75%
It's snowing. My chimney is fixed. There are flashes of sunlight here and there.
I had a great talk with Tucker about stuff, was able to tap out when my emotions were big but not too big, and we had a lovely weekend.
And... I just had a really great lunch.
I have some fatty loin chops in the freezer for quick meals. I'd been eating them with a bunch of chimichurri sauce to offset the fattiness but it's winter now and my parsley/oregano isn't available for chimichurri. I also don't have a big pile of sauerkraut this year and didn't really do any potatoes (though in hindsight I did buy a big bag of potatoes which are now downstairs).
I also have two kinds of wheat kernels, marquis which is a hard red bread wheat and ac andrews which is a soft white wheat. Most recently I'd ground the ac andrews and it behaved oddly, but I had some ground left over. I decided to make some bannock and fry it in with the pork chops to use up the fat and give me a carb. I also tossed a bunch of my pickled carrots (jalapeno, garlic, carrots, salt brine) on the plate too, they're ultra crisp and definitely a veggie.
This was a pretty great choice. The bannock was perfect. It's not only the fresh grind of the flour that gave me flavour; I think there's something about soft white wheat that makes me think of tortillas. The grain had that sweet/parched/toasty/aromatic flavour from frying, with a little bit of crispy not-quite-deep-fried taste around the edges from the lard it cooked in. I'm out of milk so I added a touch of powdered milk to it (proper bannock) which gave it a ghost of sweetness. The low-gluten fully-whole flour made such a soft and pillowy bread between the flaky/crispy outsides. Then the pork chops are always glorious, about 40% streaked and marbled fat, seared and meaty and silky with the fat just on the edge of melting at serving temperature so that it's textured like butter in the mouth. And then slightly soured, cool, bright, garlicky carrots with an entirely different type of sweetness and a crunch so loud it's almost too much within the confines of my own head. They were the perfect offset to that soft and fat.
This is where I want to be at with my 75% calorie project: not constrained by rules about what I can't eat but instead drawn in by a celebration of place and relationship. Mom brought me the carrots and we made the pickles together with her and my brother; the place she got them is itself a real place (Desert Hills in Ashcroft) I could get to and see and walk the soils. They have goats that climb a tower for treats and Mexican farmworkers who make tamales and sell them from a fridge in the back and have an ongoing relationship with the site. The grain was brought up from the lower mainland by Josh (soon to be my own grain I do hope) from a, no, _the_ grain CSA in the lower mainland who experiment with different varieties and know me as the person up north who probably is the most distant CSA member. And then my pigs about whom I've said more elsewhere. Plus a little dried milk, baking powder, and salt from the store that tie me in to my civilization and back me up when I need variety or just want to engage in the worldwide commerce that humans have always done and that I'm rich and fortunate enough to partake in.
Anyhow. That was a good lunch. Outside the sun is bouncing brightly off new snow and one sunbeam falls through the curtains to lie across my hands as I type.
Time to get back to work.
Edited to add: "had some ground left over" by which I mean flour. Ground wheat is flour. Sigh.
I had a great talk with Tucker about stuff, was able to tap out when my emotions were big but not too big, and we had a lovely weekend.
And... I just had a really great lunch.
I have some fatty loin chops in the freezer for quick meals. I'd been eating them with a bunch of chimichurri sauce to offset the fattiness but it's winter now and my parsley/oregano isn't available for chimichurri. I also don't have a big pile of sauerkraut this year and didn't really do any potatoes (though in hindsight I did buy a big bag of potatoes which are now downstairs).
I also have two kinds of wheat kernels, marquis which is a hard red bread wheat and ac andrews which is a soft white wheat. Most recently I'd ground the ac andrews and it behaved oddly, but I had some ground left over. I decided to make some bannock and fry it in with the pork chops to use up the fat and give me a carb. I also tossed a bunch of my pickled carrots (jalapeno, garlic, carrots, salt brine) on the plate too, they're ultra crisp and definitely a veggie.
This was a pretty great choice. The bannock was perfect. It's not only the fresh grind of the flour that gave me flavour; I think there's something about soft white wheat that makes me think of tortillas. The grain had that sweet/parched/toasty/aromatic flavour from frying, with a little bit of crispy not-quite-deep-fried taste around the edges from the lard it cooked in. I'm out of milk so I added a touch of powdered milk to it (proper bannock) which gave it a ghost of sweetness. The low-gluten fully-whole flour made such a soft and pillowy bread between the flaky/crispy outsides. Then the pork chops are always glorious, about 40% streaked and marbled fat, seared and meaty and silky with the fat just on the edge of melting at serving temperature so that it's textured like butter in the mouth. And then slightly soured, cool, bright, garlicky carrots with an entirely different type of sweetness and a crunch so loud it's almost too much within the confines of my own head. They were the perfect offset to that soft and fat.
This is where I want to be at with my 75% calorie project: not constrained by rules about what I can't eat but instead drawn in by a celebration of place and relationship. Mom brought me the carrots and we made the pickles together with her and my brother; the place she got them is itself a real place (Desert Hills in Ashcroft) I could get to and see and walk the soils. They have goats that climb a tower for treats and Mexican farmworkers who make tamales and sell them from a fridge in the back and have an ongoing relationship with the site. The grain was brought up from the lower mainland by Josh (soon to be my own grain I do hope) from a, no, _the_ grain CSA in the lower mainland who experiment with different varieties and know me as the person up north who probably is the most distant CSA member. And then my pigs about whom I've said more elsewhere. Plus a little dried milk, baking powder, and salt from the store that tie me in to my civilization and back me up when I need variety or just want to engage in the worldwide commerce that humans have always done and that I'm rich and fortunate enough to partake in.
Anyhow. That was a good lunch. Outside the sun is bouncing brightly off new snow and one sunbeam falls through the curtains to lie across my hands as I type.
Time to get back to work.
Edited to add: "had some ground left over" by which I mean flour. Ground wheat is flour. Sigh.