Feb 25, 2023·edited Feb 25, 2023Liked by Antonia Malchik
I really like your take on metaphors--sometimes they are the key to breaking open a new meaning, but many times they can also be shoehorned into speech in ways that are, what one writer I admire, terms lazy language. Attention to words, the deep meanings encoded in their histories, the precision in a turn of phrase are all a purposeful act that we need more of, it feels like. Also I watched a very nerdy and delightful show about living on a medieval farm for a year and these crazy archaeologists lived and re-created what life and the seasons would mean with work in preserving food, etc. One of the things that stuck with me is how they stored their apples--in the rafters, where a little more heat kept them dry and less likely to rot (?). I loved it for those kinds of details and discoveries the crew made as they learned from historians, etc. Not sure if it's right, but I'm curious to try something like that next time I live with an apple tree. ;)
How cool! I think it's probably accurate enough -- it's a detail I remember from some L.M. Montgomery novels. Not Anne of Green Gables, but a different series, that the character would get an apple from rafters at a neighbor's farm. I don't have any rafters :(
In Russia, my stepmom owns a dacha (most Russians have some form of dacha, even if it's little more than a shed, but almost always a garden, out in a country village), where they grow produce, and in Moscow they keep boxes of apples all winter wrapped in newspaper in a box on the enclosed but unheated balcony. It's probably just the right balance of heat and humidity? I just need to research more. The apples wither a bit over the months but they don't rot.
I think part of the magic of metaphors is how they arise spontaneously, as if from our subconscious. It's more than the final product - a juxtaposition of two disparate concepts - it's the inspired process of even thinking them together in the first place. When a metaphor is so established and unreflexively incorporated into everyday speech that it no longer really functions as a metaphor, continuing to use it as metaphor (not just a convenient shorthand expression) can become stale. The content and structure is still there, but it's sort of dead because there's no *reason* for needing that particular metaphor at that moment; we're trying to make the moment fit the metaphor. You can't really force a metaphor, anymore than you can not think of an elephant.
Maybe today soil and potatoes are just soil and potatoes, and then tomorrow some new experience will turn them back into fresh metaphors.
I think you've gotten to a core of something there, with when metaphors become stale. Cliches.
I love thinking about the way that metaphors arise in different languages, from words themselves and what they reflect about the world and then, as you say, arriving at a juxtaposition of two disparate concepts. And you're right, you can't force it. But maybe you can find it? Open yourself up to seeing the world in different ways, or seeing if it can speak to you.
We'll see if the potatoes and soil will do something along those lines ;)
The estimate of food waste in America is 40%. It sounds like you are doing much better than the average. Final disposition in compost is still part of a virtuous cycle. The potato in all its form is one of the foods I miss the most in the carb counting derby. If average folk simply stopped and considered (which you model so well), our situtation all by itself would improve.
It was funny, I read that in your post after writing this. I'm really lucky to have a composting service in the area. And this year the local detritus will come back to my garden as soil . . .
Feb 23, 2023·edited Feb 23, 2023Liked by Antonia Malchik
I liked your last paragraph so much that I copied it down in my journal.
I too had some potatoes that I had stored (obviously) not well. I kept wanting to save them as long as possible, as if they could make it until March, that I'd win some sort of award. But instead they just got lumpy and a bit moldy, and I had to sneak them into some soup instead of enjoying them closer to their prime. There's a metaphor in there for sure, but I like this idea of just sitting with the disappointment instead.
I totally get the winning some sort of award idea! I guess the same goes for canning a lot of stuff, too. Like, what am I going to accomplish with yet another rack of tomatoes that will take years to get to?
I didn't think anyone else had read Metaphors We Live By.
As for "puttng by" all that food, I was a kid on the tail end of that as a common lifestyle (already abandoned by those who had more money, and by my people as soon as they could) and remember canning season in August on the southern Plains. My parents had lived that way all their lives, of course, including through the Dust Bowl. I think a certain share of the problems we inherited from their generation is a reaction to the difficulties of that life. My mom hated canning, sewing, all that, and my dad never said anything positive about life on the farm (of course he was one of those men who seldom said much at all). I ocasionally saw a touch of nostalgia from them about the loss of community, but not about the physical world. We sometimes think of the overwhelming expansion of consumer capitalism as being about greed (and some of it, with some people was and is), but the way was made easy by a working class that was seeking any release from hardship that it could find.
Well, now you know someone! It was recommended to me maybe 15 or more years ago by a friend at the time who taught English as a Second Language and was very into pedagogy, Piaget, and Vygotsky. I'd been working in textbook publishing for a few years by then, and it turned out we both had an interest in how both language and learning work, which of course have a lot of overlap.
My mom grew up on a homestead and did all the things I think partly out of nostalgia, but I've never known anyone who had to rely on these methods who wasn't eager for a less labor-intensive life. I have this unpublished essay I keep going back to about fossil fuels and the release from labor. It was about much harder labor from centuries ago, but I think there's a lot in what you say about how hard life could often be, especially an agricultural life even recently, and what a relief it is not to have to do that work. I like the canning and growing, though I more enjoy the hunting and gathering, but truly hate sewing. A lot. Solidarity with your mom there. I have no interest in having that activity foisted on me. And if I were forced to do all the others purely for survival? They'd probably be less attractive. I imagine that's where having an *actual* community can come in. You don't have to do everything yourself.
Great to have the luxury of choosing our labors. They become the play that sings in body and soul. This BIG CITY (the big apple) kid transplanted himself to this freezing wind blasted forest out of love, and that includes of cutting, hauling splitting and storing firewood, shoveling snow, pulling salsify, knapweed and thistle, as well as appreciation for having THE GOOD FOOD STORE within a modest drive and a car to get there... and hospitals, and more - but not of everything. And there's the rub.
You meditation on words reminds me of one of the opening lines-a piece of the purpose statement-of the book of Proverbs.
"...to understand a proverb and a saying, the words of the wise and their riddles."
For years I couldn't help but think, "Great, I can solve riddles. How practical." Because, you know, Will James and the Enlightenment, etc.
But one of the definitely patterns throughout Proverbs is the pitting of odd, unexpected, asymmetric words against each other. I think one of the points of this ancient text is that words that look simple are layered with nuance and complexity, and a good part of building wisdom (the WORDS of the WISE) is through digging into it!
And I think Aristotle said something (in the Poetics?) about how the sign of a true philosophy was the ability to find links in disparate ideas through metaphor.
Hakim Sanai, THE HADIQUA, the walled garden. The wall designates not a sharp delineation, but a distinction between the bhakti path of love and the solitude desert like abundance of the paths like Zen . See OSHO, UNIO MYSTICA VOLUME 1, DISCOURSE 1.
"One of the definite patterns throughout Proverbs is the pitting of odd, unexpected, asymmetric words against each other" -- now you know I'll have to go back and read them! That's something I love in language, the juxtaposition of unexpected words. I've never been drawn to write poetry, but it's something I admire so much when it's done well. Like that poem I put at the end of the list. I keep going back to it, sinking into her word choices and spacing and the whole mental shape of the thing.
"'To be a master of metaphor,' Aristotle wrote in his Poetics, 'is the greatest thing by far. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others, and it is also a sign of genius.'"
Yeah, that was the quote I was thinking of, but apparently was too lazy to Google on my own! :D This sort of elevates the metaphor above how the grade school language lessons present it, as one tool equal among many. Metaphor is sort of the essential unit of meaning, which we are using all of the time in ways banal and exciting, which your piece explores. (Why did I use the word 'elevate'? What about high things are better? Because more conspicuous? Closer to the heavens? Harder to reach? And why 'tool'? Are we 'making' something with language?)
Many of the Proverbs look like tiny tautologies at first blush, like "The righteous are good, and the evil are bad." Boom. Done. But if a reader takes some time to do a real story analysis on them, and look at the images, characters, plot, values, etc. then they can really start to pop. They are full of solid things like eyes, mouths, tongues, hands, feet, paths, fields, houses, etc. and loads them up with all sorts of meaning, so that after reading, one can ponder those meanings out in the world. (The world!)
If you (or anyone else reading this!) ever want to give it a run, but feel intimidated over how to get oriented to the text, feel free to reach out! :)
Have you all read Mary Douglas' Thinking in Circles? I just started it and already fascinated--it's about how ancient storytelling was less narrative and more ring or circle--and those phrases in the bible specifically are one's she uses as an example--where it looks like tautology but it's a parallelism on either side of returning the end to the beginning--where the meaning is in the middle. It's super intriguing and this thread reminded me of it so much...
I have not read it, but I queued it (and some other of her interesting titles!) in my Goodreads. Chiastic structure is all over the Bible, where events work to a middle point, and then work in a sort of opposite way. Some of them span huge swaths of narrative, or as small as couplets, or even smaller ones embedded in larger ones. There is a really interesting graphic about the flood narrative here for an example: https://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/the-power-of-chiastic-story-structure-especially-in-series/ Someone explained it in a really helpful way to me, that our life is mostly chiastic. Wake up, get ready for the day, have breakfast, go to work, lunch, work, go home, have dinner, get ready for bed, go to sleep. (Yes, lunch is actually the ultimate meaning for our day, haha!) A progressive view of history is pretty modern, when most of life is a series of repeating patterns and themes-cycles of wake and sleep; peace and war; building and tearing down; being born and dying.... you get the picture. I agree with you that it is a really fascinating to think about!
The couplets in the Proverbs do some really interesting things, where it says something like, "x does y, but a does b", but the things compared and their attributes are asymmetric, so you have ponder... why did we compare these things rather than something with it's opposite? It's kind of like haiku: they don't binge well. But, it's all about using words and metaphors to enrich experience with meaning. Which, after materialism and deconstruction have stripped so much meaning out of our lives, I think people are hungry for!
yes--I love thinking about that our life is mostly chiastic, it's really true. And the idea of bingeing related to haiku or the proverbs had me laugh and then to think how much a sign of what's missing in our days is that inclination to binge instead of pauses, moments for thinking with, rather than the scroll, the binge, the influx of information without end. Thanks for sharing that link too!
What a great conversation. I haven't read "Thinking in Circles," either but it makes so much sense. I often imagine a nautilus shell or a mosaic when I'm writing more structured (that is, edited) essays. I LOVE the idea of the meaning being in the middle. Maybe some of us do that without realizing it? I definitely got that feeling from Rebecca Solnit's "The Faraway Nearby." I felt like it circled into the heart of the story and then spiraled back out again, in a very satisfying way.
They talk about "up" and "down" and things being paths and all sorts of ideas in "Metaphors We Live By." Your pausing in "elevate" reflects exactly that idea -- that higher things are better. It's really interesting. And they have a section on tools. All sorts of stuff. It was really mind-opening when I first read it years ago.
My to-read pile is getting so massive it's starting to intimidate even me, but taking another read of Proverbs doesn't sound like a bad idea. (Why would an idea have a sound?!)
I love this sentence: Most of the time it’s handling language like it’s a live wire.
Because language can be a livewire, sometimes a very dangerous one. Look at the words Donald Trump used to inflame his supporters enough to actually attack the capital building.
And I love the contrast of your discussing metaphor and the use of language -- pretty abstract concepts -- with the reality of growing potatoes in the dirt.
It’s true. I also look at it from my dad’s perspective growing up under Stalin and the resurgence of the phrase “enemy of the people” and its iterations.
We lost an entire crop of stored buttercup squash to mold a few years ago and many potatoes. I empathize. I’ve had similar thoughts about the craziness of our food markets. The frozen huckleberries that took a whole day to gather - have always been eaten “too soon.” I love a good chokecherry syrup on pancakes in January. Never once ate a dehydrated tomato (but have them). Canned green tomatoes make the best chili verde. I’m storing way too many pickles. Turns out you really only need one jar a year.
Glad to know I’m not alone! Though I have to admit pickles is one thing we get through a lot of, thankfully.
You know what I’m going to try more of is growing tomatillos instead of tomatoes. Makes such good salsa! But maybe on your recommendation I’ll try green tomato salsa too.
Every year I make an effort to gather just one more half-gallon of huckleberries. And every single year they’re gone too soon.
We did tomatillos in CO and it was much better suited for it than the east side of Glacier. My neighbor grew them last year and they just couldn’t get big enough. But with some lime juice added to blended green tomatoes you’d never know the difference! We add chopped frozen roasted green chilies when we feel like we’ll die without a good green enchilada sauce. But I have yet to feel that way about zucchini pickles. 😂 Hope we have a good huckleberry season this summer for you and us and the bears! My oatmeal isn’t the same without them.
I will try the green tomatoes, thank you! (I cannot stand zucchini pickles. The tendency to pickle all vegetables is one I can't quite get behind. I stick with cucumbers and green beans but that's it.)
Yeah, the bears. Last year's berry season around Arlee was pretty bleak. I felt guilty picking off a few service berries around the house. May they eat well this year from their customary foods, and thanks for the enchilada sauce hack.
Yeah it was bleak here too. Felt the same way! I couldn’t even get to the chokecherries before the birds and I was ok with that. I still stole thimbleberries along the trail anytime they were ripe though. Glad to share any hacks I can! Hope it’s not as cold there as it is here tonight.
We still had plenty of huckleberries up high, but the chokecherry situation around town was dire due to the late cold and snow in mid-June. I got just enough for 4 quarter-pints of jelly. I don’t begrudge the bears getting most of them.
I really like your take on metaphors--sometimes they are the key to breaking open a new meaning, but many times they can also be shoehorned into speech in ways that are, what one writer I admire, terms lazy language. Attention to words, the deep meanings encoded in their histories, the precision in a turn of phrase are all a purposeful act that we need more of, it feels like. Also I watched a very nerdy and delightful show about living on a medieval farm for a year and these crazy archaeologists lived and re-created what life and the seasons would mean with work in preserving food, etc. One of the things that stuck with me is how they stored their apples--in the rafters, where a little more heat kept them dry and less likely to rot (?). I loved it for those kinds of details and discoveries the crew made as they learned from historians, etc. Not sure if it's right, but I'm curious to try something like that next time I live with an apple tree. ;)
How cool! I think it's probably accurate enough -- it's a detail I remember from some L.M. Montgomery novels. Not Anne of Green Gables, but a different series, that the character would get an apple from rafters at a neighbor's farm. I don't have any rafters :(
In Russia, my stepmom owns a dacha (most Russians have some form of dacha, even if it's little more than a shed, but almost always a garden, out in a country village), where they grow produce, and in Moscow they keep boxes of apples all winter wrapped in newspaper in a box on the enclosed but unheated balcony. It's probably just the right balance of heat and humidity? I just need to research more. The apples wither a bit over the months but they don't rot.
I think part of the magic of metaphors is how they arise spontaneously, as if from our subconscious. It's more than the final product - a juxtaposition of two disparate concepts - it's the inspired process of even thinking them together in the first place. When a metaphor is so established and unreflexively incorporated into everyday speech that it no longer really functions as a metaphor, continuing to use it as metaphor (not just a convenient shorthand expression) can become stale. The content and structure is still there, but it's sort of dead because there's no *reason* for needing that particular metaphor at that moment; we're trying to make the moment fit the metaphor. You can't really force a metaphor, anymore than you can not think of an elephant.
Maybe today soil and potatoes are just soil and potatoes, and then tomorrow some new experience will turn them back into fresh metaphors.
I think you've gotten to a core of something there, with when metaphors become stale. Cliches.
I love thinking about the way that metaphors arise in different languages, from words themselves and what they reflect about the world and then, as you say, arriving at a juxtaposition of two disparate concepts. And you're right, you can't force it. But maybe you can find it? Open yourself up to seeing the world in different ways, or seeing if it can speak to you.
We'll see if the potatoes and soil will do something along those lines ;)
The estimate of food waste in America is 40%. It sounds like you are doing much better than the average. Final disposition in compost is still part of a virtuous cycle. The potato in all its form is one of the foods I miss the most in the carb counting derby. If average folk simply stopped and considered (which you model so well), our situtation all by itself would improve.
It was funny, I read that in your post after writing this. I'm really lucky to have a composting service in the area. And this year the local detritus will come back to my garden as soil . . .
detritus is undoubtedly the word of the day :)
I liked your last paragraph so much that I copied it down in my journal.
I too had some potatoes that I had stored (obviously) not well. I kept wanting to save them as long as possible, as if they could make it until March, that I'd win some sort of award. But instead they just got lumpy and a bit moldy, and I had to sneak them into some soup instead of enjoying them closer to their prime. There's a metaphor in there for sure, but I like this idea of just sitting with the disappointment instead.
I totally get the winning some sort of award idea! I guess the same goes for canning a lot of stuff, too. Like, what am I going to accomplish with yet another rack of tomatoes that will take years to get to?
And thanks! :)
I didn't think anyone else had read Metaphors We Live By.
As for "puttng by" all that food, I was a kid on the tail end of that as a common lifestyle (already abandoned by those who had more money, and by my people as soon as they could) and remember canning season in August on the southern Plains. My parents had lived that way all their lives, of course, including through the Dust Bowl. I think a certain share of the problems we inherited from their generation is a reaction to the difficulties of that life. My mom hated canning, sewing, all that, and my dad never said anything positive about life on the farm (of course he was one of those men who seldom said much at all). I ocasionally saw a touch of nostalgia from them about the loss of community, but not about the physical world. We sometimes think of the overwhelming expansion of consumer capitalism as being about greed (and some of it, with some people was and is), but the way was made easy by a working class that was seeking any release from hardship that it could find.
Well, now you know someone! It was recommended to me maybe 15 or more years ago by a friend at the time who taught English as a Second Language and was very into pedagogy, Piaget, and Vygotsky. I'd been working in textbook publishing for a few years by then, and it turned out we both had an interest in how both language and learning work, which of course have a lot of overlap.
My mom grew up on a homestead and did all the things I think partly out of nostalgia, but I've never known anyone who had to rely on these methods who wasn't eager for a less labor-intensive life. I have this unpublished essay I keep going back to about fossil fuels and the release from labor. It was about much harder labor from centuries ago, but I think there's a lot in what you say about how hard life could often be, especially an agricultural life even recently, and what a relief it is not to have to do that work. I like the canning and growing, though I more enjoy the hunting and gathering, but truly hate sewing. A lot. Solidarity with your mom there. I have no interest in having that activity foisted on me. And if I were forced to do all the others purely for survival? They'd probably be less attractive. I imagine that's where having an *actual* community can come in. You don't have to do everything yourself.
Great to have the luxury of choosing our labors. They become the play that sings in body and soul. This BIG CITY (the big apple) kid transplanted himself to this freezing wind blasted forest out of love, and that includes of cutting, hauling splitting and storing firewood, shoveling snow, pulling salsify, knapweed and thistle, as well as appreciation for having THE GOOD FOOD STORE within a modest drive and a car to get there... and hospitals, and more - but not of everything. And there's the rub.
You meditation on words reminds me of one of the opening lines-a piece of the purpose statement-of the book of Proverbs.
"...to understand a proverb and a saying, the words of the wise and their riddles."
For years I couldn't help but think, "Great, I can solve riddles. How practical." Because, you know, Will James and the Enlightenment, etc.
But one of the definitely patterns throughout Proverbs is the pitting of odd, unexpected, asymmetric words against each other. I think one of the points of this ancient text is that words that look simple are layered with nuance and complexity, and a good part of building wisdom (the WORDS of the WISE) is through digging into it!
And I think Aristotle said something (in the Poetics?) about how the sign of a true philosophy was the ability to find links in disparate ideas through metaphor.
And one sign of Truth is the linking of our gardens with all and everything in and around us.
The root meaning of "paradise" is "garden" :D
Hakim Sanai, THE HADIQUA, the walled garden. The wall designates not a sharp delineation, but a distinction between the bhakti path of love and the solitude desert like abundance of the paths like Zen . See OSHO, UNIO MYSTICA VOLUME 1, DISCOURSE 1.
"One of the definite patterns throughout Proverbs is the pitting of odd, unexpected, asymmetric words against each other" -- now you know I'll have to go back and read them! That's something I love in language, the juxtaposition of unexpected words. I've never been drawn to write poetry, but it's something I admire so much when it's done well. Like that poem I put at the end of the list. I keep going back to it, sinking into her word choices and spacing and the whole mental shape of the thing.
It's been way too many years since I read Aristotle, but I'll believe that! There's not really much new under the sun. I just Googled quickly and came across this short essay about it: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/2011/07/mastering-metaphor-a-sign-of-genius
"'To be a master of metaphor,' Aristotle wrote in his Poetics, 'is the greatest thing by far. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others, and it is also a sign of genius.'"
Yeah, that was the quote I was thinking of, but apparently was too lazy to Google on my own! :D This sort of elevates the metaphor above how the grade school language lessons present it, as one tool equal among many. Metaphor is sort of the essential unit of meaning, which we are using all of the time in ways banal and exciting, which your piece explores. (Why did I use the word 'elevate'? What about high things are better? Because more conspicuous? Closer to the heavens? Harder to reach? And why 'tool'? Are we 'making' something with language?)
Many of the Proverbs look like tiny tautologies at first blush, like "The righteous are good, and the evil are bad." Boom. Done. But if a reader takes some time to do a real story analysis on them, and look at the images, characters, plot, values, etc. then they can really start to pop. They are full of solid things like eyes, mouths, tongues, hands, feet, paths, fields, houses, etc. and loads them up with all sorts of meaning, so that after reading, one can ponder those meanings out in the world. (The world!)
If you (or anyone else reading this!) ever want to give it a run, but feel intimidated over how to get oriented to the text, feel free to reach out! :)
Have you all read Mary Douglas' Thinking in Circles? I just started it and already fascinated--it's about how ancient storytelling was less narrative and more ring or circle--and those phrases in the bible specifically are one's she uses as an example--where it looks like tautology but it's a parallelism on either side of returning the end to the beginning--where the meaning is in the middle. It's super intriguing and this thread reminded me of it so much...
I have not read it, but I queued it (and some other of her interesting titles!) in my Goodreads. Chiastic structure is all over the Bible, where events work to a middle point, and then work in a sort of opposite way. Some of them span huge swaths of narrative, or as small as couplets, or even smaller ones embedded in larger ones. There is a really interesting graphic about the flood narrative here for an example: https://www.helpingwritersbecomeauthors.com/the-power-of-chiastic-story-structure-especially-in-series/ Someone explained it in a really helpful way to me, that our life is mostly chiastic. Wake up, get ready for the day, have breakfast, go to work, lunch, work, go home, have dinner, get ready for bed, go to sleep. (Yes, lunch is actually the ultimate meaning for our day, haha!) A progressive view of history is pretty modern, when most of life is a series of repeating patterns and themes-cycles of wake and sleep; peace and war; building and tearing down; being born and dying.... you get the picture. I agree with you that it is a really fascinating to think about!
The couplets in the Proverbs do some really interesting things, where it says something like, "x does y, but a does b", but the things compared and their attributes are asymmetric, so you have ponder... why did we compare these things rather than something with it's opposite? It's kind of like haiku: they don't binge well. But, it's all about using words and metaphors to enrich experience with meaning. Which, after materialism and deconstruction have stripped so much meaning out of our lives, I think people are hungry for!
yes--I love thinking about that our life is mostly chiastic, it's really true. And the idea of bingeing related to haiku or the proverbs had me laugh and then to think how much a sign of what's missing in our days is that inclination to binge instead of pauses, moments for thinking with, rather than the scroll, the binge, the influx of information without end. Thanks for sharing that link too!
What a great conversation. I haven't read "Thinking in Circles," either but it makes so much sense. I often imagine a nautilus shell or a mosaic when I'm writing more structured (that is, edited) essays. I LOVE the idea of the meaning being in the middle. Maybe some of us do that without realizing it? I definitely got that feeling from Rebecca Solnit's "The Faraway Nearby." I felt like it circled into the heart of the story and then spiraled back out again, in a very satisfying way.
They talk about "up" and "down" and things being paths and all sorts of ideas in "Metaphors We Live By." Your pausing in "elevate" reflects exactly that idea -- that higher things are better. It's really interesting. And they have a section on tools. All sorts of stuff. It was really mind-opening when I first read it years ago.
My to-read pile is getting so massive it's starting to intimidate even me, but taking another read of Proverbs doesn't sound like a bad idea. (Why would an idea have a sound?!)
You have to read The Nutmeg's Curse - I've read it twice and it was so important. We're discussing it in Sciwri bookclub next month, should be good!
I finally remembered to get it because you’ve spoken so well of it a couple of times!
I will never look at a potato again without the off chance it could spawn a tsunami of thought. Thanks Madame.
🥔🥔🥔
I love this sentence: Most of the time it’s handling language like it’s a live wire.
Because language can be a livewire, sometimes a very dangerous one. Look at the words Donald Trump used to inflame his supporters enough to actually attack the capital building.
And I love the contrast of your discussing metaphor and the use of language -- pretty abstract concepts -- with the reality of growing potatoes in the dirt.
Because we need both.
It’s true. I also look at it from my dad’s perspective growing up under Stalin and the resurgence of the phrase “enemy of the people” and its iterations.
And yes we do! Thank you. 🥔😊
We lost an entire crop of stored buttercup squash to mold a few years ago and many potatoes. I empathize. I’ve had similar thoughts about the craziness of our food markets. The frozen huckleberries that took a whole day to gather - have always been eaten “too soon.” I love a good chokecherry syrup on pancakes in January. Never once ate a dehydrated tomato (but have them). Canned green tomatoes make the best chili verde. I’m storing way too many pickles. Turns out you really only need one jar a year.
Glad to know I’m not alone! Though I have to admit pickles is one thing we get through a lot of, thankfully.
You know what I’m going to try more of is growing tomatillos instead of tomatoes. Makes such good salsa! But maybe on your recommendation I’ll try green tomato salsa too.
Every year I make an effort to gather just one more half-gallon of huckleberries. And every single year they’re gone too soon.
Malchik, you are not alone in so many ways beyond and within the whims of fate vis a vis how the GARDEN grows that contains and lives through us all.
We did tomatillos in CO and it was much better suited for it than the east side of Glacier. My neighbor grew them last year and they just couldn’t get big enough. But with some lime juice added to blended green tomatoes you’d never know the difference! We add chopped frozen roasted green chilies when we feel like we’ll die without a good green enchilada sauce. But I have yet to feel that way about zucchini pickles. 😂 Hope we have a good huckleberry season this summer for you and us and the bears! My oatmeal isn’t the same without them.
I will try the green tomatoes, thank you! (I cannot stand zucchini pickles. The tendency to pickle all vegetables is one I can't quite get behind. I stick with cucumbers and green beans but that's it.)
Yeah, the bears. Last year's berry season around Arlee was pretty bleak. I felt guilty picking off a few service berries around the house. May they eat well this year from their customary foods, and thanks for the enchilada sauce hack.
Yeah it was bleak here too. Felt the same way! I couldn’t even get to the chokecherries before the birds and I was ok with that. I still stole thimbleberries along the trail anytime they were ripe though. Glad to share any hacks I can! Hope it’s not as cold there as it is here tonight.
(It is bitter here tonight. Hope everyone is sheltered somewhere safe.)
We still had plenty of huckleberries up high, but the chokecherry situation around town was dire due to the late cold and snow in mid-June. I got just enough for 4 quarter-pints of jelly. I don’t begrudge the bears getting most of them.
I am totally stealing this recipe!