Saturday, February 12, 2011

Day 12


Today is full of rain again. We did a bang-up job cleaning the kitchen- we scrubbed every surface we could find, even the compost bucket, as those were jobs we could do under cover. During our ½ hour of sun we went down to the hedge by the mandioca field to gather kindling, breaking cut branches into progressively smaller pieces to fit into the oven. We cook on a wood-fired stove here. We light it once a day, during lunch time. In the morning we get up and eat a breakfast of homemade yogurt and fruit (and some people eat cereal that Kim makes). During breakfast we also make the bread dough, and let it rise until lunch. Today I made our bread, adding raisins, flax seeds, and sesame seeds for interest. Lunch is our biggest meal, and it’s often warm, consisting of varied hot vegetable dishes, grain, and a big salad. And dinner is always a soup, bread, and leftovers from lunch. Because we don’t have a large refrigerator here, being ‘off the grid,’ we don’t save leftovers longer than this. Whatever is left over the next morning gets incorporated into the day’s dog food.

We spent this afternoon having a big grand-rounds about herbal medicine making. If it’s rainy again tomorrow, we’re going to make castile soap bars, and perhaps an oil-based bug repellant out of the citronella leaves Kim has been infusing (the tree is growing outside the kitchen) along with eucalyptus, rosemary, and pennyroyal. I think we’re all secretly hoping for rain.

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