(superpersons!)


My last Halloween, I'd begun to elongate and decided to go as a tree! I wore green tights, twined myself with ivy, wore a bird's nest in my hair. 

Feeling quite jolly about it, I soon learned that it was my last All Hallows' Eve as a child.

We knocked on a door, and shouted a joyful Trick-or-Treat! A dumpy woman with a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the corner of her mouth had nothing to offer but this: She looked me up and down, and said, "Next time, just wear a fig leaf." 

But I never stopped loving the festivity, the excitement of dress-up, and some ancient frisson of the parting of the veil between this life and the mystical.

In our societal-asylum of us-and-them, and them must be condemned, am reading about the particular self-righteousness condemning Halloween. 

It's not Christian. No? 

Is it human? Is it fun? Does it enrich us with playfulness?

On a more sober note, the kids get sugar/MSG/Aspartame/HFCS/artificial color-highs from the industrial-strength "candy."

And pondering our economic overreach, our Wiley Coyote teetering on a cliff's edge, we might put that wild whoopee fun money into... oh, food pantries?


That said, I may rummage in an old trunk... a costume for the night's silliness, and celebration of autumn harvest. Fall colors of gold and crimson, bright pumpkins, and munchkins afoot!

Jack O Lantern Pumpkins 
 
Thanks to all for 
Reading, reviewing and yea gifting 
the Wayfaring Traveler books.


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Saturday, October 21, 2017

Farmers Market, Bounty & Recipes

pumpkin

A Feast of Produce
Interesting People

Every now and then, I walk the inedible stretches of supermarket aisles, trying not to hyperventilate. GMO's by the gazillion, AgBiz sprays galore...

Drifting over to produce, we find poison waxed-over apples. Sleeping Beauty special, and who's the fairest of them all? 

It could be old-timey and maybe imperfect apples from the farmers market. Crunchy, wowza taste and some of it made into pies and fresh-squeezed apple cider.

Farm Pictures 5 
 
Cider was a gravitation point today. Farmers offer high-taste, intense color and vitamin content, from family farms, food they eat themselves. Many smile on appreciative customers and do bulk discount. 

Moi? Am transferring hearty apple cider from gallon glass jugs into quart canning jars. Once processed, and sealed, they'll be tucked away for winter's mulled cider.

Recipe, all ingredients organic:
2 Qts. cider
1-2 cinnamon sticks 
1+ tsp. whole clove spice
1+ tsp. whole allspice
6 whole black pepper corns
1/2 orange, thinly sliced
1/2 lemon, thinly sliced

Your kitchen will smell ambrosial as you slow simmer. The mulling creates a flu- and cold-fighter, an immune booster. Simmer in an enamel or glass pot. Not, repeat, not aluminum. (Linked with Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, etc.; ditto flu shots, caveat emptor.)

The cider guys at our local farmers' market are gradually transitioning to glass from plastic, as customers get a clue re investment in infrastructure, and return the jugs!

Had marvelous chats with the mushroom fellow. Have been drying his shitakes for winter. 

He told me he's growing all his shrooms in the sun for Vit. D content, and they'll have even more if I sun-dry them, now that the overcast and deluge have let up. 

 Mushrooms,mushroom,mushrooms,shitake

Blest here with high-elevation brilliant light, am currently drying his oyster and shitake mushrooms on trays in the sun room.

Another bounty at the market? Folks have conversations; there's little texting in evidence, it being so people-rich.

I asked the mushroom guy about his bright-eyed munchkin, and he beamed. On a recent jaunt, the little guy was sitting in his car seat in the back. The Dad played a CD of cello music and wee sprout started singing along. With perfect pitch!

It's nearly the "last rose of summer" with celery. Organically-grown is a deep vibrant green. I came home with a couple nearly meter long heads, full of leaves. They dry beautifully for winter cream of celery soup.

The woman farmer who brings in organically-grown eggs, brown and the blue-green Araucanas, was looking shell-shocked, and hadn't a single egg.

She told me, her Australian blue-heeler farm dog just died, and last night a bobcat got into her chicken coop. They go berserk; it killed twenty-five hens and the eighteen left were too traumatized to lay.

A man had just bought a pound of red onions from her, and was so distressed at her loss that he gave her a twenty dollar bill, and said, "Please buy some baby chicks."

Bobcat (short tail; smaller than mt. lion)

You've heard of Hopi Blue Corn? It's seed that's been saved for hundreds of years on the Pueblos hereabouts. Almost a purple-black and high in protein, nutrients and TASTE. 

(Eat your heart out, Monsanto.)

It's regarded as a sacred food of long lineage and is protected from the biotech monsters who seek to destroy ancient seeds--in order to charge for their expletive-deleted GMO patents. Harrumph.

Hopi Blue Corn Organic

Met a young farmer who's growing beautiful blue corn and thinking ahead, gulp, he invested in a $4,000 stone flour grinder. He had fresh-ground corn meal in cloth sacks... THE best corn bread on God's green earth.

For skillet cornbread (I have to get busy with the cider) check out the Recipes at my books & more site: