Stagnating and Sprouting

It’s Fall. Is that why I feel I’m stagnating? I’ve plenty to do: still a lot of canning and cooking, some harvesting, and a whole lot of work on next Spring’s garden, not to mention our Fall and Winter garden. But I feel the need to do new things, to keep the skill set growing. If only in small ways. The next big one that’s coming up is the chickens, which I anticipate in Spring (we’ll probably start from chicks), but until then…

I’m sprouting. It seems like such an easy and simple and logical thing to do. I have been thinking about it for a while but sometimes a person needs some other person pushing upon her a packet of seeds, just a couple of tablespoons full, and a small leaflet with instructions and saying “Here it is, that’s all you need, it’s simple.” That happened to me at my last Farmers Market on Wednesday and my fenugreek seeds are now soaking in the Ball jar. They need to be rinsed twice a day, which feels right to me: I like that rhythm. I figure I will experiment with seeds and beans and then choose two or three that we like and I’ll buy pounds of it and store them in my freezer.

I feel like lots of good things happened at that Farmers Market. Besides the sprouts I am very excited about the raw milk (great article in Salon here). I read up on the farm that is supplying the milk and am confident it’s the right choice. I want to make yogurt and paneer with it, and later on more “cultured” cheeses. The only downside is that it’s quite expensive ($4.5 per half gallon), so I won’t be able to indulge my milk cravings (I can drink a gallon of the stuff some days).

And sometime this weekend or next week, whenever I find a moment, I am going to bake my first bread. That’s also not a big one, really, not a difficult one, but one that will make all the difference as Fall comes barreling down the pipeline.