Bees are dying and have chosen the walkway under the clothesline for their hospice. Dear neighbor Jay planted a hedge of Carolina Star Jasmine between our homes. The bees love it and this is the height of its fragrant season. Is it because there’s so much work to do this spring that the bees are dropping dead from over work?
I have to put on shoes to hang and retrieve the clothes from the line, for fear of being stung on the toes by the poor bumblers in the throes of their death writhe. Dozens.
What could be ailing them? Fungus among us? DDT-like substances?
Our FDA does NOT seem to be protecting anyone’s interests but Big Agra’s. I’m afraid their interests are NOT in the best interests of the natural world.
Keep a good thought for the bees, please.
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Bone Broth seems to be a wonderful way to increase nutrition in a yummy way.
What you’ll need:
- A large stock pot
- Several pounds of bones – these can be from scraps in your kitchen, the carcass from one or two roast chickens, or specially bought grass fed beef bones from your local butcher. Make sure you include the joints and ligaments – these are important.
- Veggie scraps (use onion peels and ends, garlic peels and ends, carrots, celery, peppers, etc – you can use just about anything that isn’t bitter). We like to throw in any veggies that are looking a little “sad” in our veggie bin at the end of the week – not moldy, but the ones looking a little too soggy to eat fresh.
- Very important: 1-2 teaspoons of apple cider vinegar. The acid helps to draws the minerals from the bones.
- Optional: fresh herbs and spices. We’ll often throw in some fresh rosemary or sage, or other herbs that are floating around. Get creative! Once you’ve tried this a few times you’ll find what you like.
The process:
- Put the bones, veggie scraps, vinegar, and herbs into the stock pot. Cover with filtered water.
- Bring to a boil and skim any foam off the top. The foam is just any impurities coming out of the bones. Sometimes it’s there, sometimes it isn’t.
- Reduce the heat on your stove to the lowest possible and gently simmer your broth for at least 8 hours, up to 48 hours. The rule of thumb is the bigger the bones, the longer you need to simmer your broth. Make sure not to cook the broth at too high a temperature! It will denature some of the proteins and create natural MSG. We put the stove at the lowest temperature and just leave it for a couple of days.
- Strain out the bones and veggies, and either use immediately, or store in a big glass jar in your fridge. It keeps up to a week.
So you have a gallon of broth in your fridge. What now?
I drink it like I would a cup of tea every evening; sometimes multiple times a day. You can use it as base for soup, stews, pulled meats, or sauces. Use it instead of water for cooking grains such as rice, quinoa, or millet. If you make it gelatinous enough, you can cut it into cubes and eat it cold, like jell-o (fun and super nutritious food for kids!) And I’m sure there are plenty of other uses for it.
Grab some bones, dust off the big old stock pot, and get cooking!
Our local Farmer’s Market has some yummy grass-fed beef bones and chickens that taste so different from grain fed. Yummy! Thanks, Lorie!
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Dads and Grads duly celebrated.
Hallmark rakes in the bucks.
Trader Joe’s has cards for cheap
They work just as well so WTF?
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Eager to begin the Turf Removal Project in the front yard to save water and enjoy a wider driveway. Parking for our local private school is oozing into our neighborhood. Some days, we can’t even get out of our street, the traffic is so bad. Forget about parking. The High School kids are so cute and right on schedule. They’re primping in the rear view mirror for final checks on their appearance while maneuvering mom’s Mercedes or Lexus SUV to take up precisely two parking spaces.
Wider drive will save on frustration AND be permeable so any rain (is there any rain out there?) may percolate down into the water table.
Won’t it be lovely when the L.A. River is really flowing through an EARTHEN water course way? Cement channels funneling all that precious liquid out to the sea seems a tragedy to me... not to mention the fertilizers, petrol, and insecticides are not fish friendly food!
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Welcome to the new Poet Laureate of the United States!
Charles Wright’s poem Body and Soul II (for Coleman Hawkins) was shared by my lovely writing teacher, Andrea Beard, on Friday...
The structure of landscape is infinitesimal,
Like the structure of music,
seamless, invisible.
Even the rain has larger sutures.
What holds the landscape together, and what holds music together,
Is faith, it appears -- faith of the eye, faith of the ear.
Nothing like that in language,
However, clouds chugging from west to east like blossoms
Blown by the wind
April, and anything’s possible.
Here is the story of Hsuan Tsang.
A buddhist monk, he went from Xian to southern India
and back -- on horseback, on camel-back, on elephant-back,
and on foot.
Ten thousand miles it took him, from 629 to 645,
Mountains and deserts, in search of the Truth,
the heart of the heart of Reality,
The Law that would help him escape it,
And all its attendant and inescapable suffering.
And he found it.
These days, I look at things, not through them,
And sit down low, as far away from the sky as I can get.
The reef of the weeping cherry flourishes coral,
The neighbor’s back porch light bulbs glow like anemones.
Squid-eyed Venus floats forth overhead.
This is the half hour, half-light, half-dark,
when everything starts to shine out,
And aphorisms skulk in the trees,
Their wings folded, their heads bowed.
Every True poem is a spark,
and aspires to the condition of the original fire
Arising out of the emptiness.
It is that same emptiness it wants to reignite.
It is that same engendering it wants to be re-engendered by.
Shooting stars.
April’s identical,
celestial, wordless, burning down.
Its light is the light we commune by.
Its destination’s our own, its hope is the hope we live with.
Wang Wei, on the other hand,
Before he was 30 years old bought his famous estate on the Wang River
Just east of the east end of the Southern Mountains,
and lived there,
Off and on, for the rest of his life.
He never travelled the landscape, but stayed inside it,
A part of nature himself, he thought.
And who would say no
To someone so bound up in solitude,
in failure, he thought, and suffering.
Afternoon sky the color of Cream of Wheat, a small
Dollop of butter hazily a the western edge.
Getting too old and lazy to write poems,
I watch the snowfall
From the apple trees.
Landscape, as Wang Wei says, softens the sharp edges of isolation.
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Good Summer Solstice! Longest Day comin' up! Enjoy!
