The Squeaky Wheel Gets the Meat

A couple of weeks ago I kvetched about missing the deadline for the last meat co-op delivery.  You can't keep a good woman meatless.  Incensed about forgetting to hit the checkout button on my order, I emailed the farmer's wife to ask if there were any way to buy from a different delivery location.  However, driving all the way to the farm, about two hours away, was not my preferred pick-up destination.

If you've kept up with the organic, non-GMO, local, free-range debate in books and movies over the past few years, you would know the farmer.  The products he sells -- beef, pork, chicken, turkey, eggs, and sometimes rabbit, lamb, duck, and duck eggs -- are all free-range.  After seeing the farmer prominently in one of the food debate movies and discovering just how close the farm is, my research turned up several co-op delivery sites in my neck of the woods.

Meat products are as seasonal as vegetables and fruit.  Chicken lay more eggs when there's more sunlight in the summer before slacking off to almost none in the winter.  Cows and pigs and sheep give birth in the spring in the northern hemisphere.  If you want to have suckling pig or a leg of lamb for a spring holiday and expect to buy it a week before the holiday, chances are it's from Australia or New Zealand where it would be autumn and the piglet or lamb would be big enough for slaughter.  If you want local piglet or lamb, you'll need to freeze it until the spring.

The farmer's wife wrote back allowing me to pick up at a different delivery site.  Joy!  Elation!  And the delivery date isn't until the second week of December!  That means that the freezer will have been emptied a bit more with all the Thanksgiving dishes having been eaten yesterday.

Good thing.  Since this is the absolute last delivery until late spring next year, I'll need to stock up.  My order included:

1/4 cow (approximately 110 lbs. of meat)
1/2 pig (approximately 100 lbs. of meat)
plus,
2 Filet mignons
5 Delmonico steaks
10 lbs. ground beef

That 1/4 cow and 1/2 pig means a quarter of the cow and a half of the pig.  You can order a whole animal if you want, but we don't have that much freezer space.

My only regret is that the cuts won't include a standing rib roast for Christmas or a ham shank for New Year's.  He didn't have any lamb available either.  Maybe the other farmer who shows up at the farmers' market has a leg of lamb to stick in the freezer for Easter. 

The one thing about holidays from my childhood home that I never liked was back-to-back meals.  Mama served turkey for Thanksgiving and again for Christmas, and ham for New Year's Day and again for Easter.  In my house, the now tradition is turkey and dressing for Thanksgiving, beef rib roast and Yorkshire pudding for Christmas, ham, collards, and black-eyed peas for New Year's Day, and lamb and asparagus for Easter.  Oh, and pancakes on Shrove Tuesday which needs bacon or sausage as an accompaniment.

Darn it!  I didn't order any bacon or sausage.  Back to the order form!

Music to My Wheels

My eldest daughter applied for a week-long pipe organ seminar this summer. Her organ master recommended her for the program since he knows the program director quite well. We had some concern since there are only so many spaces available and we didn't hear about the program until a week before the deadline.

But last night we got an all-but-confirmation email from the director in response to our email letting him know we had mailed her registration form and fee. He said he would look forward to receiving it. Nothing about "Sorry, but the program is filled."

My husband and I sat down with Google Maps and began planning our respective routes to and from New England. He plans to ride her up on his motorcycle so that he can add the New England states to his colored-in map of states that he's ridden in. While I, on the other hand, was mapping out stops on the way back.

Another summer (mini-) road trip! Woo-hoo!

So far on the agenda after leaving the northern New England states are stops in Wellesley, MA; South Hadley, MA; Northampton, MA; Poughkeepsie, NY; New York City; and Bryn Mawr, PA. Yep, six of the Seven Sisters. One can dream, can't she?

Belated Earth Day

With the warmth of the sun returning to my part of the universe, today feels like a day to celebrate my Mother Earth. Here to help in that celebration are some websites.

Enjoy. And always remember that...

The first day of spring is one thing, and the first spring day is another. The difference between them is sometimes as great as a month. ~Henry Van Dyke

http://www.earthalbum.com/

http://www.breathingearth.net/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ESHjYat9rk

Previously on The Gaelic Wife

Yesterday’s blog about my Facebook Former led to some questions about my life before becoming The Gaelic Wife. So to get everyone on the same page, let’s begin, shall we?

Chapter One: I was born. No, no. That’s too far back. But it’s a good back story for character development. You see, I haven’t always been The Wife, but I’ve always been Gaelic.

Imagine growing up in the town of Maycomb, Alabama, that Scout (Miss Jean Louise Finch) describes in the opening of “To Kill a Mockingbird”. That was pretty much my childhood, transposed to the 1970s. It was a town bypassed by good intentions. The race track that would have brought in a steady revenue stream was located elsewhere because the thought of having racing nearby bothered the town elders. The four-lane road from the interstate directly connecting through the town toward an outlet mall was nixed because they feared people would speed through the town. Now they speed by it on the interstate never knowing that it lies a mile to the west of the right-of-way.

Factory work kept the next generation close to home, except for a few who were shooed away by well-meaning parents in hopes of a better life for their offspring. In its heyday, there had been a cotton mill, a tire and rubber plant, a steel plant, a pipe shop, and a foundry. As my Baby Bust generation came along, the cotton mill sat empty with broken window panes; the pipe shop was out of business; the foundry was long gone, overtaken by Mother Nature’s weeds and vines. The steel plant was operational as much as it sat idle. The tire and rubber plant seemed the only way to go. It ran shifts round the clock, six days a week.

Blue laws kept the plant shuttered on Sundays, as well as the department and shoe stores, the libraries and the grocery stores. Mine was a dry county which didn’t allow the sale of alcohol. The county line, and the first liquor stand, was a thirty-five minute drive following the serpentine of the river around the bends and fingers of the mountains which dipped toward the water.

My section of the Deep South was at the very end of the Appalachian Mountains. There’s a certain twang in our voices that carries along the crests of the mountains. Nuances are honed in the hollers and ridges down the eastern backbone of the country. My family instilled a pride of our Scots-Irish heritage. Bluegrass and traditional Celtic music carry the same lilt and resonances much as our souls carry the same religions and prejudices and suspicions.

Once upon a time there was a trolley line that ran from my little town to the county seat. The trolley fell out of favor, replaced by busses. With the increasing encroachment of civil rights into small towns, bus lines were shut down rather than having mixing. The last solitary public pool was left to turn putrid green with algae rather than clean it for the black kids since only the Blanche Dubois’s of the world would darken the doorway of the shower house. Some years later it was backfilled to make room for a mobile home retailer.

In winter, my father would throw us in the car and race to the nearest fire in the N-town on one side of the tracks to watch the firemen futilely battle a fire started from a coal fireplace, a gas heater, or just plain old negligence as it raced through timber-frame structures sitting squat to the ground. In summer, he would pile us in the car and meander to the sirens of gospel music wafting from the N-town on the other side of the tracks. Our neighborhood was a thin slice of 1950s prosperity sandwiched between two sets of railroad tracks against which shanty-like houses shouldered sheltering the poorer blacks in town and giving those sections of town their pejorative names of N-town.

Hierarchy was learned at an early age. Families that once had been well-to-do saw their fortunes evaporate during the war as their farmlands were confiscated. Families whose reputations survived were knocked off their pedestals in response to a d-i-v-o-r-c-e. Conditions such as divorce, and cancer, and affairs were only spoken of in whispers. Some things, like mental illness, were never discussed because it just didn’t happen to anyone you knew. Pity and shame kept people quiet about unmentionable subjects and kept them in their places if they dared to even dream of straying from the straight and narrow.

[Editor’s note: The author has been convinced that this should be serialized since it’s already much longer than most of her blogs. More of the “Previously on” blogs will be forthcoming soon.]

Weather Report

Epiphany is winding down. I go to a Carnivale party over the weekend where the hostess insists that I can't drink or eat until I have beads on. Break open another box of beads straight from New Orleans, put two around my neck, and head straight for the bar on her back porch where the drinks are chilled not with ice but by the outdoor air.

At church, we are reminded that Wednesday is Ash Wednesday. The priest confesses to having an addiction. To baseball. He's looking forward to Ash Wednesday. Not because he plans to give up his addiction during Lent, but because Wednesday is the first day of Spring Training games, which to him means the first day of Spring.

Sunday afternoon on our way to a Girl Scout delegate training session, my second daughter asks when I'll take them out of school. I have a tradition of checking the kids out of school on one of the first really nice spring days to go to the cathedral and play in the garden. She says that playing in the garden as a child made her feel like princess. I remind her that it's still winter.

"I hate winter," she says.

"Then kill the groundhog," I answer.

But the radio this morning reminds me that the groundhog saw his shadow after all. I miss the traffic and weather on the 8's and ask my husband what today's forecast is. His reply? He gives me the rundown of the highs and lows for the week. But today?

"Blustery with a chance of winter."